Best Food Writing 2013 (48 page)

The following week, a different shoulder treatment—cooked sous vide and then finished in the wood oven, slick and tender and intensely fragrant with herbs—gets dunked in a fondue that chef Pomplun whipped up: heavy cream, grated sheep cheese and a glug of sherry. The rich, tangy sauce doubled down on the comfort food texture while offering a sharp, nutty counterpoint that amplified the meat flavors to extraordinary effect. The fermented lamb ribs, now a week old, come out of the combi oven, where they have steamed for hours, and get finished on the grill. A few go in the oven to see if it makes a difference. They're seriously funky, almost cheesy, but not quite complete.

Pelaccio whisks a bit of lemon juice and oil into the steaming juices, dunks in a rib, and the meat is suddenly in sharp, delectable focus: finished.

“I would probably just serve a few of these on a plate with the vinaigrette and some herbs,” he says, when asked about presentation. A deceptively simple dish, since by the time the ribs reach the diner they will have undergone fermentation and two or three cooking methods.

The plates for Fish & Game were thrown by a friend in Amagansett, in food-flattering white and off-white. “They have energy to them; they're very cool,” says Pelaccio. Until the flatware was delivered, the kitchen staff ate with their hands.

As winter softens into spring, more vegetables arrive, both as overwintered roots and new sprouts, and the kitchen staff is visibly thrilled. A few weeks before opening, Emde is at work making “abacus beads,” sticky dumplings that look like fat orechiette, but out of fresh-dug parsnips instead of the traditional taro root. A delivery of baby greens from Common Hands Farm comes in—mizuna, radishes and a spicy mix—and she eagerly tastes them, grabbing more to toss with the beads and the ground pork sizzling on the flat top. Chef Pomplun is working on a milk-poached salsify dish, finished in the wood oven, with brown butter and hazelnuts and a generous strewing of sunflower sprouts and red-veined sorrel. A loaf of his brioche, a golden cloud of butter and egg with just enough flour to give it shape, sits on the end of the counter with a knife nearby, steadily getting shorter as the day lengthens.

Emde also makes leeks, roasted in the hot ashes at the edge of the fire, then peeled and dressed with anchovy vinaigrette and salt-cured egg yolks shaved thin like bottarga. Pelaccio bangs out a spontaneous combination of olive oil cake, candied carrots, and fresh cheese that tastes at once ancient and modern: simple flavors, but straddling the sweet/savory line in a contemporary fashion. While some dishes, like the salsify, are firmly codified, it's still only temporary; all the combinations are subject to change as the seasons progress and the ingredients shift. That adaptability is the governing principle of the place.

The dynamic here seems like a band rehearsing for a gig; Pelaccio is the clear leader, but everyone's input is expected, even encouraged.

“In the past, I would collaborate, but mostly I had ideas and people executed them. Now I sort of hang back; I want them to stretch their legs and find their own voices. Jori and I have been cooking together for years, and a lot of what I was doing came from her.” Emde is a prodigious preserver; jars of vivid vegetable pickles line shelves over the counter, vinegar ferments in carboys on the floor, and homemade Cynar ages in oak barrels under a table. The couple tends a large garden in Chatham where they grow food for themselves and the restaurant, and they plan to expand it. Fermentation
in all its forms will be an ongoing process, and the various preserved foods will find their way into many dishes. The large I-beam over the opening into the dining room serves as a shelf for quickly multiplying jars of condiments.

Reflecting on their decision to try a new, highly personal approach to cooking, a hybrid of high-end refinement and down-home accessibility, Pelaccio returns to the reason he opted out of the franchise model.

“Good cooking takes time, it takes love and attention. A lot of the restaurant business is not like that. But you are in a service industry, and your job is to make people happy.”

Emde comes over; she wants to make a vitello tonnato–type thing but with lamb belly and anchovy, using her homemade Worcestershire sauce. Everyone weighs in with possible permutations, ideas fly. Pelaccio pauses. “Fuck it—let's just cook Asian food.” Emde responds: “You'd make everybody happy.”

Pelaccio smiles. “Yeah, except the people in this room.”

 

 

H
IS
S
AVING
G
RACE

By Kevin Pang

From
The Chicago Tribune

Trib
features reporter Kevin Pang usually deploys his wicked wit writing about pop culture, comedy, and the cheap-eats end of food. After a notable 2011 story of a bad-boy chef going off the rails, however, Pang dug in to profile another chef, whose quest for redemption might have a happier ending.

I
t was the most important night of his career. Curtis Duffy hovered over plates inside the gleaming white kitchen of his new restaurant, Grace. Head down, with the poker face that was the 37-year-old's default demeanor, he arranged long celery curls, ricotta and fried sunchokes into a three-dimensional wreath resembling the architecture of Antoni Gaudi.

The lock on the glass front door was unbolted, and the first customers walked through.

Finally. The restaurant was supposed to have opened in March. It was now December. The equipment that arrived broken, the delays, the cost overruns—all of it had turned many of his nights sleepless. But so did the pressures of high expectations. Curtis had worked his way up through the finest restaurants in Chicago—Charlie Trotter's, Trio, Alinea—and earned four-star reviews under his name at Avenues in The Peninsula hotel on the Magnificent Mile. But this restaurant, Grace, was his.

What would customers think? How would food critics react? What if the restaurant was a failure? The hypotheticals lingered, but on this December night, the what-ifs became secondary.

He was mostly anxious about the 9:30 p.m. reservation.

It was booked for Ruth Snider. In many respects, she was the woman who had saved Curtis. She steered him at a time his life felt aimless, back when he stole from supermarkets and bullied kids in his neighborhood. She kept an eye on him during his travails, through family turmoil . . . before and after the murder. They cried on the phone with each other.

This is a story of the small-town kid who proved himself in the big city. Of connections forged and lost on the path to becoming the best—no matter the cost. Of closing your eyes and hoping your problems disappear.

It's a story of a chef, and what cooking gave him and what it took away.

Mostly it's a story about family.

While the glitterati and food critics in attendance on opening night snapped pictures of the food on their tables, Curtis Duffy focused on Snider, the middle school teacher who—in a way she's too modest to take credit for—helped make Grace possible.

Curtis could've booked her reservation at an earlier time. But he chose 9:30 p.m., the last table of the night, when they could have the whole restaurant to themselves. There was something he had to tell her.

Runaway

Running away was the easy solution. Curtis did so every few months from his Colorado home, over the injustices imposed on a 10-year-old boy: getting grounded, or having toys taken away. One day, Curtis announced he was leaving the family—this time,
forever.
But Jan Duffy called her son's bluff.

“Let me help you pack,” she said. “We'll go to the supermarket and pick up some food for you.”

He stewed in the front seat of his mom's car, and got as far as the supermarket parking lot. It ended with a contrite Curtis in his mother's embrace. She turned the car around. Looking back, the message stung. You can never really run away. Some problems will always follow you, even when you're old enough to have children of your own. Even then, there is no running away from what you are.

A couple of years later, in 1987, when Curtis was 12, his father, Robert “Bear” Duffy, gathered his wife and three kids for a family meeting. “We're moving to Ohio,” Bear said. No warning, no time to reason or argue. The Duffys would leave Colorado Springs in two weeks.

In Colorado, Curtis had his skateboard, his friends, his own bedroom, a big backyard to run around. Why leave?

Bear, a Vietnam War veteran given his nickname by his biker friends, pulled in decent money at his father-in-law's tire retreading company. He'd been under the impression the business would go to him when his father-in-law retired. Instead, the company was sold to someone else. Bear was devastated, family members said. They believed Bear saw a convenient escape: Move closer to his family near Columbus. And so his decision was final. There was no talking Bear out of anything.

What had been a steady job in Colorado Springs became a string of odd jobs in Johnstown, Ohio, 30 minutes outside Columbus: a lawn mower repair shop, a tattoo parlor, whatever garage that would spare a few dollars for him. At one point, he was even an officer in the town's small police force. Jan found steady work at a supermarket. Still, the Duffys went from a five-bedroom house in Colorado to a two-bedroom apartment in Johnstown. There weren't enough beds for Curtis to claim one, so for a while he slept on the floor of a walk-in closet.

Curtis felt trapped in a small town, wearing out the tape on his speed-metal cassettes, prone to bursts of rage. He and his older brother, Robert Jr., went out looking for fights.

“My brother and I weren't the easiest kids,” Curtis said. “We were bored out of our minds.”

(Attempts to reach Robert Jr. for this story were unsuccessful.)

Around Johnstown, everyone knew Robert Jr. as “Tig,” short for tiger, all paunch and brawn. Curtis was “Bones,” tall, lean, a tough shell. The Duffy boys made an intimidating tag team. They used fists, hammers, even their skulls as weapons, Curtis said: One time he pummeled a kid's face so badly the boy was later fitted with braces.

Curtis got an after-school job stocking shelves at the local Kroger supermarket and quickly hatched a scheme for more money: He stashed a case—dozens of cartons—of Marlboro cigarettes in a garbage
can and planned to retrieve it after-hours, then sell the cigarettes to friends. An inventory check revealed the missing case, which was easily traced back to one Curtis Lee Duffy. Stealing that many cigarettes was considered a felony, but the store manager decided against pressing charges. If Curtis' uncle weren't also a cop who turned a blind eye at his nephew's indiscretions, Curtis surely would have landed in jail.

School? If he felt motivated, Curtis said, he'd work for a C. The thought of home economics class was even less palatable, especially when it was mandatory for all sixth-graders. There Curtis sat, choosing a table as far back as possible in Room 12 of Adams Middle School.

And that is where the switch flipped for him, the filament glowed and the bulb flickered on. All it took was a word: Something something . . . yada yada . . .
pizza.

His teacher, Ruth Snider, knew what to say to middle school boys who thought only girls cooked or sewed. It was an attitude she had seen in many other adolescent boys with machismo to burn.

In her first lesson, Snider promised the officially sanctioned food of 12-year-olds.

By the end of that 45-minute class, Curtis had punched out circles of Pillsbury biscuit dough, slathered on spaghetti sauce, slapped on discs of pepperoni and covered it all with cheese. Cooking provided something lacking in Curtis, he'd later realize: a sense of ownership and control, an illustration of cause and effect. Get your hands in the dough, give a damn about something, and watch results bubbling from the oven 12 minutes later.

Snider witnessed the transformation. In Curtis she saw a boy who put on a hard exterior but behind it was sullen and painfully shy, a student still adjusting from being uprooted. He was all nervous tics, fingers constantly inside his mouth, nails emerging chewed down, arms crossed in a defensive posture. But with every fruit kabob skewered and every cinnamon roll baked, Snider watched his veneer crack, slowly, then in large pieces, until the boy felt safe in the classroom kitchen. Now Curtis actually
looked forward
to coming to school.