But the anticipation was also a problem. Brandon and I were trying something that we had never done before, and we were trying it in public. This wasn’t like publishing a book. When you write a book, you get to workshop material with a small group of like-minded people, revise, work with an editor, revise again, work with a copyeditor, revise again, and then see two rounds of typeset proofs, all before the thing goes on sale. When you open a restaurant, people come in, eat your food, and if they don’t like it, they tell everyone. There are few other pursuits in which you can have such a high-stakes debut. Just a month earlier, another highly anticipated restaurant had opened in our neighborhood, and on its first night, it was flooded with diners live-Tweeting their critiques and commentary. What we needed was to open quietly, to be allowed some time to learn how to run a restaurant. We had a lot of mistakes to make. We needed to protect ourselves somehow, possibly with body armor, to keep from being immediately trounced. That was our only chance of figuring out how to make good food at a reasonable speed, and to make our customers happy.
We owe Delancey’s early success, and what small degree of sanity we still have, to our friend Ryan Bergsman. Most restaurants do two or three days of “soft opening,” offering meals on an invitation-only basis to friends and family or just quietly unlocking the doors and seeing who shows up. But two or three days didn’t feel like enough to us, and the let’s-see-who-shows-up option sounded like strolling into the middle of the street and waiting to be hit by a car. Ryan and his wife, Kristen, had been helping us with construction, and he had an idea: that we should do an unusually long soft opening—seven nights in all—and make it reservation-only, strategically ramping up the number of reservations as the days went by. That way, we could incrementally work up to full capacity.
We would make July 30, a Thursday, our first night. Like our charity dinner with Olaiya, we would do a three-course fixed-price menu: twenty dollars per person, with beer and wine for three dollars a glass. We would serve only thirty people. We would take Friday and Saturday to regroup, and then we would do the same thing on Sunday. Then we would be open from Wednesday to Sunday of the following week, serving the full menu and taking first one and then two seatings of customers. (I should add that by this point in the process, we were out of cash, so we’d be buying each night’s ingredients as we went, and slowly, we hoped, making some money to put toward our opening food-and-beverage inventory.) And the week after that, on Wednesday, August 12, 2009, we would open officially to the public.
That first Thursday began with Mom and me and the composed salads. Once they were plated and sent out, I went to the pizza station to help Brandon. We’d decided to do four types of pizza: Margherita, Brooklyn, Crimini, and Zucchini Anchovy. The pizzas at Delancey are about twelve inches across, and a very hungry person can put away a whole one on his own, but for the fixed-menu dinners, we served them family-style, so each person could taste a slice or two of each pizza. We would make six of each type, we figured, or maybe eight, until people cried uncle.
We started with the Margherita. Brandon would stretch the dough, lay it on the peel, and then I would put on the toppings. The sauce would go down first—a scant ladleful, or else the dough gets soggy. Then came the fresh mozzarella, which I tore into shreds as I went along. It takes approximately twenty seconds to hand-tear fifteen bite-size shreds from a ball of mozzarella and distribute them evenly across a pizza, but when it’s over a hundred degrees in the room and there are thirty people waiting for you, it feels like twenty minutes. When I had finally finished, I nudged the peel toward Brandon, and then he rushed to slide the pizza into the oven, rushed to stretch a second, nudged it toward me, rotated the first, took the first out of the oven, and slid in the second, now topped and ready. Then he stretched a third and rotated the second while I sliced the first, drizzled it with olive oil, snipped a couple of fresh basil leaves over the top, and passed it to a server. Then I topped the third, and we went on like this—this, plus a lot of swearing—until we had made six. Then we moved on to the Brooklyn, which was like the Margherita, except before baking, it also got a handful of aged mozzarella, ground in a food processor to roughly the texture of potting soil, and afterward, it skipped the basil and olive oil in favor of a grating of Grana Padano. Then we made six of the Crimini, and then six of the Zucchini.
We made pizzas for probably an hour and a half, and then I went back to my station and, again with my mother, plated dessert: scoops of homemade vanilla malt ice cream in teacups, with a giant salted chocolate chip cookie wedged in the saucer. We hadn’t been able to get a dishwasher for the night, so Brandon, Mom, and I were also taking turns doing the dishes. It was so hot back there, and so humid from the running of the dishwashing machine, that the ice cream began to melt the instant it landed in the cups. The servers grabbed them four at a time and nearly ran them to the dining room. One of the customers, the mother of a friend, stepped outside to cool off and fainted on the sidewalk.
The next morning, we slept in, and then we made a phone call to hire a new produce vendor, because the one we’d originally chosen (for year-round staples like crimini mushrooms, lemons, and fresh herbs) had messed up every single item in our first order. It’s not complicated: the vendor had given us a weekly “fresh sheet,” listing every item they offered and its brand or place of origin. But they delivered portabello mushrooms instead of crimini, conventional lemons from Mexico instead of organic lemons from California, and thyme not from a farm in central Washington but from someplace near San Diego.
Two days later, on Sunday morning, I drove my mother to the airport and cried the whole way home. I was on my own now. We were on our own. There would be no one to make sure that we remembered to eat, no one to rub our backs, no one to reassure us, no soft parental buffer between us and the very adult thing we were doing. As she disappeared through the sliding doors, I felt like screaming, Waaaait! Don’t leave us alone with this thing!
That night, we did our second dinner, also a fixed menu. I wrote the courses on the chalkboard that we’d accidentally glued to the floor a couple of weeks earlier: farm tomatoes, thickly sliced and topped with corn cut straight from the cob, cherry tomatoes, basil leaves, and basil-shallot vinaigrette; four types of pizza; and then more salted chocolate chip cookies, this time served with blueberry yogurt popsicles that I made in tall, narrow shot glasses. Our friends Ashley and Gabe were there, and Ashley later told me that they’d decided that night to buy a house they’d been looking at in the neighborhood, just so they would be close to Delancey. This made us feel pretty great, even if most real-estate experts would not recommend choosing a house on the basis of proximity to pizza. Ben was there that night, too, and Brandon’s old friend Bonnie, who had been at our wedding. Afterward, she sent us a thank-you note on electric pink paper, telling us how proud she was. I keep it pinned to the bulletin board in my office, and I still get choked up when I read it.
We had somehow survived our debut as restaurant owners. The plan was working—or what was left of the plan, after a weeklong heat wave and the disappearance of John. Now all we needed was a cook. The next morning, Brandon picked up the phone and called Jared. We didn’t care what we had decided about him ten days earlier. We knew that he could do the job with his eyes closed, and we needed help.
He came right away. He still had another job that kept him busy until mid-afternoon, but he would get as many shifts covered as he could, and he would work for us three nights a week. To cover the other two nights, we hired another cook we’d decided against in the first go-round, a very nice guy who, as it turned out, was the slowest, sweatiest pizza stretcher the world has ever known. On our first official day, we opened to a line of customers that stretched down the block and around the corner. We were terrified. Brandon put on Charlie Parker with Strings, an album that had been my dad’s, the most soothing music we had. Because any help is better than no help, we kept the slow guy for three weeks before Brandon gently let him go, our first official firi
ng. Then our chef friend Danny came to the rescue, driving the hour-plus from Vashon Island, where he lives, to stretch pizza for us two nights a week. Every day was a new rescue operation, and it would be that way for a while.
TOMATO AND CORN SALAD WITH SHALLOT VINAIGRETTE
This is the salad that we served on our second night, and it stayed on the menu for weeks, until the end of tomato season. It’s very, very simple, and there’s no place to hide a mediocre tomato or starchy corn, so use the best you can get. It comes together quickly, but do note that the vinaigrette should be started ahead of time—at least an hour and a half before you plan to eat, or even earlier—so that the shallots and garlic have time to be lightly pickled by the vinegar.
At home, we like to eat this salad with buttery scrambled eggs, some chewy bread, and a wedge of extra-sharp cheddar cheese. And I highly recommend this: When the platter of salad is nearly empty, take a crusty hunk of bread, sop up the last shallots and tomato juices with it, balance a sliver of cheddar on top, and eat.
FOR THE VINAIGRETTE
2 small or 1 medium shallot (about 50 g), minced
1 medium clove garlic, minced
5 tablespoons (70 ml) red wine vinegar
1/2 cup (120 ml) olive oil
1/8 teaspoon sugar
A good pinch of fine sea salt, or more to taste
4 or 5 fresh basil leaves
FOR THE SALAD
2 large beefsteak tomatoes, or 6 smaller tomatoes
1 or 2 handfuls of cherry tomatoes
Raw kernels from 1 ear of corn
Crunchy salt, such as Maldon or fleur de sel
A few fresh basil leaves
MAKE THE VINAIGRETTE
Stir together the shallots, garlic, and vinegar in a small bowl. Set aside for 1 hour—or even a couple of hours, if you have time. You’re looking to soften the flavors of the shallot and garlic, so that they no longer taste raw; they should taste lightly pickled.
Whisk in the olive oil, sugar, and salt. Add the basil leaves, bashing them with the whisk to bruise them and release their oils. Let sit for another 30 minutes. Before using, remove and discard the basil leaves, and taste for salt.
ASSEMBLE THE SALAD
Slice the tomatoes into 1/2-inch-thick rounds. Arrange them on a platter. Halve the cherry tomatoes, and strew them around the tomato slices. Scatter the raw corn kernels on top. Season with a good pinch of crunchy salt. Spoon the vinaigrette liberally over the whole platter—1/4 cup wouldn’t be too much; you’ll want extra for eating with bread—and then snip the basil leaves into strips over the top.
NOTE: Leftover vinaigrette can be covered and stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 days. (After that point, the flavor of the garlic and shallot can get too strong.) Bring to room temperature before using.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
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In the beginning, we were both at the restaurant seventeen hours a day. Maybe only fifteen, if we were lucky. We couldn’t afford a prep cook, so we did everything ourselves.
We’d get there at nine, because the deliveries begin arriving then, and if you’re not there to unlock the door, you don’t get your delivery. The single guys who’ve worked at Delancey would probably also like me to note that if you’re not there, you don’t get to see that pretty olive-skinned girl from Billy Allstot’s farm bend over in her tight jeans, hoisting cases of fresh tomatoes out of a truck spray-painted with a mural of vegetables. She delivers at nine on the dot. Prep cooks start the day early, and restaurant vendors start even earlier.
But at Delancey, the pizza dough is more important than any delivery. It has to be checked first thing in the morning, to monitor its rise. The dough for any given day is made the previous day, and in general, the slower the rise, the more flavor you’ll taste in the pizza. As of this writing, almost four years into running Delancey, the dough is made around 11:30 a.m. in the winter and 2:30 p.m. in the summer, and it’s ready around 11:30 the following morning. We use very little yeast so that even on a hot day, when the yeast is more active than on cooler days, the dough still rises slowly over eighteen to twenty-four hours. I will never understand why pizza is considered a fast food.
But when we opened, everything was trial and error. From day to day, our greatest fear was that the dough wouldn’t rise in time—or, worse, wouldn’t rise at all, which would mean that we had nothing to sell. We needed each day’s dough to be risen and ready within a narrow window of time, between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Any earlier, and we wouldn’t be there; any later, and there wouldn’t be time to portion it and then shape the portions into balls. That was one issue.
The second was that, although Brandon had been testing and retesting the dough for more than a year, he had never made it on a day when the temperature went above 86°F, because temperatures above 86°F are hard to come by in Seattle. But of course, there we were in a heat wave. So between the 750°F pizza oven, a convection oven, and the industrial dishwasher that runs almost constantly from 4:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., all within about 250 square feet, the kitchen was rarely below 90°F for weeks. We were back there sweating our brains out, steam-room-style, and all we could think about was how to keep the dough from rising too fast. An easy solution, of course, would have been to use less yeast, but we already weren’t using much—about a teaspoon for every seven pounds of flour, for the baking nerds out there. We were afraid to use any less (though we now know that we can, and in hot weather, we do). If we had had a nice, roomy walk-in refrigerator, we wouldn’t have had to worry: We could have used as much yeast as we wanted and made the dough at any time of day. We could have shoved it in the fridge to slow the rise as needed. But we didn’t have a walk-in.
For the first months, we made the dough at the end of the night, after service. It took about nine to twelve hours to rise—much less than the eighteen hours Brandon was aiming for—and if we made the dough at midnight, the timing was just right. In other words, the dough got more sleep than we did. Our thirty-quart mixer can hold enough dough to yield about forty pizzas, and we would make three batches each night. Once each was mixed, Brandon would give it a final stir with a giant wooden spoon and then scrape it into a tub. We would snap lids on the tubs and then leave them to rest overnight in one of several places, depending on the ambient temperature of the kitchen. If the temperature was moderate, we would leave them on top of the pizza station, facing the closed mouth of the oven. If it was a little warmer, we would leave them on the shelves next to the pizza station, a little farther from the mouth. If it was actually hot, they would go on the shelf underneath the pizza station, just a few inches from the ground. If it was even hotter than that, we would carry them into the dining room, where it’s always fairly cool, and leave them on a table. When it was historic-heat-wave-hot, we heaved the tubs into the back of our car, drove them to our apartment, huff-and-puffed them down the stairs to the basement, the only place left in town where a person could comfortably wear long sleeves, and stored them there until morning, when we reversed our steps.
Wherever it was, the dough had to be checked first thing. Through trial and error, Brandon figured out the optimal rise level, and he marked it with a Sharpie on the outside of each dough tub. If the dough was over the line by 9 a.m., the rise was too fast and the flavor could be diminished. There was a lot of swearing. Ideally, it would still be a little below the line and could be left to continue rising naturally for another hour or two. If it was way too low, Brandon would put the tubs somewhere warm—usually on top of a refrigerator—to speed the rise.
There’s still an element of precariousness to the process, even after doing it close to a thousand times. But at the start, every day was pure touch-and-go.
So, before we had a prep cook, Brandon and I would rush to the restaurant at 9 a.m. He would check on the dough. Then there would be deliveries to receive and put away. Around 11:00, the oven would need to be lit. The night before, at closing, he or the pizza cook would have leaned a small steel door over the mouth o
f the oven, and the next morning, when the door was lifted away, the oven temperature would still be about 400°F. Brandon would sweep out the old ash and then build a fire—roughly the same size as one you’d build in your home fireplace—on top of the previous night’s still-glowing coals. Within a couple of hours, the oven would be hot enough that any soot on its ceiling would have burned clean away, and this meant that the oven was at least 700°F, an important marker. From this point, it would take about three hours for the oven to be ready for cooking, heated properly from edge to edge. Of course, Brandon would want me to clarify that the oven isn’t one single temperature from edge to edge, and that’s part of what’s so great (and exhausting) about cooking in it: it’s about 400°F near the mouth and close to 1,000°F way up in the dome. To get each pizza exactly the way he wants it, he obsessively rotates, wiggles, lifts, and otherwise repositions it an average of ten times in its approximately three and a half minutes in the oven.
Anyway, while the oven heated, there would inevitably be a piece of equipment to fix. Because we had bought almost all of our equipment used, most of it broke within the first year. One morning, it might be the bar fridge, which needed a new compressor after about a week of use and finally got one after four months. Another day, the problem might be the small fridge that we used for storing the dough once it had been portioned into balls. It refused to get any colder than 55°F, and it needed constant tweaking to achieve even that. On our first day of soft opening, three hours before the guests arrived, the mirror in the empty bathroom spontaneously fell off the wall, slamming onto the sink and somehow managing to turn on the faucet before hitting the floor, where it shattered triumphantly. Not long after, the toilet paper dispenser shimmied loose from the wall, leaving behind a quarter-sized hole. We had bought a residential-grade dispenser rather than a commercial one, failing to note that most residences don’t have a hundred-plus people using the toilet each day.
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