Delancey

by Molly Wizenberg

  3 tablespoons fish sauce

  3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice

  2 to 3 tablespoons (25 to 35 g) light brown sugar

  6 to 8 tablespoons water, to taste

  1 medium clove garlic, minced

  1 fresh Thai (also sold as “bird’s eye”) chile, minced

  FOR THE SALAD

  8 ounces (225 g) thin rice noodles (roughly the width of linguine)

  3 or 4 napa cabbage leaves, thinly sliced crosswise

  1 medium carrot, shredded or cut into matchsticks

  Half a cucumber, halved, seeded, and thinly sliced

  A handful of chopped fresh herbs, preferably a combination of basil, cilantro, and mint

  8 ounces (225 g) cooked meat, cut or torn into bite-sized pieces (see note, above)

  1/2 cup (65 g) salted peanuts, coarsely chopped

  TO PREPARE THE DRESSING

  In a jar or small bowl, combine the fish sauce, lime juice, 2 tablespoons of the brown sugar, 6 tablespoons of the water, the garlic, and the chile. Whisk well. Taste: If it’s too pungent add more water, 1 tablespoon at a time. If you’d like more sweetness, add more brown sugar, 1/2 tablespoon at a time. Remember that you’re going to be putting this dressing on unsalted vegetables and noodles: you want the dressing to have a lot of flavor, but it shouldn’t knock you over. Pour into a serving bowl. (Covered and chilled, the dressing will keep for 3 days to a week.)

  TO ASSEMBLE THE SALAD

  Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the rice noodles, and cook for 4 to 5 minutes, until tender but not mushy. Immediately drain the noodles into a colander, and rinse them well with cold water. Lay out a clean kitchen towel on the countertop, shake the colander to drain away excess water, and then spread the cooked noodles on the towel to drain further.

  Divide the noodles between two or three good-sized bowls, depending on the number of diners, and top with the vegetables, herbs, and meat. Scatter the peanuts on top. Allow each person to spoon on dressing to taste. Toss well, and eat. (Alternatively, you can present this salad family-style: Toss the vegetables, herbs, and noodles in a mixing bowl and then mound them on a serving platter. Arrange the meat over the noodles, and top with peanuts. Each diner can scoop their own portion from the platter and dress it as they see fit.)

  Yield: 2 to 3 servings

  8

  Our friend Ben is one of those people who can cook anything without breaking a sweat. I love him for that. I also hate him for it. In his off-hours, he’s often cooking, and it’s usually something from the canon of French classics, the kind of dish that comes with not only a formal title, but a formal title in italics. The phone would ring at eight on a Wednesday night, just as we’d be starting to scramble some eggs for dinner, and it would be Ben, calling to invite us over for coq au vin, steak frites, or truite amandine, his tone so casual you’d think he were talking about opening a can of soup.

  “There was a special on trout at Ballard Market today,” he’d say, “and I’m about to make a cocktail. Why don’t you come over?”

  We’d go over. Ben is an opera director, and he and Brandon have known each other since Brandon was in college and Ben was dating Brandon’s friend Bonnie. In early 2008, he landed a job as the assistant director of Seattle Opera. He moved to town that summer and found a little house to rent in our neighborhood, on Alonzo Avenue, about a mile from our apartment. We’d let ourselves in the side door, and he’d be waiting with his signature cocktail, an icy pour of gin spiked with freshly ground black pepper and a clove of raw garlic. Then would come the trout: a whole fish for each of us, crisp-skinned, dressed in browned butter, sliced almonds, and parsley. And in case the sight of a sautéed whole trout wasn’t enough to make us giddy on a weeknight, this specimen would be sitting upright on the plate, folded in half using some classical technique so that its tail poked jauntily through its mouth. I want you to know that it takes a lot of restraint to keep from putting a half-dozen exclamation points at the end of that sentence. Ben would even have warmed the plates.

  If Ben hadn’t moved into that house on Alonzo, I doubt Brandon would have found the building where we opened Delancey. But one day that fall—probably early November, though none of us can remember the date—Brandon stopped by to see Ben, and when he couldn’t find a parking space on Alonzo, he drove up the block to Northwest 70th Street, took a right, and parked outside a charming old one-story commercial building with a FOR LEASE sign in the window.

  When Brandon came home later and told me about it, I remembered the street fair I’d gone to on Northwest 70th that summer, with Ben. The block between Alonzo and 14th Avenue had been closed to cars, and the businesses there had propped their doors open and put chairs and tables out on the sidewalk. There was face painting, and a bouncy castle, and there must have been a petting zoo, because I remember a small, straw-lined pen in front of what is now the dining room of Delancey, with a goat and maybe a pig? Honoré Artisan Bakery, which sits right next to Delancey, had just opened, and we bought some of their pastries. This block was technically in my neighborhood, but I’d never realized there were businesses there; I’d thought it was all bungalows for blocks around.

  The FOR LEASE sign, as it turned out, had gone up only the day before Brandon saw it. There were three adjoining storefronts on offer. The landlord showed us into 1415, which only shortly before had been the Peapod Book and Birth Store. Straight ahead, about eight paces from the front door, was a wall with a mural of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin and, between them, a quote by A. A. Milne. If you turned back to look at the door, you’d find a second mural above it, this one of a couple of three-masted ships, sails billowing, on a baby-blue sea. Walking toward the Winnie the Pooh wall, you’d pass through a doorway into a second room in back, where there was a psychedelic rainbow-painted plaster cast of a pregnant woman’s belly hanging on the wall. From that back room, you could turn right and wind up in a low, dark rabbit warren of a hallway that led to a small bathroom on the left and, on the right, a doorway into the rear of number 1417, formerly Gracewinds Perinatal Services. There, just inside the doorway, was a closet. If you opened it, you were rewarded with the sight of a bumper sticker on the wall that read, MOMS ROCK! AT KEGELS. (I figured this was just a triumphant, if oddly punctuated, statement of fact. But the other day, I learned that there is, or was, a Ballard-based mommy-punk band called The Kegels. Their 2005 album Totally Effaced includes tracks like “Sux2b3” and “Mini-Van Mom.”) And then, going back into the hallway, you could continue on to 1421, which had already been claimed, the landlord told us, by a woman who planned to install an umbrella shop. This made me feel better about the odds of the restaurant succeeding. I mean, if you think a lot of new restaurants fail, imagine the death rate for umbrella shops.

  Common wisdom (and my brother David) says that you should open a restaurant in a part of town where there’s plenty of traffic, plenty of street life to support it. You should open in a part of town where similar businesses are already succeeding. You should probably not open a restaurant on a street like Northwest 70th in Ballard, where no one will see it unless they’re looking for it. The street is narrow and relatively quiet, punctuated by speed bumps, and it’s easily a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Seattle. When I moved to Seattle in 2002, I didn’t know anyone who lived in Ballard, and people talked about it as though it were far enough away that it might as well be the island on Lost. But we’d stumbled upon a nice little duplex to rent there in 2006, and we’d gotten to know the area. We liked that it felt like its own small city, that it had a lot of independent businesses, that it looked out for its own. Brandon’s restaurant could be a true neighborhood joint there, hidden in plain sight on Northwest 70th. It could be the kind of place we’d like to have around the corner from our apartment.

  Together, 1415 and 1417 added up to just over a thousand square feet. In that kind of space, the restaurant could seat about forty people—a little smaller than the other potential locations, but it
felt right. (Many more people than that, and he might be taking on more than he could manage; many fewer, and he wouldn’t make enough money to be worth the effort.) There was plenty to tackle: 1415 had wall-to-wall carpet; 1417 had a lumpy teal concrete floor; both had ugly cottage cheese–like popcorn ceilings; and the façade was a queasy mash-up of beige, green, blue, and bright red. But the important parts were there. The ceilings were high. A dozen saucer-shaped industrial pendant lights hung from the ceiling on a network of steel tubes. They were exactly the kind of thing we liked, old but timeless, and even in a salvage shop they would have been expensive. Here, they were included in the deal. The bar across the street had a loyal following, and the bakery next door was getting a lot of press, and the café diagonally across the way had just been bought by a young chef who planned to serve an ambitious all-local menu, all the way down to the sea salt. Everything about it felt right, including the fact that 1417 had once been a tavern, a small but notable detail that made it likely that the city would approve permits for a restaurant.

  And in a previous incarnation, number 1415 had been a violin shop. If a man can’t build a violin, he might as well make pizzas in a former violin shop.

  THE BENJAMIN WAYNE SMITH

  It seems only fitting to include a recipe for our friend Ben’s signature cocktail—and to name it after him, while I’m at it. I’ve watched him make it many times, but for our purposes, I asked him to write down his method. This is what he gave me:

  I was spoiling myself, dining at the Palena Cafe in Washington, D.C. The café is attached to a very fancy and expensive restaurant (Palena), which one can see at the end of the long hallway connecting the two. It’s sort of like looking into first class from coach.

  Anyway, I sat alone at the bar one night eating spaghetti and veal meatballs and overheard a man in a cowboy hat order his martini like this: “Take the cheapest gin you have, crush a garlic clove, add a few grinds of black pepper, and shake with ice. Strain it into an ‘up’ glass. Take the clove from the shaker and add it to the glass.”

  Try it with three ounces of gin. You can adjust the garlic quotient by more or less crushing of the clove. Obviously, the more pepper you use, the sharper the drink. I usually do two big grinds on a very coarse setting. It floats in the drink, but I don’t mind.

  I usually use Burnett’s gin when I make this cocktail, but anything cheap will do just fine.

  NOTE: Ben is going to give me a royally hard time for this, but contrary to his advice, we usually use Voyager or Tanqueray. And we use less gin per drink, about 2 ounces. Rinsing the glass with dry vermouth isn’t a bad idea, either.

  9

  There are approximately one million steps between signing a commercial lease and opening the doors to the public. Anyone with a regular heartbeat can probably tell you that. Before Delancey, when I considered someone who had successfully navigated those steps—my brother David, say—I assumed that he had been able to do it because he had a gift, possibly bestowed upon him at birth, that gave him a bunch of skills that non–business owners don’t have. There was a Business Fairy, a cousin to the Tooth Fairy, and she’d visited him in the nursery and, with a wave of her wand, gave him The Knowledge.

  When Brandon signed the lease for the space that would become Delancey, I wanted to know where the hell that fairy was. It was November 21, 2008, the Friday before Thanksgiving. He had two empty storefronts, and because the landlord had given him six months of free rent, he hoped to turn them into a restaurant within that amount of time, if not sooner. I was around, but I wasn’t formally helping: I was paying our bills with freelance writing work, and my book would be published in early March, consuming the bulk of my time for weeks before and after. Anyway, though the signing of the lease certainly seemed to mean that Delancey was happening, I still couldn’t imagine it. I could say to you, My husband is opening a restaurant, but the words didn’t mean a lot to me. I still couldn’t see how, exactly, he was going to do it. The construction alone was an enormous obstacle, and I couldn’t see beyond it. Brandon is a bright, resourceful guy, but there was a lot to learn—and I’m just talking about construction, not management or marketing or even making pizza.

  In the early weeks of planning Delancey, Brandon thought he would hire the Business Fairy. Most people building businesses (and homes, and everything in between) do. She’s called a contractor.

  Brandon met with three contractors who came highly recommended. The first was too busy. The second gave a bid for $250,000, about four times Brandon’s total budget. The third gave a similar bid, but then he leaned in and confided, “You know, you don’t really need a contractor. You can do this on your own. Hire an architect to help you with the permits, but you can do the rest.”

  So it was that Brandon mostly built Delancey himself, with a mishmash of paid, traded, and volunteer help. The team consisted of a local architect named Henry Walters; my architect-designer cousin Katie Caradec and her friend and business partner, Pantea Tehrani, who worked remotely from the Bay Area; one of the landlords, who doubled as a discount plumber-slash-construction-worker; our friend John Vatcher, who gave us his toolbox and his weekends; various employees at home improvement stores, who offered advice; and nearly two dozen other assorted friends, who were compensated in Cool Ranch Doritos. Together, they got the job done, if not quickly, easily, or elegantly. Construction began in early December of 2008, and if we’re going to be perfectly honest, it’s still going on.

  The first thing Brandon bought was a box of surgical masks. Then the Winnie the Pooh wall came down, and after it, the plaster cast of the pregnant belly. Then he ripped out the carpet, and then the popcorn ceiling. There’s no quick way to scrape a hard, bumpy crust from a surface eight feet above one’s head, but he devised a couple of decent tools, the most effective being a long broom handle with a putty knife screwed onto the end of it. (Don’t worry: he had the popcorn ceiling tested for asbestos first.) The process took a week, because as it turns out, a person can hold a tool above his head for only a certain amount of time before his shoulders relocate semi-permanently to the level of his ears. Between episodes of scraping, he’d pick out toilet fixtures or fill out paperwork for permits. When he’d come home at the end of the day and draw himself a bath, there’d be a half-cup of ceiling in his hair.

  By the time he’d finished scraping the ceiling, the debris on the floor was thick enough that you could drag your foot through it and spell out SOS or, if you spanned both rooms, MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY. After Brandon carted it all to the dump, it was time to do unspeakable things to the floor.

  What we wanted was a natural concrete floor: no paint, no nonsense, just a coat of sealant. Concrete floor we had, but it was riddled with nonsense: glue, foam padding residue, and teal paint. So, at the recommendation of a Home Depot employee, Brandon rented something called a shot blaster.

  A shot blaster looks like a large vacuum cleaner, and it’s a cross between that, an industrial sander, and a tennis ball machine. You push it (slowly and with difficulty: it’s heavy) across a flat surface, the same way you would a sander. As you do this, it pummels the surface beneath it with tiny steel balls, which it instantly sucks back up and recirculates, and the abrasive action of the balls strips away paint, glue, sealant, skin, whatever they encounter. The shot blaster rental fee was steep, and Brandon only paid for twenty-four hours, so he had to work fast. He had appointments all day and couldn’t start until after dinnertime, so I went along to help. Because only one person can push the machine at a time, I passed the hours—we were there until after midnight—by cutting out paper snowflakes and sticking them to the front windows with electrical tape. It was almost Christmas.

  The shot blaster easily removed the blue paint, the carpet glue, and the foam residue, but it also left a conspicuous pattern in its wake, like the trail a lawnmower leaves on grass. Had we been told that it would do this, we would have shot-blastered in a pretty crisscross pattern, country club–style. As it was, what we had were wo
bbly stripes that pointed roughly in the direction of the eventual pizza oven, Brandon’s spot in the kitchen, as though to say, The guy to thank for this design atrocity is standing right here. Worse, the process had revealed some substantial cracks and an old floor drain in what would be the dining room, problems that had been hidden, sealed with concrete, until we blasted the crap out of them. We looked at each other, and suddenly he was Tom Hanks and I was Shelley Long and we were in The Money Pit. At any moment, a bathtub was due to fall out of the ceiling.

  And that is why the floor at Delancey is painted.

  MEATLOAF

  At the end of a day of shot blastering or other hard labor, nothing tastes better than a meatloaf sandwich. I like mine as straightforward as they come: a slice of meatloaf, mayonnaise, and bread. Maybe lettuce, but probably not.

  This recipe is not about reinventing meatloaf. For the most part, its ingredients are classic ones, though when they come together, I think the result is particularly good. My subtle tweak to the concept is fish sauce. You might think a typically Asian ingredient seems out of place in something as American as meatloaf, but at my friend Matthew’s suggestion, I tried it, and I love the quietly deeper, more savory flavor it brings. You won’t actually taste the fish sauce itself, but you’ll benefit from it.

  Whenever I have a day-old baguette or other French-style bread, I make breadcrumbs for recipes like this one. Trim away and discard the crust; then tear or cut the bread into 1-inch pieces. Pulse the pieces in a food processor until they’re reduced to crumbs roughly the size of barley or short-grain rice.

  And a note about the meat itself: Don’t be tempted to buy the leanest possible grade of ground beef or pork. You want some fat for tenderness.

  Lastly, your hands are your best tool for mixing meatloaf evenly and quickly. My favorite mixing technique is something I call “the Claw,” and it’s described below. If the thought of a handful of raw meat makes you squeamish, try keeping a box of powder-free latex gloves in the kitchen.