Delancey

by Molly Wizenberg

3/4 cup (135 g) basmati rice

  1 1/2 cups (350 ml) water, plus more for washing the rice

  1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt

  2 cups (475 ml) coconut milk

  2 cups (475 ml) whole milk

  1 cup (235 ml) heavy cream

  1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon (112 g) sugar

  Half a vanilla bean

  * * *

  Put the rice in a medium bowl, add cold water to cover, and swish the rice around with your fingers to remove the excess starch. Drain, and repeat two more times.

  In a heavy large (4-quart) saucepan, combine the 11/2 cups water, the washed rice, and the salt. Place over medium-high heat. When the water begins to simmer, cover the pan and reduce the heat to low. Simmer until the water is absorbed, about 10 minutes. Then stir in the coconut milk, 1 cup of the whole milk, the cream, and the sugar. Scrape in the seeds from the vanilla bean, and then add the pod as well. Raise the heat to medium and continue to cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the rice is tender and the mixture thickens to a soft, creamy texture, about 35 minutes. Remove from the heat, and discard the vanilla pod. Stir in the remaining 1 cup whole milk.

  Transfer the pudding to a storage container. Press a sheet of plastic wrap directly onto its surface, to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.

  Serve the pudding in small bowls, with cherries, if you like.

  Yield: 8 to 12 servings

  24

  Like toddlers and sharks, a restaurant never holds still. One day, it might seem that you’ve got it pinned down, figured out, every problem solved, but the next day, a prep cook will forget to put salt in the pizza dough, the freezer will be found unplugged, and water will start dripping from the ceiling of the walk-in. We have days, and weeks, like that. But as the months passed, Delancey began to really work, in every sense of the word. I never thought I would say it—in fact, I have blushed at the naïveté of even thinking of saying it—but sometimes, Delancey does feel like a dinner party. Nobody wears a chef’s toque, and nobody cares how precisely you can brunoise a carrot. But everybody wants to cook a good meal, and to do it in good company. Our staff calls it “the pizza party.”

  This industry that seemed so other turned out to involve a lot of people like us. Granted, it takes real work to find them. There are plenty of the other kind to choose from, and plenty of people who want to hire them. The other day, I came upon an online ad posted by a chef who was looking to hire a “sick” baker for his restaurant. “One of those really crazy, socially off ones,” he specified, “that make line cooks seem sane.” I’ll bet his in-box was full within the hour.

  We set a certain tone at Delancey. Articles in business magazines call it “workplace culture,” a concept so dull-sounding, so soporific, that you could use it as the basis for a lullaby. But Brandon and I spend a lot of time at Delancey, and we need it to feel like a pleasant place to be. And it turns out that even if you want a workplace that’s fairly unstructured and relaxed, it takes guiding, shaping, and difficult conversations to get there. After a while, we came around to Susan the Oracle’s method of hiring, often choosing fed-up paralegals, ex-dancers, and part-time choreographers over professionally trained cooks. To do well at Delancey, you’ve got to like collaboration. The restaurant is small, and we don’t have a dozen bussers and interns to do the grunt work: everyone has to do their part, and sometimes more. You can’t keep score. You’ve got to take initiative, to do your job well for the sake of doing it well. In return, we’ll be game to hear your ideas, and to help you to learn what you want to learn. A couple of years ago, when one of our cooks wanted to start curing meat, we brought in a chef-instructor from the local culinary school to teach him. Now you can get your Delancey pizza with house-made lardo, coppa, or bresaola.

  But there are exceptions, and we still make mistakes. Last year we hired a new cook, a very experienced cook who came recommended. He’d been working in fine dining and was eager for a change. He wanted a more mellow, lighthearted environment, he said. He worked for a week before giving notice. Our kitchen was too unstructured, he told one of the other cooks, and he missed the formality and straightforward heirarchy of a traditional kitchen.

  * * *

  I was talking the other day with my friend Matthew, and he said something that surprised me. He said that, as a customer, Delancey has always felt the same to him—that from his seat at the bar, he never saw the big ups and downs. It was a relief to hear—maybe no one noticed the streaky wine glasses that gave me night sweats?—but it surprised me. The whole restaurant has surprised me, and maybe the people in it most of all. Sometimes I come in late at night, just before closing, and Brandon and I sit at the bar and share a pizza and a couple of beers. We watch the kitchen’s final hustle, the servers clearing tables and filling the mop bucket, and I think, Hey, whoa, we did it. This place was once an empty room covered in popcorn-ceiling debris. Now we provide jobs for fifteen people! Fifteen people who like this place enough to hang out here on their days off! Fifteen people we like enough to call friends! The staff and many of the regulars, they’re now the people we spend our time with—not because we have to, but because we do. It was a community that we fell into, and then one that we chose.

  It’s hard to talk about any of this without veering into sticky, sappy territory. Actually, what I should apologize for is the fact that I can’t talk about it without referencing an early ’90s romantic comedy starring Matt Dillon. It’s Singles, a Cameron Crowe movie, the story of a group of twenty-something, grunge-era Seattleites looking for love. I’m a big Singles fan. In particularly low moments, I even quote lines from it. It’s not that it’s a great film (though I think it’s a very good one) or a particularly accurate portrayal of my adopted city (grunge had already gone the way of the cassette tape by the time I arrived), but I am to Singles as pre-teen boys are to Monty Python and the Holy Grail: I know it backward and forward, as though it were made expressly for me. About midway through, when Kyra Sedgwick’s character is dating Campbell Scott’s character, she walks into the coffee shop where he often hangs out. As she enters, the camera shoots from her point of view, slowly scanning the faces of the movie’s other major characters, who are all in the coffee shop too, as they greet her. That’s what it’s like when I walk into Delancey to meet Brandon for a late dinner after service. I’m Kyra Sedgwick—indulge me here—and over there, there’s Katie, who’s been with us since two months after Delancey opened; Jenn, who started in the spring of 2010; Mariko, who started not long after Jenn; Estela, who filled in as a dishwasher one day in late 2010 and is still around today; Brandi, still steering the dessert menu; and Joe, Brandon’s right-hand pizza man for two years. There’s the couple of regulars who come in once a week and bring us homemade jam in the summer, another couple whose dog is our dog’s best friend, the neighbor who called once to tell us that he’d caught a salmon and wanted to give us half; the pair of ladies who got married at the table by the bar.

  Sam fills in sometimes as a host. For a time, he ran his web design business out of Delancey’s back office. Megan Gordon, his girlfriend, made her wildly popular Marge Granola in the Delancey kitchen for more than a year, baking it on days when we’re closed. In the summer of 2011, Brandi teamed up with Olaiya to found the Pantry at Delancey, a cooking school and community kitchen located directly behind the restaurant. Rachel Marshall, who worked for us as a server from late 2009 until late 2011, made and bottled her eponymous ginger beer at Delancey until the stuff became so successful that she took it full-time, building her own production kitchen and opening a bar called Montana and a Rachel’s Ginger Beer shop at Pike Place Market. Though our friends could be successes anywhere, it’s been nice to do it together, to have the company, to be able to hoist each other up.

  Almost a decade ago, when I decided to quit graduate school, I was newly broken up with a boyfriend. He was a very kind, serious, thoughtful guy, someone who tutors kids with severe learning disabilities in his free
time. I remember feeling so frivolous in comparison, so guilty, as I thought about giving up academia to try being a food writer. Food writing wasn’t important. It wouldn’t save a life. I did it anyway, because I wanted to, but I certainly couldn’t justify it on the grounds of world peace. That justification doesn’t work for opening a restaurant either. But there is something about Delancey that, to me, matters just as much: We get to make people happy. We get to give people a good night. We get to spend our days doing work that we can be proud of, and when we’re done, there’s all the pizza you can eat.

  SHORTBREAD WITH ROSEMARY AND CANDIED GINGER

  Through Delancey, Brandon and I got to know Christina Choi, chef-owner of Nettletown, an all-too-short-lived restaurant in the Eastlake neighborhood of Seattle. Christina had big eyes and a great laugh, a passion for wild foods and foraging, and her cooking was complex and inventive. If you were very, very lucky, you got to taste her crisp-seared wild salmon sandwich, with a swipe of peanut butter, pickled carrots and onions, and sprigs of dill, parsley, and fennel fronds. Christina died of complications from a brain aneurysm in December of 2011, at the age of thirty-four. We miss her, and Nettletown.

  This recipe is my attempt to re-create one of the cookies she kept in a glass jar on the front counter of the restaurant. I was able to find her basic shortbread recipe online, on a blog she kept for a while, but I’ve had to wing it on the quantities of rosemary and ginger. I make my cookies a little smaller and thinner than hers, but all in all, I hope she would approve.

  Christina made these cookies as slice-and-bakes, but the dough can also be rolled out and cut into any shapes you like.

  1/2 cup (100 g) sugar

  2 sticks (226 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature

  2 cups (280 g) unbleached all-purpose flour

  1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

  1 tablespoon (about 4 g) finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves

  1/3 cup (60 g) chopped candied ginger

  * * *

  In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the sugar and butter. Beat until light and fluffy, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed with a rubber spatula.

  In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and rosemary. Add to the mixer bowl, and beat on low speed until the flour is absorbed and the dough begins to form large clumps that pull away from the sides of the bowl. Add the candied ginger, and mix briefly to incorporate. Divide the dough between two pieces of plastic wrap or parchment paper, and shape it into roughly 11/2-inch-diameter logs. Wrap, and refrigerate the dough logs for a few hours or overnight, until good and firm.

  When you’re ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 300°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

  Remove the logs from the refrigerator, and while they’re still very cold, slice them into 1/4-inch-thick rounds. Arrange the cookies 1 inch apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the edges are pale golden, rotating and switching the pans midway through. Transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.

  These cookies will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for a week, if not longer. They can also be frozen.

  Yield: about 60 cookies

  EPILOGUE

  The days are different now from how they were before the restaurant, but not in the way that I thought they would be. I don’t have a formal title at Delancey. I’m not a professional cook. I’m mostly there during the daytime, before opening, the hours that no one sees. I like that. My work consists of tasting new dishes; filing invoices, paying bills, and organizing; making sure the bathroom is tidy (when it comes to getting a wad of paper towel into a trash can, a lot of people would be more successful if they were blindfolded and spun around); helping to write the menu and editing it for typos (Brandon tends to capitalize all nouns; he’s German at heart); sending website updates to Sam; doing payroll and front-of-house scheduling; and running a relay race with our bookkeeper, passing tax information back and forth. I do the jobs that I’m good at and enjoy doing, which are mostly the jobs that Brandon is bad at and hates doing. Logical enough, though it took a while to figure out. Then Brandon does the jobs he’s good at, like making pizza and leading the staff—being “the motherfucker in front,” as Chris Bianco succinctly put it. One of the most loving things that Brandon has ever done for me is to choose not to teach me how to work the pizza station, so that even in case of emergency, I will have no obligation to step in. Not everyone is cut out for being the motherfucker in front. In case of emergency, we close for the night.

  When we negotiated the lease for Delancey back in late 2008, we added a clause that gave us first dibs on the space next door, should the umbrella shop ever move out. We might want to expand, we figured, or maybe add a bar, a sort of waiting area for the restaurant. The umbrella shop moved to Pike Place Market in late April of 2012, and we—this time with muscle from our contractor friend Joe Burmeister—set to work turning the pocket-sized space into a bar. Like Delancey, it was designed by my cousin Katie and her friend Pantea, with a lot of annoying interruptions from Brandon and me. It’s called Essex, after one of the streets that crosses Delancey in Manhattan. The Delancey Street and Essex Street subway stops share a station; our Delancey and our Essex share two bathrooms, a hallway, and a kitchen. Same thing, basically.

  Initially, we thought of Essex as a place for people to hang out and have a drink before eating at Delancey, but as the opening date got closer, we began to think of it as something bigger: a small restaurant with an emphasis on cocktails, a place where Brandon and our cooks could play around with making and serving things that don’t fit at Delancey. For a couple of years, Brandon has been tinkering with various herbs and flowers, teaching himself how to make bitters and liqueurs that we now serve at Essex. He’s made liqueurs out of everything from wood oven–roasted radicchio to fennel, wild watercress, Pixie tangerine peels, and cilantro root. My favorite, called Burg’s Extra-Special Orange, is his nod to Grand Marnier, made from three kinds of citrus and aged for four months in rye barrels. It’s named for my dad, who would have loved it. Like the drinks, the food at Essex reflects Brandon’s love for making things that other, more sane people would probably outsource. We make the cultured butter that we serve with bread, and the mustard we serve with house-made beer-boiled pretzels. The cooks are curing fish now, and over the course of each year, they pickle hundreds of quarts of vegetables and fruits to serve with cheeses and cured meats. Essex opened in mid-August of 2012, and I gave birth to our first child, a baby girl named June, on September ninth.

  I see now that Delancey was the beginning of a process that will continue to shape, stretch, and reshape us. I don’t know what we would be without it, that process, that constant growing, but it doesn’t mean that I crave it the way Brandon does, or that I always like it. But I’ve learned now that we can withstand it, and that I can withstand it. I consider it a great personal victory that I could be eight months pregnant, helping to pick out crown molding for a bar that, for all I knew, could open on the same day that I went into labor, and not have to breathe into a paper bag. Of course, after Essex, Brandon also wants to open a distillery. He bought a briefcase-sized copper whiskey still a couple of years ago, though it’s never left its box, so we’ll see what becomes of the idea. Either way, when we were in the car together recently, driving to join one of our cooks for an Essex menu meeting, I filed an official request that we not open anything else—not the distillery, not anything—for five years.

  “Oh, of course not,” he said. “I’m done! I just want to enjoy what we have.” He went quiet for a minute. “I mean, I definitely won’t do anything for three years.”

  “Five years.”

  * * *

  When I was a kid, my mother used to sometimes go on vacation by herself, to New York to shop and see a couple of shows, or to some fitness spa where, this being the’80s, her souvenir would be an oversized calf-length hoodie sweatshirt with something or
other spelled out in bubble letters on the back. While Mom was gone, my dad and I would eat bachelor-style meals of hot dogs and baked beans, and in the mornings, he would endeavor to impose some order on my thick hair before we left to run carpool. It was normal to me that my parents did things separately sometimes—that my mother should go away by herself, or that, on another occasion, my father might go fishing with the guys. But I imagine that my mother in particular had to fight for it—not so much with my father, but with strangers or even friends, people who found it odd that a married woman, a mother, would leave her spouse and young child not for work or some other imposition, but for some time alone, for herself. My parents didn’t have any kind of storybook marriage, but the older I get, the more I admire their belief in independence. It wasn’t necessarily easy, but they had a certain kind of trust. They let each other be individual people even as they chose to be together.

  Brandon was twenty-seven years old when we opened Delancey. I was thirty. I was married to him, but in a sense, I hardly knew him. I didn’t know that he had a head for business, or that he could lead people, or that, after going through the multiyear rigmarole of opening a restaurant, he would even still be interested in it. And I didn’t know that he would be right: that it would, in fact, realize everything that matters to us. I learned that only by letting him do it—“letting” in the very loosest interpretation, through clenched teeth and with a certain amount of screaming.

  In return, I got to discover something in myself, albeit also with some screaming. I have never been good at change. Even small, positive changes, like Brandon getting a haircut, can upend me for a day or two. But I thought somehow that, by throwing myself into Delancey, I could trick my system, beat change at its own game. I couldn’t. I couldn’t change in the way that I had wanted to: I couldn’t be a professional cook; a consistently game, supportive spouse; or even a pleasant person. But Delancey did change me. I saw my own limits, walked right up to the edge and even over it once or twice, and I saw that I could be all right again. I could be more than all right: I could be happy. I learned that my life could reshape itself completely, and that, maybe if I stopped trying to fight it or to hurriedly reshape myself before anything else did, I could instead let it slowly guide me, bend me, and bring me along. Brandon saw that before I did, I think; that’s why he helped get me out of the kitchen at Delancey. He let me go so that I could let go.