As it turned out, Ryan had not only left Sonoma on a moment’s notice for us, but he had also left behind a girlfriend, Ana, a winemaker he’d been dating for a couple of months. When he told us, we couldn’t believe that he’d come at all. Once every other month or so, she’d fly up to visit, or he’d fly down to see her. In the late spring, April or early May, we congratulated him when he told us that he wanted to go back to Sonoma to be with her. He stayed at Delancey until Memorial Day, and before he left, he helped us to find and train his replacement, a cook his sister knew.
Almost a year after he moved away, Ryan and his girlfriend came to visit. We’d just bought our house, the definition of a fixer-upper. She and I spent an entire afternoon crouched on the living room floor with pliers, yanking up carpet staples, while Ryan and Brandon hauled out the remnants of a wall we’d torn down. We’d run out of furnace oil the day after closing, so the house was very cold, and I have a picture of beautiful, kind Ana in the living room that day, wearing a down parka and work gloves, covered in dust. I came across it again while moving some boxes a few months ago, and it occurred to me that without the mess Jared made, I might not have known her at all.
* * *
Jared came back once. It was December of 2011, almost two years after his exit. He showed up in the doorway one night, just before opening. I was at home, and Brandon called as soon as Jared left.
“You’re not going to believe who was just here,” he said. “He came in with a girlfriend and their newborn baby. The girls think he looks like a bearded version of Charlize Theron in Monster. But he seems like he’s doing really well.”
“He is? He’s doing well?”
“Yeah. Lives in California now. He’s got some land there. Grows medical marijuana for a living.”
“He’s growing marijuana for a living?”
I’m kind of sorry that I wasn’t there.
SWEET-HOT SLOW-ROASTED PORK SHOULDER
This roast is quite different from the pork shoulder that Paseo puts in their sandwiches, but in many ways, I like it more. All credit for this recipe goes to Allison Halley, a very talented cook who once worked at Delancey. This roast was inspired by one that Al and her boyfriend, Jason, served at her birthday party. Afterward, at the restaurant, she and Brandon played with seasonings, deciding on a combination similar to that used for the classic Italian roast porchetta, and devised a combination smoking/roasting technique for cooking it. At home, though, I keep it simple and just roast the thing. This isn’t the quickest recipe on Earth—the pork should ideally be seasoned twelve to twenty-four hours before cooking, and then it cooks for nearly seven hours—but there’s nothing difficult about it, and the result is a tender, hugely flavorful roast with lots of fragrant juices. We happily eat it on its own, with vegetables and some rice or potatoes for sopping up the juices, though it’s also terrific in Vietnamese Rice Noodle Salad and the leftovers make a killer fried rice.
You’ll want to look for a roast that’s well marbled, and if it isn’t already tied, ask your butcher to tie it for you. Note that, like the meatloaf, this recipe is a good reason to keep powder-free latex gloves around. The smell of garlic powder tends to cling to bare skin a little longer than most of us would like. (And in case you wonder, we use garlic powder here because fresh garlic has a tendency to burn.)
1 tablespoon dried thyme leaves
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder
One 3-pound (1 1/3 kg) boneless pork shoulder roast
1/4 cup (50 g) sugar
1/4 cup (60 ml) fish sauce
Crunchy sea salt, such as Maldon or fleur de sel
* * *
A day or two before you’d like to serve the roast, season it: Combine the dried thyme, black pepper, and red pepper flakes in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle. Grind thoroughly. Add the garlic powder, and process or stir briefly to combine. Place the roast in a bowl or on a deep plate—something big enough to hold the roast and catch any juices. Rub the roast evenly with the seasoning mixture; then cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours.
When you’re ready to cook the roast, position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 200°F.
Remove the roast from the refrigerator, and put it in an enameled cast-iron pot with a lid (I use a 5-quart Dutch oven). Cover the pot, and put it in the oven. Roast the pork—resisting the urge to open the oven to check on it!—until it is fully tender and a lot of juices have accumulated in the bottom of the pot, about 6 hours. (If you check it with a meat thermometer at this point, the center of the roast should read between 170° and 190°F.)
In a small bowl, combine the sugar and fish sauce to make a glaze, whisking until the sugar is dissolved. Remove the pot from the oven, set the lid aside, and pour half of the glaze over the roast. Raise the oven temperature to 225°F, and return the pot, uncovered, to the oven. Cook for 20 minutes more; then pour on the rest of the glaze. Cook for another 20 minutes. By this point, the roast should be nicely browned on top. Remove the roast from the oven, and allow it to rest for at least 10 to 15 minutes before slicing.
You can either slice it thin or cut it into coarse chunks, depending on how you plan to serve it: slices are lovely when you’re serving it on its own, and chunks are a nice way to eat it with rice. In either case, spoon some of the juices from the pot over the pork, sprinkle it lightly with crunchy sea salt, and serve hot.
Yield: about 6 servings
23
I remember the months when I cooked at Delancey—the way it felt to stand at my station in the early afternoon, hovering over the day’s to-do list with a Sharpie—as though they ended yesterday. But after I fired myself, each day blurred into the next. I guess that’s how it works. When we retell the details of our lives, most of us are no better than the average Yelp reviewer, the one who vividly remembers that the server tipped over a glass of wine but forgets that she comped the entire bottle in apology.
The months after were a lot like the months before: I didn’t know what to do with myself. I helped with hiring and training, cleaning and running errands, and I still did payroll and staff scheduling. I did co-owner stuff, manager stuff, the boring stuff that I somehow like. But as much as I could, I stayed away—because even then, even though I wasn’t technically working a job there, Delancey always asked for more.
When Brandon wrote the business plan, the business plan that I had been too disbelieving to look at, he had budgeted for the restaurant to be open only forty-eight weeks a year. Europeans get a month of paid vacation, he figured, and so do workers in plenty of other countries. What’s the point of taking on the risks of running your own business if you can’t step away every once in a while and enjoy what you’ve built? He made his projections with that in mind, with the idea that the restaurant would generate no income for four weeks of each year. We would make less money, and so would our staff—a fact that could cause insurrection—but nonetheless, he hoped that we could manage it.
In late May of 2010, we decided to take our first proper vacation—not the kind of sleeping-and-seeing-family vacation we’d had over the holidays. This time, we would do it right. We would go somewhere far away, somewhere with good food, somewhere that would return us ready for the hard work of summer, the busy season. We made plans to fly to Paris with two friends, rent an apartment, and spend a week. We were on a budget, so the four of us rented a one-bedroom and crammed into it, with Brandon and me on the pullout couch in the living room. We ate, and we ate, and we ate well. At the end of the week, Brandon flew home to reopen the restaurant.
Because a plane ticket from Seattle to Europe is never cheap, we agreed that I might as well stay on for another week and get the most out of it. So when he went home, I went to London to visit a friend.
My friend Brian, normally a New Yorker, was living in London that year, and he’d offered me his guest room. My goal
s were specific: to walk all over the city, and to eat at the River Café, the Michelin-starred restaurant opened by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers almost twenty-five years prior, a place famous for its refined Italian food and the celebrated cooks (Jamie Oliver, April Bloomfield, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, among others) who learned their trade in its kitchen. I have no patience for the cult of the celebrity chef, but a place with that kind of longevity and success has to be doing something interesting. I wanted to see what it was all about.
Brian made a reservation and invited our mutual friend Charlotte to join us. One very hot Saturday afternoon, the three of us went for lunch. I remember the date: June 5, 2010. There’s an L-shaped outdoor patio that runs along the length of the restaurant and then makes a hard left into a garden area, and we were seated in its elbow, under an awning, next to a door that led into the kitchen. We ordered a pitcher of Pimm’s Cup—that’s what you do, I was learning, in England in the summertime—and a few dishes to share. Servers would emerge from the kitchen every few minutes, carrying plates of food—pink scampi still in their shells, a whole roasted fish on a raft of fennel fronds, a pristine globe of strawberry sorbet in a glass bowl—and we watched them pass, hoping we’d ordered well. After a little while, our antipasti came out, and then fat scallops with grilled polenta, and prosciutto draped over wedges of the summer’s first melons. It was all very, very good. Then the pasta course arrived.
We were in mid-conversation when the server presented it, and I remember noticing, as she set down the serving plate, that it was not especially pretty. I’m not looking for my food to resemble an architectural model, but when you’re dining in a famous restaurant, I don’t know—I just didn’t expect the pasta to be ugly. It was listed on the menu as tagliarini with nettles, borage, Parmigiano-Reggiano, butter, and nutmeg, but it looked like a small bird’s nest that had been rained on a few times, blown out of its tree, soaked in an algae-filled pond, blotted briefly, and then stepped on. I took a bite.
It tasted much better than it looked. The flavor was quiet at first, the way a train is when you just begin to see it down the track, but a few chews in, the bright green, minerally taste of the nettle came on, and it hung there for a while, ricocheting around my mouth the way the flavor of an oyster does. Even after I swallowed, it was still there, ringing. Brian and Charlotte were talking, so I took a second bite. The flavor filled my entire head, and there’s no way to describe what that felt like, except to say that I knew something terrible was about to happen. I was going to cry. I clamped my lips together to stop it, but I must have looked odd, because Brian glanced at me in mid-sentence and then froze, staring, and the way a cork pops out of a Champagne bottle, I let loose a sob.
I feel compelled to assure you that I had never before cried over food, or not since I was in diapers. Not bad food, and certainly not good food. I thought people were moved to tears by food only in movies about famine or in films set in Tuscany with an original soundtrack by Enya. I love food, but I’d never cried about it. And it’s not that I was really crying about the pasta, per se. Except that I was. I was wiping my eyes with the tablecloth and wheezing.
I hoped maybe it wasn’t actually happening, that the unusually hot weather was causing me to sweat profusely from my eyes. Either way, it was a bad place to be doing whatever I was doing. It occurred to me that I might not be able to stop. My friends looked alarmed.
“I’m just so . . . [wheeze] . . . moved . . . by this pasta [wheeze],” I managed to get out. And my blubbering made me laugh, and then I wheezed again, and then we were all laughing.
The meal went on, because we had ordered more, and we ate that whole roasted fish, and a loquat tart and an affogato, and by the time we were ready to leave, it was nearly four in the afternoon.
As we paid the check, we watched the lunch crew set up their staff meal, a buffet along the bar. They filled their plates and began to stream past us to a lawn next to the patio, where they sat together, at least twenty of them, to eat. They smiled and gestured and leaned into each other, and the whole scene was eminently civilized, idyllic, the kind of vignette you find in an M. F. K. Fisher essay about a restaurant in the French countryside in the first half of the last century. I couldn’t stop staring at them, watching the way they were with each other, the way they clearly enjoyed being there. As they sat, we watched the dinner staff arrive: the servers polishing wine glasses, the female chef taking a seat at the table next to ours with a pencil and a binder stuffed with notes and old menus. These people, I thought, are making something here. It sounds obvious when I write it down, but that’s what I thought: These people know, and they care, that what they’re making is beautiful. They aren’t just going through the motions; they’re going after it. It was spectacular to watch: calm, precise, quietly exuberant.
I noticed, as I sat there staring, that their routines and patterns—the small, self-contained world they inhabited—felt familiar to me. A year before, it would have meant nothing. But now I understood what they were doing, what motivated them, and why it mattered. I understood their work—how good it can feel to dream up a plate of food and put it on a menu and serve it to people, and how good it feels to sit together afterward and eat and rest and crack a joke—and I liked that I understood.
I’ve never been much of a joiner. I like to be alone. I belonged briefly to my high school’s Environmental Club, and once, in college, went to a Ralph Nader Super Rally, but there are few groups in which I’ve felt a real sense of membership. But watching the daily rituals of this restaurant thousands of miles from our own, I suddenly felt like a part of Delancey. I felt like a part of Brandon. I felt like a part of the small, self-contained world that we had made: one that I had never planned on, that I struggled to negotiate, but that was ours now, mine.
When I was in college, my father used to send me clippings from the New Yorker. He would see an article on a topic that I was interested in, or might have been interested in sometime in the previous ten years—he was always slow to notice that his child’s interests had evolved, that classic dad trait—and he would fold it up and put it in an envelope and mail it to me. Toward the end of my freshman year, in June of 1998, he sent an article about Jack Kerouac, a collection of excerpts from Kerouac’s journal. About six years earlier, when I was in my early teens, I’d been a Kerouac fan. I’d read On the Road and had decided to become a Beat poet. Six years later, I had not become a Beat poet, but I read that New Yorker article anyway, and something at the end caught me. It was a paragraph from a journal entry that Kerouac wrote shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday, and in it he made a list of pledges to himself, changes and improvements that he wanted to make in anticipation of getting a year older. He vowed to travel more, to sleep less, to take his coffee black, to do chin-ups. Then he wound up his arm and threw down: “You have to believe in life before you can accomplish anything. That is why dour, regular-houred, rational-souled State Department diplomats have done nothing for mankind. Why live if not for excellence?”
I cut that out, that paragraph, and taped it to the wall of my dorm room, and to the wall of every room I’ve lived in since. Today it’s pinned to the wall behind my desk. I don’t know exactly what part of it grabbed me twelve years ago, other than the fact that I was in my twenties, like Kerouac, and that I was into being a good student. Being excellent was important to me. Whatever it meant then, it was that dowdy word excellence, that word in the Jack Kerouac sense, that came to me at the River Café. Maybe that was why I’d been such a failure of a pantry cook: because I had wanted so much to excel, to please our customers and to succeed, that it had paralyzed me. I couldn’t put my head down and just do my job. It was also, I realized, what had made Brandon want to make pizza, and to open Delancey. And it was what kept him awake some nights, regretting a lone sub-par pie that he had tiredly let go out to a customer. His determination, his perfectionism, his dreams for Delancey—they weren’t just some maddening obsession; excellence was what he wanted and why he
did what he did. We wanted the same thing. I had to wheeze over a plate of pasta in another restaurant, in another country, before I could see that, and before I could see him.
BRANDI’S COCONUT RICE PUDDING
It was cherry season when I got back to Seattle, and Brandi, Delancey’s pastry chef, had developed this pudding as a way to show them off: a small bowl of cold coconut rice pudding, topped with macerated fresh cherries from the farmers’ market and a dusting of crunchy coconut streusel. It’s good enough that one of the servers [cough, cough, Katie] once ate so much that she got “the sweats.” But the rice pudding is delicious on its own, too, and that’s how I like it at home. If you’d like to try it with cherries, though, just halve and pit them, and then toss them gently with sugar and lemon juice—about 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice for every 6 ounces (170 g) of cherries.
Canned coconut milk is available in most grocery stores, but be sure not to buy the reduced-fat kind. This recipe is best made with full-fat coconut milk. If you’re having dessert, I figure, have dessert—fat, sugar, the real stuff.
Delancey Page 16