Delancey

by Molly Wizenberg

  It was a given that Brandon would do a cheese pizza based on the flavors of Di Fara’s, with tomato sauce, a little fresh basil, and a combination of fresh mozzarella, aged mozzarella, and Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano. Most New York–style pizzerias use only aged mozzarella, the kind you grate or shred, on their basic cheese pie; Di Fara’s was the first he’d known to add fresh mozzarella, too. The result was soft and milky in some bites, rich and chewy in others, and perfectly salted, and though it had a decent amount of cheese, it somehow wasn’t gloppy or soggy. Brandon’s basic cheese pie would use the same three cheeses—two mozzarellas and Grana Padano, because Brandon likes it better on pizza than Parmigiano-Reggiano—and as a nod to Di Fara, we decided to call it the Brooklyn.

  It was New York that got him into this, but Brandon also wanted to serve a Margherita, Italy’s classic cheese pie. It’s simple: just tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, and olive oil. That also means that it’s hard to do well, because there’s nowhere to hide an unbalanced sauce or a cheese with so-so flavor. He would make a Margherita, but he had to get it right.

  Beyond those preliminary decisions, there were a lot of details to work out. Do you grate the aged mozzarella, or do you grind it to small pebbles in the food processor? Do you slice the fresh mozzarella, do you hand-tear it into pieces, or do you put it in the food processor, too? How much of the sauce and cheese can you use before your pizza leaks a pool of orange oil and requires blotting with a half-dozen napkins prior to consumption? And does the basil go on before or after baking?

  That said, the toppings were never the point for Brandon. The point was the basic combination of crust, sauce, and cheese, and the way they talked to each other. When most of us think about pizza, we might think about pepperoni or goat cheese or ham and pineapple, but what makes pizza taste like pizza, what allows us to recognize this particular food as pizza, is the union of crust, sauce, and cheese. When Brandon started to think about what kind of pizzas he would make, his focus was on those elemental parts. He wanted each component to be the best it could be, and he wanted those components to be in balance. The menu would have an interesting seasonal pizza or two, but for the most part, he didn’t want to devote a lot of attention to elaborate toppings, because it took enough attention just to assemble and bake each pizza—at slightly different temperatures for different toppings—so that the textures and flavors would be exactly as he wanted.

  So the Margherita would be the restaurant’s nod toward Italy, and the Brooklyn would be the foundation for almost everything else. If you ordered a Pepperoni, for instance, you were essentially ordering the Brooklyn plus pepperoni. The same went for the Padrón, which was a Brooklyn with roasted fresh chiles. But you could, of course, order a Margherita and ask to have pepperoni or padróns added to it. Nobody was going to tell you that you couldn’t eat what you wanted to eat. The menu wouldn’t encourage diners to add a metric ton of toppings, but Brandon would be happy to do it, if asked.

  (The current record for most toppings added to a single pizza was set on January 22, 2011, by a man who must have spent the day skiing or snowshoeing or maybe just smoking a lot of weed, because he had worked up an appetite that could be satisfied only by a Pepperoni with added sausage, prosciutto, bacon, pickled peppers, and double the normal amount, he specified, of crimini mushrooms.)

  The opening menu would also have a couple of sauceless pizzas, like the Zucchini Anchovy, a typically Roman combination of zucchini blossoms, anchovies, and fresh mozzarella, only our version would use thinly shaved zucchini in place of the blossoms. And there would also be the Crimini, which was based on a Jamie Oliver recipe that we liked to make at home: a platter of thinly sliced mushrooms, fresh mozzarella, fresh thyme leaves, and olive oil, slipped under the broiler until browned and bubbly and then eaten with bread. Brandon would swap out the platter for pizza dough and the broiler for the wood-burning oven.

  But that spring, while the oven was only half-tiled and the basement filled with stuff, the toppings were still in their testing phase. We didn’t know yet whether anyone would even like the Crimini, because Brandon was still trying to figure out how much mozzarella to put on it. There was a folding card table at one end of what is now the bar, and it, with a clamp lamp hooked to the side, was my prep station. I had a cutting board, a paring knife, a box grater, a plastic pack of fresh thyme sprigs and a bag of crimini mushrooms, a tub of fresh mozzarella, and a few tester bottles of olive oil that we’d been given by a vendor eager for a contract. I’d slice mushrooms and pick thyme leaves, and once there was enough for a few pizzas, Brandon would do his part. A batch of dough made about forty pizzas, so we’d be there until midnight. There wasn’t enough room on the folding table for the finished pizzas, so after a while, once we were done sampling them, we’d stack them on the rungs of a nearby ladder. It wasn’t so much about the eating, anyway. It was about practice and repetition, about taste memory and muscle memory, about trying to figure it out.

  WINTER SALAD WITH CITRUS AND FETA

  I don’t think it’s possible to get tired of pizza. (I do, though, reserve the right to reverse my stance in a few years.) But regular infusions of salad and crunchy vegetables help to make us feel less like grade-schoolers at a slumber party.

  Salad is no easy feat in winter and early spring in Seattle, when grocery store options are slim and there’s no lettuce at the farmers’ market. But a few years ago, I discovered that I love escarole, one of the sweeter, milder members of the chicory family, and shortly after that, raw kale became the It Thing, and suddenly cold-weather salads seemed a lot more plausible. Brandon came up with the following citrus-based dressing one January at the restaurant, where it’s served on chicories with French feta, citrus segments, and plenty of chopped pistachios. When it’s on the menu, I eat it a few times a week, and when I make it at home, I also add avocado slices.

  I’ve intentionally left the salad ingredient amounts open to interpretation, and you should feel free to use a combination of whichever greens you like best. You’ll want a good handful per person. For the grapefruit segments, I like to add them with a light hand, but you might like more than I do. Don’t skimp, though, on the pistachios or the feta.

  FOR THE DRESSING

  1 tablespoon Champagne vinegar

  1 tablespoon freshly squeezed orange juice

  1 tablespoon freshly squeezed grapefruit juice

  1/2 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

  1/2 clove garlic, pressed or grated on a Microplane

  1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt

  Pinch of freshly ground black pepper

  Pinch of grated lemon zest

  Pinch of grated orange zest

  1/4 cup (60 ml) olive oil

  FOR THE SALAD

  Mixture of winter greens, such as escarole, lacinato kale, endive, and radicchio

  Grapefruit segments

  A generous amount of unsalted pistachios, coarsely chopped

  French feta, crumbled

  Avocado, sliced (optional)

  PREPARE THE DRESSING

  In a jar or small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, citrus juices, garlic, salt, pepper, and zests. Gradually add the olive oil, whisking to emulsify. (This dressing will keep in the refrigerator for a few days; after that, the citrus juices tend to oxidize.)

  ASSEMBLE THE SALAD

  Combine the greens in a wide bowl and add dressing to taste. Toss gently, and top with grapefruit, pistachios, and feta. Add avocado slices, if using, and serve.

  Yield: about 1/2 cup dressing, enough for about six to eight servings of salad

  12

  It occurs to me that when I write about Delancey, I sometimes toss around possessive pronouns a little carelessly. Sometimes it’s his restaurant; sometimes it feels like ours. Sometimes it sounds like I’m right there next to him in the construction debris, and sometimes it sounds like I’m reporting from a safe, tidy newsroom, keeping tabs on him via satellite phone. None of these is incorrect. Eve
n while I lived and ate and worked and slept beside a man who was clearly opening a restaurant, for a long time I tried to pretend that the restaurant didn’t exist.

  When the idea for Delancey was hatched, I was so deep in my first book that I was writing in my sleep. I’d wake up and boom! have a new paragraph. The book was my full-time job, and when that was finished, I had freelance work, and then it was time to revise the book, and then it was time to get out and promote it.

  Let’s say your spouse is a statistics professor and you’re a biologist. If you made a Venn diagram of your professional interests and capacities, the circles might overlap, and they might even overlap quite a bit, but still, you’re the biologist and your spouse is the statistics professor. You have different jobs. Brandon and I were like that. What made our Venn diagram odd was the fact that most of my writing has been about food. Our circles don’t just overlap; they’re nearly consuming each other.

  So I should explain why, in the beginning, I didn’t want to be a part of the restaurant, and aside from the menu planning, I didn’t really even want to help with it.

  At first, Brandon had Carla. The restaurant belonged to them. They were opening a restaurant. It wasn’t my project. But after Carla pulled out and I slowly began to help now and then, I knew that Brandon found it odd that I was so hesitant, that I wasn’t more interested, that I even seemed somewhat threatened by it. But he told himself that I was just preoccupied, nervous about my own work, and that wasn’t an inaccurate assessment.

  He knew the restaurant would be a lot of work. He had no illusions: of course it would be a lot of work. But he had done the math, and he believed that it would be worth the trouble. It’s not that I didn’t believe him; I just wasn’t wholly convinced. He began planning the restaurant at almost exactly the moment that the U.S. economy began to tank. By the time the lease was signed, the unemployment rate was soaring and businesses were keeling over left and right. Here he was, opening a type of business with a notoriously high failure rate in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Plus, Brandon has never been great with numbers. He’ll accidentally reorder a sequence as he jots it down, or he’ll dial a phone number backwards. Still, even knowing that, I didn’t want to look closely at his calculations. I didn’t have time, I told him. I could help him with the menus, because that was squarely up my alley, but that was all. I didn’t want to open a restaurant. And hey, we were talking about a giant, violin-shaped ice cream boat. Why should I waste time on the details?

  But I couldn’t say that to Brandon. Instead, I put my head down and did my own job, and because I like to see Brandon happy, and because I knew how much he wanted the restaurant, I encouraged him to keep doing his job, too.

  * * *

  Publishing a book is the headiest experience I can imagine, short of waking up one morning to find myself in bed with Bruce Springsteen circa Born to Run. I got to buy some new clothes and dress up and leave the house a few times—strange behaviors for a writer—and best of all, I felt like a professional. I loved meeting the people who had supported me and my writing, who had made the book possible. I felt like somebody.

  So I wasn’t prepared for what came after: a sadness like I had never experienced. When I got home from my book tour at the end of March, the high lasted for about a week, and then, without being able to say why, I felt empty. I’ve since been told that there’s a kind of “postpartum” depression that can come with finishing a large creative project, and that it’s normal, but at the time that it was happening, I didn’t know any of that. I just knew that I felt used up. I felt paralyzed, stuck—unsure of what to do next, unable to even think about what to do next. The rational part of me knew that I was probably just exhausted, wading through the gray zone of transition from one project to another, but that’s not what it felt like. I couldn’t feel anything.

  This was also when I began to understand that the restaurant was, in fact, going to open. This was not a hobby, another project that Brandon would get bored with and forget. I began to add it up: He had built a pizza oven. He owned a thirty-quart industrial mixer. Our basement was filled with equipment. He was actually doing it. While I was busy with my own work, it had been easy to avoid thinking about the future, about this nebulous restaurant thing. But once the book was done, there was nothing else to think about. It was right there in front of me. I chose this moment, four months after the lease was signed, to tell Brandon for the first time that I didn’t want him to do it.

  I had never expected us to have nine-to-five work lives, the kind where you come home, have dinner on the table by six-thirty, and then sit on the couch with a glass of wine and watch Law & Order reruns until bedtime. (I prefer to watch Law & Order reruns in bed, on the laptop, with a box of Trader Joe’s chocolate Joe-Joe’s cookies.) I chose to write for a living, and that is not a steady, reliable, nine-to-five gig. While my line of work does give me a lot of day-to-day flexibility, the work itself is not easily contained or compartmentalized, and the hours are rarely regular. In spite of that, I had expected our lives to have a gentle rhythm. I expected us to eat dinner together at our kitchen table, the way we had in our first years as a couple, the way my family always had. I expected us to get into bed together, at the same time. I expected the peace of mind that comes with having at least one member of the family—Brandon, I thought—receive a regular paycheck from an outside employer.

  “I don’t want you to own a restaurant!” I blurted out. We were at home, in the kitchen, cleaning up after lunch. I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

  “What are you talking about?” Brandon said, stunned. He stared at me.

  I didn’t want anything that a restaurant stands for. I didn’t want him to work nights and holidays. I didn’t want to eat dinner alone. My interest in food has always been about sharing it—about the kitchen table, about home cooking, not restaurants. I like the intimacy, the quiet, the scale of home cooking. During college, I tried interning in the kitchen of a highly regarded restaurant in San Francisco, an internship I was very lucky to get, and though the word hate would be too much, I didn’t care for it. I loved that it was my job to get up to my elbows in food, but I didn’t like the most basic fact of it: it’s not like home cooking. When you plate a dish in a restaurant, you hand it to a server, and that’s the end of that. It’s time to plate another dish, and then another, and then another, and you’d better do it fast. There can be an appealing badassery, and even a certain romance, to being a line cook, but it’s not part of the job description. Mostly, you’re sweating in a hot kitchen, and the dining room—the eating part, the pleasure part, the connection part—is on the other side of a wall. It’s grueling, repetitive work, and you do it while most of the world is relaxing. The customers are not there to share a meal with you, and anyway, you haven’t got time: there are a dozen tickets on your rail.

  “I don’t want a restaurant!” I was screaming now. “I don’t want this! I never wanted this!”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he screamed back. “Why didn’t you tell me?” We were both crying. “You encouraged me!”

  “I didn’t think you would go through with it! I thought it was just a thing—a hobby!” I cried.

  “It was never a hobby!” His jaw tightened. “How could you think it was a hobby? I did this for us! I did this for you! I did it because I thought we would both like it!”

  The restaurant was already doing what I feared it would. We had recently watched the stresses of restaurant ownership tear up a friend’s marriage, and I figured it was naïve to expect anything different for ours. The restaurant industry runs on long days, late nights, and regular infusions of adrenaline, alcohol, and drugs. It’s not a family- or marriage-friendly atmosphere; it’s what gave us Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I didn’t want Brandon to become a Restaurant Person, a guy in a stiff white coat who answers only to “Chef” and yells orders in broken Spanish while snorting coke with waitresses (or off of waitresses) during di
nner service. I didn’t want to lose the person I knew.

  Brandon tried to reason with me. The restaurant would change things, he agreed, but it would be for the better. We’d be able to stay in Seattle, which would not likely have been the case if he’d stayed the course and gotten his PhD: he’d probably have wound up an assistant professor of music at the University of Faraway Town We Would Only Agree to Move to Because There Were No Other Options on Earth. He might actually make good money from the restaurant, too, which would definitely not be the case with a university teaching job. Anyway, pizza, he assured me, is a recession-proof food. People will always want to eat pizza, the same way they’ll always want hamburgers and barbecue. It was a no-fail business proposition. He also knew his intentions for the restaurant: that it would feel as close to a dinner party as he could possibly make it, a place like Boat Street, a restaurant for us non–Restaurant People.