There’s a moment during every cook’s first milk-braise when it becomes clear that life will never be the same. For me, it happened when the creamy liquid hit the hot skillet, gushing between two double-cut pork chops that had been seared to deep mahogany. My kitchen became thick with the scent of bloomed fennel seed and sweet dairy, and almost immediately, the milk began to simmer, creating a luxurious hot tub in which my pork would become so tender, the first bite would nearly make me lose my balance. 

For my newfound milk-braising bliss, I have Rita Sodi and Jody Williams—who recently released Via Carota, a tome of Italian recipes centered around dishes served at their eponymous West Village trattoria—to thank. Contained within are the secrets of their braciole al latte, pork chops braised in milk, which alerted me to the magic of this technique.

The recipe begins with pork fat—more specifically, with instructions for making strutto, an empyrean paste of pancetta, pork belly, garlic, rosemary, and fennel. You rub down the (previously brined) chops with this mixture, then sear them in a hot skillet on both sides, nestling in a few leaves of lacinato kale. Then in goes the milk, enough to partially drown the chops before you slide the pan into the oven to finish cooking.

Milk-braising relies on lactic acid, which tenderizes meat and inhibits dryness. In an acidic environment, meat pulls in more moisture and softens more quickly. Then there are the sugars present in dairy, which round out the flavors of whatever’s being braised. As the milk cooks, it curdles—a good thing, for once—and in Sodi and Williams’ braciole, it makes a creamy, aromatic gravy for the chops. 

Sodi, who grew up north of Florence, has known about milk-braising for as long as she’s been cooking. People have been braising with milk in Italy and elsewhere for centuries if not longer. “It sounds like something a dairy farmer would do. If you had money, you’d braise in wine with spices,” says Ken Albala, culinary historian and professor at University of the Pacific, who points to recipes for other slow-simmered dishes in early cookbooks. 

Of course, there are many early examples of meat simmered in dairy or dairy-like deputies, as with yogurt-based curries or the coconut-milk-based soups of Thailand. As Harold McGee notes in On Food and Cooking, intentionally curdling milk in cooked dishes dates back as early as the 17th century, when French writer Pierre de Lune described reduced milk being “marbled” by acidic currant juice.

Pork is a good starting point, but as I’ve learned, you can milk-braise just about anything. “You could do pumpkin with cinnamon sticks, or big turnips with juniper,” Williams says, adding that celery root and cabbage take wonderfully to the technique. 

Her only hard and fast rule? The braising liquid must be whole milk; forget cream (too oily) or skim (not enough fat). The meat or vegetable you choose should also be large enough that it won’t overcook before the milk separates, which takes time.

Williams recommends searing the main ingredient before braising it (at 400ºF); you’ll know it’s ready when it has fully surrendered its rigid structure. 

“You’ll want to wreck it,” says Williams.

This story is brought to you by SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through cookbooks new and old, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

Recipe

Via Carota’s Famous Braciole al Latte (Milk-Braised Pork Chops)

Get the recipe >

The post The Magic of the Milk Braise appeared first on Saveur.

This story is brought to you by SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every two months, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

Rita Sodi and Jody Williams cook like Hemingway wrote. With a deft touch and as few straightforward ingredients as possible, the pair composes dishes that are equal parts familiar and revelatory. Cultured butter and salted anchovies. Tonnarelli cacio pepe. A delicate, creamy risotto flavored only with meyer lemon. It’s an approach that stands out in a city with more than a few high-end restaurants known for caviar “bumps,” three-figure cheeseburgers, and a more-is-more approach to dining. 

Take insalata verde, one of the only regular items on the hyper-seasonal menu at their beloved West Village trattoria Via Carota. It is simply a tall pile of greens tossed in tart, well-seasoned vinaigrette, but what’s essentially a jumble of leaves becomes transcendent in Sodi and Williams’ kitchen. Samin Nosrat dubbed the insalata “the best green salad in the world.” 

But Via Carota isn’t only about the food. The wood-accented trattoria manages to feel both intimate and celebratory. Sodi and Williams—married business partners—finish each other’s sentences in Italian and English. Sodi is terse; Williams is effusive. They’ve been at it since 2008, when Williams pulled up a barstool at Sodi’s first restaurant. Today, they run five successful businesses whose throughline is masterful plates of unembellished classics. 

Unfortunately for us New Yorkers who would just as soon eat at Via Carota daily (bank account be damned), wily diners have caught on. Since the restaurant opened in 2014, wait times have pushed three hours. Even on the coldest days, locals and out-of-towners alike happily settle for outdoor seats, where they feast on freshly grilled mushrooms topped with smoked scamorza cheese beneath the heat lamps, their blissful exhales visible in the freezing air. 

Those mushrooms are one of many memorable recipes in the new Via Carota cookbook containing 140 dishes, from carciofi fritti to sugo di carne to the restaurant’s cult-favorite hand-chopped svizzerina, a hybrid of steak tartare and an exceptionally tender filet mignon. 

I sat down with Williams and Sodi to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on their new cookbook and to hear what’s next for their growing restaurant empire.

Ella Quittner: You begin the cookbook with a dedication, the Italian phrase forza, which I know usually means something like, “you can do it!” or “you’ve got it!” Why? 

Rita Sodi: It’s a word my mother always told me. Anything, you can do it—forza, forza. When Jody joined the family she started to use the word too.  

Jody Williams: For me it’s encouragement. When you are struggling, when you are tired, when you are going uphill, forza. We got it. These last few years? Forza, everybody—keep going. We use it so much, it’s almost like a sigh. 

EQ: You joke in the book about how you opened Via Carota so you could actually see each other. What was that time in your lives like? 

JW: It’s true! With Rita at I Sodi, me at Buvette, and early days—placing orders in the middle of the night, getting up to clean and do it all—we joked we should see each other. And we looked down the block and thought, maybe we should do something there. Rita was like, forza, let’s do it, and we started figuring it out without a big plan. 

RS: We knew it would be a place near our other restaurants. We really didn’t know the name yet. Everything came together naturally without thinking too much.

JW: That’s the way we go about all of the restaurants. We need to get inside, see where the light comes in, and understand the space. The space will tell us where things go and what things should be. It reveals itself. We cook how we want to eat and the way we like to eat is to go out and eat mostly sides, which are usually relegated to this sad little corner. We want the kale, and the potatoes, and the turnips, and skip the mains. 

RS: People can choose how they eat. It’s not the straightforward “you need to have a pasta, then a main course.” It’s freedom from the classic Italian way to eat. 

EQ: Then you opened Via Carota. Your other two restaurants at the time, I Sodi and Buvette, were quite popular—but did you anticipate what a smash success you’d have? In 2018, The New Yorker food critic Hannah Goldfield called it “New York’s Most Perfect Restaurant.” 

JW: Never! We were totally surprised at the success, and appreciative.

RS: When we build something, we don’t think about the success—we think about making it somewhere we would go every day. And we’ve been lucky, very lucky. 

(Williams knocks on the wooden table.)

EQ: It’s regulars from the community, but it’s also everyone else! People travel from other states to visit. 

JW: There’s something soulful that happens at Via Carota, that [Goldfield] wrote about. It’s something we couldn’t buy or create. It’s just nurtured, grown. We don’t make it precious, we don’t make it about us. Deep down if you stripped away all the things and you looked into Rita or me, as people, there’s this desire to give, to share. This thing of, if we have something, you break it in half to give a piece to somebody else. 

EQ: The cookbook reflects that beautifully. And like the restaurant menu, it adheres to the seasons—a section for each one, more or less. As chefs, or as home cooks, is there ever a time you would break that rule and cook something out of season? 

RS: No. No way.

JW: Rita is like, “Tomato season starts in almost July.” Everyone has tomatoes around June 15, but she’s like, “We’re gonna wait.” You just listen and respect [the produce]. Seasonality just makes sense; it was never a gimmick or a trend. 

RS: There is a reason why seasons have different vegetables. The weather makes those vegetables. Your body needs something different depending on the weather. 

JW: Rita did want to try a wedge salad at home [out of season]. She picked up a head of iceberg lettuce. And she really wanted to try it. 

(Williams laughs so hard, she can’t continue.)

RS: Never again. I was like, “So what do we do now?” And Jody was like, “Oh no. You chose the worst one. We cannot do this.”

JW: She chose the one iceberg lettuce head that was empty in the middle. So instead, we broke it up by hand and threw it into pinzimonio. 

EQ: Many dishes in the cookbook have memories attached to them. Which is most meaningful to each of you? 

JW: I would say the coniglio fritto. There was this moment when I went to Rita’s home on Via Carota, just outside of Florence, when her mother died, and there was not a lot of conversation, but there were a lot of people. And the butcher came up the hill and dropped off meat. And everybody came and dropped stuff off; everybody just knew what to do, and what to cook. I was the prep cook and the sous chef. Out came this blue and white tablecloth that Rita was rolling out tortelli di patate on, cutting mountains of veg so small to make sugo di carne, and her sister fried up rabbit. And you, [Rita], told stories about your mother through all this, and it was beautiful. Her mother could have three people or 50 people at lunch depending on who was around, so sometimes one or two rabbits wouldn’t be enough, so she would grab a loaf of bread, chop it up, dredge it, season it, and fry it together with rabbit. So that’s what sits today under the rabbit leg. It’s so delicious and such a surprise. Moments like that are when you really learn to cook. 

RS: Mine is the ribollita. In wintertime, people gather more than in other seasons, lingering by the table. It’s this thick vegetable dish that’s with you, warming you, giving you this comfort. It’s one of my favorite memories, the ribollita.

EQ: The book is more than 400 pages. Did you have trouble deciding what to include? Did any recipes not make the cut?

JW: Sure. Yes. And we wanted to do some new things too, but we left it to the heart and soul. I kept wanting to steal some I Sodi recipes, but I did not get the I Sodi steak tartare in the book. 

EQ: In the spotlight on truffles on p. 320, you write that your truffle connection is a special vendor who brings a basket of black truffles and a basket of white truffles, which Rita sorts through, sniffing, and touching. It’s such a beautiful image. What is Rita looking for? What qualities make an ideal truffle, for those of us picking them blind?

RS: The smell itself of the truffle—the truffles all smell, but I’m looking for the smell I like. And you want them to be firm, so you can slice them really nice and thin. You don’t want them to be wet inside, with soft spots [you can feel]. 

EQ: Water gets its own section in your book as an ingredient. Much has been written about the famous Via Carota insalata verde vinaigrette. You soak frutti di mare before deep frying. The potatoes in the patate fritti. What are some other ways water is important in the cookbook? 

JW: [For example], the lemon risotto is water-based. If we used chicken stock, that would be a chicken lemon risotto. With water, lemon juice, and a few leaves of basil, you have made its own little stock. 

RS: And for cooking the pasta, water is essential. Water is an ingredient!

JW: Water is an ingredient, but it’s also a purifier; by just allowing and being comfortable, you’re able to let other things in a dish stand out because you’re not crowding it or clouding it. It’s like what’s said about writing: take away until you can take no more.

EQ: If you were to curate a winter dinner menu for a home cook from the book, what dishes work well together? 

JW: The easiest thing [to start] is piles of pinzimonio and olive oil. Add watercress and salad leaves, then you have your celery, carrots, puntarelle, maybe artichokes, put in a boiled egg—elaborate on pinzimonio. And little bruschettas are nice, with gorgonzola and pear, or with ricotta and pear. 

RS: And truffles, if you can get them, will be a good addition to any dish. Besides pasta, they’re good on cheese, eggs, more or less a lot of vegetables too.

JW: And when entertaining, or even if it’s just Rita and I, we will spend all day at the table. At one end of the table is what awaits you next. And the other end is what you’re eating now. Over there might be nuts, dried fruit, cookies, and in front of us we’re having salami and cheeses. So I would crowd the table with things easily prepared. Have an artichoke dish come out. Have the carrot dish. Have a whole series of vegetables. 

RS: And chicory.

JW: And then go for a big bowl of pasta. Maybe a risotto, though you have to stand and stir, so that’s a little challenging. Or maybe you’re going to pull something out from the oven, like the rigatina con cipolline, or the braciole al latte with a bunch of kale ripped up underneath. And then have the next thing waiting! Like a dolce, or cheese. Give more reasons to hang out and drink. 

This interview was condensed and lightly edited.

The post Why Everybody’s Talking About the New Via Carota Cookbook appeared first on Saveur.

If we’re going to celebrate anything about the decade of wide-legged flare pants, precariously cropped tops, and espresso martinis, then it’s high time we slow clap for the salad bar. 

The early origins of the American salad bar are disputed—though it’s believed to have emerged sometime in the 1960s, as a “before” course to steak or lobster or something orders of magnitude more exciting than limp iceberg. By the 1970s and ‘80s, fast food restaurants and other chains like Wendy’s and Sizzler ushered in salad bars with an aim of diversifying and “freshening up” existing options. But it wasn’t until the ‘90s that these troughs of greens and fixings ballooned and became ubiquitous. In 1994, Florence Fabricant likened the salad bar to a new kind of cafeteria—a celebration of abundance and sometimes even the main course itself, with dozens of composed sides and toppings to peruse, with something for every palate and preference. 

It’s time again to give them their due. And this time, at home. We’re not only living through a ‘90s reboot; we’re also in an era of making up for lost face-time—of maximizing the number of minutes available to gossip over ice-cold martinis, rather than fretting to get a soufflé out on the table at an exact stage of rest. So make like a midsized storefront near any office building in New York City in the year 1996, dim the lights, and throw a salad bar party.  

Ready your fighters.

No one is coming to your ‘90s salad bar party to be served. Salad bars are all about freedom and chaos—they’re an invitation to be picky, gluttonous, or to go really hard on one specific and weird item and basically ignore everything else. Self-service is key. Tongs will serve as an extension of your guests themselves as they peruse your side-by-side offerings (yes, you should set up a series of platters and bowls in a row to reference the real thing—plus plenty of ice to keep everything chilled, unless you’re planning on your guests eating pretty much immediately).

Bet on a basic base.

You are not a farmers market. Start with chopped romaine, mesclun mix, shredded cabbage, or baby spinach—or if you’re truly feeling fussy, remove the ribs from kale, slice into ribbons, and massage the leaves to tenderize. Then move right along… 

Give your leading lady the star treatment. 

Rather than trying to serve 10 different proteins and ending up with mediocre chicken breast and defrosted shrimp as though you are an actual 1990s salad bar purveyor, pick one really great protein that still tastes stellar at room temp—two, max—and give it the royal treatment. Think sesame-roasted tofu, or exceedingly crispy chicken cutlets, sliced and served with lemon wedges. Or soy-miso-marinated salmon. Vegetarians in the building? No one will complain about beautifully rendered six-minute eggs, halved for optimal drip, sprinkled with Maldon and drizzled with chili crisp. 

And make a supporting actor out of carbs.

If there’s anything we learned from the early 2000s’ fast-casual improvements upon the ‘90s salad bar, it’s that a well-prepared grain or toothsome noodle can promote a boring bowl from sad salad to exciting meal. Take note, and select a single carb that complements your choice of base. If you went kale, consider something tender and nutty, like bulgur wheat. For a limper lettuce, call in a complex grain that won’t cause wilt, like fluffy, oil- and salt–seasoned quinoa (cooked in broth for bonus flavor), or crispy rice. A tangle of chewy udon noodles would play Mercutio beautifully to almost any crunchy base.

Fancy a side salad. 

Cheeky little side salads—say, a dead-perfect tarragon chicken salad, a simple lentil salad, or marinated olives—differentiated the ‘90s salad bar from the scarcer bars of yore. Pick one or two exceedingly easy options that complement your offerings, portion onto lettuce leaves, and nestle within one of your serving platters. If you don’t know where to start, grab a rotisserie chicken, some fresh herbs, and a dollop of mayo. When in doubt, go sweet and salty, then hit with a touch of acidity: toss pickled red onions into those lentils, or add chopped green apple to that herby chicken. 

Lighten your load.

The ‘90s salad bar was frequently a pay-by-the-pound fiasco. As an homage, over-index on the crispy-crunchies: those ingredients that pack the most gratifying flavor and texture, but that won’t weigh down the (completely imaginary) bill. Think: bacon bits, fried shallots, tortilla strips, sliced radishes floating in ice water to keep them crisp, julienned carrots, and homemade croutons. 

You simply must have a tiny vegetable.

The year is 1990. The baby carrot hit shelves just four years prior, broccolini is about to have its big debut, and cherry tomatoes are everywhere. If you can find any tiny in-season vegetables to round out your own throw-back salad bar, by all means, please do. (If you can’t, just drain a few marinated sundried tomatoes and put them out for show. When people run out of 90s topics to discuss, someone can point to the bowl.) 

Call in your creamy king.

A creamy, fatty element is critical for rounding out a ‘90s salad bar—but please forgo the burbling pool of cottage cheese. Instead, consider offering sliced avocado drizzled with lemon to keep it green, grilled halloumi, or crumbled feta for completeness. 

Dress to impress.

Ditch the most authentic of offerings (a simple balsamic vinaigrette) and spring for more variety. Create a DIY condiment station at one end of your salad bar with multiple salt, fat, acid, and heat options. Olive oil; mayonnaise; red, white, and rice wine vinegars; lemon and lime juice; soy sauce; fish sauce; sriracha; anchovies; fresh herbs; brown sugar; chili crisp; crushed garlic; Dijon mustard; grated fresh ginger and crushed red chile flakes are all staples you likely already have, or can obtain with little fuss.  

Prepare to get sloshed. 

It wouldn’t be a ‘90s party without high-ABV cocktails in glasses ill-suited for stumbling guests. Make a big batch of cosmos, or appletinis, and set up a sidebar with martini glasses and an ice bucket for yet another round of self-service. 

Don’t forget a dessert that masquerades as an exciting trick.

While melted chocolate is not traditional to a salad bar, no 1990s dinner party is complete without a performative and over-the-top dessert—think molten chocolate cake, or raspberry coulis poured tableside over vanilla scoops, or crème brûlée. Feel free to purchase these from a local bakery, but do be sure to over dramatize the first bite, which should be in concert with some sort of visual effect (oozing chocolate centers, raspberry rippling over the surface of a sundae, or the shattering of a sugar lid). The ‘90s were, after all, not a time of great culinary restraint. 

The post How to Throw an Over-the-Top ‘90s Salad Bar Party appeared first on Saveur.

There is no shortage of challenges for the front of house, an industry term for those who work in customer-facing restaurant roles. A new project, launched by a collection of international hospitality organizations, aims to investigate these shortfalls, with the goal of developing better support systems.

Last month, The Front of House Project—conceptualized by digital publisher Fine Dining Lovers, in conjunction with a handful of partners like the Basque Culinary Center and Relais & Chateaux—launched two global surveys targeting both diners and hospitality workers. 

“It has been hard to ignore the devastation that has been building over the last three years, and while a lot of support has been shown for the restaurant industry, it has focused on the restaurant as a whole, as well as the chef and kitchen,” says Ryan King, editor-in-chief of Fine Dining Lovers. “It was clear that [the] front of house was just not being given the attention they needed. Fifty percent of a dining experience is down to the amazing work of the front-of-house crews.”

The surveys, which were developed over the course of six months and edited by Vaughn Tan, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management, ask diners to select from a list of several possible beliefs to ascertain the respondent’s view of “good service” (i.e. “Waitstaff are attentive but don’t get in my way or interrupt my meal repeatedly,” or “Waitstaff know the food and drinks menu in detail and can explain it to me”). The survey also poses questions like, “Do you believe that the customer is always right?” 

The survey asks respondents in the industry things like what resources their current employer is lacking and quizzes them about their views on career-development opportunities. “Have you encountered discrimination of any kind from fellow restaurant team members while working in front of house in any of the restaurants you have worked at?” the questionnaire asks.

Both versions of the survey attempt to investigate how and why a guest may choose to shirk a reservation, and what impact that has on service.

King says that so far the questionnaire has received about 7,000 responses, though the surveys will be open until Aug. 25. The resulting data will be made accessible to all through a free-to-access digital report. 

“The industry is on its knees,” he says. “We are in a critical position right now and this information may give us the opportunity to shape and direct the industry in the best way possible for the future.”

The post Servers Have It Rough, But Help Could Be On the Way appeared first on Saveur.

Generation Z is dining in.

At least according to a new report released by American market research company The NPD Group, which surveyed 18 to 24 year olds in the U.S. about their dining habits. The report reveals that these Gen Z diners make, on average, significantly fewer annual visits to restaurants compared to prior generations at the same age. 

Of course, the pandemic and its associated rounds of lay-offs (to which Gen Z was disproportionately vulnerable) accounts for a significant portion of this generational shift, though The NPD Group notes survey participants cited a host of other factors as well. 

According to the survey findings, “Apparel, footwear, beauty, and technology are among the categories on which young adult Gen Zs spend their money… Many apparel brands have successfully tapped into Gen Z values, like diversity and empowerment, and, as a result, have gained a larger share of their spending.”

An increase in menu prices was also flagged as a major contributing factor for half of the Gen Z subjects surveyed. 

As for the other half, Gen Z diners themselves suggest that it might not be so simple—and some restaurateurs would agree.

“When you look at Fat Choy, everything about it makes it appealing to a Gen Z person,” says Justin Lee, owner and chef of the Lower East Side restaurant which he describes as “kind of Chinese” and vegan. The setup is fast-casual, with most items (like the popular Green Veg Rice Rolls or Sticky Rice Dumplings) going for $10 or less. “It’s a very non-judgmental place, with extraordinarily good food that’s very good for the environment.”

And yet, Lee estimates that only about 10 percent of their customer base is Gen Z.

“I have no idea why. Do they have so much interaction with their phone, they don’t want it with human beings? It’s mind boggling,” he says. “We’re trying to be a progressive restaurant for the world. Those kids can talk about how [culturally aware] they are, but if they’re not voting with their dollars, and they’re buying chicken tendies down the block, it’s hypocritical.”

“I would like to support places in line with the practices I have in my own at-home eating,” muses Isabel Merrell, who just turned 25 and lives in Los Angeles. “But usually when I go out, I’m just looking for places that have really good food and atmosphere.”

Amy Morton, the owner of Found Kitchen, The Barn Steakhouse, and Stolp Island Social in Illinois and the mother of three Gen Z daughters, suspects that the reported reduction in Gen Z diners could be explained by the profound ways in which quarantine affected young adults’ habits. 

“Their time out in the world as an independent being versus the amount of time that was Covid, it’s way more than it would be for someone who is 50 or 60. Their habits could take longer to shift back. And it could be the first time in their life that they had the experience of being a homebody,” she says. 

Corey Smith, 24, lives in San Francisco and cops to maintaining a number of dining habits she adopted out of necessity during quarantine, like taking food to go and eating it outside at Ocean Beach. 

And Merrell says she’s more of a homebody than ever. “People have built more of a relationship with being at home, whether it’s conscious or unconscious. There’s less drive to be out all the time,” she says. “There’s less of a baseline of always doing something, and more of a baseline of doing things on your own.”

For her, this at-home comfort is compounded by her excitement about a garden she began to grow during the pandemic. “It was one of the only fluid, dynamic things I had in my life at the time,” she says. And cooking with what she grew was one of the only ways to infuse her life with excitement, she says. Just recently, she planted a new crop of sungold tomatoes, fairy tale eggplants, and shishito peppers, which she says she looks forward to incorporating into her meals.

Smith says that when she does go out to a restaurant now, she does so with firm intentionality. “I want to get something really good, and something I can’t make at home. If I am going to try somewhere new, it should be an exciting thing.”

(A handful of the Gen Z sources I interviewed told me that quarantine either forced them to learn to cook or strengthened their cooking skills, by way of TikTok and other internet platforms that made it easy to experiment with new recipes.)

Meanwhile, some restaurant owners are grappling with the challenge of attracting this age group in time to convert them to the next generation of regulars. 

At The Clam and also Market Table, two long-standing restaurants in New York City’s West Village, roughly 10 percent of customers are Generation Z, estimates Mike Price, President of Blackfoot Hospitality. 

And when Gen Z diners do come in, it tends to be because they’ve identified either spot as a good location for a first date. “Quickly, those 22 year olds are going to turn into 28 year olds, looking to entertain a group of friends, not just splitting an app on a date,” he says. 

Part of Blackfoot’s strategy for those two restaurants, as well as for its newer addition The Mary Lane, has been to hit social media as strategically as possible. “We’re leaning into those things in a way we haven’t before, because we know the necessity,” he says. 

Blackfoot has experimented with engaging Gen Z influencers to post about the brunch at one of their locations in exchange for a free meal. Price also says that after a TikTok influencer posted about the Happy Hour at another Blackfoot restaurant, The Little Owl, “happy hour blew up” with Gen Z. Price is currently discussing with his team whether it makes sense to host a party around fashion week at The Mary Lane for even more exposure. 

Price also says he has noticed that Gen Z clientele tend to come in for a dish or specialty cocktail that would be cumbersome to execute well at home, like perfectly shucked fresh oysters, which is the one item he won’t deliver on DoorDash. 

“We watch long lines of people lined up for Supreme, or for whatever merch drop. There is this aspect to TikTok and Gen Z that is FOMO-oriented and needs exclusivity, and [they] will wait from sun up to sun down for literally nothing as long as they have validation on their TikTok when they get it,” says Lee.

When asked whether he would pay a TikTok influencer to hype up Fat Choy, Lee barely pauses.

“We probably should have done it already. It’s something we should do as soon as I get off this phone call.”

The post Why Gen Z Is Lukewarm About Dining Out appeared first on Saveur.

In 1957, a new kind of restaurant opened at 135 Essex Street in Manhattan, more or less equidistant from the borough’s Chinatown and the tenements that had served as the epicenter for Jewish immigrants since the turn of the 19th century. 

It wasn’t the cuisine that was new. Americanized takes on Chinese food, like moo goo gai pan in a velvety slick of soy sauce and broth thickened with corn starch, had become ubiquitous in New York City since the collapse of the Gold Rush fueled discrimination and violence that forced Chinese immigrants living on the West Coast to move east. 

But Bernstein-on-Essex, as the restaurant was called, was the first in the city to offer up these dishes in strict compliance with kosher standards. The egg foo yung, for $2.50, came with chicken livers instead of pork. Shellfish was nowhere to be found. And the restaurant’s sign featured a man in a yarmulke, next to text that declared the eatery “the tastiest delicatessen in the world.”

In her new exhibition Open Sundays, now on display at the Harkawik gallery on the Lower East Side, Stephanie H. Shih displays a stunningly rendered version of this sign in her signature painted ceramic. It is one of 30 sculptures she has created to explore the overlap of Chinese and Jewish communities in the neighborhood for the roughly hundred-year period beginning in the late 1800s. 

A few yards from where the Bernstein-on-Essex sign hangs is a long table that displays Shih’s sculpted takes on other iconic food and drink, like a bilingual bottle of Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki, roast pork on garlic bread, Golden Plum Chinkiang Vinegar, and a can of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda.

“A lot of my solo shows are about this idea of authenticity,” says Shih, who has been working in ceramic full-time since 2015. “There are no cultures that are untouched by other cultures. These are two communities that grew up alongside each other. It was not always friendly, but simply from proximity and the fact that they were the two largest non-Christian immigrant groups, they had commonalities.” For example, she says, the tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas began right near Harkawik, on the Lower East Side. 

Shih’s “RPG” sculpture, featuring 10 glossy slices of roast pork arranged appealingly across a slab of garlic bread, depicts another classic crossover: a sandwich stuffed with Cantonese-style char siu and duck sauce, popular in the Borscht Belt in the 1950s. (Just a few neighborhoods northwest, the Manhattan outpost of Court Street Grocers still peddles an RPG under the moniker “Catskill Roast Pork” for $15.) 

Shih says she almost named her show “safe treyf,” after the colloquial way Jewish immigrants referred to Chinese food in New York City. (It was characterized as such because of the lack of milk mixed with meat—a kosher no-no—and because, as some historians posit, discrimination against both immigrant groups in New York City made for a sort of culinary safe haven.) “Chinese food started to get this pass, when people might have kept kosher otherwise in the home,” Shih says.

Instead, she called the exhibition Open Sundays, to capture yet another commonality: while most businesses closed in observance of the holy day, the doors to both Jewish and Chinese businesses remained unlocked, ready to tout frozen dumplings, warm loaves of challah, and heaping plates of lo mein that were, in some cases, completely kosher.

The post The Fascinating Connection Between New York City’s Jewish and Chinese Immigrants appeared first on Saveur.

On a recent Thursday evening in the West Village, several dozen people gathered at Emmett’s on Grove to eat pizza and drink beer. It would have been like any other night at the popular Manhattan restaurant, but for the price of entry: not a standard reservation, or a forty-minute wait for a walk-in seat, but an NFT, featuring the Hot Papi pizza anthropomorphized with fried-egg eyes and a bacon smile. 

The NFTs were the handiwork of the new company Front of House, which launched in early June with the aim of becoming “the internet’s one-stop-shop for digital collectibles from the best bars and restaurants anywhere.” For now, it offers NFTs linked to special diner privileges at New York hotspots Dame and Wildair, in addition to Emmett’s on Grove. Each can be purchased with cryptocurrencies, or plain-old credit cards. (NFTs, in case you live under a rock, are “non-fungible tokens,” aka unique digital crypto assets that are registered on a blockchain, and increasingly being used to gain access to member-only clubs, services, and subscriptions.) 

To enter the pizza party, guests needed to furnish either a $33 NFT good for that specific event, or one of the heavier-hitting NFTs currently offered by Front of House, such as the $1,000 Fish & Chips Hospitality Club collectible from Dame, designed by Marianna Fierro and redeemable for one table reservation per week until the end of 2022. 

Turnout was strong, with about sixty adults, two children, and one extremely fluffy gray dog. Revelers drank beer from tall glasses adorned with a cheeky FOH logo (sarcastic, colorful 2017-era food mag branding seems to be a strength of the company) and ate as many slices of pizza as they could stomach. One bearded man wandered the room ostentatiously displaying a black tote bag from ApeFest. At 7pm on the dot, party guests were politely ushered out, so regular service could begin. 

According to Front of House co-founder Phil Toronto, a consumer tech investor and Partner at VaynerFund, the company has so far sold about 100 NFTs, including 40 of the pricier, single-restaurant-affiliated tokens. In addition to the $1,000 Dame Hospitality Club collectible, Emmett’s on Grove offers a similar token with reservation access until the end of this year for $300, and Wildair offers a series of Donut Friend collectibles for $200 a pop, which provide (vaguely defined) access to their specialty donut flavors and events, plus a hint at potential extra benefits down the line. Front of House expects its next drop to be a series of NFTs from East Village restaurant Hanoi House.

“The beauty of the opportunity is that we don’t need to decide from conception what perks are offered [with the NFT]. On an ongoing basis, we can experiment with different offerings. There’s the opportunity to establish a meaningful relationship with top supporters of the restaurant,” says Sarah Better, Emmett’s chief of staff. 

At the end of this year, participating restaurants will have the chance to evaluate the NFTs they have issued and either re-up or alter the perks offered, as well as the option to issue a fresh set of tokens. 

Toronto says the revenue from the sale of each collectible is split 80 percent to the restaurant and 20 percent to Front of House (including FOH NFTs traded on the secondary market). His primary goal with FOH is to increase cash flow into restaurants, he says. The company has plans to expand to Los Angeles and Canada next, and would like to create NFTs that offer package deals—for example, a single NFT that offers reservation perks across some five or six separately owned restaurants in a single neighborhood. 

Danielle Vreeland, who lives in Tribeca, tells me she initially bought an Emmett’s Supper Club collectible for her husband as a Father’s Day gift, but decided to keep it for herself. (The NFT holder must be present at any reservation made using the token.) “I would like to see 4 Charles and Carbone create NFTs,” says Vreeland. “That would be beyond.”

The post The New Price to Be a Restaurant Regular? An NFT appeared first on Saveur.

In the latest End-Stage Capitalism marketing stunt so bizarre that it’s bound to cause vertigo, cream cheese giant Philadelphia has teamed up with two of the most famed chefs in New York City—Jeremiah Stone and Fabián Von Hauske Valtierra of Contra and Wildair—to create “an immersive culinary experience” that sits squarely at the intersection of thick, blended dairy and… feelings?

From July 14 through July 16, diners will be able to visit this pop-up restaurant, aptly called Feeladelphia, for $35 a seat (reservations via OpenTable). Each course of the prix-fixe menu, curated by Stone and von Hauske Valtierra, is poised to elicit a specific emotion—such as the cream cheese–infused “Playfulness” course of chocolate, strawberry curd, and mousse, which has a menu description that promises to awaken one’s inner child. 

Other aspects of the dining experience (or, as the press release calls it, the “sensorial and experiential journey”) portend “captivating visuals, stimulating sounds and sensorial surprises to enhance each feeling.” Spoilers include a captivating checker-pattern on crackers, and the “pop” of caviar. 

This latest experiment in multi-sensory dining seems tangentially (if accidentally) related to the work pioneered by scientist Charles Spence, who runs the Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University. Spence has partnered with large food brands to incorporate ASMR triggers into products, and worked with fine-dining chefs to develop and track the ways in which inedible stimuli paired with meal courses might enhance or otherwise affect the eating experience. (Think: hearing through headphones the sound of a duck being shot as you take a bite of perfectly seared duck breast, or smelling salt water as you toss back a fresh oyster.)

As to whether New York City diners will in fact experience “allure” while tasting a dish of black truffle, caviar, garlic confit, and cream cheese this week, only time (and, presumably, reviews delivered via TikTok) will tell. If anyone could make a person feel feelings about mass-produced cream cheese though, it is Stone and von Hauske Valtierra, whose innovative Michelin-recognized restaurants have kept a steady stream of diners waiting for tables on the Orchard Street sidewalk since 2013. 

And at the very least, diners can rest easy after the meal, knowing that all proceeds will be donated to an as-yet-defined charity. Unless, of course, they are lactose intolerant.

The post Eat Your Feelings for $35 Plus Tax appeared first on Saveur.

Norman Jean Roy fears nothing, not even death. But he is a little worried that his rye berries may overcook.

It’s July 29, 2020—day 140 of the pandemic—and Roy tells me as much while stirring the berries into submission for a few loaves of Danish rugbrød. He’s spent the time in lockdown furiously preparing to open Breadfolks, a new bakery in Hudson, New York.

“Smell these,” he says, brandishing a wooden spoon. The rye berries smell earthy and the tiniest bit sour.

Roy is either a world-famous photographer moonlighting as a small-town baker, or a small-town baker moonlighting as a world-famous ­photographer, depending on whether you consider “energy expelled” or “income generated” the more compelling indicator. With the exception of an odd job here or there (say, a recent Allure cover showing soccer stars Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris moments away from a kiss), the 51-year-old has retired from shooting celebrities and fashion models for the likes of Vanity Fair and Vogue. He’d rather master dough lamination and nail the ideal ratio of seeds to wheat—profit margins be damned.

“I chose bread because I have a love affair with grains, and because it’s the most humble thing I could do,” he says. “There’s no money in bread. That humility in the process is at the core of what this is about for me. I want to feed as many people as I can, at the level of quality I have experienced, in a way everyone can afford.”

Roy is intense, bald, trim, and ready to tip into a conversation about British Romanticism or the very point of human existence (to learn, to experience, to evolve) as casually as he offers me a spoonful of apple filling. The filling, suffused with lavender and anise, reminds him of the orchard town in Quebec where he was born. He describes it as if it were a person he knows, not a pot of jam: “soft and feminine, delicate and gentle.”

His gaze is fierce and present, but not aggressive. His eyes follow mine when I glance away, toward one of the nine-odd employees passing through the room, built around an oven the size of a shed. With it, Roy and another baker will produce several types of sourdough, pastries ranging from traditional pain au chocolat to a “baklava cruffin,” a few different cookies, and einkorn madeleines.

“We’re not reinventing any wheels—just making food we love and introducing a lot of alternative grains. We try to use an heirloom grain or whole grain in everything we do,” Roy says. Breadfolks buys what it can from area farms, then sources the rest from Utah’s Central Milling Co.

Roy’s wife and Breadfolks’ co-owner, Joanna, explains that supplying their neighbors with an honest, nutritious, top-notch product at an accessible price is the culmination of a lifelong search for a meaningful career for her husband, who had become disillusioned with the creator-consumer relationship inherent in his work for high-end glossies.

As he puts it: “In this world, where you still have a billion human beings living without access to clean water, where you have systemic racism and so many other injustices, I couldn’t continue to coerce people into consuming things they don’t need. Nobody needs a $10,000 purse. I thought: ‘You know what? I’m going to bake bread. I’m going to feed my community. I’m going to do one-on-one transactions. I make a loaf; you buy a loaf.’”

The bakery sits on Warren Street—the busiest thoroughfare in otherwise sleepy Hudson—alongside venerable local joints displaying “Black Lives Matter” signs, and swanky new businesses aimed at New York City weekenders (among them, a hotel with rooms named “the Writer” and “the Gardener,” priced more than a touch above the average writer or gardener’s reach).

Breadfolks’ front door is permanently etched with the phrase “All Are Welcome Here.” An optimistically temporary paper sign reminds customers to don masks. Country loaves, at a generous 1,000 grams, go for $8 each.

“The actions you take in a small town have greater effect,” says Hannah Black, a James Beard semifinalist and co-owner of the much-beloved Hudson hotspot, Lil’ Deb’s Oasis. “In this little community, some people are really active and dedicated.”

The Roys came to the Hudson Valley as many urbanites do, in search of intermittent Friday-through-Sunday respite, purchasing a 6,000-square-foot rustic-modern retreat on 50 bucolic acres in nearby Craryville in 2013. Within six months, Roy had shuttered his Manhattan photo studio and moved upstate full time with Joanna and their two young daughters.

“I never lived in New York City,” he says. “I worked there, I slept there, I did a lot of things there. But that’s not what I’ve come to understand as living—it’s merely doing. I spent the entire first year here watching the light change. I felt like a plant that had been living in a pot, and someone finally planted me into the ground.”

As he inspects a bit of experimentally braided croissant dough with the focus and exactitude you’d expect from a person who once fully submerged himself in a shark tank to get the right shot of Rihanna, Roy divulges that he’s been a baker since age 8, when his Acadian grandmother first showed him how to shape a boule. Traveling the world on assignment only deepened his interest. Then, in 2015, while photographing Serena Williams in San Francisco, Roy first tasted a slice of country bread from the city’s famed Tartine Bakery.

“It was nothing short of a religious experience,” he says. “I’d eaten great bread all over the world, but there was something different about this that captured my attention.” He began researching sourdough obsessively, eventually studying at the San Francisco Baking Institute.

“Two Decembers ago,” Joanna remembers, “he said, ‘Jojo, I want to be a baker.’ And I said, ‘Do it. Go find some real estate.’” By January 2019, the couple had signed a lease on the space that became Breadfolks, as well as a studio for Joanna’s forthcoming line of ceramics, Clayfolks.

The way Roy talks about sourdough after a single revelatory bite is not unlike how he talks about the genesis of his photography career. In 1991, a few years into an underwhelming architecture job, he bought a Minolta X-370 because his then-girlfriend needed padding for her modeling portfolio. The two drove to Florida, where Roy took Sports Illustrated-style shots of the woman bikini-clad on the beach. “I discovered photography by accident and fell in love immediately. The next day, I woke up, quit my job, and that was it.

“I give myself full permission to change the course of my life at any given point, so long as I stay at 100 percent,” he says. “I go 100 percent, 100 percent of the time.” I comment that it must be a real bummer when he gets a cold. “I don’t get sick,” he says immediately, then, acquiescing after a pause, adds, “rarely.”

Roy has long been an advocate of all things analogue, and it was in his own darkroom in 2000 that he met Joanna, a painter who took the graveyard shift printing photos for his exhibitions. The next decades beckoned a roster of big-name subjects: Usher, George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Hillary Clinton, and Ed Sheeran, whom Roy photographed in the rain with a guitar slung behind his back. In another shot, the guitar has been lit on fire.

“The things that hold my attention are things that move, that you can’t repeat. Predictability to me is uninteresting,” he says. “Portraiture afforded me a little bit of control over the situation, but was never the same thing twice. Baking bread, because you’re dealing with a living organism, you can never bake the same bread twice.”

Once he has finished adding the rye berries to the rugbrød, Roy introduces me to a few other fixtures around the bakery. “This is Mia, and this is Sergio,” he says, pointing toward stand mixers with the giddiness of a child hosting an imaginary tea party. “And we’ve also got Bruce and Dolly.”

For a man so enamored with esoteric symbology that he named all of Breadfolks’ coffee blends after calculations that reduce down to three, six, or nine, the mixers’ monikers seem to be the comedic relief of the kitchen. Together, we watch dough swirl around in Bruce’s enormous belly, mesmerized for a few minutes, before Roy has to run. It’s nearly 6:30 p.m., and he’s got a Zoom meeting, then several more hours of baking to do before he calls it quits for the night. As I leave, he offers me a little bit of Betsy, his sourdough starter, for the road—a parting gift.

A few days later, despite a healthy downpour, there’s already a line stretching down Warren Street when I arrive to sample Betsy’s offspring. It’s only two hours after opening, but Breadfolks has sold out of ham-and-cheese croissants. I manage to get my hands on a pain au chocolat so assertively flaky, it shatters like shrapnel at the first sign of teeth. The baklava ­cruffin—an ode to the Middle Eastern sweet made of phyllo, honey, and chopped nuts—turns out to be laminated dough ­layered with pistachio and twisted into a shape that resembles a double-height cupcake, with a honey-glazed core. It tastes like a cross between a kouign amann and an ethereally light doughnut. This thing is so soft inside, I’d like to lie down on the sidewalk and use it as a pillow.

I bite into Roy’s magnum opus, the country loaf, and finally understand what he meant about going 100 percent, 100 percent of the time, or at least I think I do, because it’s 100 percent perfect. It’s pert, tangy, and chewy, and it forces me to tear off hunks and cram them into my mouth as though I’ve just been bit by a viper and the loaf is a time-sensitive antidote. The purpose of Roy’s existence may very well be to learn, to experience, and to evolve. The purpose of mine is to take this bread home and ­dragoon it into a tomato sandwich, with haste.

The Roys’ next hope is to expand their operation across the country, into what they call “micromarkets.” He explains: “The idea is to bring this sort of quality to an area that doesn’t yet have it, but has the desire for it.”

For now, the couple remains agile, having sold all of their ­possessions two years back in a bout of self-actualization. At the very beginning of the pandemic, they unloaded their house and its contents, too, before moving into a furnished rental 10 miles east of Breadfolks.

“I don’t have any permanent anything,” Roy says. “I don’t think too far in the future.”

And that lucrative photography career? He’s not sure if further celebrity cover shoots are in the cards.

“But ask me next year,” he adds, with a smile.

The post The Celebrity Photographer Who Put Down His Camera To Bake For His Community appeared first on Saveur.

On a recent Wednesday evening at 7 p.m., dozens of people flocked to their screens, glasses of wine in hand, for a mass Zoom call.

But it wasn’t your usual quarantine happy hour. These attendees were gathered for a B.Y.O.B discussion of the mathematics behind “wine tears”—those gravity-defying drops of liquid that hover on the inside of a wine glass, millimeters above the wine itself, dripping back down as if quietly weeping.

“Now, I even see someone here from the four o’clock session!” said Cindy Lawrence, CEO of the National Museum of Mathematics and event host, as participants streamed in. “They must have liked it enough, they decided to come back!”

“They might’ve had some wine left,” said a second host.

“Who would have leftover wine?” quipped a participant in the chatroom. From my empty apartment, I raised a glass of Calcarius Rosso in a phantom toast.

A few minutes later, UCLA Professor of Mathematics Andrea Bertozzi took the (digital) stage to talk tears. As she explained, the phenomenon is, in some respects, an “old story.” Physicists have been describing it since 1855, when James Thomson—older brother to Lord Kelvin—kicked off the qualitative discussion. The going theory has, for a while, been the “Marangoni effect.”

Get seasonal recipes, methods and techniques sent right to your inbox—sign up here to receive Saveur newsletters. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at @SaveurMag.

The basics go something like this: Wine is made of water and alcohol. Alcohol evaporates more quickly than water, which creates a difference in surface tension across the fluid. Wine begins to clamber up the inside of a glass because of this difference in surface tension. As it does, the alcohol bits continue to evaporate more quickly, creating stronger surface tension in the liquid climbing up the glass, which pulls on the wine at the surface more urgently than the liquid in the base of the glass. Wine travels upwards, falling back down only when its weight exceeds the force pulling it up.

But while preparing for a recent drink-along grad school lecture on the topic, Bertozzi realized that there was more to the story.

“Like most professors, I was nailing down the details of the lecture the night before,” she told me over the phone. “I’m going through the old papers I had read many years before, and I was like, ‘Wait, nobody has looked at the full physics here?’”

Bertozzi—along with Yonatan Dukler, Hangjie Ji, and Claudia Falcon—revisited the topic, ultimately penning a study that explores a more comprehensive set of quantitative factors contributing to wine that seems to whimper.

“Wine tears were understood for several centuries—at least qualitatively. And about 30 years ago, people started doing experiments to actually measure those effects,” said Bertozzi. “But they never really looked at the full dynamics. They hadn’t developed a theory of what happened when gravity pulled wine tears back down. They were also looking at just dry surfaces, which doesn’t account for the swirling of wine when you drink it.”

The new study’s main findings? Wine tears emerge from an unusual circular shockwave in the liquid, created by a balance of three physical effects: a Marangoni stress effect, gravity, and bulk surface tension (aka, the surface tension of the large pool of wine in the base of a glass).

“If you remove any of those three effects, wine tears don’t happen,” said Bertozzi. “It needs to be that balance. If you get rid of the Marangoni stress, they won’t happen. They won’t work on the Space Station, with no gravity. And if you use chilled wine, you’re much less likely to see this.” (Chilling alcohol suppresses its evaporation, she explained.)

Back in the Zoom lecture, Bertozzi tipped a bottle of port into a stemless martini glass to demonstrate the effect. She aimed a flashlight through the glass to reveal tears forming in shadow, before breaking out a bottle of Knob Creek.

The most common misconception Bertozzi faces, she told me, is that wine tears (also called “legs”) have something to do with the quality of the stuff. “From what we found,” she said, “it’s largely just the alcohol by volume.”

Bertozzi demonstrated as much with her bourbon, before moving to Q&A. “What if you’re crying into your wine? Does that affect its ‘tears’?” asked one participant. Bertozzi laughed and said she’d need to do more research. Before long, the session began to disband, so we could head off to our next round of Zoom happy hours, now better armed for the banter.

The post Wine Legs: What Causes Those Little Streaks of Wine That Form On The Side of The Glass? appeared first on Saveur.

About 45 minutes into PBS’ recent documentary about The Inn at Little Washington, a George Washington impersonator asks The Inn’s chef and proprietor Patrick O’Connell a simple question: “Why would you want to wash your hands every time you greet someone?”

The George impersonator is in character at Mount Vernon, which the ever-theatrical O’Connell has rented for the restaurant’s 40th anniversary party. It’s June 2018. Elsewhere on the property, food world giants like José Andrés, Cristeta Comerford, and Daniel Boulud mill around, awaiting duck liver mousse with port gelée, and Maine lobster perched on rafts of crispy potatoes, dolloped with caviar.

“You are completely confusing me, I must tell you,” continues Faux-George, confounded by modern notions of cleanliness in a restaurant kitchen. O’Connell laughs.

Twenty-three months later, questions about restaurant hygiene are no longer a party joke, as O’Connell and restaurateurs worldwide grapple with the challenges of reopening while complying with public safety regulations to curtail the spread of coronavirus.

“We struggled with coming up with a solution,” says O’Connell, who hopes that when The Inn, located in Washington, Virgina, reopens in late May, it can remain a delight and a curiosity to diners, in spite of new limitations. One in particular that gave O’Connell pause was an expected 50 percent maximum occupancy rule, which had the potential to make the space feel barren.

O’Connell’s big idea? Call in the mannequins.

Sixteen of them, to be specific, outfitted in 1940s-inspired costumes provided by the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia. On The Inn’s reopening night, forecasted for May 29, guests will find these non-sentient patrons perched at tables, ensconced in scenes designed to imitate those one might otherwise stumble upon on any regular night, like a couple mid-proposal.

“As soon as the mannequins were clothed, it felt as if they had come to life. They began to create a narrative,” says O’Connell, who as of yet has named only one of the dummies: Yvonne. So far, “she’s the only sure dead ringer,” he says.

O’Connell, who thought he would pursue a life in theater before discovering a love of restaurants in the 1970s, has built quite the show at The Inn over the past four decades, resulting in its three Michelin star–designation. His menus are studded with items like “the world’s smallest baked potato,” and the cheese course is proffered to guests from the back of a large plastic cow called Faira, which is hefted from table to table. (Her udders are referred to as “Faira’s faucets.”)

O’Connell says that in this new pandemic era, he’s more focused on what he can add to the restaurant experience, rather than what he must take away. His servers will wear masks bearing the reproduced grins of Marilyn Monroe and George Washington, for example, and diners can take solace in a plexiglass dome that now sits neatly on Faira’s cheese-bearing back.

“The days of pointing a finger an inch from the cheese can easily be altered without changing the experience,” he says.

Other restaurateurs seem to be taking O’Connell’s cues. Over in Greenville County, South Carolina, the owners of Open Hearth restaurant have called in a gaggle of blow-up dolls (“the G-rated kind”) to fill out empty tables. At Maison Saigon in Bangkok, oversized stuffed pandas keep solo diners company.

Meanwhile, back in Virginia, O’Connell has no other immediate plans to modify service beyond what’s necessary to make guests confident that The Inn is going above and beyond to obey safety regulations.

“We’ve lived through some horrifying moments and days. We’ve grieved. We need to find ways to continue to celebrate living,” says O’Connell. “By treating our guests better than they would treat themselves, through our focus on making them the star of whatever living performance we’re doing that night, they feel reaffirmed—they feel good about themselves. Good about life.”

The post Leave It to That Eccentric Genius Chef Patrick O’Connell to Serve Up Surprise and Delight Just When We Need It Most appeared first on Saveur.