Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  Dotolo—five feet six and broody, with glasses, a multicolored sleeve tattoo, and a three-day beard—is the primary architect of the menu, and he is uncompromising about his food fantasies. He has sometimes served fruit whole, without utensils, so that the customers will have the pleasure of feeling juice run down their chins. “I had this weird thing last night,” Dotolo told me once. “I was, like, eating tofu and I was, like, thinking about how much it reminded me of, like, bone marrow and, like, brains and, like, that weird texture—like, soft, a little bit gelatinous. But the flavor of tofu is, like, so yelchth. I’ll think about that now for, like, maybe a year before I think about something to do with it. I think it’d be fuckin’ hilarious to do tofu at Animal, just because it throws people off so much.” He thought for a second, and said, “Maybe you do tofu with meat.”

  One day, Dotolo got his hands on a whole lamb from a local purveyor. “I can’t say who, ’cause it’s not approved, but it’s fuckin’ good,” he said. “It’s all fed on apples and pears and lettuces.” Shook butchered it in the kitchen. They prepared the liver with roasted butternut squash and sage brown butter, and the leg with green-garlic tzatziki, farro, and rutabaga greens. “Now I just have two tenderloins and a neck to use,” Shook said. They served the brain to the chef de cuisine at the Beverly Hills branch of Thomas Keller’s bistro Bouchon when he came in to eat one night. “I cut the skull open—whack!—with an ax,” Dotolo recalled. “Most guys use a band saw.”

  The following afternoon, seven frozen pigs’ heads arrived from Niman Ranch, and in the morning they went into a brine. They were for head cheese, which Shook and Dotolo were taking to a food festival in South Beach. In the afternoon, Shook, who is small and voluble, and wears boots with his shorts, opened the walk-in cooler and checked on the heads. One, in a pot, was already cooked; it was for the restaurant. “I was talking to my friend Tandy Wilson, at City House, in Nashville. I was, like, ‘Man, your head cheese stays so fuckin’ moist,’” Shook said. “We got real wasted and he said, ‘Boy, the trick is to cook the head and leave it in the pot overnight.’ So we tried it and it worked amazing.”

  In the kitchen, Dotolo stood over the cooked head—cartilaginous, magenta, baring its teeth—and rooted persistently around the cheek and neck for the prime bits. “We’re partially professionally trained chefs, partially self-trained,” he said, removing a delicate layer of skin, like a pink satin blanket, and tossing it into a garbage can. Then he tore a hunk of flesh from the jaw and shredded it with his fingers. “It’s a pretty meticulous job,” he said. “Some people don’t see the worth in it. I think of it as the transformation of something you would never eat into something really tasty.”

  The food lovers of South Beach were, if not delighted, at least challenged. It was broadening by force. Shook said that everyone kept saying, “Head cheese? What’s head cheese? Is that like blue cheese?” One woman, when Shook finally had a chance to explain, spat it out on the table and said, “Oh my fucking God, I’ve been kosher for thirty-two years.” Shook giggled, recollecting. “Not anymore, you ain’t!”

  • • •

  Before Animal, there was Incanto, in San Francisco, the first American restaurant devoted to Fergus Henderson’s beliefs and a more puritanical expression of the whole-animal proposition. Incanto began as a traditional Italian place owned by Mark Pastore, a mild-mannered and reasonable man, who is extreme only when it comes to Dante: he has a special room at the restaurant where he displays a bust of Beatrice, and he sometimes dresses up as Dante for Halloween. In 2002, when Incanto had been open for a year, Pastore partnered with the chef Chris Cosentino. Now the walls of the main dining room are decorated with antique butchers’ tools—splitting cleaver, bone saw, sausage stuffer, lard bucket—and the references to Dante tend to come in shouted form and refer to the nine circles of his Hell, to which inattentive employees may be condemned.

  Cosentino is forty, hyper and exhausted, with a small, pursed mouth, a sharp nose, and spiky dark hair. He wears thick-framed rectangular glasses and a stirrup of facial hair that makes it look as if his jaw could come unhinged, like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. Under stress, he gets blinky and pissed. His coffee order is a Quattro. The first time I met him, he was sitting at the counter at Pigg, his new restaurant in downtown L.A., where, alongside products from Boccalone, his cured-meats business (“Tasty Salted Pig Parts” is its motto), he serves Fermín’s acorn-chomping jamon de bellota—crudo. Serving raw pork is cocky, a frank challenge to American sensibilities, and an inversion of Angyalian disgust: what should repel is presented as attractive. Cosentino dares you to eat it.

  The official opening was a few days away and Cosentino was tweaking the dishes. “Layer a little bit more ear in there,” he told a cook behind the sneeze guard, who was preparing ear slices with a side of brain aioli, which Cosentino calls “brainaise.” “Make it look like a sandwich of ears.”

  He turned to me. “What do you think the culture of texture is in the United States?”

  “Crunchy?” I suggested.

  “Correct. What do you think the culture of texture is in Asia?”

  “I think there’s more slime,” I said, picturing the chicken feet—bones half-enrobed in silky, fatty, gathered skin—that were my first encounter with it-is-what-it-is Asian presentation.

  “Jiggly—soft—unctuous. That’s why offal isn’t very popular in this country. There’s nothing crispy—unless we make it crispy.” He described frying the ears and pairing them with pickled peppers, mint, and red onion. He said he expected to go through 150 pounds of pig ears a week.

  Upset by the amount of waste in the meat industry, Cosentino started serving the parts Americans no longer wanted to eat: spleens and blood and sperm; lungs, lips, and livers. Embedded in his dishes are sermons on how properly to treat an animal: he serves pig’s snout with escargot and watercress, because pigs in nature like to eat the snails and vegetation found near streams; he pairs wheatgrass pasta with cow stomach and intestine, because cows ought to eat grass. A few years ago, he said in an interview with Meatpaper that the one meat he finds too extreme is balut, the Filipino unhatched chick—a whole animal, eaten whole. “It was difficult, but I tried it,” he said, rating it “pretty gnarly.” But he believes that meat-eating should be hard. Bringing people face-to-face with the reality of what they are eating makes them more conscious of their choices, and sometimes they respond by ordering the vegetarian entrée. For a while, he eliminated butter and made his pastry chef use suet for pork-fat cookies and lard caramels. He imitated a pastry chef, whining, “I don’t want to make suet pudding. That sounds nasty.” Then, playing himself, he barked, “Shut up! Make fucking suet pudding.”

  He went on, “They call me a barbarian. They say I’m meat jihad. I just think we need to look at food in the U.S. with a more open mind.” To avoid becoming a hypocrite, he takes his kitchen crew to slaughter an animal every year. Once he killed a heifer named Bertha so big that, even after she was divided between two cars, the weight of her popped his hubcaps off.

  Not long after becoming the chef at Incanto, Cosentino instituted an annual Head to Tail dinner, two nights of extreme offal, prix fixe, that allow him to explore the outer boundaries of decency, manners, and taste. The second year, Fergus Henderson showed up. “That was fucking daunting,” Cosentino says. “This is the first time I’ve cooked for Fergus. I’d met him, I’d eaten in his restaurant, I’d staged in his restaurant, but I’d never cooked for Fergus.” He served a shaved tripe salad, pig’s-brain prosciutto, and lamb heart. The final savory course, before a chocolate blood pudding, was a braised pig head with grilled liver and large intestine—a dish that had to go in the oven two courses before it was time to serve it, so that it could caramelize. After Cosentino fired it, John Relihan, the young cook responsible for it, approached him and said sheepishly, “Uh, chef, I, uh, didn’t put the, uh, head in the oven.” The dining room was full. “Now I’m ba
cked up on what to me is the grandfather of it all. We’re shitting the bed on Fergus’s table,” Cosentino says. Five minutes passed, and no food emerged, so Cosentino leaned through the window into the kitchen and bellowed, “John Relihan, you will give me head! You will give me head now! You will give me fucking head!” When he turned around, the whole dining room was silently staring at him.

  Benjamin Ford, a chef who serves a variety of domestic hams and a whole-pig dinner at his place, Ford’s Filling Station, in Culver City, says he always tries to get a woman to read over his menu and make sure it’s not too alienating. Cosentino, apparently, takes no such precautions. When Anthony Bourdain filmed No Reservations at a Head to Tail, the menu included raw venison heart on a brioche made with pig skin; a goose-intestine soup Cosentino called “anal-ini,” because, he says, “it looked like a little goose asshole”; and a dish he named “Big Brain, Little Brain”: cow’s brains and testicles. For dessert, he made a doughnut filled with pork-liver-chocolate ganache and served espresso brewed with pig’s blood. He heated the blood until it coagulated, then strained it out, leaving behind a metallic flavor familiar to anyone who’s ever been punched in the nose. Cosentino is one to force a joke. One of the dishes he is proudest of involved asparagus (a diuretic), lamb kidney (a filter), and a bright yellow lemon vinaigrette, which he turned into a fluid gel with agar and sprinkled around the plate’s edge, like drops on the rim of the bowl.

  Cosentino’s mission is to bring the offcuts associated with poverty cooking into the realm of fine dining. For a long time, he ignored foie gras: too luxurious. But in the years following the passage of the ban in California in 2005, foie gras—fatty, foreign, soft, femme—took on a different aspect. Soon to be forbidden, it became a totem of food-world machismo, the unlikely über organ meat. One chef had “foie gras” tattooed across his knuckles. Cosentino vowed to protest to the end, right up to the enforcement date. The ban, which prohibits the sale of any product of a force-fed bird, may incidentally eliminate magret (the fatted breast), most duck prosciutto, tongue, heart, fat, testicles, and down feathers. Cosentino saw foie gras as a whole-animal issue: the duck, paragon of exploitability, was being placed off-limits. “The duck is the pig of the air,” he said. “You can use everything.”

  • • •

  In the spring of 2012, I went to San Francisco to watch Cosentino get ready for the last Head to Tail that could include foie gras. It was two days before the event, and already the atmosphere at the restaurant was wistful and charged, like a high-school graduation party. Cosentino had on a T-shirt that said “Stop Tofu Abuse. Eat Foie Gras” and a dark blue apron with white stripes. The previous day, his pastry chef had all but cut her finger off with an immersion blender, so he had taken over making the dessert: foie gras panna cotta with shavings from a frozen maple-cured foie gras torchon. The dish required forty-eight lobes, the yield of forty-eight ducks. But now he had to worry about that night’s regular dinner service.

  When the host arrived, Cosentino called him over. “Hey, listen,” he said. “We’ve got a VIP tonight. Vinny Dotolo is coming in. He’s the owner of Animal. Death and destruction comes upon him.”

  Cosentino put on his chef’s coat and went into the kitchen. Like a pagan altar before a battle, it smelled of cooking meat—a nearly extinct pleasure, now that everyone west of the Hudson cooks sous-vide. (It’s strictly regulated in New York City.) There was a digital clock, with seconds, on the wall, in the middle of a death’s-head mural that resembled the flag of a motorcycle gang. “Shut up and cook,” it read. In the walk-in cooler, a pig hung from a hook and hay-brined beef tendons were splayed on a rack like wet noodles. There was a bucket of foie gras, steeping in milk; a layer of orange-yellow fat had formed on the surface. Cosentino opened a box of lamb spleens, which were being pressed. “Oh, dude! See how dense and firm they are?” he said. He poked one, grayish, greenish pink, and expressed a drool of blood. He opened another container, this one full of lambs’ heads, green-flecked with marinade, and still in possession of their cold, blue eyes. “Vinny Dotolo from Animal is coming in,” he said. “I’m going to make him cry.”

  Manfred Wrembel, the chef de cuisine, a small, handsome man with a neat beard and cropped hair, appeared at his side. “We could do sweetbreads!” he said, bouncing a little on his toes. “We could confit the potatoes in tallow.” He swung a bucket of duck fat enticingly.

  “I’m going to fuckin’ destroy them,” Cosentino said again. “I think he’s with his wife, though, so I don’t know.” Then he remembered that he had three mahi-mahi humps. “Do two on the board and one for him. That hump is going to be fatty, fatty, fatty, fatty, fatty. It’s a cool set-up.” He went back into the kitchen, rubbed his eye, and tasted a chunk of duck heart from a hotel pan full of gizzards, livers, and hearts.

  “Good, eh?” Manfred said. “Disgustingly good?”

  Cosentino started picking out the choicest bits for Dotolo. “I’m going to do best-part-of-duck risotto for him,” he said. “With duck egg instead of cheese. Pain and suffering is coming.”

  A few hours later, Dotolo and his wife, Sarah Hendler, were seated at a corner table at Incanto. Hendler is slim and precise, with fair skin and a skeptical aspect. Her role in the Animal universe has been to try to erase in the public consciousness and hide from her parents Dotolo and Shook’s reputation as stoners, enshrined in their reality show and in an early feature story about them in which their friends were depicted sticking cocktail picks up their noses and one friend tried to catch the “awful fountain” of his own urine in his mouth. She represents civilization, and she tries valiantly to hold the line.

  “I like very specific things,” Hendler said. “I like pasta.” Before her was a plate of sea urchin and beef tendons and a plate of lamb kidneys. “We didn’t order it,” she said. She looked at the kidneys. “Am I going to like it?” she asked Dotolo.

  “No, but you should try it.”

  “We went to Per Se and the waiter was shocked that I don’t eat tripe or uni, and I’m married to this guy!”

  “My favorite dish at Per Se was the tripe,” he said apologetically.

  Cosentino came over with the mahi hump, and Hendler gently remarked that they might have too much food already.

  “I’m going light, are you kiddin’?” Cosentino said. “This is easy.” He told them about the foie dessert he was working on.

  At the mention of foie gras, Dotolo grew glum. Animal, he said, sold thirty orders of maple-sausage-foie-and-biscuits every night, and went through $400,000 worth of foie a year. Later, Shook told me he found the ban absurd. Like the food-freedom contingent, he considered the government’s standards far beneath his own. “I think the foie gras I’m serving here is better than the chicken they’re serving in the elementary schools, and the ground beef with the pink slime.”

  “I’m inspired by it,” Dotolo said at Incanto. His first transformative food moment was walking into Michelle Bernstein’s kitchen at The Strand, in South Beach, and smelling foie gras searing in a pan. “I was like, ‘Wow,’” he said.

  “I don’t like foie gras,” Hendler said. “I finally tried the loco moco.” She shrugged.

  Foie gras, Dotolo said, was only the beginning of the vegan predation. “We believe that what will be next is caviar, sea urchin, and then line-caught fish,” he said: the low-hanging fruit, unbacked by corporate lobbyists. “They’ll never fuckin’ touch the beef industry.”

  “Bone marrow,” Hendler said. “That’s another thing I don’t eat. It’s the consistency.”

  Cosentino and Dotolo bemoaned the scarcity of high-quality offal in the U.S. “All innards end up in commodity—it’s so stupid!” Dotolo said. “We say, ‘You kill all these cows, where are the hearts?’”

  “Hamburger,” Cosentino said.

  “Dog food,” Dotolo replied.

  “It’s a dirty, fuckin’ nasty business,” Cosentino said. “The
offal goes as payment to the slaughterhouses. They bulk it up.” After much searching, he said, he had found a source for green tripe—intestine stained from a diet of grass and left in its natural state. “White tripe is bleached with Clorox,” he said. “Doesn’t it say on the bottle, ‘Don’t Drink?’ I’d give you a bag to take home but it’s still frozen.”

  “I’m not a tripe person,” Hendler said. “I’m a nice Jewish girl from New York City.”

  • • •

  By 5:30 on the night of the Head to Tail, there was a line out the door. The theme of the night, chalked on the specials board, was “Respecting the Right to Choose the Meat We Eat!”

  “And people don’t like offal,” Cosentino said smugly. “They think it’s gross.” Harold McGee, the food writer, was one of the first to arrive. He has helped Cosentino with technical problems over the years, such as how to pasteurize blood without causing it to coagulate and lose its color. He sat at the bar with a friend, and when the amuse-bouche arrived—whipped calves’ brains and toast—he tapped his temple and nodded. I struggled with the brains—not with the creamy, mild taste, but with the idea of them. For me, they were, as Claude Lévi-Strauss might have said, “bad to think.” The reference felt too pointed, too much of a put-down of bovine intelligence—as if the highest possible use for this young brain was to feed mine.

  A few seats down sat the Dapper Diner, a heavy Asian fellow with a side part, who was wearing a lavender shirt, a striped periwinkle bow tie, a maroon vest, a silk handkerchief in the pocket of a brown sport coat, and a thumb ring. He was tweeting a picture of the menu. “I just tweet,” he said. “I don’t write.” (His bio on Twitter, which I looked up later, reads: “I eat. My 4 basic food groups are foie gras, sweetbread, truffle, & pork belly.”) It was his second Head to Tail. “Last year, he did bone marrow éclair,” he said, a huge smile breaking over his congenial face. “I love offal. Other places are doing it, but not as much as here. You see sweetbreads and liver showing up more and more, but here they’ve been playing with it longer.”