Philadelphia’s Italian Market is something of a misnomer. One of the oldest establishments of its kind in the country, it’s where locals go to stock up on pasta and Parmigiano-Reggiano—and, increasingly, to feast on such international delights as lamb barbacoa, pho, and freshly pressed corn tortillas straight from the steamy bag. 

The market, located on and around 9th Street in South Philadelphia, is essentially a living museum chronicling the city’s demographic and culinary evolution. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants from Sicily and Abruzzo landed in this part of town. In the 1970s, the area drew Vietnamese refugees escaping war, while the mid- to late 1980s saw the arrival of thousands of Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge. A decade or so later, the North American Free Trade Agreement brought waves of Mexican immigrants, largely from Puebla, many of whom still call South Philly home. 

So, what started as an Italian market more than a century ago has become an all-out global feast. Growing up in Philly as a third-generation Italian American, I spent my childhood exploring those stalls. There was Isgro Pastries for cannoli, each delicate shell piped to order with chocolate chip-studded ricotta. Cacia’s Bakery and Sarcone’s Bakery satisfied my cravings for tangy, garlic-scented tomato pie, while Di Bruno Bros. was a perennial pitstop for wedges of Parmigiano shipped in from the Motherland. Ralph’s (the oldest Italian restaurant in America) was for celebrating birthdays and baptisms. 

But the older I got, the more I came to appreciate Philly’s cosmopolitan food scene beyond the Italian mainstays. After all, Philadelphia is home to one of the country’s highest percentages of residents born abroad, primarily Latin America, East Asia, and West Africa. And with all that immigration has come some truly phenomenal food. 

Since moving back to Philadelphia eight years ago, now with my own family in tow, I’ve introduced my husband and our three daughters to my childhood favorites—and to fragrant papaya salads, herb-marinated pork tacos, and bubbling bowls of hot pot. In the process of rediscovering my home city as an adult, I’ve become something of an expert on the international dining scene. Follow my recommendations, and you’ll be treated to a global taste tour—without setting foot outside the City of Brotherly Love. 

Thai at Kalaya

4 West Palmer Street
(215) 545-2535

Opened in 2019 as a tiny BYOB in the Italian Market, Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon’s ode to southern Thai cuisine now occupies a revamped warehouse in Fishtown. Palm trees grow under the lofty ceiling in the center of the dining room,where you might start the evening with a cocktail made with galangal and lemongrass. The fiery, complex curries are always revelatory, as are the platters of grilled freshwater prawns and sweet-and-tangy cabbage doused in pungent fish sauce. Consider bookending those mains with an appetizer of handmade dumplings, such as the bird-shaped kanom jeeb nok, and a dessert of shaved ice that arrives in a shimmering dome.

Cambodian at Mawn

764 South 9th Street

According to the sign outside this small, lively restaurant, Mawn is a Cambodian “noodle house with no rules.” Peruse the menu, and you’ll see why: There are dishes chef Phila Lorn, the son of Cambodian immigrants, ate growing up, including cold noodles with oyster sauce and clam salaw machu in a tangy tamarind-lemongrass broth. But there are also unorthodox standouts, including a particularly phenomenal Thai khao soi, the schmaltz-enriched Mawn noodle soup (an ode to Lorn’s wife and partner, Rachel), and (at lunch) a Cambodian chili dog with Prahok and sport peppers. Make a reservation, since the 28 seats book up weeks in advance.

Japanese at Royal Izakaya

780 South 2nd Street
(267) 909-9002

There are two ways to nab a spot at Royal Izakaya, the ever-packed Japanese bar and sushi counter in the Queen Village neighborhood: Either book online for the coveted eight-seat counter exactly 30 days in advance, or try your luck at the walk-in-only front room, which serves more casual fare. At the counter, watch chef Jesse Ito (trained by his father and co-owner, sushi chef Masaharu Ito) skillfully prepare each bite of the exquisite 16-course, $300 omakase with highlights including charred New Zealand salmon belly sushi and Kombu cured Japanese scallops. If that sounds a bit extravagant, stick to the bar, where shrimp shumai and chile-glazed wings pair wonderfully with pitchers of Kirin Ichiban. 

Modern Italian at Fiore Fine Foods

2413 Frankford Avenue
(215) 339-0509

Fiore is a fresh chapter in Philly’s long love affair with Italian cuisine that offers a lighter alternative to the usual red-gravy staples. The contemporary café in Fishtown has whitewashed walls and big windows that let in lots of natural light, and nearly everything on the menu is made from scratch. Breakfast centers around baked goods such as lemon olive oil cake, custard-filled bomboloni, and cornetti with pistachio cream, plus savories such as egg and ricotta sandwiches on focaccia. For lunch, there are slow-cooked pork panini and housemade pastas. No matter the time of day, save room for a scoop of gelato (I love the rainbow cookie and fresh fruit flavors), or get a pint to go. The restaurant usually closes after lunch but makes exceptions for the occasional pop-up dinner.

Afrocentric at Honeysuckle Provisions

310 South 48th Street
(215) 307-3316

Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate opened Honeysuckle Provisions in West Philadelphia in 2022 as a way to bring fresh produce and healthier prepared foods to a neighborhood that was lacking both. The project began with the Afrocentric café and market on site, where you’ll find plantain snack cakes (inspired by St. Aude-Tate’s Haitian heritage) and breakfast sandwiches with vegan black-eyed pea scrapple. Earlier this year, the couple unveiled Untitled, an ever-changing tasting menu served in an eight-seat room that speaks to the couple’s memories and to Black culture and history as a whole. The experience starts with a handwritten menu and unfolds with highlights including sorghum tea and deviled eggs from their compost-fed chickens topped with lump crabmeat and caviar—served on ceramic dinnerware that Tate, an artist and chef, made himself. 

Modern American at Illata

2241 Grays Ferry Avenue

Philadelphia has long been a BYOB paradise, thanks to the state’s rigid and antiquated liquor laws. But in the wake of the pandemic, the once-booming genre seemed to be losing steam, with longstanding spots closing left and right. Then, Illata opened in 2023. At the intimate, 20-seat spot in Graduate Hospital, a table of four can (and should) order the whole succinct menu. The dishes change regularly, but a recent meal included plump mussels in miso and chile oil, vivid green caramelle pasta with mint and peas, and a salted brown butter tart I can’t stop thinking about. Insider tip: Pick up an eclectic bottle of wine (or non-alcoholic beverage) at nearby Cork. 

Mexican at El Chingon

1524 South 10th Street
(267) 239-2131

Juan Carlos Aparicio started baking at age 16 after moving to the U.S. from Puebla, and in 2022, he finally opened his own place. Inside this colorful South Philly café, you can taste the culmination of three decades of experience woven together with time-honored family recipes from Mexico. Cemitas are built atop his from-scratch rolls and stuffed with chorizo or herb-marinated pork, and tacos come on sourdough tortillas, made using a starter he’s kept since his baguette-baking days. Beyond the sandwiches and baked goods, the aguachiles stand out for their bright flavors and variety. Try the “tropical” ginger-spiked salmon topped with thin mango matchsticks, or the vegan version with hearts of palm.

International at Friday Saturday Sunday

261 South 21st Street
(215) 546-4232

Have you ever heard of a cocktail made using the Fibonacci sequence? At this modern American restaurant in Rittenhouse Square, bartender Paul MacDonald uses the mathematical formula—in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones—to strike the optimal balance of ingredients in cocktails such as the Assassin’s Handbook, with mulled wine shrub, Averna, Jamaican rum, and cognac. Start with a pre-dinner cocktail at the polished downstairs bar. Afterward, head up to the dining room for chef Chad Williams’ tasting menu that features dishes such as pasta with Benton’s Country Ham and collard greens and jerk quail, which make fantastic finger food when tucked into the slightly sweet coco bread that comes alongside it. 

Jewish American at Famous 4th Street Delicatessen 

700 South 4th Street
(215) 922-3274

In a notoriously difficult industry, few restaurants make it to the century milestone, and those that do are usually tourist traps. But since 1923, Famous 4th Street Deli has been a Queen Village staple for gathering around heaping, perfectly executed hot pastrami or chopped liver sandwiches, bowls of matzo ball soup, and other Jewish delicatessen standards. The wooden tables, set amid deli cases of knishes and black and white cookies, are always overflowing with  neighborhood families, well-dressed office workers, and everybody in between. 

Italian at Saloon 

750 South 7th Street
(215) 627-1811

Walking into Saloon feels like stepping back in time. The South Philly staple, part Italian restaurant, part steakhouse, opened in 1967 and still exudes that nostalgic charm with its wood-paneled walls, penny-tiled floors, and stained glass light fixtures. The bilevel restaurant fills up nightly, with waitstaff (sharply dressed in all black) buzzing around tables covered in plates of clams casino, veal piccata, and New York strip steaks. If you don’t have a reservation, you can usually find a seat at the upstairs bar. Wherever you land, start with an icy martini and end the meal with a treat—say, tiramisù or cannoli—from the old-school dessert tray.  

Mediterranean at Mish Mish

1046 Tasker Street
(267) 761-9750

Dinner at Mish Mish, the Mediterranean-ish restaurant on East Passyunk, feels like an intimate, effervescent dinner party. The dishes change seasonally—fluke crudo with torn herbs and elderflower vinegar in the spring, perhaps, or braised pork with tamarind barbecue sauce in the fall. Natural wines are broken out by cheeky descriptors (“pink linen,” “hammocks, palm trees”), and it’s all set to a soundtrack that bops from Egyptian rap to aughties R&B. Speaking of cheeky, the giant apricot that hangs over the front door is a nod to the restaurant’s name: Mish Mish means apricot in Arabic. Deal hounds shouldn’t miss Sunshine Hour, from 5 to 7 p.m., for $8 snacks (think “lil hunks of marinated feta”) on the sidewalk patio.

Vietnamese at Gabriella’s Vietnam

1837 East Passyunk Avenue
(272) 888-3298

In the wake of the Vietnam War, thousands of refugees settled in Philadelphia, resulting in a large, vibrant Vietnamese community. Along Washington Avenue and in pockets of South Philly, pho shops and Vietnamese bakeries specializing in bánh mì and bánh cam (sesame rice balls) abound. Complementing the tried-and-true classics, chef Thanh Nguyen, who grew up in Vietnam, opened Gabriella’s in 2021 to spotlight dishes that are popular in her home country right now: water fern dumplings, crisp savory crepes, and vermicelli platters served with a pungent kumquat-shrimp dipping sauce, to name a few. Early evening, the minimally adorned dining room fills with families, while later, it’s groups of friends feasting on chicken hot pot, sizzling catfish, and other shareable favorites.

The post How to Eat Your Way Around the Globe—Without Leaving Philadelphia appeared first on Saveur.

Years back, on an evening in Awendaw, South Carolina, a nine-year-old girl named Charlotte made dinner for her family. Charlotte’s mother had just stepped out to tend to an emergency, and the child took it upon herself to light the stove and cook up a meal of rice and fried liver, complete with a rich, brown gravy made from the fond left behind in the skillet. Now at age 81, the renowned Gullah Geechee chef Charlotte Jenkins says, “I always watched my mother cook and enjoyed being with her in the kitchen, so I figured it would be no problem for me to cook as I’d seen her do.” And she was right. When her mother called to check in, Charlotte’s brother answered the phone and let their mother know that Charlotte had not only capably prepared their dinner, but she’d done very well—and the gravy was perfect.

From that early moment, a spark was lit in chef Jenkins that couldn’t be extinguished. She held her brother’s opinion in high regard, and he encouraged her to continue cooking. In 1962, just after graduating from high school, she moved to New York City, joining other African Americans in the Great Migration, a time when many Black Southerners moved north and west in search of a release from the grips of the highly oppressive Jim Crow South. She eventually returned to South Carolina in 1973 to raise a family with her late husband Frank, a fellow Lowcountry native, and in 1997, the two of them opened Gullah Cuisine in Mount Pleasant, a restaurant that served the Jenkins family’s authentic Gullah Geechee food—red rice, okra gumbo, shrimp and grits, and seafood casserole—for almost two decades.

Like Jenkins (as well as my grandmother and most of my elders), I also had fond childhood memories of cooking, eating, and feeding my family. Despite growing up in Charleston, just across the river from Mount Pleasant, I never had an opportunity to eat at Jenkins’ restaurant, which closed when she retired in 2014. Truthfully, I didn’t learn about her work until I began my own journey as a chef, when I started looking into the culinary history of my hometown. Along the way, I came across a multitude of Black women chefs who, just like Jenkins, had largely been left out of conversations in the media around Southern cooking.

This past March, at the annual Charleston Wine + Food festival, I had the great pleasure of leading a cooking class with Jenkins and her daughter Kesha, where we taught our guests how to cook a perfect pot of rice, as well as conch stew and wedding punch, two recipes from her seminal 2010 cookbook, Gullah Cuisine: By Land and By Sea. “The conch stew to me was always an authentic Gullah dish,” Jenkins tells me, “something that wasn’t even an everyday thing for us because conch was sometimes hard to get. And back in the days when we got conch, it was exciting to prepare it. It’s in this odd shell, and you have to work to get the meat, and to me, the final product is delicious.” The wedding punch was a recipe of Kesha’s, a refreshing, celebratory concoction of moonshine, fresh sliced fruit, and Kool-Aid that packed a powerful punch (pun intended). Jenkins kept a watchful eye on me as I prepped and cooked the stew alongside her. After working so many years in professional kitchens, I’m great under pressure, but no chef in any restaurant gave me the feeling that Jenkins gave me then—a look that said, “I trust you to make this, but I’m keeping my eye on you just in case.”

Kesha, Jenkins, and I also discussed the role that Gullah Geechee culture played in creating American cuisine and its roots in the African diaspora. When enslaved West Africans were first brought from their fertile rice-growing homeland to the low-lying barrier islands of South Carolina, they retained their culture and community as much as they could. Many recognizable Southern American dishes, such as collard greens, cornbread, and sweet potato pie, were developed during this time, and are emblematic of the Gullah culture’s enduring influence. 

Despite existing for centuries in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Gullah Geechee cooking is still considered a new concept to many, and Jenkins acknowledged that the investors and income her restaurant required simply weren’t there when she needed them. “I didn’t get that support,” Jenkins tells me. “The support I got was from my family, my savings, and our community—that’s what kept us going.” But while it was around, her Gullah Cuisine restaurant was instrumental in putting the region’s foodways on the map. “Nobody seemed to know about Gullah food then, or that Gullah Geechee people exist and have a style of cooking,” Jenkins says. “The restaurant woke people up to that.”

Despite being retired, Jenkins continues to answer the call she felt as a young girl and hasn’t stopped cooking since; after many years, she’s still mentoring young chefs, cooking for family and friends, and catering private events with Kesha at her side. At 2023’s Charleston Wine + Food festival, a year before our cooking class together, Jenkins and other Gullah matriarchs from across the Lowcountry were honored at a dinner prepared by young women chefs with ties to the local community. “I saw all the work I’d done didn’t go in vain,” Jenkins says. “It means a lot to me to teach others about our cuisine and culture,” she adds, “because if I don’t share, it dies. But by sharing, I can keep it alive.” 

Recipes

Gullah Conch Stew

Get the recipe >

Pineapple Moonshine Punch

Get the recipe >

The post Chef Charlotte Jenkins Is Spreading the Gospel of Gullah Cuisine appeared first on Saveur.

Strolling the aisles of your local Goodwill, you might pause at a shelf piled with old porcelain plates decorated with flowers, vines, and bucolic scenery. These affordable dishes—known as transferware—were invented for the emerging middle class in 18th-century England. Inspired by hand-painted Chinese porcelain but stamped by machine, then exported by the shipload, English transferware became the go-to dish for early American households. 

Transferware’s earthenware base material (sometimes substituted for ironstone, porcelain, or bone china) kept the dishes highly affordable, but their printed-on monochrome designs—featuring castles, courting couples, and other intricate scenes—looked anything but. The technique lives on today, both in pricey, collectible Limoges porcelain from France, as well as in lower-grade plastic servingware that’s suddenly in vogue.

Across the United States, well-known chefs are now reviving transferware, swapping minimalist white dishes for Southern Willow Blue, English Chippendale, Historic American Brown, and other vintage designs. There’s a comfort to these old dishes, which conjure up meals in grandparents’ homes. These days, far from feeling formal or stuffy, the quaint motifs encourage a more relaxed dining experience. Here are the restaurants at the forefront of the transferware renaissance. What’s old is new again.

Gift Horse

272 Westminster St., Providence, RI

Before opening this groovy raw bar, chef-owner Benjamin Sukle (of Oberlin restaurant fame) dove into 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s dinnerware designs to match the new restaurant’s “timeless, brash style.” Rosebud Chintz from Spode was a winner, and eBay and Etsy got the job done. “Every time I have an empty plate in front of me, I can’t help but turn it over to see who made it, what collection it’s from, and how old it is,” says Sulke, a self-proclaimed “lifelong plate flipper.”

Get the look:
Royal Albert Rose Confetti 5-Piece Bone China Place Setting
Villeroy & Boch Audun Ferme Dinner Plate
Gracie China Rose Chintz Porcelain 8-Inch Dessert Plate

Hermosa

4356 W. Armitage Ave., Chicago, IL

Ethan Lim’s modern Cambodian restaurant (named after its neighborhood) pays homage to his late mother, Momma Lim, who ran a noodle stand in pre-war Battambang. With the COVID-19 pandemic in the rearview, Lim “wanted to focus on creating a space where time stood still and the service style was reflective of being at home,” a philosophy that shines through in such touches as his partner’s grandmother’s English Chippendale plates—on which he serves Dungeness crab and caviar.

Get the look:
Royal Albert Old Country Roses 10.25-Inch Dinner Plate
Portmeirion Botanic Garden Dinner Plates
Loki Dessert Plates by Matthew Williamson

Mister Mao

4501 Tchoupitoulas St., New Orleans, LA

At her maximalist “tropical roadhouse,” chef-owner Sophina Uong swaps starched tablecloths and matching plates for a hodgepodge of colorful transferware. “I know it drives our cooks and servers crazy, because nothing matches and things are impossible to stack together neatly, but to me, that’s the beauty of recycling pieces of history,” she says. Menu standouts include avocado chaat and turmeric-potato pani puri.

Get the look:
Bitossi Vintage-Inspired Floral Dinnerware
Gien Les Depareillees Rebus Dinner Plate
Spode Woodland Turkey Dinnerware

Chubby Fish

252 Coming St., Charleston, SC

Housed in a defunct corner store, James London’s dock-to-table restaurant sprinkles in deep blue transferware to complement the casual, nautical feel. “We try not to take ourselves too seriously,” says London, referring to dishes featuring tuna belly toast and caviar sandwiches served on mismatched china. “Guests get excited when they see plates or glasses they grew up with, and often bring us boxes of plates from their garage that they think will work with our lineup,” he says.

Get the look:
Spode Blue Italian 16-Piece Set
222 Fifth Adelaide Woodland 16-Piece Dinnerware Set
Williams-Sonoma English Floral Dinnerware Collection

Troubadour Bread & Bistro

381 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg, CA

Boulangerie by day, bistro by night, Troubadour Bread & Bistro’s whimsical aesthetic shines through in the escargot and tartiflette served on gold-rimmed Limoges, a transferware subset popular in 19th-century France. “I love that each piece has a story, and that we get to give these plates a proper stage,” says co-owner Sean McGaughey.

Get the look:
Famille Rose Dinner Plates
RHODE Dinner Plate Sets
Noritake Hertford 12-Piece Set

Ma Der Lao Kitchen

1634 N. Blackwelder Ave., Suite 102, Oklahoma City, OK

The shatterproof melamine dishes at this brother-and-sister-owned Lao restaurant are a nod to the duo’s childhood. “I want patrons to feel like they’re at my mom’s house,” says co-owner Jeff Chanchaleune, who serves mugifuji pork katsu and nam khao on the same plastic, floral-rimmed plates he ate from growing up.

Get the look:
Siren Song Floral Print Melamine Plates
Tarhong Cottage Blue Floral Melamine Dinnerware
Sandia Melamine Dinnerware Set

Oma’s Hideaway

3131 SE Division St., Portland, OR

To create a restaurant that existed “outside the space-time continuum,” the co-owners of this Singapore and Malaysian hawker-inspired eatery leaned into bold, clashing patterns and ornate details such as lustrous fabrics, thrifted floral transferware, and a ’70s-esque iridescent snakeskin bar top.

Get the look:
Bitossi Bel Paese Fruit Accent Plate
Sur La Table Italian Blue Floral Salad Plate
Abi Dessert Plates

The post The Restaurant Design Trend We Can’t Get Enough Of appeared first on Saveur.

At the tip of Cape Cod, on a narrow strip of land 60 miles out to sea, lies Provincetown, Massachusetts—the end of the world (or, at least, New England), and the place I’ve called home for close to two years. Locals might call me a “washashore,” but I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

That’s because Ptown is (per capita) the queerest town in the country and one of the most sought-out vacation spots for anyone on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. It’s a place of extraordinary natural beauty (the dunes! the beaches! the gardens! the architecture!) as well as a playground for freedom and pride. The main drag, Commercial Street, runs the length of the town along the bay side and is home to the majority of the restaurants, clubs, shops, and galleries. During the summer, it overflows with people of all flavors of gender expression, kink, and sexuality.  

I landed in Ptown after 20 years in professional kitchens ended in epic burnout. In 2021, mid-pandemic, I sold Willa Jean, my restaurant in New Orleans, and headed north. Love was waiting, as was eventual heartbreak and, ultimately, recovery and healing in Ptown. 

I’m not sure if it was the sunset G&Ts with friends on the beach, the impromptu clambakes, or the slices of pizza I devoured in the street after raucous nights out, but eating my way through the city has taught me that to be a queer person in Ptown is to be part of a community. Every restaurant and bar contributes to this spirit, and these are some of my favorite places.

Nor’East Beer Garden

206 Commercial Street

The Nor’East Beer Garden is an unassuming outdoor space on Commercial Street that serves some of the best food and cocktails in Ptown. That’s because you never get bored: The culinary “theme” changes each season; this summer, it’s “light Italian,” which means you can savor dishes like mushroom pâté, burrata with fried dough, and minty brown-butter mussels. 

Sal’s Place

99 Commercial Street

Sal’s is by the water in the West End, which makes for spectacular views. Cash-only and often difficult to reach by phone, Sal’s is worth the trouble of getting a reservation, whether you’re booking dinner with friends or a date. Don’t skip the cauliflower Caesar with baby romaine, which I love to order alongside the charred octopus with garbanzo beans and smoked chile oil.  

Relish

93 Commercial Street

This inviting little bakery in the West End makes a variety of breakfast and lunch sandwiches—great for a handheld meal while strolling about, or as beach picnic fare—but I always go for the pastries. Spring for a wedge of key lime tart, or grab a cookie or a slice of coffee cake.  

Tea Dance at the Boatslip Resort

161 Commercial Street

Shirtless muscle gays, margarita-sipping drag queens, straight vacationers who love to party—Ptowners of all stripes congregate every afternoon at the ultimate pregame called Tea Dance (or just “Tea”), held at the Boatslip Resort from 4 to 7 p.m. The legendary bartender Maria reigns over the right side of the bar, the end closest to the water, and will happily start you off with the Planter’s Punch, their official cocktail. 

Strangers & Saints

404 Commercial Street

After Tea, many revelers flock to Strangers & Saints, housed in an incredible 1850’s Greek Revival homestead. The Ken Fulk-designed interior, and well-made cocktails make for a dependably enjoyable second stop. The food goes well beyond basic bar snacks with dishes like meatballs with salsa verde and cucumber kimchi (my go-to dish), which pair nicely with the charred shishito peppers or spicy Moroccan carrots. Eating at Strangers & Saints feels like being welcomed into the home of someone with impeccable taste who loves throwing dinner parties.

The Mayflower

300 Commercial Street

Long before Provincetown was an LGBT+ mecca, it was a Portuguese fishing village. Remnants of that past can be found at the Mayflower, where traditional Portuguese flavors endure in dishes like the Portuguese kale soup, made with spicy linguica sausage and red beans. Its obligatory sidekick is an order of garlic bread, and if you’re still feeling peckish, a dozen steamers, a Cape classic of brothy soft-shell clams that you dunk one by one in melted butter. Family-run with a no-reservations policy, the Mayflower has an old-school diner feel with a down-home friendliness to match. They also happen to make the best Manhattans in town.  

Irie Eats

70 Shank Painter Road

Provincetown has a large, vibrant Jamaican population—many first arrived as seasonal workers and wound up making Ptown a year-round home. A little off the beaten path is Irie Eats, which offers spicy Jamaican food that fuels my summer season. My favorite dishes in the regular rotation are the curry goat, jerk chicken or pork, salt fish, and oxtails—all of which come with rice and red beans, and slaw. It’s a grab-and-go vibe, but they do have a small outdoor seating area to soak in the sun (and the flavor). 

Pop + Dutch

147 Commercial Street

My personal “best sandwich shop” award goes to Pop + Dutch. Their slogan is “Sandwiches. Salads. Lube,” and their tiny market selling vintage, often slightly titillating textiles and art only adds to the appeal. The shop carries everything you need for a day at the beach or pool, including sunscreen and, yes, lube. The fridges are stocked with fresh potato salad, pimento cheese, chicken salad, dolmas, and a variety of drinks including a great Arnold Palmer. But the sandwiches are the main event (lately, I’ve been loving specials like turkey topped with Cool Ranch Doritos and ranch-flavored mayo). In the morning, they make a mean scrambled egg sandwich on brioche, but slugabeds be warned: It’s only available from 9 to 10:30 a.m.

Crown & Anchor

247 Commercial Street 

The grande dame of Ptown is Crown & Anchor, an entertainment venue that sits in the center of town. Housing six bars and entertainment venues, a restaurant, a pool club, and a hotel, it caters to visitors and locals of all types. In 2021, it got new owners who were determined to turn the complex into a safe (and profitable!) space for queer artists, musicians, and chefs, among others. The restaurant concept changes daily, while the oyster bar is open seven days a week. Brunch (Thursday through Sunday) is hosted by yours truly and features a New Orleans-meets-New England menu. Expect my famous biscuits and gravy, plus live drag performances fueled by talent and fantasy. 

Lobster Pot

321 Commercial Street

The bright neon lobster sign, one of the Cape’s most recognizable images since 1979, welcomes stampedes of seafood lovers to the Lobster Pot. Tanks of fresh lobsters? Check. Ocean views? check. Consistently friendly service? Check. The plan of action here is to venture upstairs to the “top of the pot,” snag a seat at the bar, and kick things off with a perfect bloody mary. Then, it’s lobster rolls all around—or, for the lobster-averse, a wide-reaching menu of all sorts of fish and shellfish that you can order pan-roasted, grilled, stuffed, baked, blackened, fried, and more. There are also to-go dishes around the corner at Lobster Pot Express (5 Ryder Street). 

The Red Inn

15 Commercial Street 

Happy hour at the Red Inn is peak Ptown. From 2 to 4 p.m. daily, you can enjoy a raw bar menu, cocktails, and wine specials—all on a deck overlooking the beach that’s blessed with the best natural light in town. If oysters won’t cut it, chase them with heartier dishes like panko-crusted shrimp with sweet chili sauce, bacon-wrapped oysters, or shrimp remoulade salad. 

Helltown Kitchen

338 Commercial Street, Unit 3

Legend has it that Provincetown, because of its remote location, used to be a hideaway for smugglers and pirates. That’s why Puritans began calling it Helltown, a nickname that inspired the name of this restaurant that blends international flavors with New England ingredients. There’s truffle-scented, South American-spiced lobster risotto studded with peas and mushrooms. And if lobster isn’t it for you, Helltown does an incredible pork vindaloo that comes with mango chutney, basmati rice, and naan to sop it all up. 

Provincetown Brewing Company

141 Bradford Street 

Provincetown Brewing Company is fueled by community activism, and its business model reflects that. Not only does the brewery donate 15 percent of proceeds to LGBTQIA+ and Outer Cape causes; it also buys from queer-owned businesses and farmers. I’m big on their artichoke-cheese dip and jerk chicken sandwich, which I wash down with a flight of whatever PBC beers happen to be on tap. Keep an eye out for themed parties, trivia nights, “fag-out Fridays,” women’s night, and even a “yappy hour” for dogs. 

Atlantic House

6 Masonic Place

If Tea is where the party starts in Ptown, the Atlantic House (aka “A-House”) is where it ends (or at least where last call happens). Most patrons have no idea that the establishment is a contender for the oldest gay bar in America, having been in continuous operation for over two centuries. It draws the biggest crowd of any bar in Ptown and has three spaces: little bar, macho bar, and the dance floor, where the lights are low, the music is loud, and little by little the clothes seem to disappear. 

Spiritus Pizza

190 Commercial Street

Spiritus pizza is an old faithful and has become the staple stop between the party and the after party—so much so that the hour from 1 to 2 a.m. is called “pizza dance.” Spiritus is the only late food option in town, and after last call at the bars, the pizzeria fills up with hungry crowds, who overflow onto Commercial Street to revel in what’s essentially a nightly pizza party. There are three New York-style slices: cheese, pepperoni, or Greek (cash only!).  

Chalice at the Land’s End Inn

22 Commercial Street

Chalice is a new favorite wine and beer bar on the manicured lawn of the Land’s End Inn, which sits atop the tallest point at the end of the Cape. Complete with a fire pit and stunning views of Provincetown and beyond, it makes an ideal pitstop on your way to Tea or pre-dinner cocktails.  Look out for the pink martini flag: If you see it flying, then Chalice is open and well worth the uphill walk.

The post Where to Eat and Drink in Provincetown, Massachusetts appeared first on Saveur.

Plot to Plate is a SAVEUR column in which features editor Alex Testere exercises his green thumb, sharing practical gardening tips and seasonal produce-driven recipes from his patch of earth in New York’s Hudson Valley. He is also the author and illustrator of Please Grow: Lessons on Thriving for Plants (and People).

A tomato is never just a tomato. Even when you, alone in your garden on a late summer afternoon, sift through the tangle of overgrown vines, gently prodding each available fruit before plucking the ripest specimen from its stem—even then, you are merely scratching the surface. You may have planted that tomato, but who grew the fruit that produced the seed you sowed? Who packaged that seed and shipped it to your door, or trucked it to the retailer from which you procured it? Who raised the cow that created the manure that amended the compost that fertilized the bed? Maybe you, indefatigable farmsteader, did all these things yourself—in which case, kudos!—but if you look closely enough, I think you’ll find some spaces where another person’s work shines through the cracks. 

Gardening has always been a community-powered enterprise, and no one knows this better than Alice Waters, chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching students around the world the value of (and skills behind) growing your own food. “There is no more meaningful work than that,” Waters told me recently in a Zoom call, where we discussed everything from the fleeting delights of perfectly ripe produce to gardening’s relationship to community and democracy. In October of this year, Waters will also receive the tenth annual Julia Child Award for her contributions to transforming American food and cooking. 

On the subject of ripeness, I started thinking about the summer fruits I look forward to this time of year. Peaches and nectarines come to mind, and tomatoes, too. I’m sure to face flak from some of you for this, but I am very solid in my belief that a tomato has no business being consumed in the American Northeast outside the month of August, with some occasional exceptions for July and September. When a slice of sun-ripened summer tomato adorns a BLT or sits beneath a heap of herby chicken salad, I constantly wonder whose cruel joke it was to turn the otherwise anemic slices of mealy fruit into year-round sandwich staples. Perhaps that’s what first drew me to Waters’ recipe for Heirloom and Cherry Tomato Salad, a dish simply designed to celebrate a glut of the beautiful multicolored fruits.

While I would never attempt to “improve” a recipe of Waters’, I was inspired by our conversation (you’ll see why below) to toss some stone fruits into the mix, a balanced blend of whatever I could find at the farmers market in that perfect window of ripeness. I took a tip from Waters’ 1996 Chez Panisse Vegetables book and tore up half of a stale miche, tossed it in olive oil and minced garlic, and toasted it in the oven to make some croutons, their craggy edges eagerly awaiting a soak in the salad’s herby, shallot-filled vinaigrette. It’s one of those dishes you might only get a chance to eat once a year, at the singular convergence of ripe stone fruit and ripe tomatoes—and I think it’s all the better for it.

What follows is an edited and condensed version of my conversation with Waters:

Alex Testere: Thank you so much for joining me today, Alice. I’m so excited to chat about plants and gardening and everything they have to teach us. 

Alice Waters: My pleasure! It seems we both see eye to eye there.

Will you tell me a little about how gardening first informed your relationship with food?

Well, I guess it began back when I was a kid. My parents had a victory garden during the war, and I grew up eating strawberries out of that garden when I was very, very little. It was very important for my parents—they had four kids and didn’t know how to feed them. And it was so great because all their neighbors had victory gardens, too, and they’d trade vegetables that way. I didn’t know that until I was a bit older, but I just love that idea, that you can get a neighborhood together and plant all different things and just share them. So no matter where we lived, including when we moved to California, they planted that victory garden. 

And how did that evolve as you grew up?

When I arrived at Berkeley amidst the Free Speech Movement, that really changed my life because I felt then the power of the people to make change. And [activist] Mario Savio said don’t just study one discipline at school, you know? Go to another country and see what an education looks like there. I took him very seriously, and I up and went to France. I didn’t know at the time that France was a slow food nation, that it hadn’t been industrialized yet, and that was my first experience of a culture of eating only what was in season. So, for example, when those little fraises de bois (wild strawberries) were gone, I cried! I didn’t know I couldn’t have them all the time, or that they had to be gathered from the woods; they couldn’t be cultivated. I remember eating a Charentais melon in September and just having these extraordinary foods. I didn’t realize later that it was all about ripeness. I came home and I wanted to be able to eat and live like that.

I can already see the throughline forming to your work at Chez Panisse and sourcing ingredients directly from local farms. 

Yes, and now, after 53 years, the reason for the longevity of that restaurant is absolutely the ripeness of the ingredients—and of course, you can’t have anything ripe if it’s shipped from halfway across the world. It has to be picked before it ripens, and it never actually ripens in travel. 

This whole idea of seasonal cooking really is about ripeness as a criteria for wonderful produce—and you can’t think about ripeness without thinking about where the food was grown, how far it’s traveling, and that perfect little window of time when that heirloom tomato, for example, is at its best. 

I think you’re absolutely right. In 40 Years of Chez Panisse, Michael Pollan wrote the afterword about this, and I think he just nailed it. He ordered the fruit bowl, which at the time was a selection of ripe peaches, and he just understood this exactly. 

[Editor’s note: Pollan describes the peaches, presented within their impossibly small window of ripeness, saying, “There are times … when no amount of culinary artifice can improve on what nature has already perfected, and it would be folly—hubris!—to try.”]

And I’m really relying on this idea to make school-supported agriculture a reality in our country. If we decide nationally—internationally, even—to have schools be the economic engine behind agriculture, then everyone would eat ripe food. I mean, Eliot Coleman is up there in Maine farming in his greenhouse in winter, and we’re going to need that, but this was how we always did things before 1950. No pesticides, no shipping of fresh produce. You know, I think it’s a part of how our democracy has lost its way. I know it’s about food, and this obsession with the values of fast, cheap, and easy. 

It really shows us that access to fresh, ripe food for everyone has to be a community project. It’s like we’ve collectively forgotten that part of the process, and that personal connection to where the food comes from is the missing piece of the puzzle.

This is where the Edible Schoolyard Project came from. A woman at the San Francisco County Jail, her name was Cathrine Sneed, called me—she was a gardener and therapist there, and she asked if we would buy their vegetables for Chez Panisse if they grew them to our specifications. And I said absolutely, and she had me come meet her students, some of the inmates there. This one guy, maybe about 17 years old, told me it was his first day in the garden, but it was the best day of his life. I cried, and I said to myself, if it can work in a jail, it can work in a school. Thirty years later, we’re part of a network of over 6,500 schools around the world. Many of them are independent of us now, too: I can’t tell you how many are in Japan; [activist] Carlo Petrini has a million signatures he’s giving to the president of Italy to bring these programs to every school in the country; the mayor of Paris, a year ago, decided they would only buy organic, regenerative produce for the city’s schools from within 125 miles of the city, and they’re already close to meeting their goal.

So it seems like there’s a need for this, an urgent desire for folks all over the world to create these kinds of community-driven food programs. 

It’s meaningful work: “I planted this seed, I grew this plant, I picked this tomato.” I think the greatest issue in our country is a lack of meaningful work, but we don’t ever talk about it. My father in particular, he said, “When I don’t have meaningful work, I don’t want to be here anymore.” I think about that, and I don’t want to ever have work that I don’t love. I’ve loved every minute of the restaurant, and it has been a big challenge at times. But I love the people and that kind of collaboration. I never had a search committee finding people for me. I just ran into them and said, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And they were people that had all different talents.

I can’t help but think of the way plants collaborate with each other, how their roots intertwine and exchange nutrients, and, as with many forms of companion planting, the garden becomes a community in and of itself. 

That’s exactly right. And everybody has a contribution to make, it doesn’t matter how small. If we didn’t have our wonderful dishwasher at Chez Panisse, we couldn’t run the restaurant. He deserves to be elevated, to have a nice place to work. And it’s that—this hierarchy of people we see as important and ones we see as not as important, it’s so wrong. We all eat together at the restaurant, whether it’s a dishwasher or the head chef, it doesn’t matter. And it is like the way nature works. But that’s why I think this idea, if it could really take hold in every country, then we could really address this question of meaningful work and community, but also of health and climate change, too.

We talked a little about regenerative agriculture, but what role do you feel gardening and growing food plays in addressing climate change? 

I think it’s probably biodiversity that is my greatest hope for the future, because in this frightening world of climate change, we need to know what to plant when it’s hot, when it’s raining, when it’s really cold. And to do that, we need to exchange seeds and to know what’s happening around the world in other climates now. And of course, with all the incredible varieties of produce, whether it’s tomatoes or green beans or chicories in every color of the rainbow—it’s like wow, could we have a delicious solution to climate change, too?

So by collectively tending our gardens, we could be cultivating community, feeding the hungry, fighting climate change, and it can taste great, too. It sounds like a win-win-win-win to me.

It’s so important. There’s really nothing to lose.

Recipe

Heirloom Tomato and Stone Fruit Salad with Garlicky Croutons

Get the recipe >

The post Why Alice Waters Believes Gardening Can Save Our Democracy appeared first on Saveur.

At the back of a butchery in the town of Martina Franca, Riccardo Ponte claps his massive, baseball-mitt hands, calloused from years of charcoal burns and judo holds, and presents the next plate. Tender chunks of veal lung wrapped in sinister layers of pork fat form a glistening pyramid on the table. “Pugliese chewing gum,” he says with a grin, before retreat- ing back to his grill, a central fixture of his shop, called Mang e Citt, or “Sit Down and Eat” in Pugliese slang. Most of the macellerias—butchers that double as informal restaurants—have, out of convenience, moved to standard-issue flat-top grills in recent years. Ponte’s setup, however, is somewhere between a pizza oven and a hearth, a kind of infernal cubby hole carved directly into the wall of his small fluorescent-lit shop. Stacks of meat balance precariously on skewers; coals, dispersed in various piles, create heat zones measured purely by feel. Ponte insists that this technique, established centuries ago by the butchers of Martina Franca, makes all the difference: “You can taste the process,” he says. 

I had come to Puglia—the gleaming, postcard-ready wedge of Southern Italy that sticks into the Ionian Sea like a boot heel—to eat. This, I recognize, is not a very original quest: Elizabeth Gilbert has been there, Stanley Tucci has done that. Spend enough time digging through guide books and suggested itineraries, and you’d be excused for thinking the only thing in Italy to do is eat.

When we travel to eat, though, we’re often looking for a story—a tale to bring back home, or a clear, easy-to-digest version of a place that fits squarely in our own mental atlases: The ruby red aperitivo glistening in the Tuscan sun, the trapizzino held aloft on the Spanish Steps, the pale green scoop of pistachio gelato, doled out in a Sicilian alleyway. Or, in Ponte’s case, the small-town, larger-than-life chef, seemingly grief-stricken by your physical inability to accept “just one more” piece of grilled meat.

It’s easy to arrive in a place like Puglia with pre-conceptions about Southern Italy: a hot, quiet place, where things move slowly and naps are plentiful. But I quickly learned that for every person doing something one way, there is someone else doing the very same thing—for the very same reasons—a completely different way. As one meal bled into the next, I found that every time I built a story out of the meals I ate and the people I met, every time I thought I had found some definitive sense of what Puglia actually tastes like, it quickly fell away.

While I wish I could take credit for stumbling upon Ponte’s establishment, I was part of a tour group traveling through the region. Roads and Kingdoms, an online travel magazine, has, in recent years, pivoted toward offering small-group, food-centric trips around the world. Trips like the one I took to Puglia are focused not on big-name restaurants, but on offering a backstage pass to show travelers how the actual sausage gets made, drawing on what co-founder Nathan Thornburgh describes as “an archipelago of interesting people.” 

If it all sounds vaguely Bourdainian, that’s not a coincidence. Founded in 2012 by Thornburgh and food writer Matt Goulding, the company and its journalism was for many years supported and funded by Anthony Bourdain. Today, Roads and Kingdoms’ trips actively try to avoid what Thornburgh refers to as “following the umbrella across the piazza.” Potential guests must undergo an interview process to make sure they’re a good fit for the group: Fighting couples and Michelin star-hunters have been turned away in the past. 

Roads and Kingdoms’ shift toward this kind of “don’t-call-it-a-group-trip group trip” is indicative of a wider trend in travel, one in which access is everything. Whether helmed by chefs, academics, or journalists, experiences are being gently curated in a way that feels uniquely yours as they lodge themselves into your memory. Serendipity, by definition, can’t be manufactured. Oftentimes, the best partner to the unexpected is time—slow down and stretch out a trip and you’re bound to meet the characters and have the conversations that end up solidifying the travel experience in your mind. That’s harder on an organized tour, but, as these experiences seem to posit, not impossible.

The interesting person leading us on this particular trip was Eugenio Signoroni, one of Italy’s most celebrated food writers, as well as the editor of the hotly contested “Osterie d’Italia” guidebooks from Slow Food International’s publishing house, which list and review the best traditional restaurants across Italy. On day one, as golden hour sets in at the masseria, or farmhouse, that would serve as our base, Signoroni explains that this is a trip to shatter preconceptions, not confirm them. “You know the stories of the nonna, the Italian grandma and her amazing cooking?” he asks. “I want you to know it’s a total myth: My daughter’s grandmother doesn’t know how to cook a damn thing.” It was a good line for a tour built on this kind of punk-rock premise, but in talking to him afterwards, it became clear that the sentiment behind it is true.

“We like to build up this romantic idea of tradition,” Signoroni says when I ask what he notices when talking to first-time visitors to Italy. “It makes us feel safer and more comfortable.” Four years prior, when I visited Puglia for the first time, I had felt a kind of self-satisfied contentment: Sipping wine and watching a blacksmith working on new horseshoes for the stallions he kept behind his shop, the memory fits squarely into the romantic. “If we want to really understand a place,” Signoroni says, “we have to see it as it is, not as we think it should be.” 

That doesn’t mean you won’t find intergenerational recipes and deep-seated heritage in Puglia. This is a place fiercely proud of its traditions, themselves a mishmash of the steady wave of conquerors who came to this land over millennia. It’s a pride that has been reinforced by recent history too, borne from decades of being looked down upon by the rest of the country. Long one of the poorest regions in Italy, Puglia was left behind by the industrialization that took hold in the north. As a result of a largely subsistence economy, cucina povera—literally “poor kitchen”—is the backbone of Pugliese cuisine. It’s only in recent years, as Puglia has marketed itself as a global destination, that the culinary label has been wielded not with shame, but with a kind of reclaimed dignity. 

At Cibus, a family-run restaurant tucked away in a labyrinth of climbing alleyways in the town of Ceglie Messapica, every dish reveals new layers of com- plexity that belies the kind of catch-all utilitarian implication of cucina povera. The Silibello family offers a crash course in the ingredients of the Salento region: Lampascioni, often translated as “bitter onion” but actually the bulb of a type of hyacinth, takes on the consistency of burnt newsprint when fried, yielding a bitterness that prepares the palate for what comes next. Stringy stracciatella cheese is teleported out of the heart of the burrata balls where it’s most often found, and spread out onto overflowing plates, to be eaten by the dripping forkful. Slices of capocollo and other cuts from the Apulo-Calabrese black pig are arranged into a gradient of richness with clear instructions on how to avoid blowing out your taste buds with hits of lard too early. To bring us back to earth, a Pugliese classic that emerged from tough times: fave e cicoria, a bed of mashed fava beans, topped with chicory leaves and lashed with olive oil. A ragù follows, made with tender horse meat and ricotta forte (an aged, barnyard-forward cheese with a long shelf life ideal for peasant pantries), and juicy, butter-soft slices of beef from the region’s Podolica cow, equally prized for its meat as for its milk.

With its familial ambience, its focus on hearty, of-the-soil ingredients, and its secret, in-house cheese cave, Cibus is the kind of place most travelers dream about when they dream about Italy. And it is exactly as satisfying as you might imagine. Here, all of Signoroni’s “romantic ideas of tradition,” are confirmed to carry at least a foundation of reality. But just 30 miles away, in the town of Putignano, those vague notions of some idealized past are being intentionally—and ruthlessly—torn apart.

At Osteria Botteghe Antiche, chef Stefano D’Onghia takes many of the same ingredients—the same dishes, even—and brings them into a kind of parallel universe where what is known and established gives way to what there is left to learn. There is lampascioni here too, but it is accompanied by a kind of capocollo pocket, filled with chickpea purée. Fave e cicoria becomes a vague signpost rather than a cornerstone of tradition: The fava purée is stuffed into a single grilled green pepper and served alongside a spoonful of caramelized red onions. Ricotta makes an appearance, too, but it is imbued with mint and hidden within the delicate folds of a zucchini flower. Orecchiette, the ear-shaped pasta often served in Puglia with broccoli rabe, is made—intentionally, cheekily—with grano arso, burnt grain that for centuries was the only stuff available to the poorest of the poor. It shares the plate with indulgent chunks of grilled octopus, as if to say look how far we’ve come.

The next evolution of D’Onghia’s menu will be a push toward sustainability, something he argues is at the core of Puglia’s seemingly simple, local-first cuisine. “Nowadays it’s hard to sell a meat dish for less than 18 euros, which is strange for a region like Puglia,” D’Onghia told me. “I want to think about how to make cuts of meat that are not expensive—liver, tongue, offal—just as delicious.” He points to the octopus orecchiette as a dish that is becoming just too expensive for him to sell. What would it taste like, he wonders, if instead of serving the meat, he sous-vide cooked the octopus’s liver, a piece often discarded by fishermen? Somewhere, in some- one’s imagined reality, a nonna in a sauce-streaked apron can’t believe her ears.

Other days highlight both the diversity of the gastronomic scene and the utter impossibility of fitting it into a neat package. There’s the pork cookout in the sun-slapped courtyard of a pig farm belonging to local producers Salumi Martina Franca. It lasts for hours, and transitions organically into a long walk through the land where the animals roam free. At Intini, an olive oil producer outside of Alberobello, a fourth-generation maker explains how some visitors are disappointed to see gleaming industrial equipment instead of charming wooden presses. “If I made it the traditional way, it wouldn’t be good,” Pietro Intini says. “The real revolution in olive oil production only happened 20 years ago.”

Even where traditions do remain intact, modernity creeps in. In Taranto’s Mare Piccolo, an inland sea, Luciano Carriero, a mussel farmer from a family of mussel farmers, explains how a tight-knit network of families has come together to create a cooperative, keeping the sticky fingers of organized crime away. As we float around the bay, he draws long necklaces of the bivalves out of the water and shucks them on the spot, to be eaten raw, paired with bites of provolone cheese and washed down with sparkling wine. He insists I try more than one. “It’s like a big box of chocolates,” Carriero says, one-upping Forrest Gump forever. “Each mussel tastes a little different.” That night, I follow his bounty to its final resting place at Antica Osteria la Sciabica, tucked away along a seaside promenade in the city of Brindisi. The seafood soup doubles as a taxonomy of marine life: fish, squid, shrimp, and, yes, mussels, all afloat in a rich, tomato-based broth. The restaurant buzzes with the sounds of spoons scraping the very last drops from drained bowls.

There is something about visiting the so-called “Old World” as a resident of the so-called “New” one that sets off a kind of rabid, voyeuristic urge to witness “tradition.” Some parts of Puglia, like the family-run cheese cave hidden under a bookshelf at Cibus, or the focaccerias in every village churning out flatbreads in the same oven for generations, do feel stuck in time, and I feel an almost involuntary delight whenever I encounter people doing things as they had been done since before Italy was Italy. But I soon find myself most looking forward to the moments of disruption. I had been warned, in a way, by Signoroni’s meditations on what we often expect from so-called “authentic experiences.” I had caught little rebellions in the form of culinary innovation, and in the subtle twisting of convention. But nothing, it was becoming clear, is that simple.

On the outskirts of Bari, in Altamura, I meet Vito Dicecca who, along with his siblings, has inherited the family cheesemaking tradition, which he treats with all the sacrosanct rulebook-abidance of a mad scientist. Out of a relatively small kitchen, the Dicecca family whips up around 800 pounds of lactic heresy every day. “Anyone in Puglia can make small cheese,” Dicecca says before pointing to his brother Paolo who is in the process of tying a mozzarella knot the size of a newborn. “I want to make big cheese.” He shows off a milky goat cheese concoction, best used as a dip for crispy bagel-shaped taralli crackers (“the best drunk food,” Dicecca calls it). A bright orange cousin to caciocavallo goes by the name “Life on Mars.” While conventional wisdom says mozzarella needs to be made from buffalo milk, the Dicecca family makes a goat milk version, granting the usually mild cheese a deliciously grassy funk.

To try Dicecca’s wildest creation, I have to wait until we leave the shop in Altamura and travel into the pinewoods of the Mercadante nature reserve. There, the family has opened Baby Dicecca, a cheese bar that serves as a tasting room and satellite for experimentation. After the kind of long, languorous meal I’ve grown accustomed to in Puglia, Dicecca brings out dessert. Looking more like a cake than a wheel of cheese, this has, for good reason, become the Diceccas’ most famous act of sacrilege. To create it, he drops a wheel of blue cheese into a barrel of primitivo wine, where it soaks for 100 days. Afterwards, it’s topped with candied sour cherries, adding a tartness to the indulgent sweet and salty combination. It’s cut into wedges that are inten- tionally about 12 times too big for one person to handle and served with even more primitivo wine. It’s called, Dicecca tells me with a conspiratorial grin, “Amore Primitivo.”

This, I think, seems like the kind of person who takes great pride in his inventions, who revels in the fact that he’s challenging tradition with each new wacky idea. Does he spend as much time thinking about authenticity as I do? “Are you worried some- one is going to take your idea, or try to do some other, worse version of it?” I ask. I imagine grocery stores lined with tasteless, harmless cheeses, smothered in neon jelly.

“It doesn’t matter who invents the thing or who has the original story,” Dicecca says while doling out the next in an endless series of wine refills. “It only matters who does it best.”

Recipes

Brindisi Seafood Stew

Get the recipe >

Orecchiette with Octopus Ragù and Chickpea Purée

Get the recipe >

Ricotta-Stuffed Squash Blossoms with Fried Zucchini Coins

Get the recipe >

The post The Cuisine of Puglia Defies Definition appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the 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 month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

The author Su Scott describes the pocha marketplaces of Seoul as a kind of theater, and a glimpse into the pages of her new cookbook, Pocha: Simple Korean Food from the Streets of Seoul, immediately shows you why. Pocha stalls—short for pojangmacha, which translates to “covered wagon”—often debut at night along the city streets, illuminated by hanging tungsten lights that shine over open grills and sizzling skillets. Beneath the drape of red and orange tarpaulins, these stands turn out some of Korea’s most iconic street foods, be it spicy-sweet gireum tteokbokki (oil-seared rice cakes); bowls of pickled vegetables; or pastries stuffed with everything from red bean paste to Nutella. Set against the sound of clinking glasses of soju, it’s an altogether marvelous show for the senses, and a source of national pride. As I spoke with Scott from her home in London, I learned that her cookbook was an attempt to capture the magic and theater of the pocha as a means of preservation, both for herself and for all fans of Korean cooking.

What makes pocha food different from that offered in a Korean restaurant?

Markets are very good places for anyone to really feel the life of that particular country or culture. On a very basic environmental level, there’s a sound and smell, and it’s just sensory heaven. As you walk through the markets, you see how people move and talk and engage. There is a reasonable degree of trust as well, and you know you’re seeing the whole theater of it as it unfolds. What’s different is the way that the food is cooked: The pocha setup is very simple; there’s no set of six burners, just one hob. The dishes are very seasonal, based on what’s available and cheap, but done very well. But it happens in front of you, and there’s an immediate connection that you have with the vendor. For the cooks, while they have years of experience, their food doesn’t have ego. But there is a sense of pride—this is their life, and they want to feed you well, and for you to like it. And I think that’s quite special.

How did pocha go from a working-class experience to one beloved throughout Korea? How are they being sustained today?

In Korea, almost everyone can afford good food, and even the richest people will queue up for a restaurant’s special dish for two hours or more. Korea only came out of food poverty after the Korean War, so a lot of older generations understand what it means to be hungry, and there is a lot of love for preserving Korean food and its culture. As Korea has developed into a global powerhouse, Korean food companies are taking up space in the world market. Now, some of the neighborhoods that house pocha are being redeveloped; there are parts of Seoul I don’t even recognize anymore. Yet what I’m seeing now is that younger generations who are moving into these soon-to-be-demolished towns want to preserve these places. So I’m confident that pocha will continue to exist, though in what shape or form is another story. But I think the educated, younger generations bring savvy and eloquence to the fight to protect their culture.

How did you get into food writing?

Around 2011, food blogs were everywhere, and I remember reading food blogs such as Cannelle et Vanille and Orangette, and thinking, “Oh, I really want to do that.” So I wrote a really bad food blog, and then I somehow secured a job writing a column for a Korean food magazine, and it felt like a practice to find out what I want to write about. When my daughter was born in 2015, I realized that I’d lived in London long enough that I had distanced myself from Korean culture. So I started to explore where my Koreanness comes from, and the most tangible thing was food and the dishes that I grew up with. And in 2019, the Observer Food Monthly ran a competition for readers’ recipes, and I entered with a story about my mother’s kimchi jjigae, and to my surprise, I won. That moment crystallized what I wanted to do, and that became my first book, Rice Table, all about my mother’s and maternal grandmother’s tables and how what we feed ourselves builds the bigger picture of who we are.

Some people may be surprised to see ingredients such as cheese and hot dogs (or both, in the case of your recipe for corn dogs) in this book. How did these ingredients enter the pantheon of Korean cooking?

Going back to the era of the Three Kingdoms of Korea [18 BCE–660 CE], we were influenced by all these neighboring countries, and some of the similarities between Chinese and Korean cuisines stems from that period of trade. Then we had the Japanese occupation [1910–1945], and that brought the influence of Japan along with migrant workers from Japan and China. There are a lot of crossovers that we can’t, even as Koreans, quite pinpoint. Did a dish start with us, or did it come from Japan and was then reimagined in Korea as it is now? Then the Korean War brought American and European soldiers, and many Koreans relied on the generosity of American troops passing on rations that they didn’t want; one community’s waste became another’s treasure, and it sustained the nation in so many ways. Ingredients such as Spam or canned beans or American cheese were adapted to suit Korean palates. When you look at the very recent history of Korean food, you have to remember that free travel really only started in the early 1980s, and we welcomed an influx of tourists during the [1988 Seoul] Olympics, so it was a fundamental time of growth in all areas, but particularly in food. Now, Koreans aren’t just going to the U.S.; they’re going to Europe to study and to learn about food, and they bring a lot back with them. So what once seemed like a quite limited option—Korean people wanting to preserve Korean food—now looks different. 

How would you explain the many gradations of flavor and texture in Korean cuisine?

We have this idea of bapsang, a table that includes a number of dishes—banchan, a bowl of rice, and either soup or stew—something with a warm broth. The rest of the meal supports the rice; there is a saying that every Korean parent knows: “rice is life.” That idea comes from the generations who never had enough food. But we want to enjoy a variety of things, and we’re also very conscious of food as a form of medicine. There are also a lot of different colors, textures, and temperatures to satisfy and balance. I think the balance is the most important thing—the harmonious table. Korean people are really good with being conscious and conscientious toward nature because we had to learn to preserve food, and preserving brings a different texture. So when anyone asks me to pinpoint “What is Korean food?” I say, “harmony.” 

Pocha food is almost always enjoyed with a drink of soju, either by itself or in a cocktail such as a Soju Sour. Why is that so vital?

So in the 1960s to ’70s, there was a massive shift in Korea toward wanting to rebuild the country. Seoul became this place where everything was possible; people came with their dreams, and pocha offered a place of rest to these workers coming from all walks of life after a hard day’s work—and there was always soju. So both were booming at the same time, and they have this really lovely symbiotic relationship. It’s a bit like the pub culture in the UK—after work you have a drink with your colleagues or friends and you offload the weights of life. We work hard, so we play hard; we drink soju and drown our sorrows so we can face the world again tomorrow with rejuvenated energy and vitality. And then that comes with the culture of hangover cure; you need to sober up and start again, and there’s no time to waste. 

The book’s food and travel photographs are so vibrant. How did you determine the look and feel of the book?

I was very lucky—my husband is a food photographer, so he’s always worked in the industry. One hot summer night, we were in Busan at a pocha, and we were kind of tipsy, and we had this epiphany of the vibe we wanted in the book and doodled the cover together. It had to have neon lights and darkness and coziness and simplicity, but alongside the calm and serenity and mundanity of what Seoul can feel like if you’re not a tourist. If you live on these untrodden paths, you can capture a sense of workers breaking for lunch, people gathering in a park on a hot summer’s day, with tents and cans of beer, to watch the world go by. So we lived this idea of pocha at home in London, and when we went back to Korea to take photos, especially the location photos, I’d already made a list of 250 random things that I wanted to capture, and for about two weeks we walked everywhere to cover all the basics. I am beyond pleased with the photography in the book because it is exactly what I wanted—for people to feel like they’re walking with me.

Did you have any favorite recipes or elements in the book to develop?

Oh God, there are so many! I’m not precious about family recipes because I didn’t have family recipes as such. But the Northern-style dumpling, I remember how we made it at home, and my father was quite strong about keeping up with the tradition because he grew up eating those dishes. It’s also the first dish that my daughter asked me to cook with her, and she took such pride in making and shaping the dumplings. This is the power of food, that one recipe allowing her to engage with the culture and to embrace my family, who she doesn’t see very often. I took a video of when we made that dish for the first time together, and I sent it to my father. He cried and felt that sense of pride.

Recipes

Soju Sour

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Cheesy Korean Corn Dogs

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Tteokbokki with Chili Crisp and Honey

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The post “Pocha” Takes You on a Street Food Crawl Through Seoul appeared first on Saveur.

Down a gravel pathway in a rural Colombian town, just over 20 miles from the Caribbean coast, a group of African women donning billowy dresses offer up baskets filled with sweets: coconut-laden cocadas, chewy caballitos, and the ever-so-sweet popped millet balls known as alegría, from the Spanish word for “joy.” Cloaked in the saturated red, yellow, and blue of the Colombian flag, the women, known as palenqueras, make a living here peddling fresh fruits and homemade treats to locals and visitors alike. But it’s not just the palenqueras’ snacks that are sweet; the quiet roads of San Basilio de Palenque are paved with the sweetness of freedom.

Palenque, as its name is typically shortened, is the first free African village in the Americas, and descendants of African slaves exist here in a way that’s foreign to most other descendants of slaves, myself included: There is no police system here, and never has been. Instead, locals self-govern, and approach disputes using locally-trusted practices of forgiveness and conflict resolution. This atmosphere has enabled the community’s African heritage to flourish well beyond the legacy of Colombian enslavement. Elders retain ancient medicinal practices, young musicians revitalize erstwhile music traditions, and home cooks and chefs preserve their generations-old recipes and culinary techniques—all rooted in customs and practices brought over by their enslaved ancestors in the early 16th century. 

That heritage was immediately evident even before I arrived in Palenque, along with about 10 other Black American travelers. Roughly 4.7 million Colombians are of African descent, making up just under 10 percent of the country’s population. In Cartagena, 30 miles or so to the north, their influence is most recognizable in the street food: Arepas, the popular flatbreads frequently stuffed with meat and cheese, are made from a dough of ground and mashed maize, a common ingredient for Indigenous and Black Colombians. Among vendors doling out papas con huevo y carne (potato balls with eggs and meat) and potato- or meat-stuffed empanadas, the palenqueras, who sometimes commute north to make more money in Cartegena’s main squares, are easily visible in their vibrant colors, selling the same sweets I encountered in their storied hometown. 

In Palenque, though, that African influence extends far beyond the food: It’s an inextricable feature of the place itself. As you arrive in town, you are welcomed immediately by a striking statue of the freedom fighter Benkos Biohó, a Guinea Bissau–born revolutionary who escaped a Spanish slave port in Cartagena in the 16th century and led his people to freedom. Settling in the mountainous Montes de María region of the country, he organized a runaway slave network to help other enslaved Africans reach their liberation. He was ultimately captured and executed in 1621, but his efforts toward freedom weren’t entirely in vain: In 1713, after years of failing to take back the settlement, the Spaniards surrendered their attacks, and Palenque effectively became the first free African village, by decree of the King of Spain. Today, lionized through the brass statue, Biohó extends a single shackled arm, grasping for one more chance to bring another soul into a free world.

More than 300 years after its founding, food, art, and music have become some of Palenque’s most prominent features. Walking through the gravel roads, songs drift from open windows, while local bands perform in the streets throughout the day. Drum beats and the sounds of rhythmic steps merge with the music as it crescendos and reverberates across town. Brightly painted murals adorn storefronts and walls, many depicting Black women experiencing the ebbs and flows of life. 

As I swipe beads of sweat from my forehead, I see a mural showing a Black woman with words inscribed in her braids, an ode to a clever trick among enslaved African women who braided maps and instructions into their hair to provide key information and escape routes during the transatlantic slave trade. They would braid seeds into their hair as well, which enabled ingredients like tamarind, bitter melon, kola nut, and the subtly sweet melegueta pepper to become part of Colombia’s foodways. Elsewhere, a stoic Black woman’s eyes seem to meet the end of the short road, and a colorful “Black Lives Matter” sign points to Black people’s interconnected, global fight for liberation. 

I am soon encircled by a group of children, recruiting me into their game of tag as we approach “The House of Music.” Founded by local musical group Kombilesa Mi (which means “my friend,” in Palenquero, the Creole language here), the small museum is home to a collection of regionally specific instruments, like the Cuban-inspired marímbula and large drums called buleadors. The band members hope to transform the space to welcome even more visitors, and are actively raising money to reach their $12,000 goal. “Music is really the heart and soul of Palenque,” says Blue Apple Beach hotelier Portia Hart, “so having an institution like this readily available for the community and visitors is imperative.” 

Palenque’s music history includes a combination of traditions brought over and adapted by enslaved Africans from places including Nigeria and Central Africa. In 1927, Cuban influences reached the local music scene, which continued to evolve as more local musicians drew inspiration from other parts of the diaspora. As we walk to lunch, we are treated to some music from a local group that march near us down the road, dressed in some of the cleanest multicolored short sets in the area, their ebullient lyrics and colorful instruments rousing the entire neighborhood.

“Everything we do—how we learn how to use our environment, how we prepare the plants that grow nearby, the way we prepare fish, the way we prepare our medicine—it’s a result of our heritage from the African people,” says Víctor Simarra Reyes, a chef, educator, and an advocate for Palenque pride. 

Just a few blocks away from Biohó’s statue, at a friend’s home, Reyes has prepared an exquisite meal for us. Quiet and uninterested in small talk, Reyes focuses on getting the food to our table, which is covered in bright, pear-green banana leaves. Within just a few minutes, there are generous helpings of meat, rice, stews, and sauces. Reyes throws his towel over his shoulder, and gestures with his hands in urgency. 

“Eat,” he says. And so we do. I take handfuls of hen and cassava in a lightly sweet coconut sauce, served with a thick red bean pottage. We all take increasingly bigger bites of his bollo de plátano con cerdo asado, a traditional plantain bun cooked with roasted pork; and his cabeza de gato, a smashed green plantain snack he’d decided that day to combine with a kind of fresh cheese. We enjoy our share of sweets during a magnificent dessert spread: alegría, like the palenqueras served, sweet and fragrant with coconut, and enyucado, a cassava cake enlivened with star anise. 

It’s a marvelous feast that clearly has required hours of cooking. Reyes explains that he chose to share these dishes not in spite of their difficulty, but because of it. “We wanted to show that this cooking is not simple,” Reyes says. “It requires a lot of time, and a lot of effort.” This education is part of a larger movement that Reyes has long championed—working with Palenque cooks and chefs to preserve and create from their local foodways, rather than have their food expressed by non-Black chefs and writers. He has become a voice for sharing what he describes as Palenque’s “rustic” dining with the world, and fully and proudly communicates the integral role African roots play in their food.

Reyes’ work is documented in the cookbook Kumina ri Palenge pa tó Paraje, or “Palenquero Cooking for the World,” in English: a community collaboration he spearheaded to document recipes spanning more than 300 years of the town’s history. He and his wife, Ruth Reyes, consulted more than 600 local home cooks, collecting recipes and selecting an elite group of recipe writers and testers. “We were the first ones to go through the recipes, collect them, and put them on paper so we don’t let these traditions die,” Reyes says. Together, they produced the first cookbook documenting Palenque’s cuisine, which went on to receive the “Best Cookbook in the World” award at the 2014 Gourmand World Cookbook awards in Beijing. 

Before Reyes was a chef, he was a young African Colombian boy, helping his grandmother with her sancocho trifásico, a three-meat soup that typically took a full day to prepare. Often served with cassava and rice, both of which Reyes says are mainstays of the local diet, the soup is a peppery, aromatic, and deeply soothing dish that has persisted in home kitchens. He recalls the once-ubiquitous (and labor-intensive) bollo de maíz, a fried, roasted corn snack, which he laments had disappeared from many Palenque homes by the time he was a young man.

I get the chance to experience some of this labor with Antonia Cassiani, a Palenque native and local tour guide who goes by the name “Samba.” Gripping a massive pestle along with another partner, we rhythmically beat the corn as our group sings songs to encourage us. The process is reminiscent of an enduring practice in which women pile rice, grains, or corn into a massive wooden mortar and use their physical strength to do what locals call, “pillaring the corn.” That is, grinding the ingredients while singing songs that illustrate their dreams, concerns, and everyday thoughts. “This kitchen instrument was the creative engine of many women who poured their ideas into it, and sang their sorrows to it,” says Reyes. “It’s another example of just how important Black women are to our community, and to our food.”

When Reyes first started cooking, he picked up history and recipes orally; it wasn’t until later in his life that he learned to read and write so he could record and share his knowledge. When he graduated from elementary school at the age of 50, he immediately put his new skills to use: As part of his graduation requirements, which encouraged students to do something impactful for the community, he authored the cookbook. The goal for most, it seems, in Palenque, is not to climb and climb and climb chasing trivial achievements, but rather to salvage, to save, and to secure. 

“I take pride in my role as the representative of our traditions and our cuisine,” says Reyes. “After all these years of working, that’s what I cherish most.” 

Palenque hasn’t always been so comfortable with sharing its culture: The legacy of colonization has made many in the community understandably resistant to outside influence. Even Ruth, Reyes’ wife, was considered suspicious when she first moved to Palenque from the similar small Colombian town of San Antonio. An outsider, then, was always an outsider. But Reyes and his peers are learning to embrace opening their doors to other descendants of the African diaspora. 

“I’m very joyful that the community of Palenque is very open,” Reyes says of the shift. “My heart warms every time I see 80 buses full of tourists. Palenqueros are welcoming them and are showing their traditions, their cuisine, and their culture. They’re taking pride in it and showing it to the world.”

Reyes and his peers recognize a solidarity among curious Black travelers who come to Palenque. It might be for the food, the music, or simply the evidence that we all have a shared home, a shared origin story. The canvases on which we were forced to design a life reveal a com – mon search for freedom—perhaps most evidenced in our ability to survive and thrive in different parts of the world. 

Prior to my departure, I visit Biohó’s statue once again, his face charged and yearning to be free. My own family, like many others, were enslaved on American coasts in the Deep South, and though Emancipation supposedly gave us freedom, it would be another century before my people gained equal rights in the United States. The quest for Black liberation can be devastating. Our culture, heritage, and contributions are still often misrepresented or under – appreciated. We lose our heroes to state-sanctioned violence, are lectured about our behavior, and are chastised for demanding a society where equity and decency are primary values.

“There’s a phrase that resonates here,” Pedro Mosqueda, a chef and student of Reyes, tells me. “I’m happy, and it is not because of the music, but because of the leader who gave me my freedom.” As I gaze upon the town, filled with Afro-Colombians dancing, playing soccer, and lounging out under the dazzling sunset, I remember that freedom is so often something we find within ourselves.

Recipes

Colombian Stewed Chicken with Achiote and Yam

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Creole Coconut Chicken

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The post Colombia and West Africa Unite on the Plate in This Fascinating Food Town appeared first on Saveur.

Joyce Kutty likes wicked sharp knives and catch-of-the-day dinners. 

As a child, the 33-year-old metalsmith learned to fish the waters off Point Judith, Rhode Island, and helped her mother prepare Tamil- and Malayali-style curries in their kitchen in East Providence. Now, after a stint crafting Harmony engagement rings for Tiffany & Co., Kutty has moved on to more utilitarian objects inspired by the ancestral housewares her father carried home after visits to family in Kerala, India: Hand-forged spice spoons, hammered thali bowls, nadan kathi knives, and koduval coconut cleavers.

Her own boning and filleting knives reference the same graceful curves of these more traditional South Asian blades. “Both my parents are from coastal states,” she says. “So we eat a mostly fish diet. Making knives that can carve into fish and the things we grow stems from the root of my culture and upbringing.” Providence chefs Scott LaChapelle of Pickerel and Robert Andreozzi of Pizza Marvin are fans of her designs (Andreozzi is her occasional fishing buddy). “Part of my practice is to get out on the ocean and harvest seaweed from secret fishing spots [to create] a saltwater patina on bowls.”

On days away from her studio, she rises before dawn to cast for bluefish, stripers, and bonito. Oily mackerel is a particular favorite for those family curry recipes, which mingle deeply oceanic flavors with the sting of chiles. With every fish she brings home, Kutty also slices off a little piece for crudo to taste its essence. And the ones that get away? “Some for us, some for others, some for next season.”

Recipes

Keralan Fish Curry

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Sri Lankan Fish Curry

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The post Meet the Knifemaker Inspired by South Asian and New England Fishing Traditions appeared first on Saveur.

This interview is brought to you by the 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 month, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

When describing the food offered at their Los Angeles restaurants Kismet and Kismet Rotisserie, chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson refuse to stay in one lane. Some patterns do emerge: Do many dishes showcase the flavors and ingredients of the Middle East and Mediterranean? Yes. Do they source most of their vegetarian dishes in the “farm-to-table” tradition? For sure. Do they make a killer roast chicken? Yes again.

Yet no single label can fully capture Kramer and Hymanson’s gastronomic flair, either at their restaurants or in the dishes in their debut cookbook, Kismet: Bright, Fresh, and Vegetable-Loving Recipes. After building their respective careers in some of the best restaurants of New York—Marlow and Sons, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Glasserie, to name a few—the duo decamped to the West Coast and established their dream of a neighborhood spot. Kismet still blends their many culinary influences, celebrates California’s diverse and wide-ranging produce, and engages their local community in the way only great cooking can. In speaking with Kramer and Hymanson from their homes in California, I learned how they brought their playful, generous ethos to the pages of Kismet, and how they developed more than 100 recipes that defy easy categorization, while still inviting everybody to the table.

Jessica Carbone: You say that this isn’t a “restaurant book,” but one that you actually want people to cook from. Why?

Sara Kramer: It was important to us that this book could be cooked from—why else make a cookbook? There are books that are beautiful art objects, but that’s not quite our identity, and it made a lot more sense for us to make it super approachable. We also wanted to be clear about who we were. People have tried to pigeonhole us as a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean-inspired restaurant, but we wanted to show the breadth of what we could do. So that’s where my brain initially went: “How do we simplify the recipes without losing what makes our food ours?” 

Sarah Hymanson: We had to take stock of our own ideas of what a good cookbook is, what makes something user-friendly, what makes it intimidating. We wanted to make sure that people who knew and loved us in L.A. could find what they wanted in the book. But for people who have no idea who we are, we want them to be able to pick it up, flip through it, and be intrigued. 

SK: The whole project, from recipes to visuals, gave us an opportunity to look at the last 10+ years of working together; there’s a lot to celebrate.

SH: As restaurant chefs, our work disappears, and it’s amazing to have an object that will live on.

What did California food culture mean to you before moving to Los Angeles?

SH: I had very little experience of California before moving here. I went to San Francisco for spring break, and at the time I was a strict vegetarian, so I went to all these vegetarian restaurants, which was much easier to do there than in Chicago, where I grew up. So for me, I thought of Northern California as rooted in Alice Waters and hippie food. Southern California cuisine wasn’t in my lexicon when we moved to Los Angeles, but when we went to the farmers market, my mind was pretty blown. It was in the early spring, which is bleak in New York—just holding on until you compete with everyone else to get the first asparagus. But you come to California and there’s tons of asparagus and artichokes and lettuces…

SK: And kiwis.

SH: Yeah! We made a goat cheese and kiwi salad for dinner, and I just said, “What is this heaven?”

SK: Our number one food influence is rooted in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the climate here makes a lot of sense in relation to those influences. But there’s also a freedom in the cuisine here, and a lot of fusion that happens because of the availability of produce, and because of how diverse a place it is.

SH: Even going to the farmers market, there are so many growers from different backgrounds. There’s a huge Hmong farming population, and lots of Asian vegetables that make their way into cuisines that are not Asian, and many Latino growers as well. There’s Middle Eastern farmers growing melons and Armenians growing cucumbers, not to mention all the dates and pomegranates and olives.

One of your guiding principles is “untraditional food that understands tradition.” How do you bring that into practice?

SK: Our version of a Persian tahdig is a good example: We note where its inspiration came from, but we also acknowledge that we’re not trying to make that exact dish. We’re making a dish in a way that honors its roots, but makes sense in the context of our restaurant, our collaboration, and where we are in the world. 

SH: When we’re working on a traditional dish, we’ll often talk about what it is that we like about it, then we think about how we can make it our own. We’re grateful to have the opportunity to learn from so many different cuisines, and we want to make sure that we’re always doing justice to a dish, even if we’re not doing it exactly how it’s supposed to be.

You use ingredients that do a lot of work, like grape leaf powder on a salad, or the pepperoncini in your grilled corn. Do you have other “secret weapon” ingredients?

SH: Fish sauce is amazing at delivering that umami.

SK: Yeah, you’re really good at getting umami from lots of different places, like the fermented tofu in the schnitzel sauce; it’s such a smart ingredient. It’s a funny thing to call raw garlic a “secret weapon,” but a lot of people shy away from it, especially in fine dining, where garlic is often blanched to oblivion, and then turned into a very gentle puree. Our flavors are very punchy and bold, and raw garlic is an essential ingredient in a lot of our food.

SH: When we use things like flower waters, or raw garlic, or even fish sauce, we don’t necessarily want people to be able to pick out what it is—what makes it exciting or extra peppery or a little bit floral.

SK: But you’ll be wondering, “Why does this taste good?”

SH: “Why does it have a fresh spice to it? That’s not chile.” Or “Why does this taste more like honey than normal honey?” Because it has a tiny bit of orange blossom water in it.

Do you think of yourselves as a “farm-to-table” restaurant?

SH: At a certain point, we felt that being in Los Angeles, when we have such access to local produce, “farm to table” was a given, but not necessarily a thing that we would splatter all over our menu.

SK: Sourcing locally is so much better, but it does take a lot of effort—and effort is a resource as well. When we talk about what Kismet is, we do say that it’s produce-driven, seasonal, and local. But those are just a few of the things that it is. It is a joy to work at restaurants that have only the most beautiful produce, but sometimes that can be more of an ideal than a reality.

You talk about the challenges of ethical eating, both with produce and with meat. Sometimes that shows up in dishes where meat takes a back seat, like in the Chicken and Tomato Salad, or in sourcing as locally and seasonally as possible. How do you navigate this for the book’s readers?

SH: It’s one thing to say that everyone should be eating locally, because ideally they should. But we also want people to eat whatever they can afford, whatever makes them feel nourished from a cultural and a health perspective. People live in all different realities, and it’s important to take that into account.

SK: We try to offer substitutions and thoughts on how to source something if you don’t have access. But we also want to take the guilt out of it, to encourage people to do their best and to have minimal shame. We’re not high and mighty about only needing to eat perfect Frog Hollow apricots…

SH: If you can afford to do that, you know, congratulations…

SK: …Right, love you for that. But if you can’t, there are plenty of other options. With our book, we want to encourage the celebration of food in whatever form we can.

Recipes

Whipped Tahini Dip with Honeyed Kumquats

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Chicken and Tomato Salad with Spicy Vinaigrette

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Grilled Corn with Pepperoncini Butter

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The post This New Cookbook Proves California Cuisine Is Impossible to Pin Down appeared first on Saveur.

Plot to Plate is a SAVEUR column in which features editor Alex Testere exercises his green thumb, sharing practical gardening tips and seasonal produce-driven recipes from his patch of earth in New York’s Hudson Valley. He is also the author and illustrator of Please Grow: Lessons on Thriving for Plants (and People).

While a well-tended garden plot has the potential to keep us flush with fresh produce all summer long, most growers aren’t just in it for the sustenance. Between plucking weeds on the weekends, meticulously flicking away worms, and delicately affixing tendrils to trellises, no one’s putting in that much effort simply to eat a few sun-ripened tomatoes. A garden’s perks go way beyond the harvest, and one such benefit, I would argue, is the beauty of it all.

Many garden vegetables are quite attractive: Squashes and gourds explode with enormous golden blooms, cherry tomatoes ripen in an ombre from green to red, humble cabbages unfurl from within rippling green foliage. But one vegetable in particular captivates me every year as the warm days roll in and spring tips over into summer. Snap peas I planted back in March, some of the first crops to pop up in the spring, have been climbing skyward ever since, sending out a smattering of pink orchid-like flowers along the way.

The appeal of snap peas, for me, is threefold: First, they offer height and drama to an otherwise level garden plot, quickly rising high above everything else in the bed. Second, their powerful roots, like other plants in the legume family, help fix valuable nitrogen in the soil—a boon for raised beds that struggle to maintain nutrients year after year. Third, and perhaps most importantly, they make for an effortless, near-constant garden snack. Often, I don’t even bother to wash them. (I’m sure some of you will fight me on this, but I can’t hear you beneath my gigantic gardening hat.) Plucked right from the vine, snap peas are practically luminescent, plump and crunchy and sweet, and still warm from the sun. The French refer to them as mangetout (literally “eat all”), and, if left to my own devices, that’s exactly what I would do. The first year I planted them, the harvest never even made it indoors—they were all consumed on the spot, a sugary carbohydrate boost to fuel the day’s garden tasks.

If I must bring snap peas into the kitchen, though, I want to celebrate their sweet and simple nature, cooking them very lightly so as to maintain their crunch. This time, I decided to serve them tossed in a sauce of lemon and miso, gently wrapping them in umami balanced by the brightness of fresh mint. A pile of ricotta blitzed with charred scallions echoes the peas’ sweetness and provides a creamy foil. Dragging a crusty heel through the lot of it makes for a timeless summer side dish I can’t get enough of. 

When it comes to planting, however, the work typically begins in late winter or early spring, as soon as the ground can be worked, since peas generally favor cooler temps. But many varieties are heat-tolerant and can also be planted in mid-summer for an abundant fall harvest. Now, in late July, I’m cutting back the spent plants I started in March and planting a new crop, which should be ready by early October. Read on for a few key tips to make the most of these gardening triple threats.

Think “up,” not “out”

One of the great appeals of peas is how little ground space they take up in a garden plot. I regularly plant mine in a row just 3 inches or so from their neighbors, and they grow upwards with vigorous abundance. The trick is to give them something to climb, or else their vines will languish in a mildewy mess on the ground. The vertical height adds drama to the garden, with some varieties climbing eight feet or higher. A trellised archway is a sight to behold when heavily laden with supple green pods. A four-foot roll of welded wire cattle fencing can be cut to size and supported by wooden posts, for a simple makeshift trellis of almost any size you need—an arch included. 

Focus on the shoulder seasons

Some pea varieties are more heat-tolerant than others, but all can readily handle the cooler months of spring and fall—including some near-freezing temps. Plant seeds as soon as the ground is soft enough to work, and they’ll poke through the soil at the first signs of spring. Once they’ve run their course, by mid- to late-July, plant another batch for an additional harvest in the fall. Too much hot sun can cause peas to wilt, and I will admit, I have gone so far as to affix an umbrella to my trellis to offer them a bit of shade on the hottest summer days. 

Plant alongside hearty greens 

Lettuces and brassicas such as kale, collards, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts also love the cooler seasons and will greatly benefit from the peas’ remarkable ability to store nitrogen in the soil. If you grow peas in the spring, cut them back mid-summer and plant leafy greens in their place; turn the soil and leave the delicate pea roots in the mix for a steady release of nitrogen that will last all season long. 

Know your type

Edible peas come in three main varieties: snap peas, snow peas, and sweet peas (also called English peas or garden peas). Sweet peas must be removed from their fibrous inedible pods—these are the kinds you’ll most frequently find by the bag in the frozen food aisle. Snap peas look quite similar, but with smaller peas inside and sweet, crunchy pods that are edible, even when raw. Snow peas are very popular in stir-fries and have the smallest peas inside, with wide, flat, edible pods. While all three varieties are great nitrogen fixers and love to climb a trellis, I prefer the ones with edible pods because they make for a delightful snack while out in the garden.

Recipe

Lemon-Miso Snap Peas with Charred-Scallion Ricotta

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The post This Green Vegetable Is a Triple Threat in the Garden appeared first on Saveur.