Delancey

by Molly Wizenberg

  The kitchens at Boat Street feel like places where a person would want to spend time, where you could lean against the counter and have a glass of wine, where a home cook could confidently find her way around. I say this from experience, because I too worked there a number of times, filling in as a cook or a server for special events and catering gigs. The people who work at Boat Street want to be there, and not just because they get a paycheck. In most restaurants, there’s a firm but invisible divide between the back-of-house (kitchen) staff and the front-of-house (dining room) staff: they interact little and generally like each other even less. But at Boat Street, the back of house and front of house were sometimes interchangeable. And whatever job you did, you got a share of the tip. Each day’s tips were pooled, and a portion went to the kitchen staff. Before Boat Street, Brandon had never seen a dishwasher take home a tip.

  Boat Street employees tend to stay, and to feel invested. If you wanted to learn how to do something in the restaurant—whether or not it pertained to your job—all you had to do was ask, and someone would show you. In the summer of 2008, when Brandon decided to try eating meat, he went to Russell Flint, then the sous chef of the dinner kitchen, and Russ taught him how to cook his first steak. (It is no coincidence that Russ now owns and runs Rain Shadow Meats, the best butcher shop in town.)

  I want to say that Boat Street feels like a dinner party. Between orders, the staff clusters in the kitchen, the way guests always do at a good party. There’s a general sense that they know each other well, that they care for each other as much as they care about the food. And in the dining room, where upside-down parasols hang from the ceiling and a chalk drawing of Renee’s late dog Jeffry watches over the bar, it’s easy to feel like a part of it, to feel welcome, relaxed, and taken care of. But of course, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. There is a cosmic law, I believe, that requires every human on Earth to at some point consider, at least briefly, the idea of opening a restaurant, and that idea is usually based on the mistaken notion that running a restaurant is like having a dinner party every night. Most restaurants are not like dinner parties. Most restaurants feel more like Thanksgiving dinner.

  Imagine that it’s the fourth Thursday in November. You’re making a dozen dishes for dinner, including some that are pretty complicated. You’re standing up all day and for most of the night. You’re worried about pleasing your in-laws, your second cousin, and a bunch of other people you wouldn’t normally invite to dinner. You’re rushing to get food on the table before the teething baby has a meltdown or before your grandmother’s bedtime, whichever comes first. And once everything has been eaten, you have to clean up. No matter how much you love mashed potatoes and gravy and pumpkin pie, how much you love to cook, or how much you love to spray-paint gourds for a harvest-themed centerpiece, it’s a lot of work. In a restaurant, you do that every day. At Boat Street, Brandon and his coworkers did that every day. But still, somehow, sometimes, Boat Street did feel like a dinner party.

  Susan and Renee ran Boat Street on a human scale, with real respect, care, and a minimum of stupid rules. They made and sold the kind of food that they wanted to eat. They had figured out that working hard and living well did not have to be mutually exclusive—not even in a restaurant. It sounds simple, especially now that I’m writing it down, but it was a revelation for Brandon. Which is how, a little over a year after Susan hired him and only three months after our wedding, Brandon decided that he wanted to open a restaurant of his own.

  SAUTÉED DATES WITH OLIVE OIL AND SEA SALT

  These dates are one of my best back-pocket tricks because they’re quick, elegant, and endlessly adaptable. At Boat Street, they’re served as an appetizer, with olive oil and a good amount of crunchy salt to offset the sweetness. A few years ago, Renee opened a second restaurant, The Walrus and the Carpenter, and there they serve the same dates for dessert. You can also slice them, pit them, and serve them as part of a salad, ideally one involving oranges, pistachios, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a soft, buttery lettuce. But I might like them best at breakfast, in a puddle of cold plain yogurt.

  What follows is the basic method, not so much a recipe. Cook as many or as few dates as you’d like.

  Olive oil

  Whole dried Medjool dates

  Crunchy salt, such as Maldon or fleur de sel

  * * *

  Place a heavy skillet over medium heat, and pour in enough olive oil to lightly film the bottom of the pan. When the oil is warm and runs loosely around the pan, add the dates, taking care not to crowd them. Cook, turning the dates frequently so that they heat on all sides, until they feel hot (careful!) to the touch. They should cook fairly gently; if they’re taking on color, reduce the heat or turn them more often. Because of their high sugar content, dates can scorch easily, so keep an eye on them. You’re just briefly warming and softening them, encouraging them to absorb richness and flavor from the olive oil.

  Transfer the hot dates to a serving dish, and drizzle them with some olive oil from the skillet. Salt generously if you plan to serve them on their own, or only lightly if you’re serving them in a salad or with yogurt.

  4

  One Friday afternoon a few months after he started at Boat Street, Brandon came to pick me up after work. I was still working at the publishing house, riding the bus downtown every morning, and I was surprised when he called at five to announce that he was waiting on the steps out front. I was even more surprised when I found him sitting next to a guy I’d never seen before, with short black hair and a broad grin. “This is Sam,” Brandon said. “He started at Boat Street today.”

  Brandon was cutting back his work hours for school, and Sam had been hired as his replacement. Sam, as it happened, was also from New Jersey. Brandon was in charge of training him, and they hit it off immediately, talking music and pizza and the shared geography of their childhood (referenced, in proper New Jerseyan style, by turnpike exit number). Brandon offered him a ride home at the end of the day, and they stopped to get me en route. That fall, in my off-hours, I’d been preoccupied with my first book proposal, which I was hoping to sell to a publisher soon. In the car that evening, Sam and I wound up talking about writing, and books, and about the nineteenth-century French poets that I’d been forced to read for my college minor and that he was somehow reading for the fun of it. Not long after, he invited us over for some of his excellent homemade tabouli, and that was how Sam became our mutual best friend.

  One night, Sam took us to Cafe Lago, a restaurant where he’d worked a couple of years earlier. He had a feeling that we would like the food, and he wanted to introduce us to one of the owners, Carla Leonardi, who had become a friend. Sam’s instincts were right on both counts. Dinner, which was delicious, included a very fine wood-fired pizza, and we enjoyed ourselves so much with Carla that we were there until the manager locked up for the night, long enough for a bottle of Carla’s homemade nocino, or green walnut liqueur, to sneak onto the table. It was the first of many such nights at what became our designated corner table.

  Carla was born in Italy but raised in Ohio, and in the 1980s, she lived in New York. She knew New York pizza well. She’d eaten at Di Fara. When she and her then-husband, Jordi Viladas, opened Cafe Lago in 1990, it was the first restaurant in Seattle to serve wood-fired pizza, and most nights, Carla was at the oven. She’d recently been courted by developers who wanted her to open another restaurant, and they were offering to pay the construction expenses. She’d been thinking hard about it, thinking of saying yes, and of doing a new restaurant focused singularly on pizza. You can imagine, then, how often Sam and I lost her and Brandon to talk of tomato sauce, cheese, and dough.

  Brandon was running some catering events for Boat Street at that point, and through one of them he’d met a prominent local businesswoman who was looking for a private chef for her family. Brandon offered himself, listing Carla as a reference, and it turned out that the businesswoman was a regular customer of Carla’s restaurant. He got the job, and
so began his first experience of running his own small operation, cooking dinner for the family three nights a week. Together we catered a birthday party for the businesswoman’s husband, at which Stone Gossard, the guitarist of Pearl Jam, told us that he liked our pesto. I now see that I should have leveraged this fact into some kind of trade—the pesto recipe for Eddie Vedder’s home address, maybe—but I was too busy blushing.

  I remember Brandon telling me around that time that he’d been thinking a lot about Charles Ives, the renowned American composer. Ives sold insurance for most of his life and wrote music on the side. Because of his day job, Ives was never a “starving artist”; he made enough money that he could often give some to other composers, to help support their work. The further Brandon got into his PhD program, the more he began to think about Ives. He’d heard his composition professors complain about their lack of motivation to write, because they were burnt out on music by the end of the day. He watched other composers and freelance musicians fight to make ends meet, and he wondered if there was a middle path, à la Ives: maybe, if he didn’t try to rely on music for a living, he might have a better chance of actually writing it in his off-hours, and of meeting with some success.

  It wasn’t that he was looking for a way to leave graduate school, but he was starting to question his reasons for being there. He liked teaching music, which is what his degree would prepare him to do, but he liked teaching high schoolers, not college students. One of his favorite parts of each week was Saturday morning, when he taught at the local conservatory for teenagers. He wouldn’t need a PhD to be, say, a high school music teacher.

  Around the same time, during the winter of 2006, I sold my first book. The publisher gave me a year to write it and an advance that allowed me to live modestly while I did, so I left my job in early 2007 and began work on the book full-time. I was elated and terrified. I’m the kind of person who likes order and routine, who needs to know exactly what is expected of her, when her next paycheck is coming, and where it’s coming from. In other words, I am not a natural-born freelancer. I felt like the luckiest person alive, and like I might implode under the pressure. That Valentine’s Day, Brandon surprised me with a midweek getaway to Portland, making the most of my newly liberated schedule. He skipped school, and we drove three hours down the interstate and ate our way through town. On the night of Valentine’s Day, we went to Ken’s Artisan Pizza, a place we’d both read about. We sat at the bar and ordered a couple of local beers and a starter of wood-oven-roasted Brussels sprouts. When our pizza arrived, he threw his hands in the air. “Why isn’t there a place like this in Seattle?” he said. “Wood-oven vegetables, great pizza, good beer—we would eat there every week! We would eat there every day! We should open a place like this.”

  Brandon was always saying that kind of thing. I was getting used to it. I nodded in agreement, semi-absentmindedly. I mean, it would be nice if someone would open a restaurant like Ken’s in Seattle.

  I look at it this way: it’s not illegal to think about committing a crime. You can think all you want. Things only get dangerous when you bring another person into it. You start having a conversation—What time would we go into the bank? Would we wear ski masks or Reagan masks?—and at some point you become guilty of conspiracy, even if you never actually do anything. That’s because once you get two or more people in on a crazy scheme, it’s a lot more likely to happen. You egg each other on. You find ways to sidestep seemingly impossible obstacles: security cameras, silent alarms, the fact that one conspirator has never owned a restaurant. Brandon thinks up a lot of crazy, and sometimes illegal, schemes. I listen, and I might even nod, but my temperament is less Bonnie Parker and more Bea Arthur on The Golden Girls. He’s thinking about a getaway car; I’m thinking that our hatchback is overdue for an oil change.

  We got married in July of 2007. One night in October, over dinner at Cafe Lago, Carla and Brandon got talking about Pizzeria Bianco, the famous pizza place in Phoenix. They’d both been reading a spate of articles and awards lists that called it the best pizza in the United States, and maybe even in the world. They’d seen pictures of Chris Bianco’s pizzas, and they were impressed. They started kicking around some ideas, guessing at Bianco’s method and technique. Sometime between dessert and Carla cranking up Blondie on the stereo, a switch flipped. What came next was part joke, part boast, part dare, and all conjecture. With their powers combined, Brandon and Carla agreed, they could totally make pizzas like that. They could open a restaurant that would serve the best pizza anywhere.

  5

  Surprisingly, there was not an excess of alcohol involved. Some, but not a lot. We danced for a while in the now-empty dining room, hugged Carla goodnight, and when the next day came, the proposal was still on the table. Carla and Brandon were now opening a restaurant. I again nodded in agreement, semi-absentmindedly. They decided to meet in a few days to talk more about the idea, but I expected that would be the end of it. The restaurant would obviously go the way of the violin, the boat, and the ice cream shop.

  They began to make plans. One night a week, they would meet at Carla’s house to draft menus, talk potential spaces, and work out a budget. The possibility of a developer paying for construction was very tempting, though there was a catch to consider: the rent in that kind of scenario would likely be exorbitant, far above market value. But they had other options. Carla had some friends and regular customers who might be willing to invest in another restaurant of hers. The money would be there. They didn’t have to worry.

  Instead, they could work on the fun stuff, like scouring Craigslist for equipment. Right out of the gate, they found the restaurant-supply equivalent of a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk: a 30-quart Hobart mixer for only $900, about one-tenth the cost of a new one. They named it Sir-Mix-a-Lot.

  While waiting for replies from Craigslist sellers, they began to test recipes. They were hoping to top their pizzas with house-made mozzarella, made from scratch—just milk, buttermilk, rennet, and salt. Most restaurants that “make” fresh mozzarella start from purchased curd, and the reason for that shortcut quickly became clear. Brandon and Carla made several batches of from-scratch mozzarella, some of which I was invited to sample, and most of which looked like cottage cheese. The pizza might be tasty, but you would have to eat it with your eyes closed. The mozzarella plan was shortly put on hold in favor of testing more crucial recipes, like pizza dough. I would come over at some point in the evening, and sometimes Sam would too, and we’d wrap up with dinner around Carla’s dining room table. One night, I made a pot of creamy polenta, and to go on top, Carla braised a rabbit with herbs and crème fraîche. If ever you go into business with someone, make sure the deal comes with braised rabbit.

  There’s a strange culture among small business owners in Seattle. I can’t explain it, and any attempt to do so makes it sound like even the businesspeople in Seattle are kombucha-brewing hippies (which, actually, some of them are), but by and large, small business owners here tend to cooperate rather than compete. They encourage each other. They genuinely—or it seems so, at least—want to support each other. For example, one night shortly before Delancey opened, when Brandon and I were there doing construction work, the owner of our neighborhood’s other wood-burning pizzeria stuck his head in the door to give us a bottle of wine and his congratulations. He’s since come in a few times to sit and chat, not seeming to mind that we’re his main competition. (Yes, even people who own pizzerias enjoy going out for pizza.) And more importantly, Carla: she didn’t have to encourage Brandon, but she did. He was an upstart who’d never even run a restaurant, much less owned one. She certainly didn’t need him. She didn’t have to team up with him. But she did.

  At the time, there was starting to be a lot of talk in the food world about a place called Apizza Scholls, in Portland, Oregon. Earlier that year, the chef-owner had FedExed one of his pizzas to Ed Levine and Adam Kuban, the pizza-obsessed founders of the website Serious Eats, and they’d proclaimed it fanta
stic, even after its cross-country trek. For the sake of research, Carla and Brandon had to try it. I never refuse a good road trip, so one afternoon, the three of us got in the car and drove down for dinner.

  Apizza Scholls was very, very good. The crust was so light and crackly that it almost seemed to fizz—Pop-Rocks come to mind, and that’s a good thing—when you bit into a slice. It was something to think about. But it was only our first dinner of the night. Brandon also wanted Carla to try Ken’s Artisan Pizza, the place we’d gone to the previous Valentine’s Day. Ken’s is, in a lot of ways, the perfect restaurant. The atmosphere is casual; the quality is high; and the prices are low enough that a person could easily become a regular. The space feels warm and comfortable, with tables made from old-growth Douglas fir that was once part of a roller coaster. The starters and desserts are great, and the wood-fired pizza is excellent, perfectly blistered at the edges. The place seats about sixty people, and it’s consistently busy. People will wait for hours to eat there. We too took our place in line. Afterward, high on all of it and very, very full, we raced back up the highway and were home by midnight, with leftovers.

  Based on what they’d seen at Ken’s and what Carla knew from her own restaurant, they figured they’d need about 2,000 square feet, and that the project might cost around $250,000 if done on the cheap. But there were more calculations to do, and projections to hash out, and they needed professional financial help. That was when Brandon called my brother David. David is the youngest child from my dad’s first marriage, and he’s fifteen years older than me. We haven’t lived in the same city since I was in diapers, but like any good older brother, he made sure to give me a nickname: Molson. It took me twenty-one years to figure out that my namesake was a brand of beer.