Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey: Their Stories, Recipes, and Secrets 9780813550244

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Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey

Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey THEIR STORIES, RECIPES, AND SECRETS

Teresa Politano

RIVERGATE BOOKS an imprint of Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politano, Teresa, 1961– Celebrity chefs of New Jersey : their stories, recipes, and secrets / Teresa Politano. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–8135–4897–5 ( hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Cooks—New Jersey—Biography. 2. Cookery. 3. Cookery —New Jersey. I. Title. TX649.A1P65 2010 641.5092—dc22 2010003044 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2010 by Teresa Politano All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. e only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

For my husband, Pat, my personal chef

And our children, Joseph, Anne, and Alexander, my fellow critics

CONTENTS

Introduction ix

THE LEGENDS Craig Shelton David Burke

e Ryland Inn, Whitehouse

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David Burke Fromagerie, Rumson

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Scott Cutaneo Equus Restaurant, Bernardsville; e Claremont Tavern, Bernardsville David Drake

Restaurant David Drake, Rahway

Dennis Foy Dennis Foy’s, Lawrenceville Jim Filip Doris & Ed’s, Highlands Maricel Presilla

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Cucharamama, Hoboken; Zafra, Hoboken

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THE STARS Scott Anderson

Elements, Princeton

Anthony Amoroso

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SeaBlue, Borgata, Atlanta City

Zod Arifai Blu, Montclair; Next Door, Montclair Anthony Bucco

Uproot, Warren

Humberto Campos Jr.

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Lorena’s, Maplewood

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Bill Dorrler Due Terre, Bernardsville; Due Mari, New Brunswick . . . . . David C. Felton Corey Heyer

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Ninety Acres, Peapack-Gladstone

Bernards Inn, Bernardsville

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134

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142

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150

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Bay Avenue Trattoria, Highlands

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James Laird Restaurant Serenade, Chatham Joe Romanowski

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CHEFS TO WATCH Joe Cerniglia

Campania, Fair Lawn

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183

Kara Decker

A Toute Heure, Cranford

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Ryan DePersio

Fascino, Montclair; Bar Cara, Bloomfield

Ariane Duarte

Culinariane, Montclair

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A SWEET FINISH Diane Pinder

Donna & Company, Cranford

Photo Credits

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General Index

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Recipe Index

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223

INTRODUCTION

If you took the great restaurants of New Jersey and put them in one big city, a city far enough away from the gravitational pull of Manhattan, you’d have a culinary destination, a San Francisco or a Washington, D.C. “If this market were three hundred miles away from New York City, we’d be mentioned,” says Chef Anthony Bucco of Uproot in Warren. “We play in the shadows, and that’s fine. Not everyone is designed for the bright lights of Broadway. Do I belong there? Maybe not. But it’s also that I don’t not belong there.” Bucco’s New Jersey restaurant theory is this: “A lot of good people will get acknowledged when we’re ready to get acknowledged.” It’s time. We’re ready. Not so long ago, perhaps even just at the turn of this century, it was easy to lament the lack of sophisticated food in New Jersey. Oh sure, a few restaurants shone brightly, but, for the most part, we New Jerseyans all felt a bit like Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl—looking at the bright lights of the big city and wistfully yearning for a table in glamorous Manhattan. Now, however, it’s just as easy to imagine that we have the best seats in the house, made even sweeter perhaps because they’re our own little secret, and we can dine frequently and dine well, with a smug sense that if only New Yorkers knew, they’d be looking across the river wishing they were us.

ix

Of course, we must thank New York in part for the quality of our restaurants. Many of our chefs made the New York tour, working at Jean-Georges or Daniel or Bouley. And many of our chefs compete with their New York counterparts, catering to a clientele accustomed to eating at the finest restaurants in Manhattan. But the reality is that the quality of food and the level of creativity in New Jersey restaurant kitchens has exploded exponentially in recent years, with mini revolutions in restaurant theory (the all-local, all-fresh, all-seasonal menu at A Toute Heure in Cranford) and practice (the logical, disciplined, and scientific approach to the interpretive cuisine at Elements in Princeton, which offers one of the most exciting menus in the state). And while it’s true that New Jersey has produced some of the most innovative foodies in the country—restaurant guru Alice Waters was born here, and Mario Batali started his career at Stuff Yer Face in New Brunswick—it’s also now true that many New Jersey foodies are choosing to stay here, to work here, to flourish here. Dennis Foy is credited with starting the New Jersey culinary revolution in the late 1970s at e Tarragon Tree in Chatham. But it was Chef Craig Shelton who crystallized New Jersey’s place in culinary history with his legendary Ryland Inn—indeed, his four-star kitchen awed so many guests and launched so many restaurant careers that he is New Jersey’s culinary icon, without doubt the most influential chef in the state. ( Many of the chefs featured in this book worked in the Ryland Inn kitchen.) And when Shelton’s picture landed on the cover of Gourmet magazine in 1997, the first chef ever to be so honored, it was a signal to the entire culinary world that great things that were happening in this state. It’s an understatement to say that Shelton likes to talk. And he has lots of stories about the business. Wonder why more women are not chefs? Because most kitchens are not even fit for animals ( historically speaking, at least). ey’re abusive places, full of misfits and lost souls. It’s 130 sweaty degrees, you’re working twelve hours a day, and, when something goes wrong (and it always does), the standard trickle-down protocol is to curse, throw things, blame someone. But kitchens are also redemptive places, offering a respite for those who don’t fit in elsewhere and doling out life lessons in controlling chaos, an addictive pace of instant gratification and the heady thrill of making the impossible happen on a nightly basis. For Chef David Drake, who blew up his hand x

INTRODUCTION

in a fireworks explosion at age fourteen, the kitchen, with its motley crew of late-night rebels, was the first place he felt welcome. Today’s kitchens are more humane, and it’s far less likely that a chef will throw a cast-iron skillet to get the attention of a line cook. at picture of the old-school chef, a rotund wine guzzler, just can’t survive in the modern kitchen. “It requires way too much energy to be hungover, overweight, and out of breath all the time,” says Anthony Amoroso of SeaBlue at the Borgata in Atlantic City, a chef who competes in triathlons. But the job is still remarkably hard, with six-day weeks and twelvehour days, the kind of work that kills your back, your knees, your marriage. Food television may have elevated our national culinary IQ, but it has also glamorized the business to almost surreal proportions. e chefs profiled in this book are not by any means the comprehensive list of great chefs in New Jersey. But they are without question shining stars in a state that continues to boast a growing list of stellar chefs. ese chefs are passionate, creative, inspiring. ey are not in it for the money; they may have reached the top of their profession, but they also live at the whim of the market, and many worry about meeting their home mortgage payments, paying their health insurance premiums. “At the end of the day, we’re servants,” says Scott Cutaneo, of Equus Restaurant in Bernardsville.

INTRODUCTION

xi

CRAIG SHELTON e Ryland Inn, Whitehouse

It was October 2009, and the marquee outside the Skylark Diner in Edison blared the news in garish neon. Craig Shelton, four-star chef, is here. For many in the food world, it represented a dramatic fall from grace, this unique convergence of events that gave the average pancakeloving New Jersey diner rat the chance to eat a meal designed by a Relais & Chateaux gourmand chef. Shelton is an icon in this state, so revered for his ability in the kitchen that he’s practically a cult figure. But for the average pancake-loving New Jersey diner rat, it was nirvana, like Karl Lagerfeld designing for H&M, like Bruce Springsteen playing a spontaneous set for a small dinner crowd at McLoone’s Rum Runner in Sea Bright. And an average diner rat—or even a critic, for that matter—might think it was another stroke of pure culinary genius, one more example of how Shelton, the most influential chef in the state, the man who launched a thousand careers, the man whose famed Ryland Inn changed dining in New Jersey as we know it, was again marking his territory at the cusp of the next culinary wave. It’s a mantle Shelton no longer wants to wear. At least for now. “I need a break from being the one-man purist show. I put my time into that.” 3

But still. e idea is revolutionary. A diner with a menu that changes daily. A diner with a sommelier, and a wine list that includes a bottle of 2005 Chablis Grand Cru “Les Blanchots” by Michel Laroche. A diner where meuniere sauce and brioche-crusted flounder filet grace the menu. Where dinner begins with an amuse bouche. And, best of all, where all the prices are diner prices, with a four-dollar mesclun salad, a sevendollar Peekytoe crab dip, and a sixteen-dollar pan-seared pork loin with acorn squash and apple cider jus. “Damn near everything is fresh,” says Shelton. “It’s taken everything I’ve learned for thirty-five years to try to pull this off.” is is outrageous food for a diner—ai roasted-garlic shrimp, Vietnamese pork sticks, Maine lobster bisque with a swirl of sherry crème fraîche. Lamb chops come with a fresh fennel salad and sun-dried tomato tapenade. Pan-roasted crab cake is served with melted leeks and frizzled onions, and grilled chicken is marinated in lemon grass. Changes had to be made with care. Offer a new menu format (it’s printed daily on recycled paper), and people think you’ve raised prices (they didn’t). Burgundy chicken will sell, but coq au vin will not. Indeed, the aforementioned amuse bouche is announced by the wait staff as a “chef’s gi.” Certainly the job at the Skylark Diner was the most intellectually challenging job of his career. Shelton had to design a menu using allfresh ingredients, create dishes that are not labor intensive or so unusual that they scare away loyal customers. And he had to do so at impossible price points. It was time. e diner, a prefabricated concept in the first place, has served tired—and prepackaged—American basics for too long. Why not take advantage of the tremendous influx of fresh food and global ingredients? e foodstuffs that top chefs scrambled to acquire just twenty years ago are now on the shelves of a typical grocery store. When Shelton was working in Manhattan in the 1980s, he would order a grand total of sixteen different vegetables—onions, carrots, potatoes. “And chervil was a special event,” says Shelton. “I’ve lived through an absolute transformation of the dining scene.” Ironically, as the global food market expanded, the economy shrank. e financial maelstrom helped put his beloved Ryland out of business—and prompted many New Jerseyans to drop their dining hab-

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THE LEGENDS

its two or three notches. So at the Skylark, he’s trying the seduction process from the opposite end of the dining spectrum. People certainly were seduced at the Ryland, and absolutely gush when they talk about it. Dinners there were transcendent and visionary, a religious experience, rendering critics—even ones from Manhattan— speechless. ( “Words fail me,” said David Corcoran of the New York Times.) Conversely, mere mention of its closing—a 2007 water-main break shut it down forever—could hush an entire table, like bringing up a death in the family. e Ryland, on historic grounds in Whitehouse Station, was New Jersey’s culinary flagship, and Shelton was the demigod who brought it to us. He offered foie gras and sweetbreads, black truffles and cheeses, pheasant and confit. A dinner for four could easily run several hours and cost more than a month’s worth of groceries, yet no one seemed to have sticker shock, vowing instead to return the minute they walked out the French doors. But if the Ryland Inn was legendary for its haute cuisine during the heyday of American fine dining, its chef was legendary for his autocratic rule. It was a kitchen that offered intense training ground for many New Jersey chefs and sommeliers—David Drake, James and Nancy Laird, Humberto Campos Jr., Scott Anderson, François Rousseau. But Shelton was a chef to fear, and stories about his kitchen abound. “e man has a presence like no other,” says Campos. “ere was one standard. It had to be excellent. Or extraordinary.” If a cook could last, he could learn more in a weekend at the Ryland than he’d learned in all of culinary school. But a lot of cooks didn’t make it longer than a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. Shelton ran his kitchen in French, and the goal—always—was to answer in the affirmative. “e whole idea was to say ‘oui’ a lot,” says Campos. “Oui, Chef.” A cook who was inattentive would get tied to the stove by his apron strings. “You knew it was a bad day when you came in and you saw two guys tied to the stove already.” Other chefs tell other stories. If your station wasn’t spotless, Shelton would dump a container of trash on it. Cooks might be banished to the basement. And the competitiveness in the kitchen led to a Lord of the Flies attitude among the staff, who would oen haze each other brutally—one cook was carried off to the freezer and locked in by his colleagues.

Craig Shelton

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Shelton denies none of it. A generation ago, a true French kitchen was not a place fit for animals, he’ll tell you, the kind of environment that made Navy Seals boot camp appear mild and moderate in comparison. In France, a chef thought nothing of pushing a cook’s face onto a grill or baptizing him with boiling water. It’s the way things worked. And back in the day, he says, French kitchens were used as a sort of halfway house, filled with men who were one step away from prison. Besides, Shelton had little respect for the training his cooks had already received—even the ones who’d graduated from culinary school. “I never met one who could use a knife.” And he’s proud of his legacy, proud of all people who came through that kitchen and then moved on— to become chefs in other kitchens, lawyers, wine importers, entrepreneurs. Kitchens can do that for people, taking people who are misfits and night owls, rebels and artists, and giving them discipline and purpose. “It wasn’t about teaching cooking,” says Shelton. “It was about teaching the skills for a successful life. Discipline is nothing without love. e primary tool at the Ryland was love. It was disguised as rigor.” Shelton is a charming and somewhat rakish Yale grad, a true genius, a man who quotes Rudyard Kipling and debates Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, who talks about the complexities of Mozart and its parallels to the Ryland Inn’s ecumenical culinary approach, who fires off a white paper to the president that outlines changes in a tax code that he believes unfairly destroys both artisans and restaurateurs. He has a reputation for being an egotistical, demanding perfectionist. And he makes statements that seem thoroughly brash and arrogant: “It’s easier to be a U.S. senator than a four-star chef.” And whether you believe him or not, whether you love him or hate him, whether you believe his arrogance is rightly earned or whether it makes you squirm—well, all that seems to fade in the presence of his food. Even at a diner. Part of the reason is his impeccable sense of taste. Even if he’s just eaten calamari, he can somehow discern a hint of lavender, an essence of mint. His pre-med background—he has a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry—gives him a greater understanding of the chemistry and physiology of food and how they change as the food is prepared. (Shelton will tell you there’s nothing particularly unusual about his sense of taste. He just pays better attention. “People with the best palates are simply the ones who are patient.” ) But Shelton also has had a lifetime of eating wonderful things. He 6

THE LEGENDS

grew up a fortunate son, along the coastline in New Hampshire. When he visited his uncles in France, they would blow the dust off wine bottles, share Cuban cigars. It was a life of fine food and aesthetics. In a world of everyday pain, he says, an exquisite dinner can offer something triumphant, and, in a certain sense, is also a very democratic experience. e loss of the Ryland has made Shelton more religious and more philosophic—he went from being one of the wealthiest men in Hunterdon County to being millions of dollars in debt. He talks about other definitions of success, about his wife, his three children, how God had to smack him down hard to get him to notice. e Ryland may be gone and its era may be over—“Is it not suicidal right now to open a high-end restaurant?” But everyone in the food world eagerly awaits Shelton’s next culinary adventure, because no matter where he is or what he’s cooking, we can expect it to be a triumph. “Nobody associates my name with a diner.” Yet the Skylark, a chrome-plated landmark along Route 1, open twenty hours a day and serving breakfast all the time, with Cyndi Lauper on the sound system, has become one of New Jersey’s gastronomic gems. Shelton continues to astonish.

SECRET: Follow the Hippocratic oath. First, do no harm. Much of cooking is violent—smashing, searing, pulverizing. Almost every technique is an act of violence. e less harm you do to a food, the better it will taste.

Craig Shelton

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GRANDPA SHELTON’S CLAM CHOWDA’ Shelton family recipe. Best clams are from Maine!

yield: 2 quarts

¼ bushel New England clams (quohogs), freshly dug ⅓ liter Chardonnay, dry 8 shallots, sliced thinly 4 stalks thyme, fresh Bay leaf  quart potatoes, Yukon Gold, diced ¼ inch ¾ slice bacon, Applewood-smoked, diced ¼ inch 1¼ medium Spanish onions, diced ¼ inch 1 tablespoon roux, blond ¾ quart heavy cream ¼ pound butter, unsalted ¼ teaspoon thyme, fresh, leaves only ⅛ tablespoon sea salt, Guerande, to taste Tellicherry pepper, freshly ground ⅛ pat unsalted butter per portion Wash clam exterior shells vigorously to remove outside grit. You may want to let clams sit in seawater overnight in cornmeal to work out inner grit. Steam 1 bushel of freshly dug New England clams in 2 liters of Chardonnay with 8 shallots sliced thinly and 4 stalks of fresh thyme and a bay leaf in a heavy sauce pot. Filter and save the clam broth! Remove clams right aer they open. Remove clams from shells. Coarsely grind large clams, save any liquid. Keep smaller tender clams whole. (Add any juice you may have recuperated from the opening of clams on the half shell.) Boil diced potatoes in salted water until potatoes are nearly done. Dice hickory-smoked bacon into ¼-inch brunoise. Fry until medium (do not cook well done). Cut onions into ¼-inch brunoise and fry in the bacon fat over medium heat until barely colored and sweet. Add blond roux and cook for 5 minutes more over low heat to “cook out” the starch. Add the mixture of potatoes-and-clams cooking juice to the contents of the pan with bacon and onions. When ready, add heavy cream and fresh, unsalted butter, cook to boiling, and lower the heat to a bare simmer. Continue to cook for 5 minutes. Add the chopped and whole clams and reduce heat to a bare tremble so as not to toughen the clams, and continue to cook for 3 min8

THE LEGENDS

utes, adding fresh thyme leaves minced fine. Add sea salt and freshly milled Tellicherry pepper to taste. When serving, add small pat of butter to top of bowl. Serve right away or next day (tastes even better then).

suggested wine: Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru, Marc Colin

GRILLED “8-HOUR” MORO CCAN LAMB SKEWERS is recipe should yield 8 main-course servings (or 40 to 50 mini skewers suitable for hors d’oeuvres) 1 lamb shoulder, about 12 pounds Olives Mint leaves Marinade

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Zest of 1 small lemon 1 teaspoon ground cumin 1½ teaspoons ground coriander 1 teaspoon ground turmeric 1 tablespoon Spanish smoked paprika “pimentone” 1 garlic clove, shaved on a microplane 1 chili de arbol 1 teaspoon harissa paste Roast the lamb shoulder for half an hour at 400 degrees, then turn down the oven temperature to 225 degrees and continue to cook for 7½ to 8 hours. Remove from oven and let cool to room temperature. e lamb will still be a bit pink near the bone, but it will be super-tender. Assemble all the ingredients for the marinade in a bowl and mix together well. Trim any excess fat off the outside of the lamb shoulder. Now, using your fingers, remove the meat from the bone, muscle by muscle. You will need a knife at times. Next, cut the meat into regular cubes of the same size say, inch × inch; it is more important that they are uniform in size than what the actual size of the cube is. Take a bamboo skewer and thread a lamb cube on it. en wrap an olive in a mint leaf and thread that on the skewer. Finish with one more cube of lamb. Arrange the skewers in a stainless pan loosely and pour the marinade over Craig Shelton

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them, turning each piece until nicely coated. Cover and leave to marinate at room temperature for two hours or overnight in the fridge. When ready to serve, remove the skewers from the marinade, wiping off the excess with your fingers. Season them with salt and milled black pepper. en grill them on the barbecue over medium-hot coals for only 1 to 2 minutes per side, turning now and then, until they are nicely “grill marked” on the outside and warm but still pink in the center. ese would be nice served “puro” as is, or with a little bit of mint-yogurt sauce.

ROAST G O OSE WITH CHESTNUT, FOIE GRAS, AND SAGE STUFFING A Shelton Christmas tradition. Instead of packaged bread cubes, we invariably use our own artisanal holiday bread, staled and cubed. 1 goose, about 10 to 12 pounds; fresh, never frozen Chestnut, Foie Gras, and Sage Stuffing

2 pounds chestnuts, peeled 1 quart peanut oil (if the chestnuts are raw) 60 pieces pearl onions 4 ounces foie gras fat, rendered (from a previous preparation) 4 fluid ounces goose fat 2 bulbs fennel, ¼-inch dice 30 pieces baby carrots, organic 8 shallots, cut into 8 pieces each 2 cups duck stock, double strength 1 bouquet garnie 8 leaves fresh sage, whole Sea salt Freshly milled Tellicherry pepper 1 bag bread cubes 1 quart whole milk 1 whole egg 6 leaves fresh sage, chopped

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THE LEGENDS

serves 6

12 links duck sausage, cut into ½-inch lengths 1 pound foie gras, raw, denerved, cut into ½-inch cubes Apicius Glaze

5 ounces Tupelo honey 1 ounce ground coriander 1 ounce ground white pepper 50 saffron threads

1 ounce ground cardamom ½ ounce ground cumin 1 teaspoon ground clove

Make the apicius glaze ahead of time. Combine all ingredients and bring to hard-ball stage. Reserve in a warm area until needed for glazing the goose. Make the stuffing. If the chestnuts are raw, you will need to peel them. Score the tough outer skin on each chestnut with a sharp knife. en deep-fry them in the peanut oil at 350 degrees for about 4 minutes. Drain and allow to cool. en peel off both outer and inner skins. Do this the day before and store the chestnuts in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Oil and season the unpeeled pearl onions, then roast them in a slow oven (250 degrees) for at least 90 minutes. Crinkle a large piece of aluminum foil, and put it in the bottom of a roasting pan. Place the onions on top (the foil will keep the onions off the bottom of the pan and prevent over-coloration). Remove the onions from the oven when very so and sweet. Allow to cool and then peel. In a large casserole, melt and combine the foie gras fat and the goose fat. When moderately hot, color the chestnuts lightly, then add the fennel, carrots, and shallots. Continue to color the vegetables until golden, then add the double-strength duck stock, bouquet garnie, the whole sage leaves, and season with sea salt and pepper to taste. Cover the mass with a circle of parchment paper and braise in a 375-degree oven until all the vegetables are tender and sweet. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely. Remove the sage leaves and the bouquet garnie and discard. Soak the bread cubes in any of the juices remaining from the above preparation and whatever minimal amount of milk needed to just barely moisten them. When soened, squeeze out the excess liquid, of which hopefully there is none. Now, combine the braised vegetables and roasted onions to the moistened bread cubes. Take one whole egg and mix it up, then add into the stuffing mixture and combine well. Add the remaining chopped fresh sage, the pieces of duck sausage, and the cubed raw foie gras. Mix well to distribute evenly.

Craig Shelton

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Roast the bird. Dry the bird completely inside and out. Make sure that the kidneys and any other traces of internal organs have been removed. With a razor-sharp knife, lightly score the skin over the breast and thighs in a fine diagonal pattern. Now lightly season the interior of the bird with sea salt and freshly milled Tellicherry pepper. Stuff the bird with the above stuffing. Rub the skin all over with coarse, air-dried sea salt from Brittany (if available), trying to work it into the skin. en season the skin with freshly milled Tellicherry pepper. In a fairly hot roasting pan (or large casserole) over high heat, sear the skin all over—lightly coloring it—to begin the fat-rendering process. Put into a 350-degree oven and cook. Much fat will be rendered in the first hour, which should be largely removed and saved (freezes well) for use in other recipes. Continue to baste every 10 minutes. Aer 1½ hours of cooking, begin the glazing process. Reheat the apicius glaze and use a paint brush to lightly coat the skin of the entire bird. Repeat the glazing every 10 minutes. Cooking time will vary according to the size of the bird and oven heat variations but it will probably take 3 to 4 hours. e goose will be correctly cooked when a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh reaches 175 degrees. ( If you do not have a thermometer, it will be done when you poke the thigh with a thin skewer and the juices run barely clear instead of pink.) Do not overcook! Serve with your favorite accompaniments in the traditional Christmas fashion.

suggested wine : Albert Boxler Riesling d’Alsace

STEAK AU POIVRE Craig’s version 1 ounce black peppercorns ⅓ ounce white peppercorns ⅓ ounce canned green peppercorns Sea salt 1 fluid ounce vegetable oil 4 New York strip steaks, about 1¼ inches thick, about ¾ pound each 1 fluid ounce unsalted butter 12

THE LEGENDS

serves 4

Sauce

⅓ shallot, minced 2 ounces cognac or brandy 2 fluid ounces beef stock

3 fluid ounces heavy cream 1 fluid ounce unsalted butter ⅓ teaspoon fresh dill, minced Salt, as needed

Crush coarsely the black and white peppercorns first and then the green peppercorns with the bottom of a heavy skillet. Pat steaks dry and coat both sides with peppercorn mixture. Season heavily with sea salt. In a 10-inch heavy skillet, heat oil over moderate heat until hot but not smoking and cook steaks for 4 to 5 minutes on each side for medium rare, finishing with fresh unsalted butter. Remove steaks from pan and transfer to plates. Pour off excess fat from skillet. Sweat shallot for sauce until golden brown. Add brandy and flambé. Add beef stock and reduce by two-thirds. Now add cream. Boil mixture, scraping up browned bits, until sauce thickens and nearly coats back of spoon, about 1 minute. Now add butter and fresh dill. Cook for 30 seconds more until sauce coats back of spoon. Season sauce with salt, if needed, and spoon over steaks.

MALT VINEGAR FRIES WITH PARMESAN Yumm!

serves 4

1 pound Idaho potatoes ¼ bottle malt vinegar Salt, pepper 4 ounces grated Parmesan cheese Cut potatoes into fries. Soak for 48 hours in mixture of 2½ cups of malt vinegar to each gallon of water. Next day, remove potatoes from liquid. Dry in colander. Blanch in 325-degree fryer for 4 to 5 minutes, just until blond. Store in freezer. To serve, fry at 375 degrees until golden brown. Sprinkle with salt, freshly milled pepper, and grated Parmesan cheese. Serve immediately.

Craig Shelton

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VIETNAMESE GARLIC SHRIMP

serves 4 Garlic Marinade

¼ cup garlic, coarsely ground ⅛ cup minced cilantro, stem and root ⁄ cup black pepper, freshly milled, coarse ¼ cup nam pla ( ai fish sauce) ¼ cup palm sugar (or 50 percent granulated sugar, 50 percent brown sugar) Shrimp

1 pound shrimp ( U-16), split in shell and deveined Cucumber Salad

½ cucumber, quartered and sliced super thin ¼ fennel bulb, quartered and sliced super thin ½ celery rib, sliced on bias, super thin Fennel fronds, minced Dressing for Cucumber Salad

Juice of 2 limes, freshly squeezed ⅛ tablespoon nam pla Salt Black pepper  ounce palm sugar

⅛ cup canola oil Pinch of fennel fronds, minced Pinch of coriander, minced Pinch of ai basil, minced

Garnish

Mint, julienned Cilantro, julienned

ai basil, julienned

Final assembly: Split the shrimp in the shells all the way through, leaving only the tail part unsplit. Spread them out shell-side down on a sheet pan with parchment paper. oroughly mix together all the garlic marinade ingredients. Lay the shrimp “shingle-style” four per person. Brush the shrimp heavily with marinade on flesh side only. First cut the cucumber and fennel bulb in quarters lengthwise. en slice the fennel, cucumbers, and celery branches paper thin. Add some minced fennel fronds.

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Assemble dressing for cucumber salad: lime juice, nam pla, salt, black pepper, sugar, canola oil, and herbs. Add 1 tablespoon of Garlic Marinade. Now broil the shrimp on highest setting for 2–3 minutes. Remove to a serving plate and garnish with the cucumber salad. Drizzle a tiny bit of five-spice marinade over shrimp. Sprinkle julienned mint, cilantro, and ai basil over plate.

WARM PLUM TART Pate Sucrée

9 ounces unsalted butter 6½ ounces granulated sugar 1 egg 1 egg yolk

2½ ounces almond flour, fine 13½ ounces all-purpose flour ½ vanilla bean, scraped 2 tablespoons cognac

In a mixer with paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar. en mix in the eggs and egg yolks, scraping down sides of bowl. Add the almond flour, the all-purpose flour, then the scraped vanilla bean and the cognac. Shape the dough into a rough rectangle of about 1-inch thickness and wrap in plastic film. Transfer the dough to refrigerator and allow dough to rest for at least 4 hours, but preferably overnight. On a floured, cold surface ( like marble), roll out the dough to 1/8inch (3mm) thickness. Line the tartlet rings with the dough. Blind bake if you prefer. Crème de Noisettes

8 ounces unsalted butter 2 ounces cognac 8 ounces granulated sugar 8 fresh dark plums, very ripe 4 eggs cut into 8 to 10 wedges 8 ounces hazelnut flour, well toasted Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a mixer with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar. Scrape down sides of bowl, then add the eggs, and mix in the hazelnut flour followed by the cognac. Beat on medium speed for 10 minutes. Fill the tartlet shells about two-thirds of the way with the cream. Arrange 8 to 10 wedges of plums in a spoke pattern on top, pressing them in place with light pressure. Bake for 35 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.

Craig Shelton

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UGANDA G OLD VANILLA BEAN ICE CREAM e difference in flavor achieved by using raw, unpasteurized heavy cream, direct from a dairy farm, is unbelievable.

yield: 1 quart

½ cup egg yolks, organic  pound granulated sugar

quart whole milk—unpasteurized, direct from dairy farm 1 ounces Trimoline 1½ vanilla beans Uganda Gold ( you may substitute Madagascar Bourbon) ¾ of one espresso bean ¼ cup heavy cream—unpasteurized (if possible) Blanchir (ribbon) eggs and sugar slowly. Scrape vanilla beans and reserve both scrapings and pods. Bring milk to boil with vanilla bean scrapings and pods, the crushed coffee bean, and the Trimoline. Temper the milk cool into the yolks over ice. When cold, add the unpasteurized heavy cream. Let rest for one hour. Skim any foam. Pass through chinois (china cap). Process through ice cream machine (turbine).

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DAVID BURKE David Burke Fromagerie, Rumson

David Burke is selling his molten chocolate “can o’ cake” on QVC. It’s a genius idea, really, a commemorative tin full of dry ingredients. You mix the cake in the can, bake it in the can, serve it in the can. It’s all part of the World’s Fair of food that is the David Burke signature, where food is more than food; it’s also fun, a gimmick, a conversation piece. ere are the cheesecake lollipops, the angry lobster, the pretzelcoated crabcake, the Ferris wheel of doughnuts, the pastrami salmon, the Flavorsprays, the chocolate truffles at the River Café in the shape of the Brooklyn Bridge. ( “e fun thing is you get to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. We’ve sold the Brooklyn Bridge thousands of times already.” ) Burke is the Oz of the food world, the man behind the curtain in his vast array of restaurants, from Fishtail, David Burke Townhouse, and e Gray Lady in New York, to Primehouse in Chicago, to restaurants in Las Vegas and at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. But it’s the Fromagerie in Rumson that has his heart. at’s where it all started. Burke is a Jersey boy, a prankster who grew up in Hazlet and had the high school nickname of “Imagine-If Burkee.” He’d latch on to an idea and wouldn’t let it go. Imagine if that big oil container along the Parkway were a pool. We could get deck chairs and sit around it. How deep do you think the water would be? 17

e thing is, Burke is doing the same kind of imagining today, coming up with the kinds of out-of-the-box ideas that most adults have long since abandoned. He’s won all sorts of fancy culinary awards—he was the first American to win the prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France Diplome d’Honneur and has won the Culinary Institute’s Auguste Escoffier award. But it’s the other awards that open the window into what Burke is all about—industry recognition for research and development and innovation, plus the “Best Culinary Prankster” award by Time Out New York in 2003. Take the angry lobster. It’s angry because it’s been cut while alive, dusted in cayenne pepper and then impaled on a bed of nails. Or his trio of cheesecake lollipops—“is is one three-way you cannot pass up!”—miniature cheesecakes on a stick, coated in white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and then dipped in stuff like peanuts or Reese’s pieces. Or his Flavorsprays, a no-calorie, no-fat food spray in varieties such as tomato basil or chocolate fudge. ese are all Burke’s ideas, not the product of some creative team sitting in a room required to think up new thoughts. Burke will come up with something and carry it around with him for a week, two weeks, a month, churning it into something solid before he decides to talk about it. e whimsy all started to gel at the famous River Café in Brooklyn, the restaurant that the New York Times called both the Harvard 18

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Business School of the culinary world and the restaurant that launched a thousand chefs. Burke was twenty-six years old, had just returned from a culinary eye-opening experience in France, and was working for Charlie Palmer. It was a heady time, during which he got all his serious training. But the appeal of the River Café was also its distraction, at least as far as the chefs were concerned. e River Café sits under the Brooklyn Bridge, and its floor-to-ceiling windows look out on the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. How do you create food that can compete with that? As a chef, you need an icebreaker, a conversation piece, something memorable. And it’s tough to be different. “Everyone has Caesar salad. Everyone has carpaccio. It’s pretty difficult to come up with a signature dish.” Enter the chocolate Brooklyn Bridge, still available at the River Café, a miniature bridge made of handmade chocolate with a terrine of toasted hazelnut and Tahitian vanilla ice cream. “People remember things like that.” It’s the whimsy that catapulted him to stardom, but beneath it is an exceptional culinary skill, the ability to marry techniques and ingredients in a thoroughly new, provocative, and unusual way. His fascination with eggs, for example, another signature, turns what people generally think of as simple breakfast food into something quivery and lush, decadent and sinful—think wild mushroom flan baked in an eggshell with a shrimp garnish. Or quail eggs Benedict, another River Café invention. And then there’s his ability to think outside the box, frying lotus roots at a cooking festival in Tokyo, for example, impressing a group of Japanese judges who had always had their lotus roots pickled. It was new, it was innovative, and it was award winning. Plus Burke is just downright fun, the kind of guy you might find on any bar stool in New Jersey, part smart-ass, part comedian, very savvy. He’s the gregarious guy with whiskey voice and the great story, and everyone gathers around. It’s that showmanship that makes him a true celebrity; he does, aer all, love the spotlight, love the attention. He’s a true celebrity chef, with television appearances and book deals, traveling so much between restaurants and engagements that he makes the lament of the overbooked rock star: “You don’t even know what month it is or what city you’re in.” And he got here thanks to years of work and skill, starting before all this current hoopla about chefs began, wanting nothing more

David Burke

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than to make great food and show off a little about it. “I’m afraid this whole celebrity thing is going to bust,” he says. Everybody wants a piece of the action, to be a celebrity chef, and without necessarily the credentials. “It’s like me saying I’m a pilot.” But then he relents a bit; it is, aer all, a tough business and talent deserves to be recognized. “Nobody’s getting away with not working hard.” Besides, who’s to blame for all this fuss? “Guys like me.” Burke got started in the business aer a teenage fight with his father about his long hair. He made a deal; he’d pay rent and Dad would stop complaining. But then he needed a job, and found one as a dishwasher, where he saw his first whole chicken and vegetables that didn’t come from a can. He was fascinated, but it was in the kitchen at the Navesink Country Club where he fell in love with the controlled chaos that is the restaurant world. He was hired as a cook, and his double-breasted coat signaled he’d made the team. He loved that jacket so much that he kept it on between shis, when he went out with his friends to hang out, play basketball. It would be bloody from the butchering he’d done earlier, and bay leaves would poke from the pockets. He already had aspirations of culinary greatness, and thought the chef ’s coat was impressive. ( Years later, he still echoes the sentiment: “ere’s a certain thing when you put the coat on.” ) His friends? Not so much. Even today, one friend’s dad still busts his chops: “You still flipping burgers?” And when he decided he wanted to go to culinary school, his own father wasn’t so sure. “We need a man-to-man talk.” Obviously, Burke was convincing. When he came home aer culinary school, he got a job at the Fromagerie, an old-school French fine-dining restaurant owned by Markus and Hubert Peter, who were legendary in the business for being tough taskmasters with high standards. “You came and you hustled,” says Burke, making soups, making sausages. It was busy as hell—the sweat, the screaming. But then, restaurants are always like that, and Burke talks about all the crazy nights like a nostalgic lover. “It’s like war. Like playing paintball.” Something always goes wrong—a pipe breaks, you blow a fuse, cut a finger, an ex-wife’s on the phone. “You don’t know if you’re going to make it through the night.” But when you do, it’s intense. It’s instant gratification. “You got it that day. It was a fix.” He talks about the thrill of opening a new restaurant, growing more confident, handling more 20

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dinners. And then, boom. “ere’s gonna be that night when the wheels pop off and that’s a learning curve.” Buying the Fromagerie came during an explosion of ventures for Burke, who opened five restaurants in one year. Even he felt he was playing with too many buttons on the stereo; he was spread too thin, with so many problems at so many places, so many things needing his attention. But he’d do it again—the opportunities were there. Yet owning the Fromagerie is not as easy as he thought it would be; there’s no foot traffic, and the history of the restaurant also means the community has a serious preconceived idea of what it is. “You have to work harder, be more clever, than in the city.” Burke is slowly making changes—the bar is now bright and inviting, Tuesday offers burger nights, the Sunday brunch boasts a cotton candy station, and Burke is toying with a Saturday jeans-only “hangover lunch.” Upstairs is a whimsical dining gallery filled with antique toys. “e Fromagerie is a cooler place than it’s ever been.” Of course, you can still be fussed over in the stately dining room, and you can still order seawater-soaked organic chicken with garden vegetables or grilled Berkshire pork chop with haricots verts. And although Burke doesn’t broadcast the details of his art collection, you can also wander around the dining room and see his original Chagall and Picasso paintings. e Fromagerie is a special place for Burke; from the time he was a young man, he had flirted with the idea of coming back, owning it. It’s always nice to make good in your own backyard, and he’ll never forget the feeling he had when he signed the paperwork closing the deal. “at was a great day. I felt like a big success.” And his father, who oen putters around the restaurant, painting this, fixing that, is proud. It was snowing the day the awning went up on the restaurant announcing the new ownership—“David Burke Fromagerie.” And Burke’s father, who shares the same name, made a telephone call. “Hey, make sure that snow doesn’t cover my name.”

SECRET: e chef ’s jacket. “ere’s a certain thing when you put the coat on.”

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ANGRY LOBSTER ON A BED OF NAILS

serves 4 Seaweed Biscuit Dough

1 cup bread flour ¾ cup all-purpose flour ½ package (1/8 ounce) dry yeast 1½ tablespoons granulated sugar ½ teaspoon sea salt

cup (5 ounces) whole milk

3 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 medium egg ⅛ cup nori, roughly chopped 2 tablespoons parsley, chopped 4 strands fresh seaweed (see note below)

Place flours, yeast, sugar, and salt in bowl of electric mixer fitted with dough hook; beat at low speed until combined. Bring milk and butter to a simmer in small saucepan set over medium heat; simmer until it reaches 115 degrees on instant-read thermometer; remove from heat. With the mixer running at low speed, add milk mixture to flour mixture; add egg; increase speed to medium; beat until dough is smooth and elastic. Place dough on work surface; lightly knead 1 minute. Break off two 3-ounce dough balls (reserve remaining dough for another use); mix nori and parsley in a bowl; place on work surface; roll each dough ball in nori/parsley mixture, then into log shape; cut each dough log into six ½-ounce biscuits; reserve. Place seaweed on work surface. read three biscuits on each strand to resemble a fisherman’s buoy line and place on baking sheet. Reserve at room temperature. Lobsters

Two 1½-pound live lobsters (one-half lobster per serving) 2 cups instant flour ¼ cup chili powder 2 tablespoons cayenne Sea salt ¼ cup canola oil 1 large egg, beaten 1½ tablespoons fresh garlic, minced 22

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1 tablespoon red pepper flakes ½ cup fresh basil leaves ¼ cup chili oil (see note below) 2 tablespoons sun-dried tomatoes, julienned 1 tablespoon lemon zest, julienned, simmered in simple syrup, and drained ½ cup lobster or chicken stock

2 tablespoons unsalted butter Fresh basil leaves, deep fried 4 lemons, cut into eighths (for garnish) (approx. 1 lemon per person) Separate knuckles/claws from each lobster; split knuckles/claws on band saw; reserve. Split lobster from head to tail on a band saw. Separate body halves from tail halves. Remove brain sac from bodies. Retain tomalley and roe (if using a female) in each body half. Heat oven to 475 degrees. Mix instant flour, chili powder, cayenne, and salt on a plate; dredge lobster in flour mixture, shaking off excess; reserve. Heat oil in large skillet set over medium-high heat. Add lobster, cut side down. Cook until it begins to color, then flip. Place in oven ( bake biscuits at the same time with the lobster; brush biscuits with beaten egg; bake until lightly browned). Cook 7 to 8 minutes. Remove both lobsters and biscuits from oven. Place lobster on a platter; reserve ( keep warm). Set skillet used to cook lobsters over medium heat. Add garlic, red pepper flakes, basil, and chili oil. Cook 2 minutes. Add sun-dried tomatoes and lemon zest and cook 1 minute. Add stock, bring to a boil, and reduce heat to low. Simmer 5 minutes. Add butter. Swirl skillet until butter is incorporated, then remove from heat. Stir in lemon juice; reserve ( keep warm). To serve, set round frog (small holder with spikes used for flower arrangements) on large plate. Impale lemon eighths around perimeter of the frog; impale lobster in the center of the frog. Spoon sauce over lobster and set seaweed strand of biscuits alongside. Garnish with fried basil leaves. For the seaweed, use the rockweed (Ascophyllum nodosum) that surrounds shipped lobsters. To make chili oil, gently heat 2 cups canola oil, 2 tablespoons red pepper flakes, and 2 tablespoons paprika. Remove from heat. Let infuse at least 4 hours and strain.

NOTE

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PRETZEL-CRUSTED CRAB CAKES

serves 6 1 tablespoon peanut oil ¾ cup finely diced onion ½ cup finely diced celery 1 cup unsalted butter, soened 1 cup mayonnaise 2 pounds lump crabmeat, picked clean of all shell and cartilage 3 tablespoons minced fresh chives 1 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest

2 teaspoons Old Bay seasoning Pinch of cayenne pepper 2 large eggs ¼ cup water 1 box Pretz pretzel sticks (can be purchased in Japanese gourmet stores) Approximately 1 cup clarified butter

Heat the oil in a small sauté pan over medium heat. Add the onion and celery and sauté the vegetables for about 4 minutes, or until they are so and translucent. Remove them from the heat and drain off and discard the excess oil. Set aside. Combine the butter and mayonnaise in a large mixing bowl. Using a handheld electric mixer or a wooden spoon beat until the mixture is well blended and very smooth. Fold in the crabmeat, chives, lemon zest, Old Bay, and cayenne along with the reserved onions and celery. Cover and refrigerate the crab cake mixture for 15 minutes to chill slightly. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside. Remove the crab cake mixture from the refrigerator. Line 1 row of Pretz (about 6 pretzels) closely together and top with about ¼ cup of crab mixture. Line the top with the same number of pretzels (creating a ra). Place the pretzel-coated cakes on the prepared baking sheet. Lightly cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 30 minutes, or until the cakes are firm. Heat the clarified butter in a large sauté pan over medium heat until it begins to smoke. In batches, using additional butter as needed, fry the crab cakes for about 3 minutes per side, or until they are golden brown. Place them on paper towels to drain. Place the crab cakes on a serving platter.

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SEA SCALLOPS BENEDICT WITH POTATO CAKES, SPICE SAUSAGE, AND LOBSTER FOAM

serves 4 8 quail eggs Potato pancakes (recipe follows) ¼ pound chorizo sliced thin (½ thinly sliced, ½ to be used in oil recipe) 4 large sea scallops, cut in half crosswise—8 medallions Lobster foam (recipe follows) Chopped chives Black olive paste (recipe follows) Chorizo oil (recipe follows) Black Olive Paste

1 8-ounce can of pitted black olives, drained 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 teaspoon black pepper Juice of one lemon Place all ingredients in a food processor and blend until chunky. Set aside. Chorizo Oil

½ cup canola oil 4 tablespoons chorizo, chopped 1 teaspoon garlic

1 teaspoon paprika 1 teaspoon face salt

Combine canola oil, chorizo, garlic, paprika, and salt in a sauté pan over medium heat. Cook together until garlic is golden brown. Let rest. Strain. Potato Pancakes

2 large baking potatoes, peeled and diced 3 shallots, peeled 1 egg Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste Clarified butter or olive oil for sautéing Combine potatoes, shallots, and egg in a food processor and grate. Spoon grated-potato mixture into a bowl and add salt and pepper. Heat clarified butter or olive oil in a large sauté pan, preferably with a nonstick surface.

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Spoon 2 or more tablespoons of potato mixture into pan for each pancake. Cook pancakes until golden brown, turning frequently. Lobster Foam

¼ cup reduced lobster stock

¼ cup skim milk

Combine ingredients and quickly whip in a blender. For a faster method, use an espresso foamer. To build: Cook quail eggs sunny-side up. Place two potato pancakes on each plate, top with sliced chorizo, then sea scallops, then place a sunny-side-up quail egg on each scallop. Top with lobster foam and chopped chives. Circle the plate with the black olive paste and chorizo oil.

ROASTED SPICE-CRUSTED RIB ROAST WITH MASHED POTATOES AND WORCESTOBAKETCH

serves 6 Rib Roast

5-pound prime-beef rib roast, trimmed of excess fat ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons ground cumin 6 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper 6 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper 2 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 onion, peeled and finely diced 1 carrot, peeled and finely diced 1 stalk celery, well washed, peeled, and finely diced 2 pounds button, shiitake, or portobello mushrooms, wiped clean, stems removed, and sliced ¼ cup Madeira 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 2 cups boiling chicken stock Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper to taste Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Combine the cumin and black pepper with 6 tablespoons of the cayenne pepper in a small bowl. Generously coat the entire outside of the roast with the spice mixture and salt. Place the seasoned roast on a wire rack in a roasting pan in the preheated oven and roast for 40 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center reads 120 degrees. (Check the roast 26

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from time to time. If the spice crust starts to burn, cover the roast with aluminum foil and continue roasting it for desired time.) Remove the roast from the oven and allow it to rest for 15 minutes before carving. Raise the oven temperature to 500 degrees. While the meat is roasting, prepare the stew. Melt the butter in a large shallow saucepan (a rondeau is perfect) over medium heat. Add the onions, carrots, and celery and sauté for about 6 minutes or just until the onions are translucent. Stir in the mushrooms and sauté for an additional 5 minutes. Add the Madeira and stir to deglaze the pan. Raise the heat and cook for about 5 minutes or until there is about 1 tablespoon of liquid le in the pan. Using a wooden spoon, vigorously stir in the flour, making sure that no lumps form. Cook the mixture, stirring constantly, for 5 minutes. Stir in the boiling chicken stock and bring to a simmer. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Lower the heat and simmer for about 10 minutes or until the flavors are nicely blended and the sauce is thick. Remove from the heat and tent lightly with aluminum foil to keep warm until ready to serve. Slice the roast into serving pieces. Serve with mashed potatoes (recipe follows) and Worcestobaketch (recipe follows). Mashed Potatoes

2 pounds Idaho potatoes, peeled ¼ cup (½ stick) unsalted butter, soened ½ cup warm heavy cream Coarse salt and freshly ground white pepper to taste Place the potatoes in a medium saucepan with cold salted water to cover. Place over high heat and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer and cook for about 15 minutes or until the centers of the potatoes are tender when pierced with the point of a sharp knife. Drain the potatoes well and transfer them to a potato ricer. Push the potatoes through the ricer to a clean saucepan. Add the butter and cream along with salt and pepper to taste. Place over very low heat and, using a wooden spoon, beat the potatoes until smooth. Serve immediately. Worcestobaketch

⅓ cup Worcestershire sauce ⅓ cup ketchup

⅓ cup Tabasco sauce

Mix together all ingredients.

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BUTTERSCOTCH PANNA COTTA WITH CURRIED CARAMEL

serves 4 2¼ to 2½ teaspoons powdered gelatin 2 cups plus 1¾ cups heavy cream 8 ounces butterscotch candies, crushed 2 tablespoons vanilla extract In a bowl, add powdered gelatin to the 2 cups of cold heavy cream. Set aside. In a pot, combine the 1¾ cups heavy cream, candies, and vanilla extract and slowly bring to a boil, so as to infuse the cream with the butterscotch candy. Once the mixture comes to a boil, stir in the 2 cups of cream with powdered gelatin and stir. en turn off the heat. Before liquid is completely cooled, strain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer and strain directly into containers of your choice, such as espresso cups, martini glasses, or ramekins. Refrigerate for at least 8 hours so that panna cotta sets properly. Garnish with chocolate ganache and chocolate glaze (recipes following). Chocolate Ganache

3 tablespoons chocolate chips 1 tablespoon heavy cream Over low heat, combine chocolate chips and heavy cream and melt together. Let cool to room temperature and then pour into a squeeze bottle. Create a swirl starting at the bottom of a martini glass going up to the top of the martini glass. Chocolate Glaze

8 ounces chocolate chips 3 ounces cocoa butter Over low heat, melt cocoa butter. Remove from heat and pour chocolate chips into the pot and stir until completely melted. Let set for at least 5 minutes. Pour approximately 1 tablespoon of this mixture over top of the panna cotta.

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SCOTT CUTANEO Equus Restaurant, Bernardsville e Claremont Tavern, Bernardsville

An Olympic torch is mounted on the wall above the ping-pong table in the Bernardsville basement of chef Scott Cutaneo. It’s from the Salt Lake City Games of 2002, and Cutaneo encourages you to touch it, carry it, hold it high. e torch itself is the color of graphite, all sleek and high-tech, yet it is also surprisingly sturdy; it weighs about three pounds, and you realize it must not be all that easy to be a torch-bearer, to carry this ancient symbol proud and strong. Cutaneo is one of a handful of chefs who serve the International Olympic Committee ( IOC), which is how he ended up with one of the torches made in 2002. He cooks for the members of the elite committee—Bill Gates, Prince Albert of Monaco, Henry Kissinger. Besides Salt Lake City, he’s also been to the Beijing and Vancouver games. e Cutaneo basement is an enviable spot, in a rec-room-of the-stars sort of way. Besides the Olympic torch, the walls are decorated with posters from the Olympic Games, each framed along with Cutaneo’s extensive personal collection of Olympic pins. ( e red Jell-O pin from Salt Lake is worth $5,000; red Jell-O, explains Cutaneo, is the city’s favorite food.) A walk-in storage space—amid the heating ducts—holds shelves and shelves of copper pots, plus a well-cared-for bag of ice-sculpting tools. But the real show-stopper is the wine cellar, a well-appointed small dining room centered by a rustic harvest table and home to hundreds

29

of bottles of wine, some worth thousands of dollars. Cutaneo pulls out a dusty bottle, a Madeira from 1862. As with the torch, he’s eager to share, wants you to touch it, hold it in your hands. Don’t be alarmed if you drop it, he’ll say. What happens, happens. e wine room is also Cutaneo’s office—because it’s in this room of the house, where it’s a constant 59 degrees, that he’s most comfortable. It’s an ironic statement coming from a chef. He doesn’t like heat. Cutaneo seems a man full of ironies. Or at least a study in contrasts. When he talks about going to the Olympics, for example, he clearly views himself as a member of the support staff. “At the end of the day, we’re servants,” he says. “It’s amazing at that level. Everyone is someone. Except me.” Yet Cutaneo’s peers, the other chefs for the IOC, include famed New York City chef Daniel Boulud and British master chef Anton Mosimann. is is not an easy club in which to become a member. Indeed, Cutaneo clearly exhibits his own Olympic qualities—his work ethic, his exacting standards, and his life philosophy that says you must always push yourself, continue to strive even when you’re at the top of your game. Cutaneo is the kind of man who is always looking to improve and perfect, to do more, to get better. It’s an attitude that led him as an earnest young man to stand outside the kitchen of New York City’s Le Cirque waiting twenty minutes for a chance to ask Chef Daniel Boulud—whom he hadn’t yet met—for career advice. “What do I need to do to become a great chef?” he asked. “Go to France,” came the answer. (Cutaneo does a great imitation of Boulud.) So Cutaneo went to France, and took Escoffier classes at the Ritz. But each weekend, he also took three trains, riding four hours, to Michel Guérard, one of the best restaurants in the world, to ask for a job. Eventually, he was accepted, and worked there for a year. And it’s the kind of attitude that pushes him today to work on a television pilot and hatch plans for a restaurant in Dubai—even though he’s been at the helm of Equus, his restaurant in Bernardsville, for just a short time and despite that e Claremont Tavern, his family-friendly bistro planned for the building that once housed Le Petit Chateau, has recently opened. is is not a man to rest on his laurels. Equus is a glorious restaurant, a shrine to horse country, an epic replica of the wealthy inns of the past. It’s cavernous, with walls of fieldstone and tables large enough for a medieval feast. is is not your 30

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average restaurant. Yes, despite its history (it’s existed since 1848) and despite all that exposed wood and fieldstone, it’s oddly not a stodgy or stuffy place. ere’s a lightness of energy, an openness, a bit of frivolity. at energy is echoed in the cuisine, which is French inspired but neither stuffy nor stodgy. Cutaneo brings his own version of excellence to the table. First—and paramount—is a commitment to good, fresh ingredients (Griggstown chicken, grass-fed beef ), made well but also simply made. But Cutaneo also adds a bit of a surprise in almost every dish, with a little twist of an accompaniment, an adventurous yet subtle combination of ingredients that tease and inspire without ever actually stealing the show or taking things over the top. His leek fondue, for example, is almost sweet as candy, and the pear blueberry ginger salad unique enough to talk about on the ride home. Like the restaurant itself, the food here has an air of frivolity, of modernity; it’s the classics but better, flirting as they do with innovative sauces here, unusual accompaniments there. Cutaneo feels lucky to be here: “I’ve never seen a prettier restaurant in my life.” And he states his goal simply: to be the absolute best possible.

Scott Cutaneo

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And then there’s TV. Cutaneo’s small-screen nickname is Great Scott, and he has appeared more than seventy times as an expert chef for Fox & Friends, giving demonstrations and tips for Labor Day chili, a Father’s Day cookout. Yet he is not bombastic or loud, as his nickname implies, nor does he try to steal the drama from the real focus of the show: the food. “I’m not a prima donna.” On television, Cutaneo’s goal is to be informative yet funny. He explains techniques, offers kitchen secrets, shows how a dish comes together. He is efficient, yes, and frequently manages a bit of flair, but he allows the hosts of the show to be the hams, falling all over each other to get more air time. “In the beginning,” he says, “they used to eat me alive.” In a television food world of pompous, zealous, antic-driven, and gimmicky self-promoters, Cutaneo, crisp and unassuming, comes across on Good Morning America the same way he comes across in real life: as a gracious gentleman. And finally, family. Cutaneo has four children, and he’s nothing but grateful to be working in the same town where he lives. It allows him to pop home to play ping-pong with the boys or chase his youngest around the kitchen table. It was a tough lesson to learn. His year in New York with Daniel Boulud cost him his first marriage. e restaurant needed 98 percent, and a marriage can’t survive on just 2 percent. Cutaneo is one of those people who talk in run-on sentences and never seem to need to take a breath. He peppers his conversation with an infectious string of quotable and upbeat zenlike philosophies: “Whether you’re cooking for the president of a country or your children, that smile on their face is everything.” He reminds staff: “You’re only as good as your weakest link.” “You need to focus on the now.” “Everybody is a VIP and nobody is.” Cutaneo’s eyes dance when he shares his beliefs; he’s eager and positive, earnest and generous. He wants to share what he’s learned—in the kitchen, in life. He’s inspired by the four agreements of Don Miguel Ruiz: Be impeccable with your word; don’t take anything personally; don’t make assumptions; always do your best. It’s a philosophy he has posted in his kitchen at home and at work. He reads Deepak Chopra. Cutaneo and his family live in Bernardsville, and he and his wife are involved in numerous charities—for kids, for autism, for battered women. “It’s all about giving back,” he says. “It’s all about good karma for me.”

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“I’m the luckiest man in the world,” he says. “I’ve got a great family, and I actually make a living doing what I love. How many people can say that?” “I’ve never worked a day in my life,” says Cutaneo. “Who’s luckier than me?” SECRET: “I’m excited about all the little things.”

ENDIVE AND WATERCRESS WITH SAUCE VERT

serves 10 5 endives 4 bunches watercress

1 pound Montrachet goat cheese Salt and white pepper to taste

Remove base from endive and carefully peel leaves and set aside in a mixing bowl until needed for service. Rinse the watercress in a colander and dry. Set aside in a mixing bowl until needed for service. Slice goat cheese and arrange on a plate until needed for service. Season the endive and watercress with the dressing (recipe follows) and season with sea salt and white pepper to desired taste. Arrange on a serving plate and dress with the goat cheese. Serve immediately. Dressing

2 green peppers ½ onion 1 bunch watercress 4 ounces red wine vinegar

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard 7 ounces olive oil Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse green peppers under cool water and cut and remove the seeds and place into the mixer. Slice the onion and add to the mixer. Add washed watercress. Add the vinegar and Dijon mustard, cover and blend. Slow the blender and add the olive oil. Season to taste.

Scott Cutaneo

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WHITE TRUFFLE RISOTTO WITH PORCINI

serves 4 8 ounces fresh porcini, pan seared (optional; see note) 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 tablespoons butter 3 shallots, minced 1½ cups arborio rice 6 to 7 cups chicken stock, hot Kosher salt White pepper in a mill 3 to 4 ounces Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, grated 4 teaspoons white truffle oil 2 teaspoons grated white truffle Small white truffle, for garnish Prepare the porcini and set them aside. Put the olive oil and butter in a medium saucepan set over low heat, and when the butter is melted, add the shallots. Sweat the shallots slowly until they are very so, about 15 minutes. Increase the heat to medium-low, add the rice, and cook, stirring constantly, until each grain turns milky white, about 2 minutes. Add ½ cup chicken stock and stir until the liquid is absorbed. Continue adding stock, ½ cup at a time, until the rice is tender but not mushy, about 18 to 22 minutes. Aer about 14 minutes, season with salt and several turns of white pepper. Aer the final addition of stock, fold in the cheese and porcini and remove the risotto from the heat. Taste and correct the seasoning. Fold in the truffle oil and grated white truffle, cover with plastic wrap, and let rest 2 minutes. Spoon the risotto in warmed soup plates, grate a little white truffle over each portion, and serve immediately. When excellent fresh porcini are available, brush them lightly, cut them lengthwise into thick slices, as you would cut foie gras, dust lightly with instant flour, and cook them in clarified butter in a hot sauté pan. ey should be slightly crispy on the outside, and creamy and tender on the inside.

NOTE

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CO CONUT MACARO ONS

yield: 46 macaroons 1 pound coconut flakes 8 ounces or 5 egg whites 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 pound, 4 ounces sugar ½ ounce vanilla extract (equal to one splash) Grind the coconut flakes in a food processor into a coarse consistency. Whisk the egg whites until so peaks form, and add cream of tartar and vanilla. Gradually add sugar and whisk until stiff peaks form and appear glossy. Transfer mixture to a larger mixing bowl, and fold in the coconut. Using one of two methods, either piping out of a pastry bag or using a small ice cream scoop, pipe or scoop small amounts of mixture onto the sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Bake at 300 degrees for 20 minutes until center is firm.

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DAVID DRAKE Restaurant David Drake, Rahway

David Drake blew off his le hand in a fireworks explosion when he was fourteen. It was a defining moment, a moment that set into motion the series of events that led a boy who refused to eat fish or tomatoes or allow his milk to touch his cereal to become one of the most respected and visionary chefs in the state. Aer Drake lost his hand, he kept it wrapped in bandages for three years; he just wasn’t ready to admit that it was gone. He learned to tie his shoes with one hand, played baseball, tried to be normal. But then he started working for a mechanic with an old-school philosophy, a man who matter-of-factly told Drake that he needed to work with the tools that he had. One day they were pushing a car with a dead battery, and Drake, as usual, was using just his right hand. “Goddammit, David, you gotta use your nub.” It was a life lesson. Drake listened then, and he’s still listening today. Drake is an abundantly gied chef who accomplishes more with one hand and a set of knives in the kitchen than most chefs who are blessed to have both hands. In fact, the many New Jerseyans who have eaten a David Drake dinner over the years—at the Stage House in Scotch Plains, at e Frog and the Peach in New Brunswick, at Daryl’s Wine Bar in New 36

Brunswick, at Restaurant David Drake in Rahway—ironically should be grateful for that fireworks explosion. Because if Drake hadn’t lost his hand and felt like a bit of a misfit in the first place, he may not have ended up in the business at all. Because as a seventeen-year-old dishwasher at Chez Odette in New Hope, among the crew of other misfits attracted to the late-night craziness that is the forte of the restaurant world, Drake finally felt he’d found a place where he belonged. Still, it’s a long way from dishwasher to chef, and Drake had another handicap. He really didn’t know much about food. His Irish mother was not a good cook; she was of the era of Jell-O and Campbell’s soup, the kind of cook who boiled food to death. But she also recognized Drake’s awakening passion, and, in 1979, gave him the Culinary Institute of America cookbook as a Christmas gi. He studied it from cover to cover. And then came a five-course dinner at Le Bec-Fin. Drake was working at the Lambertville House; his boss there also recognized his passion

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for food and offered to take him to the famed Philadelphia landmark, the restaurant where Chef Georges Perrier was redefining fine dining in that city, the restaurant that was starting a culinary revolution. Drake was nineteen years old, and had to buy a suit and tie before he could go. He had never eaten fish—“I am proud to admit I never had a Mrs. Paul’s fish stick or that disgusting tuna casserole my mother used to make”—but at Le Bec-Fin, had Dover sole. On the way home, in the back seat of a yellow Ford Fiesta, contemplating the rich meal he’d just eaten, Drake vowed that fine dining was his future. “I made a commitment to myself that this was what I wanted to do.” At the time, however, Drake was looking for something that didn’t yet exist in New Jersey. Only three restaurants were preparing the kind of cuisine he was seeking—e Tarragon Tree in Chatham, Spring Valley Farm in Flanders, and the Black Forest Inn in Stanhope—and none offered paying work. And, because he had lost his hand, he was too intimidated to look for work in New York. It was too daunting; topnotch kitchens are cutthroat places to work, and he felt like he would be thrown to the wolves. “I’m really disappointed in myself for that.” New Jersey was his comfort zone, so when Betsy Alger asked him to help open e Frog and the Peach, he agreed. e restaurant didn’t come with exactly the culinary philosophy he wanted, but it would be a great learning experience. Plus the owners, Alger and Jim Black, offered a great perk—an American Express card to dine with once a month. e perk led to the next chapter in Drake’s food experience— Bouley. Drake was older when he had dinner at Bouley, an exciting New York restaurant that boasted creative haute cuisine and a celebrity clientele. Drake had had more experience, knew a bit more about food. But he hadn’t yet eaten foie gras, couldn’t define tagliatelle. And the experience at Bouley, one of the first East Coast restaurants to zealously emphasize the purity of the ingredient, was just as revelatory. At Bouley, the oncepicky kid ate sweetbreads and calf’s brain. “How far have I come?” But he also had sea bass that just stopped him in his tracks. “All I wanted to do was re-create that dish.” Later, he found out that the sauce he had eaten was actually four sauces together, along with a basil puree that somehow was the essence of basil, bright green and pure. It was this kind of food he wanted to emulate, worked daily to 38

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emulate, and his efforts landed him an excellent review from the New York Times. Drake is passionate but humble, skilled but unassuming, hard working but modest. And despite his life story, the drama that is David Drake is not the drama of losing his le hand, but the drama in his food. David is a Renaissance man, a man who contemplates each element of the meal, the marriage of tastes, a man who considers vegetables to be noble and treats them as such. In an era of chefs as showmen, with tableside gimmicks and paparazzi lifestyles, Drake is thoroughly and refreshingly the opposite. He’s famous for being competent. For being vivid and subtle. Every day, and with every dish. His food is loy, complex, and intoxicating—whether it’s his salad of warm duck confit with bitter greens and a horseradish dressing or his seared yellowfin tuna with Asian pear, shiitake, and watercress salad in a pomegranate vinaigrette. His braised short ribs are legendary, as are his desserts—lemon-scented chocolate tart, with salted caramel and pistachio dust. (Drake was once pastry chef at the Ryland Inn, and considers desserts an elemental part of the meal.) e Food Network makes it all look glamorous, attracting a lot of wannabees—“people who think they want to be in the restaurant business, but all they really want is to be on TV.” You’re just as likely to become a celebrity chef, says Drake, as you are getting into the NBA. “It’s just impossible. It’s not going to happen.” Drake has many other restaurant stories; he did, aer all, work alongside Craig Shelton at the Ryland, as well as David Burke at the River Café, some of the biggest personalities in the business, during the restaurant heydays of the late 1980s and 1990s. And in Scotch Plains, Drake was chef at the Stage House, where he pushed that restaurant into the state’s top tier. And then, of course, there’s the story of how a persuasive Jim Kennedy, mayor of Rahway, somehow talked Drake into opening a finedining restaurant in that economically challenged city. Kennedy decided that what Rahway needed was a four-star restaurant, and recruited Drake. It was a novel idea for a city on the verge of its own Renaissance, a city boasting an uplied downtown thanks to a new train line that offered extraordinarily frequent direct service to Manhattan. But then the recession hit, and Rahway was one of the first places to suffer. Drake has closed the restaurant in Rahway. He’s no longer a partner

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at Daryl’s Wine Bar in New Brunswick. Now he’s executive chef at Alice’s in Hopatcong, a casual spot on the lake, and contemplating his next move. He echoes the sentiment of his colleagues: Fine dining is dead. “I feel like I’m at the funeral.” Cuisine is not what it used to be, Drake says. Moments of brilliance are few and far between. Without some sort of gimmick or a lot of financial backing, it’s nearly impossible to make it as a chef. To succeed, you need everything to work—a great team, a great concept, the right location. It speaks volumes about the state of the restaurant business when Craig Shelton is working as guest chef at the Skylark Diner. “A Michelin-trained chef running a diner in Edison? I still think I’m going to wake up from this.” Yet Drake doesn’t seem pessimistic or maudlin. Perhaps it’s because of the hand. He knows adversity, learning at a young age how to protect himself, fend for himself. In fact, he’ll tell you that he’s lucky—lucky that he lost his hand at age fourteen, when he was still growing, instead of losing it in his thirties, like a soldier losing a hand in battle. He’ll tell you the story of the gas station attendant he met who had no arm and said: “At least you have an elbow.” It was an epiphany. An elbow makes a big difference. So even if the culinary landscape has changed, and fine dining has narrowed to a sliver of the market, he still sees opportunity to continue to fulfill his teenage dreams, to be one of the great chefs of New Jersey. “Our ultimate goals are to have a legacy of great restaurants like the ones we have loved and cherished our whole lives,” says Drake. “To retire as one of the best in what we do.” And although the contemporary scene won’t be the same as the restaurants that shaped him, he can still find a niche. “I can do my own Le Bec-Fin or Bouley, a bit reinvented, re-created, in a modern sense.”

SECRET: Drake was arrested twice before he turned eighteen. “I got into a lot of trouble when I was a kid. ere wasn’t a lot to do in my town and so we did things.”

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SNAIL-STUFFED QUAIL WITH QUINOA, BRAISED CHANTERELLE MUSHRO OMS, AND PARSLEY PERSIADE I developed this dish for Restaurant David Drake long before we actually opened. It was a concept dish that frankly, I never expected to come to fruition. But it did, and it became one of our signature dishes.

serves 6

Snail Stuffing

6 cloves of fresh, peeled garlic 1 cup olive oil One 6-ounce can of snails Pinch of course sea salt ½ cup minced onion ¼ cup minced carrot ¼ cup minced celery 4 tablespoons plain breadcrumbs Salt and pepper to taste 6 semiboneless quail Place the garlic and olive oil in a small pot and heat until hot but not boiling. Slowly cook the garlic in the oil for 45 minutes. oroughly drain the snails of their liquid. Add the snails to garlic confit and continue slowly cooking for an additional hour. While the snails are cooking, sweat the onion, carrots, and celery in a small pot with just enough oil to coat the bottom for 3 to 4 minutes, or until the vegetables are so and translucent. Remove the snails and garlic from the oil. Smash garlic into a course paste. Add the smashed garlic and the mirepoix of vegetables to the snails. Add the breadcrumbs to the mixture. Season the mixture with salt and ground white pepper, to taste. Form into six equal-size balls (the balls should be a little smaller than a golf ball). Remove front legs of the quail by inverting the leg and pulling out the meat without ripping the skin. Remove the meat from the leg carefully with a paring knife and reserve each two legs separately. Take balls of stuffing and combine with the leg meat. With toothpicks, close first the front part of the bird, “sewing” it closed. Stuff the bird with the balls and sew the back up.

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Quinoa and Mushrooms

8 ounces fresh chanterelles 2 tablespoons olive oil Pinch of salt 1 tablespoon minced shallots ½ lemon Salt and ground white pepper to taste 8 ounces quinoa 2 tablespoons olive oil Brush the chanterelles clean, and trim any hard ends. On very high heat with a good amount of oil quickly stir fry the mushrooms with a pinch of salt until they are so. Add the shallots and continue to sweat them for 20 seconds. Add a few drops of lemon and season with pepper. In a medium-size pot, toast the quinoa for 1 minute on the stovetop. Cover the quinoa with 3 cups of water. Bring to a simmer and cook covered for 10 to 15 minutes on medium heat. Parsley Persiade

2 bunches of flat-leaf parsley 4 tablespoons olive oil Salt as needed Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Pick the larger stems from the parsley. Wash the parsley thoroughly. Blanch the parsley for about 45 seconds to a minute. Have a bowl of salted ice bath ready. Using a slotted spoon, remove the parsley from the pot and shock it in an ice bath. Squeeze out all the excess water from the parsley using your hands. Place the parsley in a blender and purée for three to four minutes with a couple of the cubes of ice from the ice bath and the olive oil. To serve: In a hot skillet with just enough oil to cover the bottom, sear the quails on both sides. Place the quails in the oven for approximately 6 minutes at 350 degrees. Make a small pile of quinoa on each of the six plates and place one quail on top of the quinoa. Place the mushrooms attractively around each plate. In a small pot, warm the parsley sauce, and, using a spoon, garnish each plate with it by making three or four streaks around the plate.

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FLORIDA RED SNAPPER WITH ZUCCHINI AND RED PEPPER RISOTTO, PEA SHO OT SALAD, AND SAUCE BOUILLABAISSE Even though this recipe calls for red snapper, you can substitute almost any type of flaky-style fish, or you may serve the risotto by itself. You can purchase the pea shoots in almost any Chinese grocery store.

serves 6

Lobster Stock

One 1¼-pound hard-shell live lobster Olive oil 3 stalks of celery, medium dice 1 large Spanish onion, medium dice 2 carrots, peeled and medium dice 1 head of fresh garlic, peeled 1 head of fennel, medium dice 2 tablespoons tomato paste 2 bay leaves 1 tablespoon thyme 1 tablespoon whole white peppercorns 1 tablespoon whole coriander seeds 3 cups of good quality dry white wine In a large pot of lightly salted water, plunge the lobster and cook for 5 to 6 minutes. Remove from the water and remove all the meat, reserving for later. Heat a large braising pot. Add enough oil to cover the bottom of the pot. Allow the oil to smoke, and then add the lobster shells, being very careful not to splash up any of the hot oil. Aer about 5 minutes, add the celery, onion, carrot, garlic, and fennel and cook until vegetables are tender. Add the tomato paste. Add the herbs and spices. Deglaze with the wine. Add enough water to cover the shells and vegetables. Simmer for 30 minutes and strain.

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Bouillabaisse

4 red peppers, seeded and medium dice 1 head fennel, medium dice 1 large onion, medium dice 1 head of garlic, peeled 1 orange

1 large pinch of saffron 1 tablespoon paprika ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper 2 limes, zested and juiced 2 quarts of lobster stock Salt and white pepper to taste

Heat a large casserole dish and sweat the peppers, fennel, onion and garlic in enough oil to cover the bottom of the pot. Lower the flame and cook the vegetables until they are caramelized. Burn the orange on an open flame on all sides and add to the vegetables. Add the saffron, paprika, the cayenne pepper, limes, and lobster stock. Bring to a simmer and allow to cook for 40 minutes. Adjust the seasoning. Rice

½ gallon of filtered water ½ of a medium onion, minced 1 tablespoon olive oil ¼ pound arborio rice 2 ounces of excellent white table wine Salt and white pepper to taste Bring the water to a low simmer. In another pan, sweat the onion in a tablespoon of oil until translucent. Add the rice and stir with a wooden spoon, mixing together with onion, toasting ever so slightly. Add the water a little at a time, stirring on and off for about 20 minutes, or until the rice is about 80 percent cooked. Add the wine and stir in; season to taste. Stop the cooking by laying out the rice in a flat pan, spreading the rice in an even layer, and allow to cool. Snapper

3 pounds Florida red snapper filets, skin on and descaled Enough flour to lightly dust the fish Olive oil Salt and white pepper as needed Cut each filet in half. Season each with salt and pepper on both sides. Lightly coat with the flour. In a very hot sauté pan, coated with enough oil to barely cover the bottom, sear the fish, skin side down. Once the

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skin is crispy, remove from the skillet and place on a sheet pan large enough to hold all the filets in a single layer. Just before you are ready to assemble the completed dish, finish cooking the snapper in a 325degree oven for 5 minutes. Vegetables

1 beefsteak tomato for concassé 1 green zucchini Olive oil, as needed Lobster stock, as needed Saffron, as needed 1 teaspoon curry 2 to 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese ½ lemon Reserved lobster cut into large, bite-size pieces Pea shoots Olive oil Salt Blanch the tomato for about 30 seconds and then plunge into an ice bath. Peel, quarter, and remove the seeds from the tomato and cut each quarter into four or five pieces. Cut off the ends of the zucchini. Cut it lengthwise and then quarter. Cut narrow slices from each quarter of the zucchini. Heat a medium sauce pan and add enough oil to barely cover the bottom. Sauté the zucchini and the chopped tomato for about 2 minutes. Add the risotto to the vegetables and add 4 to 6 ounces of lobster stock and allow the risotto to get hot, while absorbing the stock. Add good pinch of saffron and curry to the risotto. Add Parmesan cheese, the lobster meat, and a good squeeze of lemon juice. In a bowl, toss the pea shoots with a few drops of lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, and a touch of salt. Divide the pea shoots among 6 shallow bowls. Mound some of the risotto on top of each bed of the pea shoots. Carefully transfer each filet of snapper to the top of each mound of risotto. Ladle 1 or 2 ounces of sauce around the risotto in each of the bowls.

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GUINNESS BRAISED SHORT RIBS WITH CARAMELIZED CANDY-STRIPED BABY BEETS WITH THEIR GREENS, POTATO PURÉE, AND BRAISING JUS We first prepared this dish at the Stage House in 1998. My chef de cuisine, Alex Stotler, suggested that we bring it back at Restaurant David Drake when we first opened. It has been on the menu ever since.

serves 6 to 8

Ribs

6 pounds whole beef ribs, deboned and trimmed of fat 2 tablespoons six-spice (recipe follows) 1 tablespoon ground black pepper 1 large Spanish onion, medium dice 2 peeled carrots, medium dice

4 stalks of celery, medium dice One 12-ounce can Guinness stout 1 cup port wine 2 cups red wine ½ gallon veal stock 1 whole cinnamon stick 2 cloves

Six Spice (a spice grinder is needed)

1 tablespoon mace 1 tablespoon ginger powder 1 tablespoon whole coriander 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon whole white peppercorns 6 whole cloves

Toast spices in oven for 4 minutes at 350 degrees. Allow to cool slightly. Grind to a fine powder in the spice grinder. Rub ribs with six-spice and black pepper. Heat a roasting pan large enough to hold the ribs. Add enough oil to cover the bottom of pot. When oil is smoking, add the ribs and brown on both sides. Remove the ribs and set aside. Add the onions, celery, and carrots to the pot and sauté for about 5 minutes. Place the meat on top of the vegetables. Add all remaining ingredients and bring to a simmer. Cover with aluminum foil and braise in 325-degree oven for 4 hours.

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Carefully remove the ribs from the pot and strain and reduce the jus by about half. Once the ribs have cooled sufficiently to handle, cut them into square portions and trim the sides. ( e scrap can be reserved for barbecued sandwiches.) Potato Purée

4 pounds large Yukon gold potatoes Whole milk (as needed) 1 pound sweet butter Salt, as needed Salt and ground white pepper, to taste Peel and cut up the potatoes into even-size pieces. Add the potatoes to a large pot of salted water and bring to a boil. Cook until just tender, about 20 minutes. Drain well and run the potatoes through a ricer back into a clean pot. Whip them with a couple of ounces of milk, and add the butter a little at a time until you have incorporated it all into the purée. Season as needed with salt and pepper to taste. Keep very warm. Beets

16 chiogga baby beets (candy striped) 2 tablespoons minced shallots Salt and white pepper to taste Remove the tops from the beets. Trim the stems from the greens and discard. Wash the leaves thoroughly until sand free. Dry between towels. Cover the beets with lightly salted water and boil until tender— about 20 minutes. Drain and cool. Rinse under cold water, removing the outer skin of the beets. Quarter the beets and sauté them with their greens and the shallots. Season with salt and pepper to taste. To serve: Reduce half of the cooking jus by approximately one third. Rewarm the ribs in the remaining jus. Place a swirl of potato on each plate. Place a square of the rib on top of the potato. Garnish the plates with beets, and pour a good amount of the reduced jus over each rib.

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FRIED MAINE CRAB CAKES, WITH CELERY RO OT REMOULADE AND FARMER’S GREENS is is a quick, easy preparation that can be prepared well ahead of time and can be doubled if you want to serve it as a main course.

serves 4

Crab Cakes

1 pound Maine crabmeat 4 tablespoons mayonnaise 3 tablespoons diced red pepper 2 finely minced shallots ½ ounce fresh basil, rough chopped Juice of 1 lemon Salt and white pepper to taste 3 eggs, lightly beaten Breadcrumbs, as needed Grapeseed oil, as needed (used later) Pick any small pieces of shell from the crab. Place in a medium-size bowl, add the next five ingredients and mix thoroughly. Add salt and pepper to taste. Form 3-ounce patties and dip into the egg wash and then dredge in breadcrumbs. Refrigerate. Prepare the next two items. Remoulade

1 medium head of fresh celery root, peeled and shredded 1 Granny Smith apple, grated skin on ¼ cup mayonnaise, or as needed 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard 1 tablespoon finely minced chives or scallions Juice of 1 lemon Salt and white pepper to taste Add the first 6 ingredients to a medium bowl. Mix well and season to taste.

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Salad

1 small bag of field greens 3 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar Salt and pepper to taste In a bowl, toss the field greens with the olive oil and sherry vinegar and season lightly. To serve: Arrange neat little bunches of salad in the middle of four chilled salad plates and spread each bundle to resemble a wreath. In the center of each wreath, place about 2 ounces of the remoulade to fill the center. Heat enough grapeseed oil in a frying pan to come around a half inch deep. e pan needs to be large enough to hold all four crab cakes, or otherwise cook in two batches. Heat the oil to a moderate temperature, then place the cakes in pan carefully to avoid splashing up the sides. Brown evenly on both sides. Once they are ready, take them out of the pan and allow to dry on paper towels for a couple of minutes. Top the remoulade with the crab cakes and serve immediately.

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BANANA MOUSSE WITH MILK CHO COLATE CREAM, COFFEE CARAMEL, BROWNIE, AND CANDIED WALNUTS is dessert is served in a glass, which needs to have a wide enough diameter to accommodate the brownie circles. It is light and refreshing, perfect for the end of a multicourse meal.

serves 4 to 6

Brownie

3 ounces sweet butter 5 ounces bitter chocolate 2 eggs 5 ounces sugar

4 ounces flour 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon salt

Melt butter and chocolate in a double boiler. Combine eggs and sugar together in a bowl. Add cooled chocolate mixture. Si together dry ingredients and fold into mix. Bake at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes (they will be slightly undercooked). Cut out six circles about 2 to 2½ inches in diameter. Coffee Caramel

2¼ ounces heavy cream 2 tablespoons whole coffee beans 3½ ounces sugar

1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 ounces sweet butter

Steep the cream together with coffee beans for about 45 minutes to thoroughly infuse the coffee essence. Strain the beans from the cream and hold the infused cream in a warm place. Heat up the sugar with a little water and the lemon juice (it should look like wet sand). When the sugar begins to caramelize, turn off the heat and slowly add the infused cream, while constantly whisking to stop the cooking. Allow the caramel to cool slightly and then whisk in the butter. Banana Mousseline

2 cups milk 3 bananas 4 ounces sugar

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3 ounces flour 6 egg yolks Whipped cream, as needed

Combine milk and bananas with 2 ounces sugar in medium saucepan and bring to a scald. Steep for 20 minutes covered with parchment paper. Strain, and discard banana. In a medium stainless bowl whisk the flour, yolks, and remaining sugar together and temper into milk. Cook over a double boiler until mixture is thickened (forming ribbons). Strain and refrigerate. When ready to use, fold in ½ cup whipped cream for every cup of mousseline. Walnuts

3 ounces walnut pieces 2 to 3 ounces sugar Put sugar in pan with a little bit of water. Add walnuts and stir constantly over heat until the sugar coats the nuts. Allow to cool. Ganache

2⅓ ounces cream 2⅔ ounces milk chocolate, chopped in small pieces Bring cream to a boil. Pour over chocolate into a medium bowl. Stir together with a spatula until chocolate is smooth. To serve: In each glass, put about half an inch of ganache. Next, put in two or three walnuts. Cover with caramel. Place a brownie into the caramel, followed by the banana mousseline. Garnish with a couple of more walnuts and powdered sugar.

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DENNIS FOY Dennis Foy’s, Lawrenceville

Back in the day—in 1978, during the beginning times of the food revolution in New Jersey—Dennis Foy offered to pay the airfare (first-class) for the mother of his pastry chef to journey to America. But only if she’d show him the proper way to make a cassoulet. Madame Renard agreed, and it led to a two-week intensive teaching lesson that was hindered partly because of the language barrier, but mostly by the fact that Madame Renard did not measure any of her ingredients. Every time she added a handful of this, a pinch of that, someone shrieked. Everything had to stop so things could be measured. Today, decades later and light-years from the countryside of eighteenth-century France, Foy serves Madame Renard’s cassoulet at Dennis Foy’s, his latest culinary venture, a farm-to-table conceptual restaurant along Lawrenceville’s quaint and historic Main Street. Foy, considered by many as a forefather of fine cuisine in New Jersey, is back with an idea that’s both ancient and modern, a restaurant that serves organic, sustainable, seasonal food. “I don’t want to overplay that,” says Foy, “because it’s just so boring, so pretentious.” Which may indeed be true. But it’s also true that for many restaurants, it’s a half-hearted promise, more of a marketing ploy than a philosophy. In Lawrenceville, Foy brings his customary intensity to his proposal. Madame Renard’s cassoulet, for example, is a labor-intensive 52

recipe—four hours of prep time and eight hours of slow-cooking time for each batch—but Foy hasn’t changed one thing from the original recipe. Indeed, Madame Renard herself was simply passing along the recipe of her own grandmothers and their grandmothers before. But ask Foy to describe this cassoulet, this rustic beauty of a dish from the south of France, and he is uncharacteristically speechless. Because it’s cassoulet, it is somehow both a hearty stew of beans and meat and also the essence of classic French gastronomy, both peasant food and haute cuisine, sustenance and luxury, raison d’être and joie de vivre. People know this about cassoulet—it’s a universal truth— and asking why this is true is like asking why Cézanne matters. But Foy tries to explain—talking about the aesthetics of food, the ephemeral things involved, how cassoulet embodies all the things you can’t articulate about food. “You have to do it the right way. From scratch. Start to finish.”

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“It’s the soul of cooking,” he says. “Cassoulet is a good piece of French lore and emotion.” en, a bit impatiently, he gives up on words, which clearly are inadequate. “Fire up a bowl of cassoulet,” he instructs his chef. Dennis Foy’s cassoulet is everything he says it is—and so much more. It’s earthy and rich and lusty—so much so that everyone at the table stops talking. Even Foy can’t stop himself from taking just one more bite—“It’s so good. Omigod”—although, strictly speaking, he’s not allowed. A recent triple bypass has put a damper on his diet. “It’s cruel,” he says. All those wonderful things he should no longer have. “No more foie gras. I can laugh about it, but it’s so painful.” But then Foy happily launches into the triple bypass story, another example, he says, of his acute intuitive instincts. It was 2008, and one of his friends, a soldier, was preparing to head back to war in Afghanistan. e two buddies got together and had a late night of wine, bourbon, cigars and reminiscing. e next morning, around 11 a.m., Foy thought it might be a good idea to call his cardiologist. He had no pain, no symptoms—but still. All his initial tests were negative. But the cardiologist offered one more—stay the weekend, he suggested, and we’ll do a CAT scan on Monday. By Tuesday, Foy was on the operating table. “I was actually relieved. Most of the males in my family are dead by fiy.” Foy is an intense man, oen abrupt, somehow bringing to mind either Robert Duvall or, perhaps, Paul Newman. ( Is it the blue eyes? Or maybe that mutual love of food? ) As a chef, he’s old-school, with strict standards and high expectations. When he asks for something, people jump. He’s a man you don’t want to disappoint, says Michael Metzner, who was lured from the venerable Restaurant Nicholas to serve as executive sous chef at Dennis Foy’s. “I admire his passion.” For the menu, Foy and his wife, Estelle, gather produce daily from the increasingly organic and bountiful local farms. e restaurant opened in October 2009, with Foy assuring his guests that the restaurant’s first anksgiving would be astonishing. “People are going to lose their minds.” e dinner, based on his mother’s traditional meal, is nothing trendy, avant-garde, or nouvelle. Just fresh, from scratch, with real ingredients. “All those things people talk about but never do.” When Foy talks about food, he talks about the language of the 54

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senses. To know food is to know how it feels, how it tastes, how it looks, to understand it instinctively. Food is not simply following the sterile instructions of a recipe. Foy will remind you that he’s Ivy League ( University of Pennsylvania)—and that not many chefs bring that level of intellectualism to the table. “A lot of guys are one-dimensional.” He talks about the philosophy of food, argues whether food is art. “Cooking is cooking. It’s a cra, more than anything else. If there’s any art in it, it’s in the presentation process,” he says. “Over. Done. Story. Close the book.” at being said, he thinks David Burke, with his cheesecake lollipops and his angry lobsters, is an artist, because he’s playful and unconventional. And Craig Shelton, another Ivy League chef, is also an artist, because he thinks on a level outside the parameters of cooking. And Foy himself is an artist, but only in the presentation of his food. e plate is a blank canvas, he says, and he talks about plating a dish with abstract shapes and complementary colors, how the dark base note of a balsamic glaze can make all the other colors of the dish explode. Of course, the second you use your fork, the art is gone, a mishmash of shapes and colors that are no longer art at all. Otherwise, food is not art, and chefs are not artists. Once a recipe is created, the act of reproducing it over and over again is not art; it’s mechanics. Painting, however, now, that’s art. And Foy will show you his own oil paintings—many of them hang in the restaurant. Foy’s paintings are well regarded, a fact that annoys some of his artist friends. Foy, born in 1952, was just twenty-two years old when he opened e Tarragon Tree in Chatham in 1974. But e Tarragon Tree ushered in a new era of dining in New Jersey—and became a training ground for many nationally acclaimed chefs, including Debra Ponzek of Aux Delices in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Jerry Bryan at the Coastal Grill in Virginia Beach. ( Bryan gushed when Foy came to the Coastal Grill: “I can’t thank you enough for what you taught me.” Says Foy: “I was very humbled by that remark. I mean, we’re both grown men.” ) Foy’s career put him at the helm of many restaurants in New Jersey and New York, including Mondrian from 1986 to 1990. But it was at Dino’s in Wildwood where Foy fell in love with the business and where he learned one of the most important—and most simple—lessons of his career. Foy was a teenage dishwasher, and the

Dennis Foy

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family who ran the restaurant had this philosophy: Treat every client like they’re a guest in your home. Twenty-five years later, the family came to his restaurant. At the end of the dinner, he asked how they liked it. e answer: “I felt like a guest in your home.” And Foy felt like a success.

SECRET: “e secret is there are no rules. Nobody tells you that.” Foy recommends the road less traveled. “I’d rather take the more difficult route. It’s been far more rewarding and exciting taking the risk.” at’s true in success—“When I achieve the goal, it’s so much more rewarding”—or in failure— “When I failed, reaching for the golden ring, it was OK.”

ASPARAGUS SOUP First Method 1 pound medium asparagus ½ Spanish onion, in ¼-inch dice 4 ounces sweet butter 12 ounces cream

serves 4 4 ounces milk 3 cloves roasted garlic Salt Pepper

Line up asparagus at the top and cut into 6-inch spears. Set aside spears. (Save them for other uses; see, for example, “Asparagus in Bondage” appetizer recipe, which follows.) Cut remaining pieces of asparagus into small circles, about ¼ inch thick. (Do not use the white part.) Put the butter and onion into a soup pot and sweat onion until tender. Add asparagus. Sweat both on very low flame, until mush. Add cream and milk. Bring to a boil; remove from heat. In a blender, purée soup until smooth. Add roasted garlic, season to taste. Second Method 1 pound medium asparagus ½ Spanish onion, in ¼-inch dice 56

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serves 6

4 ounces sweet butter 1 quart of vegetable stock. ( Make a homemade vegetable stock with a mirepoix of carrots, onion, and celery plus any additional vegetables available; add thyme, rosemary, and a couple of cloves of garlic. Bring to a boil and simmer for an hour or until the stock is well flavored.) 3 ounces extra-virgin olive oil Ice Line up asparagus at the top and cut into 6-inch spears. Set aside spears. (Save them for other uses; see, for example, “Asparagus in Bondage” appetizer recipe, which follows.) Cut remaining pieces of asparagus into small circles, about ¼ inch thick. (Do not use the white part.) Blanch the asparagus; remove when tender and place in an ice bath. Put the butter and onion into a soup pot and sweat onion until tender. When tender, place in a blender. Add asparagus. Purée with vegetable stock ( you want it silky). Add olive oil. Season with salt and pepper.

ASPARAGUS IN BONDAGE

makes 1 appetizer 5 to 7 asparagus spears 1 slice of thinly cut smoked salmon 2 ounces sauce Maltise (recipe follows) Salt Pepper Blanch the asparagus in boiling water. is preserves the color. Center and wrap the asparagus in smoked salmon ( like you are rolling a cigar.) Place seam-side down in the center of a plate. Lightly drizzle sauce over the asparagus. Sauce Maltise

6 ounces fresh orange juice, reduced over high heat to 1 ounce 1 ounce Hollandaise sauce (if you can make Hollandaise sauce, that’s great; if not, use a packaged sauce, following instructions) Incorporate the Hollandaise sauce with the reduced orange juice.

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DUCK CONFIT is recipe requires a brief tutorial. To confit is to cook a product in fat over a long period of time. For a protein, use the rendered fat of the protein itself. For a vegetable, say a tomato, use olive oil or blended oil. e result of this type of slow, long cooking is simply outstanding, and very soulful. It is at the core of French culinary lore. Duck leg Duck fat Salt Pepper Roasted garlic is recipe is not quantity based, it’s all technique, and it doesn’t matter if you have one leg or a dozen.

NOTE

Season the duck leg with salt and fresh pepper. Put rendered duck fat in a heavy-duty casserole dish. Heat to medium high. Sauté the legs skin side down until golden brown; do them all at once if possible. Turn when you have the desired golden color. Decrease or increase heat as necessary. Do not burn. When finished, completely cover the legs with duck fat. Make a boutique garné, tie it, and put it in the fat along with a handful of roasted garlic. Do not boil the fat on the stove top. Put the casserole dish in a 275- to 300-degree oven, covered, for three to six hours, or until pin tender. Remove and allow to cool in the fat. e legs are stored in the fat. ey are never removed from the fat unless to reheat and serve. e leg should be cooked medium rare and not fall off the bone. It must also be tender. To reheat, remove the leg from the fat and place the leg on a tray in a 300- to 500-degree oven.

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QUICHE Great for lunch with salad and French bread.

serves 12

Vegetable Filling

4 ounces bacon lardons, in ¼-inch by 1-inch rectangles 6 ounces diced celery 6 ounces diced leeks (or onions) 6 ounces diced carrots 1 ounce roasted garlic 1 ounce roasted shallots Cream Filling

6 large eggs 4 cups heavy cream 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon pepper ¼ pound freshly grated Reggiano-Parmesan, divided Quiche shell (see note below) Sear the bacon on low heat. Add the vegetables and salt and pepper; sweat until tender. Chop the roasted garlic and shallots. Combine with previous ingredients. Whip the eggs; add the cream, seasonings, cheese, and the vegetable mix, incorporating well. Pour into quiche mold and bake at 425 degrees for 40 to 65 minutes. Sprinkle a bit of cheese on top about 10 minutes before quiche is set. It should be so firm to the touch when pulled from the oven. Let rest for 30 to 40 minutes before cutting. For the shell, a 9-inch spring-form mold is best. Roll puff pastry ¼ inch thick, prick well with fork. Refrigerate two hours. Weight shell with rice or beans (wrapped in foil) and bake at 425 degrees for 25 minutes.

NOTE

Dennis Foy

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MOLTEN CHO COLATE CAKE

serves 12 10½ ounces semisweet chocolate (do not use milk chocolate; 66 percent bittersweet chocolate is best) 5¼ ounces sweet butter, cut into cubes 5¼ ounces sugar 4 egg yolks 5 egg whites Pinch of salt ⅛ teaspoon lemon juice 12 chocolate squares Powdered sugar Melt chocolate in a double boiler. Add butter and incorporate, using a rubber spatula. Combine sugar and egg yolks and blend at no. 7 speed; mixture will double to triple in volume and become white/pale in color. Fold sugar and egg mixture into chocolate and butter mix. ( Note: e chocolate should be slightly warm, about 98 degrees; if it’s too hot, it will not bind.) Add a pinch of salt and some lemon juice to egg whites, and whip to stiff peaks. ( e salt and lemon juice stabilize the egg whites.) Fold the egg whites into the chocolate mix. Pour mixture into ring molds, filling each one-third, topping with a square of chocolate and then adding another third of mixture. ( e chocolate squares form the molten part.) Do not overfill ring mold; they should be three-quarters of the way full. e mix will expand. Bake at 425 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes. ( It should be semifirm to the touch.) Sprinkle with powdered sugar to serve. If you place a paper doily over the cake before you sprinkle with powdered sugar, and you’ll have a cool design. is recipe can be quadrupled. If made in volume, it will keep for two weeks in well-sealed plastic containers at 32 degrees. If you do not have ring molds, use a pie tin with a removable bottom. Do not use chocolate squares if you use a pie tin. e result will be a wonderful flourless chocolate cake. Add roasted walnuts and it’s another level.

NOTE

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JIM FILIP Doris & Ed’s, Highlands

In the early 1990s, before heightened security at airports, Jim Filip and his wife flew to France, surreptitiously carrying onto the plane a few boxes full of twelve dozen live so-shell crabs. e boxes were wrapped in children’s gi wrap, which the couple hoped would render them innocuous. Filip and his wife were heading to a winery, where Filip was planning to prepare a Jersey Shore feast for a contessa who lived in Bordeaux. For most of the flight, their contraband went unnoticed, despite the occasional rustling of the crabs. But in France, a customs officer stopped them. “What’s in the box?” Filip’s face was invisible behind the load he was carrying, but his wife had a ready answer. “Gis for the children.” e couple was ushered along. Perhaps even if they’d been caught, a Frenchman would have understood why someone would go to such lengths for a dinner. In any event, it certainly wasn’t the first time that Filip went above and beyond, breaking with convention and sometimes with reason itself, to put fresh, quality ingredients on the table. Filip bought Doris & Ed’s in 1978 from Doris and Ed Petrasek; at the time it was a ninety-seat family eatery, where, for $7.95, you could order a Klondike Combination—broiled Alaska king crab, shrimp, and fish filet. Or perhaps a fisherman’s delight, garnished with fancy mushroom caps. But business was not good: “e first summer, you could 61

throw a hand grenade and not hit anyone.” And Filip was having second thoughts. “We’re probably going to walk away from it because I don’t think we’re going to make it.” But he decided to struggle through. And in the spring of 1979, he was summoned from the kitchen to meet a couple at the bar, restaurant critics from the small local newspaper. “is is the best seafood we’ve ever had at the Jersey Shore,” he was told. It was his first good review, and it brought in business. Still, Doris & Ed’s was not serving the kind of food Filip wanted. Filip had worked in Kansas City for the Steak ’n’ Ale chain, a qualityminded restaurant that hand-picked its beef. He began to make changes. One of his first moves was to remove Lancers and Blue Nun from the menu. People considered it heresy; he was flat-out told he would fail. Filip didn’t drink wine, and he didn’t know anything about it. But he did sense 62

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this: “Wine is going to be important.” He tried to buy from Mondavi, but the restaurant was considered too low-brow. So Filip wrote Bob Mondavi a letter, and the company relented. And today, thanks to Filip’s passion for good vintages and self-taught knowledge, the restaurant has been given the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence every year since 1985. Filip made other changes, sometimes little things—going to upstate New York for better butter, for example ( he wanted a more clean taste). But the most important change, at least as far as the legacy of the restaurant would be concerned, was when Filip decided he needed more and better options for his fish. “You came to the Jersey Shore to eat fried flounder,” says Filip. “You didn’t eat salmon. It was too exotic.” He started to get up in the wee hours so he could shop the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, which can be a rough-and-tumble free-for-all, especially for a small buyer. But Filip began to build relationships, make friends, increase the number of purveyors who would accept his checks. ( Today Filip deals with the sons of vendors he bought from back then.) And Doris & Ed’s began to serve salmon. Broiled, with dill butter. Still, Filip didn’t necessarily think he was doing anything that special. He was doing what he was supposed to do—buying good ingredients, staying on top of industry trends, trying always to get better. It just seemed logical. In 1998, when Doris & Ed’s won a James Beard award, the first ever given under the mantel of regional classic, Filip thought it was an April Fool’s joke. And then a colleague asked if he was ready for the onslaught, if his phone system, for example, could handle the calls. Filip spent $5,000 on a new phone system. It was $5,000 well spent. e folks at James Beard were right; Doris & Ed’s is a classic—actually, even better. It’s the embodiment of that idea you have in your head of everything an East Coast seafood restaurant ought to be, practically an artist’s watercolor rendering of fine dining at the Shore. Most times in life, however, that artist’s rendering is just that, a concept, an image without a tangible counterpart in real life, a wistful illusion—like when you dream of a perfect summer day in the middle of February. Yet Doris & Ed’s somehow manages to be the reality; it’s the kind of place that offers casual luxury, Nantucket bay scallops that taste like candy, lobster bisques so creamy and full of rich lobster that it renders all other lobster bisques obsolete—and saltwater live-lobster tanks, with creatures bobbing about until the minute they are cooked.

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And the restaurant has received many more accolades, with consistently good reviews—accolades from Gourmet magazine and Bon Appetit—and Filip was named New Jersey’s restaurateur of the year in 2004. Still, it’s a tricky thing to maintain a classic restaurant in an everchanging environment. You can’t keep everything the same. And Doris & Ed’s, despite its classic designation, is probably also one of the more adventurous restaurants in the state. People don’t notice, perhaps—all those familiar dishes remain—but Filip is one of those guys who manages to be on the cusp of whatever’s next in food, mostly because he puts himself out there. “You have to force yourself to be exposed. You have to be willing to accept the exposure.” Filip likes to eat, he likes to travel, he likes to try new things. And then he brings back those concepts to the restaurant. At Manhattan’s Le Bernadin, for example, he ate tuna carpaccio in the days when you just didn’t eat raw fish. But Le Bernadin had a reputation for advancing seafood. “It gave me an opening to put tuna carpaccio on my menu here.” “A lot of restaurants never change,” says Filip. “You have to develop the wherewithal to proceed into the future. e pizza you ate four years ago is not the pizza you eat today.” Doris & Ed’s is not trying to be the French Laundry. “But if you don’t keep trying to improve, you don’t satisfy your customers. A lot of people in the restaurant business are not daring enough.”

SECRET: “Seek the best ingredients. Always evolve.”

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GRILLED HALIBUT WITH ROMESCO SAUCE

serves 4 ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil Grated zest of 1 lemon ½ bunch thyme Four 6-ounce filets of halibut Salt Freshly ground pepper In large shallow bowl, mix together the oil, zest, and thyme. Toss the fish in the marinade, cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Romesco Sauce

¾ cup piquillo peppers ½ cup hand-torn pieces of day-old bread 1 clove garlic ¾ cup salt 1 teaspoon sugar ½ cup almonds, toasted ¾ cup blended olive oil 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 teaspoon sherry vinegar 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar Blend piquillo peppers, bread, garlic, salt, sugar, and toasted almonds in food processor and process to a smooth paste. While machine is running, slowly add the oil, lemon juice, and vinegars; process until well mixed. To serve: Prepare hot grill. Remove the fish from the marinade, season with salt and pepper and grill until just cooked through, about 3 minutes on each side. Serve with Romesco sauce.

suggested wine: 2006 Chalk Hill Estate Chardonnay, Sonoma, California; 2007 St. Innocent, Winemakers Cuvèe, Oregon

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AUTUMN BEET SALAD

serves 4 3 candy-cane beets, medium size, or regular red beets, salt roasted 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Sea salt ¼ cup basic vinaigrette (recipe follows) ½ cup black radish, coarsely grated ¼ cup Granny Smith apples, grated 1 teaspoon flat-leaf parsley chopped Freshly ground black pepper, salt 6 ounces watercress or rocket arugula, trimmed Wash beets, coat with olive oil, and roll in course sea salt. Wrap in foil and bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes or until tender. Remove from oven and cool. For the salad: In a bowl, mix the vinaigrette with the radish and let sit for one hour. Peel and cut the baked beets into ⅓-inch slices. Arrange the slices in an overlapping circle on four plates. Season with salt and pepper. Toss the radish and grated Granny Smith apples with the parsley and season with salt and pepper. Arrange the watercress or arugula on plate, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper. Top with the radish-apple mixture and serve. Drizzle basic vinaigrette around plated beets. Basic Vinaigrette

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil Whisk together the lemon juice, vinegar, and mustard. Season with salt and pepper. Slowly drizzle in the olive oil while continuing to whisk. Taste and adjust seasonings.

suggested wine: 2005 Swanson Merlot, Napa Valley, California; 2005 Hirsch, Gaisberg Riesling, Kamptal, Austria

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MUSSELS AND CLAMS WITH CHORIZO SAUSAGE IN AN ORANGE-SCENTED BROTH

serves 2 6 tablespoons olive oil 18 mussels and clams (total), cleaned and rinsed ½ cup chorizo sausage, diced or sliced on the bias 2 garlic cloves, smashed 2 cups braising liquid (recipe follows) 1 teaspoon kosher salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 2 torn basil leaves ½ tablespoon minced fresh parsley leaves Loaf of fresh crusty bread Heat a large sauté pan on high heat. Add the olive oil, heat until shimmering. Toss the shellfish and sausage and cook, shaking and stirring for 2 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add about 2 cups of the braising liquid, stir and cook until the shellfish have opened and the sauce has reduced by about half. Add salt and pepper, basil, and parsley; stir and toss around until everything is well coated. Serve in deep soup bowls with lots of fresh crusty bread. Braising Liquid

2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice 1 cup white wine 1 teaspoon lime juice

suggested wine: 2007 Chateau Ste. Michelle Erocia Riesling, Washington; 2004 Peay La Bruma Syrah, California

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SESAME-COATED YELLOW FIN-TUNA ON ASIAN SLAW WITH A SOY, GINGER, AND GARLIC SAUCE

serves 4 Sauce

2 cups chicken stock or vegetable stock 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon low-sodium soy sauce 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, grated 1 teaspoon garlic, chopped 1½ teaspoons sesame oil 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 tablespoon water Place stock, 1 cup soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and sesame oil in a stock pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for 2 minutes. Mix cornstarch, water, and 1 tablespoon soy sauce. Whisk in half the cornstarch mixture and bring to a boil. Check the thickness and add more if necessary. Strain the sauce and keep warm until service. Asian Slaw

1 small head bok choy, julienned 1 medium carrot, julienned on mandolin 1 red pepper, julienned ¼ pound snow peas, julienned Toss together and chill until service. Slaw Vinaigrette

¼ cup rice-wine vinegar 3 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce ½ cup peanut oil 1 shallot, minced 1½ tablespoons cilantro, chopped 1 tablespoons ginger, grated

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Place rice wine vinegar in a stainless bowl, add soy sauce, then whisk in peanut oil. Whisk in shallots, cilantro, and ginger until combined. Keep at room temperature for service. Tuna

Four 1-inch-thick 8-ounce tuna steaks Salt, pepper 1 ounce white sesame seeds 1 ounce black sesame seeds 4 tablespoons canola oil (for searing) 4 scallions, sliced Season tuna with salt and pepper. en coat both sides with sesame seeds. Heat a large sauté pan to medium-high heat. Add some oil and let it get hot. Place tuna in pan and turn heat down to medium. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes on each side until medium rare or medium. Place sauce on serving plate. Mix vegetables with the slaw vinaigrette and place on center of the plate. Place seared tuna on top and garnish with scallions around the plate. is dish may be used for appetizers or an entrée. You may also slice the tuna and fan it out for presentation.

suggested wine: 2005 Stonestreet Upper Barn Chardonnay, Sonoma, California; 2006 Anthill Farms, Tia Maria Vineyard Pinot Noir, Sonoma, California

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SHRIMP WITH BARREL-AGED FETA AND ORZO

serves 2 ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil ½ cup Spanish onion, chopped 3 cloves garlic, minced ¼ cup orzo, boiled in salted water for about 10 minutes ¼ cup Ouzo or Sambuca 2 cups canned tomatoes, diced, plus liquid 1 teaspoon Greek oregano, dried 1 teaspoon salt 1½ pounds shrimp, large, shelled and deveined ¼ pound feta 2 tablespoons flat-leaf parsley, chopped In a large saucepan, heat oil over moderately low heat. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, then add the Ouzo or Sambuca. Raise the heat to moderate and add the tomatoes with their liquid, oregano, orzo, and salt. Bring to a boil and cook over moderate heat, partially covered, stirring occasionally until thickened for about 15 minutes. Add shrimp, then bring back to a simmer until shrimp are just done, about 3 minutes. Stir in feta cheese and flat-leaf parsley. Bake in a 350-degree oven for about 10 minutes, then serve.

suggested wine: 2007 Domaine Christian Moreau, Chablis, AC France; 2007 Flowers Sonoma Coast, Chardonnay, California

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MARICEL PRESILLA Cucharamama, Hoboken Zafra, Hoboken

Maricel Presilla was kissed as a child by Cuban leader Fidel Castro, applauded as an adult by U.S. president Barack Obama. Her life story—from Cuban refugee in 1970 to honored White House chef in 2009—is the kind of story that seems as if it should come packaged with grandiose background music, upliing trumpets, and anticipatory drum rolls. Presilla is a historian with a doctorate in medieval Spanish history from New York University. She writes a column for the Miami Herald, and has authored books about Latin American cuisine and the history of chocolate. She runs two highly acclaimed restaurants in Hoboken, has opened a Latin food shop, and in 2009 was named James Beard best chef finalist. And she became the first woman in history to be guest chef for the White House, preparing a Latin-themed meal that pleased Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. e whole thing about the White House dinner still surprises her. She was shocked to be chosen in the first place, punctuating each reason with a small amount of silence, a bit of white space, to provide emphasis. “I’m in New Jersey, you know.” “And I’m not one of the boys.” “And I’m Latin.” It was a rarefied experience—from going through the advance back-

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ground checks to wandering the White House pantries looking for condensed milk. She met the first family’s dog, sat in the Blue Room. Her menu was inclusive and annotated, with dishes chosen to showcase an aspect of Latin culture. She made Cuban roast pork with mango canapés and Honduran enchiladas. And she made pasteles, a Puerto Rican recipe that is both labor intensive and delicate. “Pasteles have a way of turning bad,” says Presilla. ey are an earthy food, a holiday food, and the recipe was a two-day process. e filling is wrapped in green banana leaves, which can be quite fragile. But then Presilla’s pasteles were served to Sonia Sotomayor, who said they were as good as her mother’s. “It was the kindest thing she could have said,” says Presilla. “I had no idea she was as special as she is in person. I felt that all that work was for her.” In truth, Presilla, petite, bold, and blond, seems perfectly suited to the White House. She’s an ambassador herself, a missionary of sorts, 72

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one of those old souls who thinks it’s not only important to study, learn from, and preserve the past, but also to celebrate it, keep it real, and value its authenticity. And her life’s goal seems to be as vessel, a conduit to history, keeping it alive in its pure form, so we can understand it, embrace it, enjoy it. It’s personal for her—even in her choice of jewelry. One of her favorite pieces is a stunning sterling-silver necklace, a bold piece of statement jewelry handcraed by an artist from Lima, Peru. It showcases fragments of a textile that dates from the pre-Colombian era. “Having something that old just connects me to something that’s important to me,” says Presilla. “For me, it has to be personal. Otherwise I’m not happy with it.” Her relationship with food is the same. It’s personal. Her Cuban childhood is filled with happy memories of food, and she shares enchanting little stories of her uncle’s pig roasts, her mother’s Key lime pie with its perfect meringue, the leover sweet torrejas, a sort of Cuban French toast, that the family would try to hide. “ey would always put it on top of the refrigerator and I would find a way of getting there.” She talks about sweet fried plantains, and how they were used by every Cuban mother to cajole her children into eating their black-bean soup. In her house, because her mother was a professor of literature, the plantains were pieces of gold, and the cajoling was done with the Russian fable of Sadko. “I would be spellbound listening to stories about Prince Sadko and eating my sweet fried plantains.” ose foods, those flavors, those experiences, they mark her. “When you are brought up in that kind of rich food environment, you want to continue the tradition.” And so the food she serves at her restaurants is not fancy food, but rustic, authentic food, rich with tradition and memories, true to its origins. At Cucharamama, the transformation is nearly children’sbook magical; the door handle to the restaurant is a giant Ecuadorian mother spoon; open it and you’re in a world of slow-cooked meals, complex empanadas, braised meats, soups, stews. e restaurant is earthy, with original art and sculpture from every country in South America, cement-tiled floors painted in Peruvian colors. e fire in the brick oven, which was handcraed by a Venezuelan architect, reigns over the room like the ancient culinary god that it is.

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Zafra, dedicated singularly to Cuban food, is less dramatic, with tables covered in vivid oilcloth and chairs so close you’ll elbow your neighbors. e food here is familiar family food—tapas, pork roast (marinated in Cuban allspice and cumin), churrasco. “at so-called fine-dining restaurant is not in my genetic makeup.” It’s refreshing to hear someone come up with a different definition of fine food, wealth, success. Presilla talks about her father, who is an artist. His artwork decorates Zafra. And when she was a young woman, she always wanted a piece of his art in her home. Even if they didn’t have chairs to sit on, she felt rich when she had one of his paintings on the wall. “I always felt very wealthy because I had art. I felt so rich. Who has a painting like this? I always felt I was better off than a lot of people.” And she talks about her husband, who swam here from Cuba, who was rescued at the Naval Station on Guantanamo Bay, a beacon of freedom for many young Cuban boys. He arrived on U.S. soil on anksgiving Day, and his first meal in the States was turkey and canned cranberry sauce. Presilla has a manic schedule; she’s taping cooking shows for Telemundo, flying to Malaysia to guest chef at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, off to San Antonio as an adviser on Latin cuisine for the Culinary Institute of America. Presilla is a chocolate expert, and her book, e New Taste of Chocolate, is a homage to the ancient cultural history of the cacao bean. ( Presilla so reveres chocolate that cacao is part of her e-mail address.) Modern processing kills the authentic taste of chocolate—most of us have no idea of its true depths. Presilla predicts—hopes—that we’re on the cusp of a global chocolate revolution, where we return to some of the ancient methods and fuss over the origins of the cacao bean and its processing as much as we do with wine and grapes. ( Watch for an updated book.) And she recently opened Ultramarinos, a Hoboken store selling Latin American foodstuffs, books, tableware, accessories—even takeout. It offers Presilla a bigger kitchen for catering, a place for classes, events, book signings. e store is eclectic, charming, and full of things she loves from all her travels ( perhaps even jewelry). e name itself is ancient—the name of some of the oldest stores in Spain—and translates to “from beyond the sea.” In Spain, these were the stores that sold goods from the colonies. Some still exist and are among the most beautiful in that country. 74

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A great chef must have a culinary curiosity, says Presilla, and needs to experience other cultures—and not just by eating in a restaurant, but by shopping in the markets, preparing the dishes. “You need to travel to be a better cook.” But she loves her little home in Weehawken, with its view of Manhattan and its backyard garden. One recent summer, she grew 100 different types of chilies, and, by season’s end, didn’t even have room at home to park the car. e idea that success equals Manhattan is bunk, she says. inking that Manhattan offers everything is behaving like an invalid. “We can’t use Manhattan as a crutch. We have to step up.” As for that long-ago day in Cuba, when the communist leader visited her elementary school and kissed her, she remembers this: Castro smelled like sour milk.

SECRET: “Go the extra mile.” You can’t feel too comfortable, or start thinking that things are good enough. You need to go the extra mile when it hurts to do so, when it’s inconvenient. If you need an extra flower to make that arrangement exquisite, but you’re already halfway there, turn around and go back. An extra step will make it superb. “e most talented and exciting are the ones who go the extra mile.”

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MARICEL PRESILLA’S ONE-SKILLET COUNTRY BREAKFAST FOR TWO We are used to Spartan early breakfasts of scrambled serves 2 egg whites and decaffeinated café con leche during the week, but when my husband and I stay at our country house for the weekend, this country breakfast of eggs, hickory-smoked bacon, pan-fried queso blanco, tomatoes, and peaches is the treat we enjoy for a leisurely late brunch. To simplify the cooking, I prepare everything in one large, heavy-gauge, nonstick skillet. First, I brown the bacon, rendering its fat to sauté the cheese, tomatoes, and peach. e eggs come to the skillet last and are fried in the remaining bacon drippings. To round up the meal I whip up a simplified version of Mexican guacamole by mashing a buttery Hass avocado coarsely with some jalapeño, garlic, and a drizzle of good olive oil. It tastes heavenly with thick slices of toasted bread rubbed with some garlic. 6 thick slices of meaty bacon ( preferably Smithfield naturallyhickory-smoked, thick-sliced bacon) 4 ounces queso blanco, preferably queso blanco for frying ( para freir), thickly sliced 2 medium, vine-ripened tomatoes, cut into 1-inch slices 1 ripe peach, pitted and cut into thick wedges Coarse salt to taste Sugar to taste ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper 4 large eggs ( preferably organic) Avocado mash (recipe follows) Place a 12-inch, heavy-gauge, nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add the bacon slices and brown lightly, stirring occasionally. As soon as the bacon starts rendering its fat, add the cheese and sauté until light brown on both sides (the cheese will be lightly blistered), about 1 minute on each side. Remove with a slotted spoon to a large serving platter and keep warm. Add the tomatoes and peach to the skillet. Sprinkle with salt and sugar to taste and the cayenne pepper, and sauté until golden brown. Transfer to the serving platter with the cheese. Remove the bacon from the skillet as soon as it begins to brown. ( If you crisp the bacon too much, the fat rendered will be speckled with brown ba-

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con bits that will darken the eggs.) Place on the serving platter with the rest of the cooked ingredients. Add the eggs to the skillet and fry to your taste, basting with the bacon drippings. Serve on heated plates with a side of pan-fried cheese and the sautéed tomatoes and peach, a dollop of avocado mash, and thick slices of toasted rustic bread rubbed with some garlic. Avocado Mash

1 small avocado ( preferably a buttery Mexican type like Hass) 2 cloves, garlic, thinly sliced 1 small jalapeño, thinly sliced ½ teaspoon olive oil Squeeze of fresh lime Coarse salt to taste While the bacon browns, halve the avocado and pry out the seed. Scoop the pulp with a spoon and place in a small serving bowl. Add the garlic, jalapeño, olive oil, lime, and salt to taste. Mash coarsely with a fork. Taste for seasoning.

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MARICEL PRESILLA’S TRUFFLED TARO SKILLET CAKES WITH BRAISED MUSHRO OMS ( Llapingachos de Taro Trufados con Fricasé de Hongos) Inspired by the popular Ecuadorian potato llapingaserves 6 as an chos, these small skillet cakes are made with a silky taro appetizer or malanga puree seasoned with a mixture of scallions and white truffle oil, which intensifies the tuber’s earthy and nutty flavors. I brown the cakes quickly like llapingachos to develop a golden crust and serve them atop braised mushrooms flavored with a garlic and onion sofrito enriched with strips of serrano pepper and finished with a tangy white wine for a subtle touch of acidity. I oen serve this dish as an appetizer or a side for steak, lamb chops or quail. Both the cakes and the fricassee can be made ahead a day before and preheated. Pair with a lush Catena Alta Chardonnay. Taro or Malanga Skillet Cakes

1½ pounds taro or Hispanic Caribbean malanga (about 2 large ones) 8 scallions (white and 2 inches green included), finely chopped 1 tablespoon crème fraîche, Mexican cream, or sour cream 2 tablespoons white truffle olive oil ½ teaspoon salt or to taste 6 sprigs of fresh thyme Peel the taro or malanga with a small paring knife, making sure to trim any dark spots. Rinse under running cold water. ( If not using immediately, place in a bowl and cover with acidulated water.) Place in a medium pot with about 2 to 3 quarts cold water and salt to taste. Bring to a boil over medium heat; cook until tender, about 20 minutes. Drain and pass through a food mill to make a smooth puree with no lumps; place in a bowl. Add the scallions, crème fraîche, Mexican cream, or sour cream, truffle oil, and salt to taste; mix well. Divide into 12 equal portions and roll into balls between the palms of your hands. Flatten into 3-inch-wide patties and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or parchment paper and let cool at room temperature or inside the refrigerator until ready to use. While the patties cool, prepare the mushrooms (see below). When ready to serve, coat a large nonstick skillet with a thin film of olive oil (for a deep golden color, use achiote-infused olive oil) and heat 78

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over medium heat until sizzling. Working in two batches, place the taro cakes on the pan and brown for 1 minute on each side to form a crust. Li out with a spatula onto a plate. To serve, divide the mushrooms into 6 portions and heap in the center of each appetizer platter. Top with 2 skillet cakes and garnish with a sprig of thyme. Serve immediately. Braised Mushrooms

1 pound, 4 ounces mixed exotic mushrooms (small shiitake and baby bellas, oyster mushrooms, chanterelles, or any combination of seasonal wild and commercial mushrooms; avoid large, old mushrooms) ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped 1 large yellow onion, halved lengthwise and thinly slivered 2 to 3 serrano or jalapeño peppers, halved lengthwise, seeded and deveined, and cut into thin slivers 1 teaspoon salt or to taste ¼ teaspoon ground cumin ½ cup white wine ( preferably a citrusy Chilean Sauvignon Blanc) ½ cup well-flavored vegetable broth Trim the stems of the mushrooms. Place in a large bowl and cover with cold water. Swish around with your hands to dislodge any dirt adhering to them. Drain and rinse again under running cold water until clean. Place in a salad spinner and spin to get rid of the excess water if you wish. Place on a kitchen towel and pat dry. Slice the firmer mushrooms like baby bellas (immature Portobellas) or champignons lengthwise into medium slices; cut the oyster mushrooms, chanterelles, and shiitakes into irregular pieces. Heat the oil in a 12-inch skillet or sauté pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and sauté until golden, about 40 seconds. Add the onion and sauté until so and lightly golden, about 4 minutes. Add the serrano or jalapeño strips and season with salt and cumin; continue, cooking, stirring for 1 more minute. Add the mushrooms and sauté until golden, about 5 minutes. Stir in the white wine and chicken broth. Lower the heat and let simmer for 5 minutes or until the pan juices are reduced to a concentrated glaze. If not using immediately, let cool at room temperature or keep refrigerated, well covered with plastic wrap.

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MARICEL PRESILLA’S WARM RIPE PLANTAIN AND GRILLED PINEAPPLE SALAD WITH SMOKED PAPRIKA-JALAPEÑO DRESSING AND TOASTED PUMPKIN SEEDS ( Ensalada Tibia de Plátanos y Piña Asada en Vinagreta de Pimentón Ahumado y Jalapeño y Pepitas de Calabaza) Flavored with a smoky vinaigrette, sweet ripe plantain and grilled pineapples taste meaty and are substantial enough to be the centerpiece of a vegetarian meal.

serves 6

4 ripe plantains (about 9 ounces each) 2 quarts water ½ ripe pineapple (about 2 pounds) 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar ( preferably a grated Latin brown loaf sugar like Colombian panela or Mexican piloncillo) or Muscovado sugar Smoky paprika vinaigrette (recipe follows) 2 fire-roasted red bell peppers (about 6 ounces each), seeded and cut into ½-inch strips Toasted pumpkin seeds to garnish Trim the tips off the plantains and cut into three pieces, unpeeled. Place with the water in a large saucepan and bring to a boil over mediumhigh heat. Lower the heat to medium and simmer, uncovered, until the plantains are fork tender, about 20 minutes. Peel and cut into ½-inch slices. Place in a large bowl and set aside. Peel the pineapple and cut into 1-inch-thick slices. Place on a baking sheet and sprinkle with 1 heaping tablespoon brown sugar. Broil for 8 minutes at medium heat. Turn over and sprinkle with the remaining sugar; grill for 8 more minutes at medium heat. Cut into ½ inch cubes, discarding the tough core. Add to the plantains. Add the vinaigrette and roasted peppers to the plantain and pineapple mixture. Toss gently to mix and transfer to a serving platter. Sprinkle with the toasted pumpkin seeds. Serve warm. Smoky Paprika Vinaigrette

2 garlic cloves, finely mashed ⅛ teaspoon ground cumin ½ to 1 teaspoon Spanish smoked hot paprika ( preferably Pimentón de la Vera) or to taste 80

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1 to 2 teaspoons coarse salt or to taste 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar ⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil 2 jalapeño peppers, seeded and cut lengthwise into thin strips and finely chopped In a small bowl whisk together the garlic, cumin, smoked paprika, salt, vinegar, olive oil, and peppers. Set aside. MARICEL PRESILLA’S BRAISED CHICKEN BREASTS WITH GUATEMALAN FLAVORS ( Pollo en Estofado Con Sabor Guatemalteco) My recipe is inspired by the flavors of a chicken serves 4 estofado I once tasted in Antigua, Guatemala. In Guatemala, the seasoning ingredients are oen roasted and ground to a paste first before sautéing them to form a concentrated sauce. For company, I oen debone the breasts in the kitchen, slice them at an angle, and fan the meat over a pool of sauce. Serve with rice and a floral white wine such as Susana Balbo’s Crios Torrontés or a fresh Laura Catena’s Luca Chardonnay, both from Mendoza, Argentina. 2 whole, bone-in chicken breasts, split ⅛ teaspoon freshly ground pepper ⅛ teaspoon ground allspice ⅛ teaspoon dried thyme ⅛ teaspoon ground cloves ⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon ⅛ teaspoon dried oregano 2 bay leaves, crumbled 1 teaspoon salt Estofado (recipe follows) 3 tablespoons mild extra-virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon capers in brine, drained ½ cup dry sherry 2 tablespoons Central American cultured cream (crema centroamericana or crema mexicana, crème fraîche, or heavy cream)

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Prepare the chicken and seasonings. Rinse the chicken and pat dry. Place in a bowl. Grind the seasonings into a fine powder in a spice mill or coffee grinder, and rub all over chicken. Cover bowl tightly with plastic film and set aside for about 20 minutes. Prepare the estofado (recipe follows). Heat the oil in a 12-inch sauté pan or skillet. Sauté the chicken pieces until golden, about 5 minutes per side. Transfer to a plate. Averting your face to avoid splatters, add the estofado purée to the pan and simmer for about 5 minutes. Return the chicken to the pan along with the capers and sherry. Cover tightly, lower the heat, and simmer about 20 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a plate; cover with foil to keep warm. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve and return it to the pan. Bring to a simmer and cook until thickened, about 5 minutes. Remove the pan from heat and whisk in cultured cream. Debone chicken, if desired, and serve over the sauce. Estofado

1 medium yellow onion, unpeeled 8 large plum tomatoes 8 garlic cloves, peeled Heat a dry, heavy-bottomed skillet or griddle over medium-high heat. Place the onion and tomatoes in the skillet and roast, turning occasionally, until lightly charred, about 10 minutes. Peel the onion, remove the charred tomato skin, and chop the vegetables coarsely. Working in batches, puree them with the garlic in a food processor or blender.

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MARICEL PRESILLA’S HIBISCUS-RUM GLAZED BAKED APPLES WITH DRIED FRUITS AND CASHEWS Dried Fruit Filling

1 ounce dried cherries, coarsely chopped 1 ounce dried cranberries, coarsely chopped 1 ounce dried currants or raisins 3 prunes, pitted and coarsely chopped ½ cup dark aged rum ( preferably Bacardi Gold or Haitian Barbancourt) ¼ cup salted butter 1 ounce unsalted roasted cashew nuts, coarsely chopped ¼ cup brown loaf sugar ( preferably Colombian panela or Mexican piloncillo), grated (or medium-brown sugar) Mix the cherries, cranberries, currants or raisins, and prunes with the dark rum in a small bowl. Let soak for at least 30 minutes. Drain and reserve the rum for the hibiscus glaze. Add the butter, cashews, and sugar and mix well. Set aside. Makes about ¾ cup filling. Hibiscus-Rum Glaze

3 cups water 2 ounces dried hibiscus (sold as flor de Jamaica in Latin markets) Two 3-inch cinnamon sticks ( preferably Ceylon cinnamon, sold as Mexican canela in Hispanic markets) Pinch star anise 1 cup brown loaf sugar ( preferably Colombian panela or Mexican piloncillo), grated (or light brown sugar) While the dried fruits soak in the rum, place the water and the dried hibiscus in a 2-quart pan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Let simmer for 5 minutes. Strain and discard the hibiscus; return liquid to the pan. Add the cinnamon, star anise, and sugar and heat over medium heat while stirring to dissolve the sugar. Bring back to a boil, reduce the heat to medium low, and simmer for 35 minutes until lightly thickened. Add the reserved rum and continue cooking for 5 more minutes; set aside. Makes about 1 cup.

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Apples

6 Golden Delicious apples 1 medium lime, halved 6 sprigs fresh mint as garnish Slice ¼ inch off the top of every apple, rubbing the cut surface with lime juice as you work. ( e stem will fall out, but you can garnish the top with mint to simulate a stem and leaves.) Peel a ½-inch rim around the top of each apple. Core the apples with a paring knife, a teaspoon, or melon baller, taking care not to cut through the bottom of the apple and leaving at least ¾ inch of flesh around the core. Arrange the apples in a 12-inch × 3-inch sauté pan or skillet or an 8-inch × 10-inch roasting pan, leaving space between the apples. Fill each apple with 2 tablespoons dried fruit filling. Pour the hibiscus-rum glaze over each apple. Place the reserved apple tops loosely over the filling. Place in a preheated 350-degree oven and bake uncovered for 20 minutes. Cover with aluminum foil and continue baking for 1 hour or until the apples are so. To serve: Stick a mint sprig on each lid to garnish. Serve as dessert, hot or cold, with some of the pan juices and vanilla ice cream or as a side dish for roast pork, turkey, or lamb.

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MARICEL PRESILLA’S FIGS WITH DULCE DE LECHE ( Brevas Rellenas con Arequipe) In Colombia, cooks simmer figs in a sugar syrup to firm serves 6 them up and then fill them with arequipe, their version of the unctuous caramelized milk paste better known as dulce de leche. Prepared this way, the figs last for a long time, but I much prefer to use fresh ripe figs that offer more of a contrast to the ultra-sweet dulce de leche. is is a wonderful sweet snack for a merienda (the Latin aernoon coffee or tea time) or a simple elegant dessert with a glass of sweet wine much as port, muscatel, or a honeyed late-harvest Chardonnay. 12 large black figs (about 2 ounces each) ¼ cup dulce de leche Sea salt to taste Rinse the figs under running cold water and pat them dry. With a sharp knife, make a lengthwise incision along the center of each fig, making sure not to cut through the other side. Fill the incision with about 1 teaspoon dulce de leche and sprinkle with salt to taste. Place on a decorative plate and serve immediately.

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SCOTT ANDERSON Elements, Princeton

Henri Matisse rocked the art world in the summer of 1905 with Open Window, Collioure. e painting depicts sailboats in a Mediterranean port, but Matisse painted his waves pink, his sky turquoise and periwinkle. Open Window is provocative and vibrant, and it rewrote the rules for using color. “It was one of the first places where the world got a glimpse of what art would be in the twentieth century,” according to experts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where the painting is displayed. It would be premature to christen Elements chef Scott Anderson the Henri Matisse of the culinary world. But Anderson is no doubt among the handful of young and progressive American chefs who are pushing American cuisine into the future, who are preparing and pairing ingredients in a thoroughly new, modern, and dynamic way. Like Matisse and his color palette, Anderson is taking something intrinsic to his work—his ingredients—and throwing out the rules, freeing them from their former constraints and applications. Matisse’s paintings are evocative and thrilling, not simply a replica of something already found in nature. Anderson’s work, too, is not just a replica of the meals you already know. Anderson calls it interpretive American cuisine, and, at Elements, you feel as though you are dining on the cusp of the future. Anderson is young enough—and slightly scruffy, in an Ivy League 89

sort of way—to be easily mistaken for one of the well-schooled college students that swarm the nearby campus. But beneath that fresh face and pinstriped apron lies an intensity, a vision, a sureness of purpose that most college boys don’t yet possess. Anderson brings everything to the table, to be sure—it’s practically visible. But what seems to guide him most is his strict discipline, his Taoist philosophy and a willful determination to collect as much information about food as he possibly can—and then experiment with it. As a chef, Anderson is a bit unusual—he doesn’t like sugar ( “I can’t eat a whole dessert” ) and he doesn’t like fresh tomatoes ( “I’m not one of those guys who can slice up a tomato and put it on a piece of bread and eat it” ). Nor has he had any formal culinary training. He graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in psychology and sociology. 90

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But he did work at the famed Ryland Inn, which offered an intense training ground for many great chefs in the state. And he does look at cooking as a scholarly and scientific pursuit. He uses the kitchen computer as frequently as the stove, constantly Googling for an unusual ingredient or a new technique. And he keeps up with the latest gadgets—a ermo Circulator, for example, allows him to make his famous 48-hour short ribs, which are vacuum-sealed and cooked in a water bath for two days. American cuisine is all interpretive, argues Anderson. “What is American food? Cattails, acorn, buffalo, tomatoes, corn, walnuts? American cuisine is awful.” We adopt flavors from all over the world, and have always done so. “Basically, I can do anything I want.” For inspiration, Anderson looks first to Spain. “Spain is at the forefront of edgy food.” Chefs there are extremely playful, experimental, artistic— using molecular gastronomy, foams, surprising temperatures, unusual presentations. Anderson knows all of it won’t fly in Princeton. “is still is the United States. We can’t get away with a lot of things they get away with in Spain.” anks to a father who worked for IBM, Anderson spent many years in Japan, and he’s actually quite grateful to have missed the whole American middle-school experience. Instead, he spent those formative years in a much stricter culture and, as a student in an all-boys French Jesuit Catholic school, in a much more demanding academic setting. It was controlled, rigid, respectful. But at home, his mother was a free spirit, creative. And experimental in the kitchen—with all those unfamiliar ingredients, she had to be. She once bought onion rings at the market, only to discover at the table that they were squid rings; the whole family had a good laugh. All of which translates today into an exploratory attitude in a kitchen underscored by martial arts principles—and a childlike nostalgia when Anderson eats a bowl of Japanese noodles. e primary emphasis here is on local and fresh, but Anderson culls ingredients from all over the world and is inspired by many different cuisines. e menu changes weekly, and even the drinks are not what you know—what with house-infused vodkas and homemade tonics to go with your gin. Menu options include ceviche with yuzu juice, cavatelli with lamb bacon, scallops in a fiy-year-old balsamic vinegar. Desserts are redefined too; a carrot cake is not cake per se but small cubes—

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like tiny gis—of local carrots and raisins, and spiced surprisingly with cardamom. e kit kat is a gourmet version of the popular candy bar, with gianduja—chocolate with hazelnut—plus more hazelnut. e mille feuille is panna cotta made with local honey. Princeton is an odd location for such a radical chef. e town itself is erudite, traditional, and somewhat fussy. And, yes, some culinary awakening has begun, but Princeton was historically and notoriously bere of great places to dine, as if food were not noble enough to be a scholarly pursuit but instead offered mere sustenance, a pragmatic necessity that could never be entwined with truth, beauty, or even science. Like Albert Einstein and his famous inability to tie his shoes or comb his hair, Princeton seemed to take a dim view of the commonality of dinner; in the grand scheme of things, did it really matter? Indeed, the dinner party joke in this town was that you could always be sure your host would serve a great malt Scotch, but you might also get supermarket crackers topped by cheese from a can. Elements is an odd fit for Princeton on the architecture front as well. Designed by Anderson’s friend Bob Steele, the entire restaurant is made of real stuff—wood, stone, metal. It’s functional and hip, slightly modern in a seventies California sense, a bit sensible and a bit whimsical. It’s part Brady Bunch house, part Frank Lloyd Wright. Plus the restaurant sits next to a Shell gasoline station on Bayard Lane, well away from the bustling downtown, and is quite easy to drive past. “We’re off in our own little world,” says Anderson, who immediately realizes his unintended double meaning. “It’s where we are—in our own little world.” Anderson is petrified of the dining room, and is way too shy to make his way out of the kitchen to chat up his guests. So he has a chef’s table, sequestered in the kitchen, where diners can watch him work. Many expect theatrics, a bit of drama, and end up disappointed. Anderson is not a chef who throws plates—or even yells, for that matter. “at has gone the way of the dodo.” Once, for fun, he and his pastry chef staged a fight. “I’m a horrible actor, so I’m not sure how well it went.” One tattoo on Anderson’s arm symbolizes wu wei, a Tao philosophy of natural action, effortless action. For Anderson, that means being aware, anticipating what will happen one step ahead, two steps ahead, and being ready for it, letting it flow through you. e tattoo is on his right hand, his working hand. “is is the hand that’s going to do 92

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everything.” Other ink includes a Tibetan symbol for protection—a tattoo he got right before he opened the business. Indeed, the restaurant did open its doors in less-than-optimistic times. But Anderson says these are Darwinian days for restaurants—the mediocre ones will die out, and those that survive will come out shining. And he also says he’s not the kind of guy who defines success by money alone. Clearly, Elements is a vivid and bright addition to the state’s restaurant scene. And Anderson’s philosophy—cooking without limits, experimental interpretation—is liberating and revolutionary. It’s erudite, forward-thinking, scholarly. It’s food, but it’s also science, and, yes, art.

SECRET: Salt. “We know how to use salt.” Elements has twelve different types of salt in the kitchen—including black lava salt, Himalayan salt, French fleur de sel, Japanese deep water salt. e right salt can make a world of difference in taste, but many American cooks are afraid to use it—or don’t know when to use it. “You can’t put salt on aerward.”

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Chef Scott Anderson does not cook from established recipes. But here are methods for two of his favorite stocks. Quantities don’t matter, although some cooks prefer to use equal parts carrots, onions, and celery. Otherwise, experiment. MUSHRO OM STO CK Cremini mushrooms Salt Carrot

Onion Celery yme

Clean the mushrooms thoroughly and put in a large pot. Salt somewhat liberally. Place on medium-low heat with a lid. Aer some time, check the mushrooms to see if liquid has come out. If liquid has come out, drain and repeat till the mushrooms are completely dry. Mushrooms are comprised of mostly water, so the resulting liquid should be highly flavorful. Once all the liquid has been extracted, add some carrot, onion, very little celery, and thyme. Barely cover with water and simmer for 30 minutes only. Strain the mushroom stock and cool both the mushroom extraction and the mushroom stock. Combine as needed for flavor. By the way, the first part of the recipe makes the best consommé on earth, if you add a little ginger and lemongrass. VEGETABLE STO CK Celery Carrot Onion Leek

Cabbage Tomato Garbanzo beans, lentils, or white beans

Combine all vegetables and salt somewhat liberally. Put on medium heat and cover. Follow same procedure as mushroom stock. Once the liquid has been extracted, cover barely with water, add the beans and simmer till the beans are tender. (e beans are added because they have iron, which gives the stock a meaty characteristic that is not typical in your average vegetable stock. Aer draining, use beans for hummus, purees, chili, etc.) e vegetables should not be thrown away. ey should be put in a cloth and wrung out. ere’s lots of flavorful stuff there.

NOTE

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Mattias Haggland, the bartender at Elements, created the following cocktails. Amigo/Amaro translates to “bitter friend” in a combination of Spanish and Italian. is drink uses Mexican and Italian spirits. Luminor is a drink that was made for a private party for Hamilton Jewelers in Princeton; it’s named aer a particularly nice watch they sell.  AMIG O/AMARO 1½ ounces jalopeno-infused reposado tequila (we like the brand Oro Azul) ¾ ounce Campari ½ ounce agave syrup ½ ounce fresh lemon juice. Combine ingredients and shake well, then strain into an old-fashioned glass full of fresh ice. Garnish with a lemon. LUMINOR 1½ ounces Rittenhouse 100-proof rye ¾ ounce yellow chartreuse ½ ounce elderflower syrup ½ ounce fresh lime juice ½ ounce ginger beer syrup 2 dashes grapefruit bourbon bitters Combine ingredients and shake. Strain onto fresh ice in an oldfashioned glass, and top with a splash of soda water. Garnish with a couple of sprigs of mint. Beat the mint against the palms of your hands to release some of their oils so that those aromatics can be smelled while you sip the drink. 

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ANTHONY AMOROSO SeaBlue, Borgata, Atlantic City

e first time chef Anthony Amoroso swam in a triathlon, he thought he was going to drown. A triathlon is a difficult test, even for the well-trained athlete. You swim, you cycle, then you run. For many competitors, swimming is the most difficult part of the race—which can seem odd. It is, aer all, the shortest distance in the race, and it’s also at the beginning of the competition, before an athlete has a chance to get tired. But the problem with swimming is threefold. First, you’re swimming in open water—in the ocean or in a lake—which is not where most people train. And then you swim with everybody else, with no lanes as guides, and end up struggling against a group of thrashing arms and legs. e third problem is your own adrenaline. Being too pumped and excited at the beginning of any competition can throw off your timing and concentration, but when you’re swimming, too much adrenaline can really screw up your breathing. It’s tough to stay calm. In his first race, Amoroso was fighting all those issues. He had way too much adrenaline and was hyperventilating. And amid the group of splashing swimmers, he wondered if anyone would even notice should he go under. “Are there scuba divers? When I sink, will someone see me?” He turned on his back to catch his breath. He looked to the buoy. It was very, very, very far away. He looked toward shore. He decided the 96

buoy was closer than the shore. And even though reaching the buoy was not the end of the race—it was just a marker representing one leg of the swim—he decided to continue. “ere’s a point where you decide (A) are you going to be a quitter, or ( B) are you going to finish?” It was farther to go back than to go forward. Amoroso finished the swim, and finished the competition. Amoroso is one of those guys who doesn’t fit neatly behind a label and is most certainly not a chef from central casting. He’s a high school dropout who has managed to become one of the highest-rising stars in the Michael Mina restaurant empire. He is a quiet, thoughtful, and reserved man, closer to introvert than larger-than-life television star, yet he did the unthinkable in beating Chef Masaharu Morimoto on Iron Chef in 2009. He’s a man who thinks about food every waking minute,

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yet when he trains for his triathlons and Iron Man events, he eats a clean diet—and a quite boring one—of rice, beans, green vegetables, white fish, turkey, and chicken. And he’s pushing for local, sustainable, and organic food at the SeaBlue in the Borgata, in a town better equipped for luring its visitors into wanton debauchery than in asking them to be responsible, disciplined souls who commit to reducing their carbon footprint. Yet somehow the complexity that is Amoroso all works, and it is illustrated, in simple yet creative and dramatic ways, at the table. SeaBlue is a restaurant that broadly specializes in everything from the ocean—from Maine lobster pot pie to ceviche, caviar to paella, sea bass to raw oysters. At the restaurant, Amoroso can stun you with his fish—raw tuna and scallops all lovely and slippery and primordial, or a crisp tapiocaencrusted squid. But he’ll just as easily impress you with a rich pork belly or his Kobe short ribs. Desserts are just as dramatic—a grand Philly cheesecake or bite-sized beignets with chocolate crème cocoa. Amoroso grew up in Woodbridge, in family that ate real food. For breakfast, he’d have cream of wheat, oatmeal, eggs, bacon, pancakes. And then he’d get on a public bus each morning (on his way to private school) and see a mother and son sharing their morning meal—a bag of Fritos and a Coke. “I never got to have that stuff.” If he was a bit jealous then, he’s grateful now. He had a childhood of garden-to-table food, eating ripe tomatoes like apples over the sink, fresh zucchini. Plus lush dinners made by an Italian American grandmother who thought nothing of her stovetop braised meats, but who was actually cooking a bollito misto. But Amoroso was also the kind of kid who got into trouble. He quit school in ninth grade—all that sitting still and listening, well, it was just too much. “I’ve never been good at [being] stationary.” At the time, he had no idea that culinary school even existed, but later, aer he got his GED and graduated from the Culinary Institute of Hudson County College, he discovered that the kitchen was an excellent fit for him. It’s tactile. And it offers instant gratification. “I can’t imagine being the guy who works on one project his whole life.” Amoroso has worked with some of the best chefs in the business— Michael White, Rick Moonen. But it was in Las Vegas where he really began to shine, working for über-chef Michael Mina, and earning a Michelin star at the Bellagio. Mina put him at the helm of the 98

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SeaBlue in 2009, the same year Amoroso was invited to appear on Iron Chef. Mina liked the idea of Iron Chef. Win or lose, it didn’t matter, he said. But for Amoroso, the athlete, the competitor, it did matter. “I don’t have the intention of losing at all. My brain doesn’t work like that.” And so he approached it like he would approach any competition, and began training. He came to work a few hours early and asked his staff to throw out random ingredients. One day it was sole, another day duck, a third chickpea flour. “What do you do with chickpea flour?” Amoroso made soup, fritters, cakes. On the actual show, the mystery ingredient was bronzini. Amoroso pickled it, sautéed it, fried it. He put it in a Pernod and fennel pot pie and smoked it with star anise and cinnamon. And aer he won, he didn’t tell anyone, not even his parents, who came to the Borgata for a special screening of Iron Chef America, and who shed a few tears of pride at the outcome. e hardest part of the competition? Not knowing the kitchen, says Amoroso. Where do you turn for a pot, the refrigerator, a potato? Amoroso was also surprised to discover that sixty minutes of taping time was exactly sixty minutes. ( You never know with TV.) If you are injured, if the lights go out, the stove no longer works, well, it doesn’t matter. “Whatever happens, that’s your problem,” says Amoroso, who was indeed stressed. “Hopefully I won’t spill a bucket of boiling water on my foot.” Amoroso remembers watching the original Iron Chef show, on cable, in Japanese with English subtitles, and being impressed at the skill of Morimoto. When he decided to do the show—and he took a while to mull it over—he chose Morimoto to compete against. “I decided on the biggest kid in the schoolyard. “It felt pretty good to win.” Despite the fact that he’s clearly become a national food celebrity, Amoroso continues to be surprised by the notion. He’s a chef, aer all. “I’m really amazed by the fact that people care so much about what I do for a living. It makes me laugh.” When he was a kid, the celebrity to watch was Michael Jordan. Now kids are watching the Food Network, and aspiring to a career in the kitchen. It’s all a good thing, as far as he’s concerned—his customers are better educated about food, and the nation ends up with a lot of great chefs.

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Amoroso’s current challenge is to bring more local food, seasonal food into the Borgata. “If I can get clams from New Jersey, then I get clams from New Jersey,” he says. “Bring me apples from New York.” Of course he runs up against numbers—it’s more costly to buy fresh and organic and his restaurant is not small. ( “It’s a long chain of hands to get a product into this building.” ) Plus there are expectations; customers want tuna year-round, and that means bringing it in from Hawaii at certain times of the year. “You gotta at least try. Keep your backyard as close as possible and use as many things as possible in it. at’s a chef’s responsibility. If it’s more work, then too bad. If it’s harder to do that, then too bad.” It’s a philosophy that’s a bit easier to execute at home. He and his wife live in Philadelphia, and he shops for produce at the Reading Terminal Market. Sometimes, on his days off, he’ll sneak in a fishing trip. And while other guys might pack along a cooler full of beer, his is filled with lime juice, chilies, mint, and lettuce cups. Because if he catches a striped bass, he’ll cut it up and make ceviche right on the boat. “It doesn’t get any fresher than that.”

SECRET: “Challenge yourself. A little fear on the back of your neck—it keeps you going forward.”

LO CAL “SWORDFISH CONFIT” WITH CRISPY PROSCIUTTO AND SAGE BROWN BUTTER

serves up to 4 Four 6-ounce swordfish steaks Salt, black pepper 1 quart olive oil 2 lemons, sliced 6 cloves garlic, peeled 1 fresh bay leaf 1 bunch sage, leaves picked, stems removed, saving both 1 arbol chili 100

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4 slices prosciutto 4 ounces butter 1 cup white beans, cooked and pureed (optional) 1 bunch spinach, trimmed and washed (sauté in olive oil, reserve warm) (optional) Preheat oven to 150 degrees. Lightly season swordfish with salt and pepper. Combine the olive oil, one lemon, garlic cloves, bay leaf, sage stems, and chili in oven-proof dish large enough to hold the swordfish without spilling the oil. Place the dish with the oil in the oven to preheat the oil. Add the swordfish and allow to cook through (roughly one hour). Preheat a nonstick pan on medium heat, add the prosciutto, and cook on both sides until crisp. Remove to plate and reserve. In the same nonstick pan, melt the butter and allow to brown lightly. Add the sage leaves and remove from the heat. Add the remaining sliced lemon and reserve warm. For the dish: Remove the swordfish from the olive oil/reserve warm. On four warm plates, place a spoonful of white bean puree and spinach. Top with swordfish and dress with sage brown butter. Garnish with crisped prosciutto and serve.

BARNEGAT LIGHT SCALLOP PANSOTI, BABY ARTICHOKE, AND PICKLED CHANTERELLE MUSHRO OMS

serves up to 4 Pasta Dough

2 cups all-purpose flour 3 large egg yolks 1 pinch kosher salt 1 cup additional flour for the work surface Mix flour, eggs, and salt in a stainless steel bowl and work together until well combined. Dough should not be sticky to the touch. If too wet, dust with more flour to adjust. Wrap dough with plastic film and refrigerate for at least one hour and up to three days. Remember to remove the dough from refrigeration for at least 1 hour before beginning to roll it out.

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Always on a lightly floured surface, work the dough by first cutting it into three even pieces. Work only 1 piece at a time. With a pasta machine, roll out the dough on the largest setting several times, folding the ends in toward the center, while working the dough into a uniform rectangular sheet. Repeat the process with all of the dough. Once all of it is sheeted, wrap it tightly with cling film until you are ready to begin rolling it out for whatever shape/cut is desired. Scallop Mousse Filling

1 cup raw scallops 1 tablespoon crème fraîche ½ cup fresh bread crumbs 1 large egg yolk 1 tablespoon chopped fines herbes (equal parts tarragon, chervil, chive, parsley) Salt Fresh ground pepper to taste Place all ingredients except the herbs in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade attachment. Puree until smooth. Fold in the chopped herbs. Place the filling in a pastry bag. Reserve refrigerated. Braised Artichokes

6 baby artichoke leaves, peeled, cut in half and choke removed (store in 2 quarts water with the juice of 2 lemons added to prevent oxidation) ½ cup extra virgin olive oil ½ white onion, peeled and sliced thin 1 leek, sliced thin and washed well in cold water ½ bulb fennel sliced thin ½ carrot, peeled and sliced thin 1 fresh bay leaf 1 arbol chili 2 sprigs thyme ½ cup dry white wine Preheat a 2-quart pot over medium-low heat. Add olive oil. Add onion, leek, fennel, carrot, bay leaf, arbol chili, and thyme. Sweat until vegetables begin to soen. Strain artichokes and add them to the pot. Sauté lightly, stirring frequently for 2 minutes. 102

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Add white wine and bring to a simmer, cover the pot, and simmer slowly until the artichokes are fork tender, about 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer the contents of the pot to a large mixing bowl and refrigerate until cool. Once cool, remove and cut the artichokes into fourths, and return to the vegetables and liquid for storage. Pickled Mushrooms

1 pint chanterelle mushrooms, washed and trimmed ½ pint champagne vinegar ½ pint water 1 tablespoon sugar 1 bay leaf 1 arbol chili 10 white peppercorns 1 pinch salt Soened butter Pickled fines herbes Bring all ingredients to a simmer for 30 minutes and strain. Place mushrooms in a 1-quart container. Pour the warm liquid over the mushrooms and cover and refrigerate overnight. For the dish: On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough to the thinnest setting. Cut into triangles. Pipe a dot of filling into the center of each triangle. Fold the triangle in half and seal the two open sides with a little egg wash. Repeat until all the filling is used. Warm the artichokes and pickled mushrooms in 1 tablespoon olive oil and reserve warm. Cook the pasta in boiling salted water. Remove with a slotted spoon to the pan of artichokes and mushrooms. Finish with a tablespoon of soened butter and garnish with pickled fines herbes.

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ZOD ARIFAI Blu, Montclair Next Door, Montclair

At age twenty-three, aer touring Europe with his hard-rock band, aer sharing the stage with Aerosmith, Deep Purple, and Todd Rundgren, Zod Arifai decided to end his music career. “I’m too old to become a rock star now,” he said to himself. Gene Simmons had already made it at nineteen. “If you are doing something great in food, you will get discovered,” says Arifai, who still looks like a scruffy guitar player, dressed as he is in worn jeans and a hoodie, with his tousled longish hair and a bit of a goatee. “You can do something great in music and never make it. It’s all about who you know in the music business.” In the New Jersey food world, many chefs are rebels, and many once pictured themselves singing to thousands of adoring fans on an international rock stage instead of toiling behind an industrial stove. It makes sense—the restaurant business likes rebellious artists, people who thumb their noses at a pinstriped world, people who can roll daily with the situation, people who are night owls and misfits, creative souls. Yet even among this bunch, Arifai stands apart as a man who chooses his own wildly divergent path, no matter how odd or invisible it may be to the rest of us. As an artist, he’s a chef who doesn’t care to copy from the masters but one who boldly insists on forging his own dishes. He sees no reason to learn the five mother sauces and refuses to cook from a recipe—even one that he’s developed. 104

Many people on this earth will tell you that they don’t do what they do for money, that they refuse to sell their soul, mitigate their passions, just so they can squeeze inside the lines of someone else’s bell curve. Yet when Arifai says it, you believe. Here is a man you might not understand, and his belief systems might not make sense to you. But, at the end of the day, you’re willing to bet that his soul’s intact. Culinary school? Arifai didn’t go. “I don’t have this mentality,” says Arifai, who still carries an accent from his hometown in Kosovo. It’s a big waste of money, where they brainwash you into thinking there’s just one way to cook, and that’s the only way it’s supposed to be. “I don’t know how to think this way.” Recipes? Too comfortable. “I want to challenge myself. I want to

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come in and be excited. I don’t want it to taste the same today as next week, as next year.” Every day, every meal, should be like a jam session in the kitchen. e ethics of food? “We have pretty much whatever you want all the time.” Is that a good thing? Should you be seasonal? Or use the best available? Should you, for example, use fava beans just because they’re in season, when they don’t taste as good as they should? “It’s a tough question. It’s something that needs to be debated.” In the end, he decides against the fava beans, even though maybe people don’t even know how a fava bean is supposed to taste. Arifai’s restaurants—Blu and Next Door in Montclair—have become destination spots, tiny adventurous little restaurants with inventive menus, darlings of the sophisticates who live in this hip Manhattancentric town. Menu options are few, and the concept is modern American, with French, Italian, and Asian influences. He changes his menu daily—sometimes hourly, depending on his mood or what’s on the market. is is a restaurant that serves charred octopus with chickpeas and raisins, seafood dumplings in a coconut-chili broth, chilled tomato soup with watermelon and buffalo mozzarella, salmon with marinated fennel. e dishes allow the ingredients to shine—he doesn’t like crusts, doesn’t like marinating, and a chicken should taste like a chicken. Too many people have a narrow view of creativity, Arifai warns. Being creative simply means doing something unusual. And what’s unusual for an American chef may simply be the norm for, say, a Japanese chef. Many Africans think cheese and milk are disgusting. We think it’s normal. To be truly creative, we need to retrain our brains. Arifai is always thinking about food and reading about food (not cookbooks, but books about the philosophy of food or the history of food). He likes to think of things in a different way. He’ll use something savory in a dessert—his famous black olive cake, for example. People are surprised by the concept when they first read it on the menu, but so many people have fallen for it that it’s become one of his regular offerings. (A parsnip parfait, on the other hand, didn’t get the same warm welcome, but Arifai will still try to convince you. Parsnip, aer it’s been cooked and pureed, is really quite sweet, with a bit of vanilla aroma or brown butter aroma. If you think about it, he says, parsnip in its natural form is more sweet than chocolate in its natural form. It’s more suited to dessert. His customers, however, weren’t buying it.) 106

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Aer the rock music career dissolved, Arifai thought about a culinary job. His mother is a great cook, a woman who could do amazing things with few ingredients, who understood the value of onions and salt. Plus she could make a cassoulet that was mind-blowing. Arifai lived in Kosovo until he was nine, and grew up with an entirely different approach to food than an American child. “You only eat what the land is giving you.” As a teenager in Garfield, he and a friend would hop on the bus or their bicycles—honest, he says—to eat dinner at some of the finest restaurants in New Jersey and New York. ( More chefs should do that today. “Chefs don’t go out to eat. If you want to be great, why haven’t you gone there? If you want to be great, why not go to where the greatness is?” ) At his restaurants, every dinner is his—he’s been in the kitchen every single day, and refuses not to be. “I’m not lazy. I don’t cut corners. If something is not right, I’m here to make it right. I will not leave my kitchen. People who know this food understand.” Arifai’s rock band had a song that was simultaneously happy and sad, that included a composition of chords for the bass, not the guitar, with overtones of violin. It was a big humongous triumph of a song, something that mixed the traditional with the unexpected, something that went beyond. “It was our ‘Stairway to Heaven.’” Today, his food is his anthem, and, for many fans in the state, it’s equally groundbreaking and provocative.

SECRET: “Forget about everything you learned—throw it out. If you want to be creative, experiment.”

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WARM BAY SCALLOPS, HIBISCUS, FENNEL, ORANGE

serves up to 4 ½ cup dried hibiscus ½ cup water ¼ cup of dry Riesling wine 1 tablespoon sugar 1 orange, including segments and peel 1 fennel bulb Extra virgin olive oil Salt, kosher or coarse-grind sea salt 24 to 28 bay scallops 12 fennel fronds picked from the fennel top Prepare the hibiscus broth one day ahead. In a 1-quart pot add hibiscus, water, Riesling, sugar, and orange peel. Bring to boil, place in a container with a cover. Chill and refrigerate overnight. e next day strain through a fine mesh strainer and chill. Cut or shave fennel bulb with a mandolin very thin. Mix with orange segments and dress with olive oil and salt. Keep in a mixing bowl while cooking scallops. Heat oven to 200 degrees for 20 minutes. In a sheet pan, place scallops evenly, sprinkle with salt and olive oil, and place in the center of the oven for 5 minutes. Remove and assemble dish. In four shallow bowls, divide the hibiscus water. On one side of the bowl divide the fennel and orange. On the other side of the bowl divide scallops, place 2 to 3 fennel fronds on top of fennel and orange. Serve.

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DUCK BREAST WITH FIG CAVIAR, BRAISED TURNIPS

serves 4 4 duck breasts trimmed of sinew, cut off fat evenly on top and sides, make slits on the fat side across in a criss-cross fashion 8 ounces dry figs 4 cups red wine 2 tablespoons sugar 4 small turnips Kosher salt Olive oil (not extra-virgin) Butter For fig caviar: Cut figs in quarters, place in a 1½-quart pot with the red wine and sugar and cook on bare simmer until reduced by half; chill. Once the figs are cool enough to handle, take out from the wine and scoop out whatever seeds are le in the figs and place the seeds in the wine. Reduce the wine by half again. Meanwhile, peel and cut the turnips into any desired shape. Cook in salted boiling water until tender; strain and place in a sheet pan. Cook the duck: Heat two 12-inch nonstick sauté pans. Salt the duck on both sides vigorously. Place 2 ducks on each pan and lower heat to medium. Cook ducks till all fat has rendered and the skin is dark brown and thin from all the rendered fat. You will have to pour off some of the fat from the pan as the duck cooks. Turn ducks over; pour off any fat and let duck sit in the warm pan for 5 to 6 minutes. Remove and let sit on a plate for 2 to 3 minutes. is will produce a perfectly reddishpinkish (medium-cooked) duck. While the duck is resting, sauté turnips in olive oil (not extra virgin) and butter until golden brown. In a different pan, heat fig caviar. Plating: Divide turnips among 4 plates. Trim duck on all sides and cut into 3 to 4 slices. Place on plate; drizzle caviar over turnips and duck. Serve.

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MAHI WITH BLACK BEANS, PEANUTS, SCALLIONS, SWEET AND SOUR GLAZE

serves 4 ¾ cup dry black beans soaked in 4 cups water Kosher salt 4 ounces rice vinegar 6 ounces balsamic vinegar 5 ounces soy sauce 6½ ounces sugar

¼ teaspoon xanthan gum Four 5- to 6-ounce mahi filets Extra virgin olive oil Butter ½ cup peanuts 6 scallions cut into ¼-inch pieces

For the beans: Cook soaked beans in a 2-quart pan of salted water ( yes, it’s OK to salt water, despite the myth) over low heat (do not boil), until tender, about 1½ to 2 hours. Let beans cool in the water. For the glaze: Mix vinegars, soy sauce, sugar, and gum in a 1-quart pot with a whisk or a hand blender. Cook over low flame till reduced by 30 percent. For the fish: Salt fish on both sides evenly. Heat 2 nonstick sauté pans. Add 1 tablespoon olive oil and a dab of butter to each pan. Place fish bottom-side down and cook on medium-high heat until the sides of fish are white and they don’t look raw. Turn fish over and turn off the flame. Let fish rest in the pan for 3 to 5 minutes. If you touch the top of the fish with your index finger and it gives a little resistance, the fish is done. If it feels solid, it needs more cooking. Sauté beans and peanuts in butter, olive oil, and kosher salt in low heat. In a different sauté pan, heat ½ tablespoon butter and ½ tablespoon olive oil. When butter melts, add scallions and cook 30 seconds on low heat To plate: In the center of a plate or a shallow bowl add desired beans; place fish on top. Top fish with glaze, spoon scallions on top of fish. Serve.

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RISOTTO WITH BUTTERNUT SQUASH, G ORG ONZOLA, CUMIN CARAMEL

serves 4 to 6 Cumin Caramel

¼ cup water ¾ cup sugar 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar ½ teaspoon cumin Line a sheet pan with parchment paper and place in the oven to keep warm. e oven does not need to be on. In a deep small pot, add water and sugar, and gently mix with fork or finger until sugar is wet. Try not to get sugar on the sides of the pan as this will burn quickly. Place pan on medium-low heat and cook without stirring until sugar starts to turn amber. As soon as half of the sugar has turned amber in color, shut off the flame. When all sugar has turned deep golden brown, add balsamic vinegar and cumin. Take the sheet pan out of the oven and pour caramel in the center of the sheet pan. Gently spread the caramel by tilting the sheet pan. If caramel gets hard aer adding the balsamic vinegar, put the pan back on the burner on low flame until caramel is loose. NOTE

Butternut Squash

2 quarts water 1 teaspoon salt 1 medium butternut squash ( Peel until no white skin is visible, then cut in half. Cut top part into ¼-inch dice, scoop the seed from the bottom, and cut the bottom into 1-inch pieces.) Bring water to a boil; add salt and cook the smaller pieces of butternut squash for three minutes. Remove squash with a small strainer and spread on a sheet pan to cool. To the same water, add the one-inch pieces of squash and cook until so. Remove from water and puree in food processor. Do not discard the water; this broth is used for the risotto.

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Risotto

2 tablespoons olive oil (not extra virgin) 4 tablespoons butter, divided ½ medium onion, very small dice 1 cup arborio or carnaroli rice ½ cup white wine 2 dry bay leaves 4 tablespoons butter For the Finish

4 to 6 tablespoons crumbled Gorgonzola ½ tablespoon butter ½ tablespoon olive oil Heat an 18-inch sauté pan or a 12-inch pot. Add olive oil and 1 tablespoon butter. When butter has melted, add the onions and cook gently until onions look so and melting. Add rice and bay leaves; stir for one minute. Lower heat on the risotto. In the time meantime, have butternut squash broth at a bare simmer. Add wine and stir. Add 1 cup of the butternut broth to the rice and cook until rice has absorbed all the broth. Continue to add one cup at a time till the rice is cooked al dente. ( If you run out of the broth before the rice is cooked, use hot water.) Once risotto is cooked (the total time of cooking should be around 30 minutes), it should be served within a few minutes. Just before plating, add 2 tablespoons butter and the butternut squash puree to the risotto and gently mix and fold. At this point the risotto is done and ready to be served. While the risotto is cooking, slide the caramel off the sheet pan onto a cutting board. With a sharp knife, cut the caramel to sesameseed size and set aside. Do not put caramel near humidity or heat as it will clump up. For the finish, in a nonstick sauté pan, melt the butter and olive oil, add the diced butternut squash and sauté for a minute on low heat. Plating: Spoon 4 to 5 heaping tablespoons of risotto on a plate. Top with sautéed butternut squash; add crumbled Gorgonzola and sprinkle with cumin caramel. Serve.

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BLACK-OLIVE CAKE WITH BASIL ICE CREAM

serves 6 to 8 5 ounces butter, at room temperature 6 ounces sugar 3 eggs 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon flour Pinch baking powder 2 tablespoons olive paste (recipe follows) Basil ice cream (recipe follows) In the clean bowl of a mixer, place 5 ounces butter and 6 ounces sugar. With the whip attachment, cream butter and sugar until white and fluffy. e speed of the mixer should be on 8. Add the eggs one at a time wait till each egg is fully incorporated before adding the next egg. Turn the mixer to 4 and gently add floor and a pinch of baking powder; mix until fully incorporated. Add 2 tablespoons olive paste and mix. Pour mixture into a container, cover, and refrigerate for 6 hours or overnight. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter and flour individual pans (6 to 8 4-ounce aluminum ramekins), tapping off any excess flour. Place 2 heaping tablespoons of cake mixture into each cake pan. Place pans on a sheet pan and bake for 12 to 15 minutes. Serve with a scoop of basil ice cream. Olive Paste

2 cups kalamata olives, pitted Water 1 cup sugar Put the olives and 3 cups water in a pot and bring to a boil, cook for 5 minutes. Pour the water and olives over a strainer. Discard the water and repeat the process 5 more times. On the sixth time, put olives in the pot and add enough water to cover. Add 1 cup sugar and cook slowly for 15 to 20 minutes; cool. When cool, place olives in a food processor and process until you have a smooth paste. Keep refrigerated until needed.

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Basil Ice Cream

2 cups cream 1 cup milk 3 sheets gelatin soaked in ice water 8 egg yolks 1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sugar ½ cup packed extra-fresh basil (if basil is old, with black marks, ice cream will not be green) 2 sprigs tarragon, leaves removed Get a bowl of ice and water and keep close to stove. Bring cream and milk to a boil; add gelatin. Place all remaining ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Add blender mixture to cream mixture and cook, stirring with a rubber spatula until mixture starts to thicken. Do not bring to a boil. If you run your finger on the spatula and it leaves a mark, you’re done. Cook slowly. Do not rush. Chill on the ice bath and strain through a fine mesh strainer. Pour into your ice cream maker and follow manufacturer’s instructions for spinning the ice cream.

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ANTHONY BUCCO Uproot, Warren

Anthony Bucco was once so naïve about the restaurant world that he thought a Michelin star was part of a constellation. Perhaps next to the Big Dipper. He was also naïve enough to apply to the Culinary Institute of America, even though he hadn’t worked a day in a restaurant. ( ey didn’t accept him. “Today, if you sneeze, you’re invited in.”) Although Bucco knew little about the restaurant world, he knew much about food. He grew up in Monmouth County amid a large working-class family—his grandfather was an immigrant from Sicily, whose first job was picking green beans. Most of his aunts and uncles worked—in Newark factories, making leather, whatever work they could find. And his grandmother cooked—Sicilian feasts, he calls them—for everyone. Food from the garden, cherries, tomatoes, and lady apples that she canned and kept in the root cellar, pasta fagioli, meatballs with pine nuts and currants, salads with aged balsamic and olive oil, lots of olives, sardines, blood oranges and fennel, desserts of figs, nuts, and honey, elaborate holiday cookies. “I loved what her food brought to our family. At the end of the day, it was her food that kept the family together.” Today Bucco reigns as one of the bright stars in New Jersey’s culinary world, having been chef for years at New Brunswick’s Stage Le, a 115

fine-dining restaurant consistently at the top of critics’ annual lists, and having helped open Catherine Lombardi, another well-loved New Brunswick restaurant. Now Bucco is chef at Uproot, an innovative and exciting evolution in fine dining with modern American cuisine that’s meant to be both approachable and adventurous, well heeled but not fussy. And despite the level of sophistication and skill he’s reached in his field, he still carries a philosophy of food that his grandmother could embrace. First, that it’s vital to know where the food comes from. For Bucco, in many cases, that means an intimate knowledge. “I can tell you the first name of the guy who raised it. I think that’s a good thing.” Your perception changes when you visit the farm, see the animals, put a face to the name. “You look at them in a different light. You’re not sitting there with a fork and knife.” And second, that no one is more important than family, and that, as a chef, you should always be cooking your best for your wife, your mother, your children, that these people are the true VIPs in the room. Bucco starts his day by making breakfast for his three little children. “You talk about having critics. If they don’t like it, they throw it on the floor. And then the dog walks by and ignores it.” e kids’ preferences offer a few culinary lessons, too—that it’s not always about flavor, that texture can matter just as much. “Is there crunch?” 116

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Bucco calls his start in the business a spontaneous one—he saw a television ad for the New York Restaurant School and called the 800 number. A few weeks later he took a tour. “I was seduced by the idea. I signed up that day.” But school wasn’t that educational—“e only thing I did was cut carrots”—and Bucco learned most from his mentor, Chef Patrick Verre, at Jasna Polana, the Princeton country club that was once part of the estate of the Johnson & Johnson family. Verre, a former Windows on the World chef in the World Trade Center in New York, taught Bucco respect for the ingredient and respect for the animal, to treat it well during its entire time in the kitchen. “Everything we use in the kitchen was alive at some point,” says Bucco. “ese animals are giving their lives because humans are at the top of the food chain.” Ironically, Chef Verre has shunned his former expertise in rich, heavy cuisine that used lots of butter and fats to espouse a much more simple diet; he now eats lots of quinoa and gives lessons on microbiotic cooking. It’s an evolution that, although dramatic, is reflected in the evolution of the culinary world itself, moving from formal fussy food smothered in butters and creamy sauces to food that is more simple, clean, direct, with an emphasis on the origin of the ingredient. It’s right for the human diet, and it’s right for the planet. And it’s right for the chef to fight the good fight in making it happen. “It’s important for a chef to have a role in what’s responsible,” says Bucco. e evolution of food has coincided with an evolution in dining. Fine dining, says Bucco, is not dead, but expectations have dramatically changed. People don’t want to have to wear a jacket and tie, don’t want to be intimidated by waiters in tuxedos or sit hushed for hours at tables covered in white linens. ey expect better food in less formal surroundings. Chef David Drake describes Uproot as the closest thing to fine dining in New Jersey without actually being fine dining. Uproot offers a trio of experiences—a clublike lounge for casual meals, a casual dining room for a more traditional dinner, and a hushed dining room (with tablecloths) for a quiet, intimate dinner. And the food is sophisticated but simple—wood-roasted chicken, local day-boat scallops, sausage-stuffed quail, and Uproot meatballs, made with mint and pine-nut pesto. Nothing over the top, says Bucco.

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He doesn’t want guests to feel as though they’re not smart enough to be here. e menu works for the guest who knows—such as the fourteenyear-old girl who announced that the foie gras at Uproot was better than the foie gras she’d had in Paris two months ago. And it also works for the guest who doesn’t know—the person who orders chicken one month and is encouraged to try partridge the next, who likes what he’s eating, but isn’t sure why, and doesn’t necessarily need or want to know. “Not everybody gets it. Not everybody has to.” Food is the passion, the spark, that propelled Bucco into the business. “I had the opportunity as an adult to play with my food. And get paid for it.” But it’s the lifestyle that’s completely addictive, the reason he’s still doing it. Bucco talks about his job as if it were a sport; when the bell rings, when the first pitch is thrown, when the puck is dropped, it signals the start of four hours of service filled with highs and lows, every emotion imaginable. “is to me is the thing that pushes my buttons, the energy, the force. It’s a roller-coaster of emotions that consumes you. It is the best drug.” At a restaurant, you get to participate in events you normally wouldn’t—birthdays, anniversaries, that first ultrasound photo. At Stage Le, he made dinner for the most powerful people in the state—Governors Kean, Florio, Whitman, McGreevey, Cody. He tells the story of how Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jon Corzine and his Republican opponent Doug Forrester both had reservations for the same night, and how the staff choreographed their comings and goings so that neither party ran into the other. He talks about former employees who le the restaurant world for the corporate world, and ended up with a coveted position at the right hand of the boss at important dinners simply because they know how to order the right wine. And he talks frankly about the camaraderie among chefs in the state, how they call each other to ask for help, borrow food, ask for advice. In New Brunswick, folks in the business used to hang out aer hours for drinks and war stories at Clydz. Before they both had children, Bucco and Nicholas Harary of Restaurant Nicholas went weekly to the fish market together, and oen played late-night card games. When Zod Arifai from Blu comes to Uproot for dinner, they discuss Pearl Jam. Chefs have incredible egos in the kitchen because you have to, says Bucco, but outside the kitchen, they’re humble, approachable. 118

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Bucco appears to be exactly that—humble, approachable, real. Today, obviously, Bucco is more than familiar with the definition of a Michelin star, and he would love to say that on his days off he and his wife are dining at Michelin-rated restaurants. But the truth is, he’s throwing Wiffle balls to his kids, teaching them to swim, taking them fishing with a can of corn at the pond in Holmdel Park. And he loves it. “I feel like I’ve grown up.”

SECRET: “ere’s a side of me that’s scared. ere’s a side of me that’s insecure. When you’re a chef, you can’t be vulnerable. I’ve done everything in my power, trained myself well, to make sure no one will notice (my) level of anxiety. I still get nervous every night.”

RHUBARB AND CINNAMON SOUP WITH STRAWBERRIES AND CANDIED ALMONDS

serves 4 1 pound rhubarb, peeled 1½ cups water 1 vanilla bean, sliced lengthwise 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons cinnamon 1 lemon

4 ounces almonds Pinch salt 1 pint strawberries 2 ounces chiffonade of mint 1 quart strawberry ice cream

For the soup: Dice the rhubarb, ensuring the dice is consistent in size. Heat a sauce pot over medium heat and add the water, vanilla bean, 1 cup of sugar, and cinnamon. Heat the water till the sugar dissolves, add rhubarb. Cook rhubarb till it breaks down, season with salt and the juice of the lemon, then purée in a blender. If necessary, reduce down to preferred consistency. For the almonds: Heat sauté pans over medium heat add almonds and begin to toast, allowing enough room in the pan for the almonds to brown evenly. Toss the almonds with 2 tablespoons of sugar and a pinch of salt, pull from heat and reserve. Anthony Bucco

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To assemble: Slice the strawberries and place around the base of the bowl, pour chilled soup over the top, and garnish with almonds, chiffonade of mint, and strawberry ice cream.

SCALLOPS WITH ENGLISH PEA AND MINT PUREE, SUGAR SNAP PEAS, AND HEN-OF-THE-WO ODS MUSHRO OMS

serves 4 1½ pounds scallops 2 ounces extra-virgin olive oil 2 ounces butter 6 ounces hen-of-the-woods mushrooms 6 ounces sugar snap peas English Pea and Mint Puree

1 cup English peas, hulled 2 ounces mint 1 leek 2 ounces extra-virgin olive oil Salt and pepper For the purée: Blanch peas till tender; add mint just until it wilts. Shock both in salted ice water. Sweat leeks. In a blender add mint, peas, leeks, 2 ounces of shocking water, and extra virgin olive oil. Puree till smooth. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. For the scallops: Sear the scallops in a hot sauté pan in olive oil. Once one side is caramelized, flip the scallops and add 1 tablespoon of butter, for basting. Remove scallops from the pan and then add hen-ofthe-woods mushrooms. Cook mushrooms for 2 minutes, then add sugar snap peas. Serve scallops over the pea mint puree and top with mushrooms and snap peas.

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CHICKEN WITH ARUGULA PISTACHIO PESTO, ANSON MILLS POLENTA, AND HEIRLO OM SQUASH

serves 4 1 cup polenta, preferably Anson Mills or locally sourced 4 cups water Salt and pepper 4 ounces butter 4 chicken breasts, skin on Arugula pistachio pesto (recipe follows) 2 ounces grapeseed oil 2 ounces thyme 2 heirloom summer squash For the polenta: Place 1 cup of polenta and 4 cups of water in a large saucepan and whisk to combine. Bring to a simmer over low heat, whisking frequently. Lower the heat further and cook very gently, alternately whisking and scraping the saucepan bottom with wooden spoon, until the grains are so and the polenta drops thickly from spoon, at least 1 hour. Whisk in the salt, pepper, and 2 ounces butter. Cover and keep warm. ( e polenta may be transferred to bowl, covered and set over barely simmering water. If necessary, thin the polenta with hot water before serving.) For the chicken: Li one side of the skin and fill with arugula pistachio pesto. Heat a sauté pan over high heat; add grapeseed oil and chicken breast, reduce heat to medium, giving chicken a good sear. Cook chicken 80 percent of the way on the skin side, flip over, add 2 ounces butter and thyme, baste till finished. For the squash: Slice squash ½ inch thick. Pan sauté in a bit of olive oil until slightly carmelized on the outside but still firm in the middle. To assemble the entrée, using a bowl, place the pesto on the bottom, some sautéed summer squash at the base, a nice heaping spoonful of polenta, and top with the chicken. Arugula Pistachio Pesto

5 ounces shelled pistachios 2 cups arugula ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 cups chicken stock 1 tablespoon butter

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Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place pistachios on a sheet pan and toast 7 minutes; cool. In a food processor add arugula, extra virgin olive oil, and cooled pistachios. Puree until pesto texture. In a small saucepan heat chicken stock to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Pull from stovetop and add the pesto and a tablespoon of butter, then, using a whisk or handheld blender, puree.

BLACK BASS WITH CELERY RO OT PUREE, TRUMPET ROYALE MUSHRO OMS, AVO CAD O, AND A LIME HONEY GASTRIQUE

serves 4 Four 6-ounce black bass filets Grapeseed oil ½ pound trumpet royale mushrooms Celery root puree (recipe follows)

1 avocado, sliced 2 ounces extra virgin olive oil Pinch coarse sea salt Lime honey gastrique (recipe follows)

Heat a sauté pan over high heat. Add some grapeseed oil and cook bass skin side down, allowing the skin to get crispy. Once the fish takes on some nice color, flip it and turn off the flame, let rest for a minute, and remove from the pan. In a separate sauté pan heated over a high flame, add some grapeseed oil and begin to sauté thinly sliced trumpet royale mushrooms. Season the mushrooms and reserve. Place a spoonful of the celery root puree onto the plate topped with the bass. Layer the avocado and place the mushrooms across the top. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and coarse sea salt. Finish with a drizzle of lime honey gastrique. Celery Root Puree

1 bulb celery root 1 apple 1 onion Heat a sauce pot over medium heat; add celery root, apple, and onion. Sweat gently for 5 minutes just covered with water. Cook until the celery root can be mashed between your fingers. Puree in a food processor, reserving some of the cooking liquid for thinning the puree if necessary. Adjust seasoning. 122

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Lime Honey Gastrique

2 tablespoons honey ¼ cup lime juice Heat the honey over medium heat. Once honey begins to take on some coloring, add lime juice and reduce to syrupy consistency.

HERB-CRUSTED SALMON WITH CUCUMBER, APPLE, AND RADISH SALAD

serves 4 Four 6-ounce portions wild salmon 1 tablespoon grapeseed oil 1 bunch chopped parsley 1 bunch chopped dill 2 ounces chopped mint 2 ounces chopped chives ½ ounce coarse sea salt 1 diced cucumber 1 diced apple 1 diced radish ¼ pound kumquats 1 Meyer lemon 2 ounces extra-virgin olive oil Prepare the salmon skin on, but with all bones removed. e skin may require scaling. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees, and heat a sauté pan over high heat. Add a teaspoon of grapeseed oil to the sauté pan and add salmon, skin side down. Cook salmon for 2 minutes, then place in the oven for an additional 3 minutes. e salmon should be medium rare. Pull out of the pan and let rest. Chop up all the herbs and mix together with the salt, top the fish with the herb mixture, and reserve some for the salad. In a bowl mix the cucumber, apple, radish, kumquats, and herbs. Squeeze the juice from the Meyer lemon over the salad along with some extra-virgin olive oil. Serve along with the fish.

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HUMBERTO CAMPOS JR . Lorena’s, Maplewood

Humberto Campos Jr. had a grandfather who lived in Pennsylvania Dutch country, a landlocked grandfather who was accustomed to eating hearty dishes of chicken and pie. But he also loved linguini with clam sauce, and once when he came east for a visit, his Jersey relatives took him to a little Italian restaurant in Edison called Louca’s. Two days later, Campos had an odd urge to page through the classifieds. Campos was in his early twenties, still casting about for a career and feeling more than a bit unsettled about it; it was time, aer all, and most of his friends had already made their decisions, were off to school, had jobs, etc. eir sureness was annoying. “Something about that irked me.” But nothing had stuck with Campos, and he’d dried from school to banking to retail without finding anything that really mattered. His longest-running job had been at the Short Hills Gap, work he didn’t exactly find inspiring. But on this day, he saw an ad for kitchen help at Louca’s. “Wow,” he thought, “We were just there.” So he answered the ad—and wore his banker’s suit to the interview. Owner Alex Sofocli asked him what he wanted to do with his life. “I think I want to be a chef,” said Campos, somewhat spontaneously. A half-dozen waiters, on their break and eavesdropping, burst out laughing. Nonetheless, Sofocli saw something he liked in Campos and 124

offered him a busboy’s job, working six days a week. And on the day off, Sofocli offered, if you feel like it, you may come in and cook. Campos was floored by the owner’s generosity. “Wow,” he thought. “Where do I sign?” Campos isn’t one of those chefs who loved to cook from the time he was small. He did like to help his mom—she’s a good cook, makes amazing pies and bakes for the church—but he senses that he was more of a nuisance in the kitchen than a help. Later, when he was a bit older, he became responsible for feeding a group of friends he’d invited to the family summer house on Long Beach Island. It wasn’t intentional; his mother had announced that she wasn’t cooking. So he prepared dinner all week, with plenty of mistakes (cooking the fish with scales and guts intact, for example), but he loved it. Campos has a lovely ability as a storyteller—English is the one school subject he liked—and he’s subtle and engaging as he gently re-

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tells the big moments of his life. He starts at the very beginning—an “I was born in Rahway” kind of beginning—and slowly builds to the present, each detail deserving his full attention, its rightfully significant place in his life story. And when he tells his story, how he became executive chef and co-owner of Lorena’s Restaurant in Maplewood, each fortuitous turn in the path is some sort of magical event, a divine alignment of the fates that push him in the right direction. It was providence that led his grandfather to Louca’s, providence that he saw that newspaper ad. Maybe it’s real; maybe the fates are truly busy weaving together the details of this chef’s life. en again, it’s tough to ascribe a bit of magic to a newspaper ad. Unless, of course, you’re a hopeless romantic, which Campos thoroughly confesses to be. Campos is a young man with an old soul, and is proud to be the kind of husband who still opens the car door for his wife. “Omigod, a gentleman,” people will say. “Chivalry is still alive.” Campos doesn’t mind the comments. “I just think it’s the proper way to be.” Besides, Lorena Perez Campos, his beautiful Chilean wife, tells him that’s the reason she married him. Because he’s a gentleman. From Louca’s, Campos went to the Culinary Institute of America and then on to work at a restaurant in Colorado. He freely admits he was not the kind guy who did well in school, who applied himself or worked to his full potential. So for him, landing at a four-star restaurant like the Ryland Inn was just a dream. But the fates intervened again. A CIA roommate knew someone, and Campos was told: “Be there tomorrow with your knife kit.” Luck may have opened the door, but cooks at the Ryland Inn must earn their stars. To say that Ryland chef Craig Shelton was not an easy man to please is to deeply understate, and Shelton did not have much respect for the skills taught at culinary school. “ere was one standard,” says Campos. “It had to be excellent. Or extraordinary.” New cooks at the Ryland lasted sometimes twenty minutes, two hours, two weeks. Campos, stationed fieen feet from the door, always reminded himself that he was just fieen feet from freedom. Campos also reminded himself that he was one of the lucky employees who actually earned a salary. It was a meager five dollars an hour, but it was nice to be getting paid. Folks who worked at the Ryland say they learned more in a weekend than they did during their entire stint in culinary school. Campos’s 126

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kitchen notes filled an entire spiral notebook (and consumed two pens) on the first day alone. “I couldn’t write fast enough.” It was at the Ryland that Campos learned classic French techniques, how to butcher ducks and chickens, how to cook vegetables. And he also learned an inherent respect for the quality of the ingredient, a respect that shapes his philosophy of cooking today. At Lorena’s, the food is simple, clean, pure. “We don’t try to get too fancy, too fussy.” Campos intentionally limits most dishes to three ingredients—and then likes to add one surprising element that brings everything together, something that takes a dish from ordinary to extraordinary. Warm lump crab is spiked with white truffle oil, heirloom tomatoes are dressed with Cayman Island sea salt, rack of lamb comes with a sweet pepper marmalade. Campos opened Lorena’s in Maplewood in 2005, in a tiny space that was once home to Jocelyne’s, a well-respected and well-loved fourstar restaurant. It was quite a risk. In that first week of business, Campos answered a demanding knock at the door. “Who’s the owner?” someone asked. “I am,” Campos said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” Campos may have been wondering that himself. But again, he had destiny on his side. First, there was Lorena Perez. Campos loves to tell the story of how they met, how his father and her stepfather were both surgeons at JFK Medical Center in Edison, and Lorena was an intensive-care nurse. Both dads thought the two of them would be perfect together, and tried to arrange a date. It’s a fairly straightforward story, really, not an outrageous story or one filled with bizarre or remarkable coincidence. And yet, when Campos tells it, it’s a story filled with fate, romance, and magical destiny. He remembers their first date—how she was concerned about the rain ruining her suede Manolo boots, how they had the worst cheese plate in the world and it didn’t seem to matter. Lorena believed in him. Meanwhile, Campos had been working alongside other great New Jersey chefs—with David Drake and Corey Heyer. And then he helped launch Restaurant Nicholas in Middletown, doing everything from building the tables by hand to brainstorming the menu. It was a great experience, and Campos has high praise for Harary’s passion and work

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ethic. “How he runs things—it’s brilliant.” But aer Restaurant Nicholas opened and everyone was brought up to speed, Campos became bored, and started thinking about his own restaurant. He and Lorena started to look. “Let’s find a place. Whatever it takes.” When Lorena saw the spot in Maplewood, she instantly knew. “is is it.” But the prospect seemed unlikely. In order to make it work, they needed to close the deal in record time. e couple had maxed out their credit cards but were still five thousand dollars short. And yet, somehow, things miraculously fell into place, one aer the other in improbable sequence, including a last-minute wire transfer of funds from Lorena’s parents in Argentina. “Everything worked out. It was meant to be.” One of Campos’s first customers was famed New Jersey chef John Foy, who hadn’t realized the ownership had changed hands and wasn’t exactly happy about it when he found out. “Please allow me to cook for you,” said Campos. “It’s an honor to have you here.” Foy, says Campos, came back a few weeks later. “I got them one at a time.” A few months later, the New York Times came, and gave Lorena’s its rare rating of excellent. Campos sent the review to Alex Sofocli at Louca’s, with a note: “anks for putting up with all the BS. Hope I made you proud.” As for Campos and Lorena, well, they did everything in reverse— going into business together first, then getting engaged, and then getting married. “It is just like a little fairy tale.”

SECRET: “Keep it simple. Everything. Life is complicated enough as it is.”

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CRÊPE OF FRESH LUMP CRAB AND FIELD MUSHRO OMS WITH FRESH HERB EMULSION

serves 4 Crêpes (recipe follows) Fresh assortment of local mushrooms, preferable organic ¼ cup melted butter 2 tablespoon canola oil 2 tablespoons minced shallots Salt and pepper 3 tablespoon chopped fresh so herbs (dill, tarragon, flat-leaf parsley) ¼ cup of dry white wine 3 cups heavy cream ½ cup diced room-temperature butter Fresh lump crabmeat 1 cup of micro herbs 1 bottle of white truffle oil Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Clean mushrooms. Rinse in small batches of lukewarm water then drain. Lay mushrooms on towels, changing towels to ensure mushroom dryness. Brush a cookie sheet with melted butter. Fold crêpes in half and lay evenly on cookie sheet. Place in oven for 10 minutes. In a large heavy-bottomed sauté pan, on high heat, drizzle enough canola oil to coat pan. Wait for oil to lightly smoke and then add mushrooms and shallots in one even layer (if pan is not large enough, sauté in separate batches if needed). Season mushrooms with salt, pepper, and herbs. Set aside. Using same pan, drain off any excess oil and add white wine away from heat. Raise heat to high and reduce until sec ( “sec” is to reduce completely to the point of almost dry). Add heavy cream to pan and bring to boil. Lower heat to medium and reduce by half. Shut off heat and slowly whisk in one cube of butter at a time. Do not add more butter until previous cube has melted. When complete, add cleaned crabmeat to sauce. Remove crêpes from oven and lay one crêpe per person half on and half off on serving

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plate. Put 1 heaping tablespoon of mushroom mixture in center of plate. With slotted spoon, divide crabmeat evenly on top of mushroom mixture. Close crêpe. Adjust sauce for seasoning. Spoon the sauce on top of crêpe. ( If you would like a “frothy” presentation, use an electric handheld emulsion blender for a few seconds.) Garnish with micro herbs and white truffle oil. Crêpes

yields four to six 10-inch creˆ pes

4 eggs 6 ounces melted butter 2 cups water 2 cups milk 2 cups all-purpose flour Pinch of salt 4 ounces sugar, granulated In a large mixing bowl, mix all ingredients and whisk for 30 seconds at low speed. Scrape down sides of bowl and blend for another 10 seconds. Let mix rest. Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium high heat. Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, using approximately ¼ cup for each crêpe. Tilt the pan with a circular motion so that the batter coats the surface evenly. Cook the crepe for about 2 minutes, until the bottom is light brown. Loosen with a spatula, turn, and cook the other side. Serve hot.

SPRING PEA SOUP WITH CHANTERELLES

serves 4 to 6 1 pound shelled fresh organic peas, blanched and shocked in ice water 1 tablespoon freshly ground white pepper 2 tablespoons honey, organic ¼ cup bacon, diced and rendered ¼ cup pearl onions, white, blanched and peeled 1 tablespoon sea salt 24 ounces vegetable stock, heated 2 tablespoons unsalted butter 130

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2 cups fresh chanterelles, preferably small button size, removed of dirt and pine needles 1 cup mint, loosely packed ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil Break all ingredients except mushrooms, mint, and oil into 2 equal batches. Add 1 batch to high-speed blender and blend until frothy on top (about 2 minutes). Pour into soup pot, on low heat. Blend second batch and repeat method. Sauté mushrooms with canola oil and season with salt and pepper. Divide into 4 soup bowls and top with chanterelles, shredded mint, and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil.

SALMON TARTARE WITH WASABI TOBIKO

serves 4 10 ounces impeccably fresh sushi-grade salmon filet ½ cup sake Salt 1½ tablespoons hot sesame oil 2 tablespoons ginger juice, pickled ¾ cup crème fraîche Wasabi Tobiko (available at specialty Asian markets) 4 wonton wrappers (cut into quarters) 1 cup loosely packed fresh herbs, small pluches or micro greens Cut salmon in small pieces, about ¼-inch thick. Keep area cold. Cutting board and sharp knives must be very clean. In a mixing bowl, mix gently the sake, salt, sesame oil, ginger juice, and salmon. Pack salmon into 3 × 3 ring mold on serving plate. Add a tablespoon crème fraîche to mold and spread out evenly. Repeat with Wasabi Tobiko. Remove ring mold. Garnish plate with wontons alongside plate and micro greens. ( Wontons may be fried up to 4 hours ahead. Keep in airtight container until ready to serve.)

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STEAMED SKATE WING WITH CURRIED SPRING VEGETABLE SUCCOTASH

serves 4 2 pounds of impeccably fresh skate filet (free of any white skin, dark skin, or any membrane) 1 teaspoon Madras curry powder (not spicy) 1 cup of sweet local corn, shucked from cob and blanched in salted boiling water ¼ cup lima beans or fava beans, shelled and blanched ¼ cup shelled English peas, blanched in salted boiling water ½ cup small dice of Yukon Gold potato, blanched in salted boiling water Salt and pepper to taste Tomato water ( blend 2 pounds fresh tomato with pinch of salt; strain through coffee filter) 2 tablespoons butter ¼ cup tomato concassé, cut into small dice ¼ cup heavy cream Extra-virgin olive oil Concassé tomatoes are made by blanching whole ripe tomatos in salted boiling water and then shocking them in ice water. Skin is then peeled, seeds are extracted, and only the meat is used for preparation. Fill a steamer basket (a stainless steel or a copper fish steamer) with water. Lay fish in steamer for 8 to 10 minutes. While fish is steaming, in a large sauté pan gently toast the curry powder. When curry begins to smoke, take off heat and add all vegetables. Sauté and season with salt and pepper. Add ½ cup of tomato water and reduce by half. Add 2 tablespoons of butter and swirl gently with a spoon until butter emulsifies with vegetables. Add tomato concassé, cook for 20 seconds, and take off heat. Strain vegetables and reserve liquid. Divide vegetables evenly among 4 dinner plates. Top with steamed skate. Return liquid to fire. Bring to boil. Add ¼ cup heavy cream. Return to boil. Adjust seasoning, and spoon around skate. Garnish with a drizzle of high-quality extra-virgin olive oil.

NOTE

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COFFEE PANNA COTTA WITH BISCOTTI AND LEMON ZEST

serves 6 to 8 3 sheets gelatin ½ quart heavy cream ½ cup milk 1 teaspoon instant coffee 1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract ½ cup sugar 2 biscotti 1 lemon, zested 1 teaspoon sea salt 8 plastic soufflé cups Bloom gelatin in tepid water. Heat heavy cream, milk, instant coffee, vanilla extract, and sugar. Bring to a boil. Let steep 10 minutes. Pass liquid through fine strainer. Drain water and add gelatin to cream mixture. Stir until gelatin is dissolved. Pour into plastic soufflé cups. Cover with plastic while hot and refrigerate to set (minimum 2 hours, best overnight). Run a sharp knife around the edge of the soufflé cup and unmold each into a serving bowl. Garnish with grated biscotti and grated lemon zest. Top with a pinch of salt.

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BILL DORRLER Due Terre, Bernardsville Due Mari, New Brunswick

Someone made the mistake of giving Bill Dorrler’s baby daughter a spoonful of Chef Boyardee. She wouldn’t eat it. “ere is justice,” says Dorrler. Given that Dorrler has become more than a bit famous for his homemade pastas at both Due Mari in New Brunswick and Due Terre in Bernardsville, it would indeed be a sacrilege if his daughter ate canned noodles. e pasta he makes is pasta that can silence all conversation at the dinner table, is so popular that his restaurants offer daily five-course pasta tasting menus and his chefs conduct sold-out pastamaking classes. Indeed, to simply describe his pastas as “homemade” is inadequate, since that doesn’t convey the skill involved and implies a bit of misshapen charm. e restaurants call the pasta “hand-craed,” which is slightly more accurate although still not specific enough. “Artisan” would be the right word, but perhaps that’s an overused and inflated foodie adjective these days, carrying too much precocious baggage. Whatever the description, the bottom line here is that the pastas are simply inspired and ethereal, simultaneously rich and delicate. e reason is because they’re made from scratch every single day, hand-rolled, with two cooks manning the pasta tables at each restaurant eight hours a day. Sure, many top restaurants make pasta from

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scratch these days, but here the menu includes papardelle with a Bolognese sauce, cavatelli with fennel sausage, seasonal ravioli, short rib agnolotti or perhaps veal agnolotti, garganelli with Parma prosciutto, ricotta gnocchi, and spaghetti with lobster, shrimp, and fresh tomatoes. It’s a lot of pasta, and the job is more than tedious; it takes two and a half hours to make just a batch of garganelli. Hand rolling your pasta is not practical, and all that labor involved means that it’s an expensive proposition for a restaurant. But for Dorrler, there’s just no other way. Dorrler’s the kind of executive chef who still has cuts on his fingers and burns on his hands; he’s behind the line four or five nights a week. He’ll reach into a pot of boiling water to test the readiness of the pappardelle (five seconds too long and you’ll regret it), knows how to alter his dough recipe—sometimes by a drop of water—according to the temperature and humidity of the day, chooses his pasta makers in part by their temperament and ability, but also because of the size of their hands. Resumés don’t mean a lot, he’ll say. “I need to see your heart.”

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At Due Mari, a small box of tools is tucked on a shelf under the marble pasta counter. e tools look like relics, museum pieces, really, not the kind of tools you’d find in a world of subzero refrigeration and convection ovens. ese are the kind of tools that were used hundreds of years ago, and these are the tools Dorrler uses to roll the gnocchi, make the spaghetti, cut the agnolotti. Each shape is used for a different reason—the agnolotti are like little envelopes, for example, filled with robust short ribs, and then closed—not clamped shut like ravioli but with small flap remaining, in order to catch some of the sauce. It’s soothing and addicting, this process—just to watch it is to be inspired to try it yourself. Dorrler remembers the first time he did. He’d had instructions from a neighbor, an older Italian woman who had been making pasta her entire life, and he proudly invited her to dinner. e dough has to be just right, not too wet, not too elastic. And you have to add the ingredients a bit at a time. But Dorrler screwed it up, and they ate a very gummy pasta dinner that night. e next week, he invited her again, and this time added the ingredients a bit more judiciously. at dinner was a success. Even now, Dorrler makes his own pasta at home—and is already on his third pasta roller. ( It’s still an easy dinner, he says—homemade pasta and sauce takes less than an hour, and is so worth it.) He’ll spend his days off lost in the supermarket, wandering the aisles and looking for ingredients. It’s nice, he says, the sound of chicken in a sauté pan, when hot oil bounces and catches you on the wrist, putting grill marks on a piece of beef. “It can turn into a mess.” You miss your prep cooks and your dishwasher a lot. “But it’s OK,” says Dorrler—“as long as you have a nice bottle of wine to go with it.” Dorrler is a bit humbled to be in the world he’s in ( “It’s awesome”). His partner is famed chef Michael White (named best chef in the United States by Esquire magazine in 2002, and nominated as best new chef in the United States by the James Beard Foundation). Another part owner is sommelier François Rousseau of the Gramercy Tavern and the Ryland Inn. Dorrler was one of those kids who loved to cook. He’d create a little breakfast menu for his family; circle one, he’d instruct them. Sometimes the toast was burned or the eggs were overdone, but he had fun. He grew up in a family of good cooks, near a farm in Flemington. He understands the value of a fresh ingredient and simple preparations. 136

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Dorrler could walk into the cornfield and pick fresh corn—“I thought everybody had that.” But he also was a rebellious young man, a rough, tough kid with an aggressive lifestyle that required bail money a couple of times. He has a degree in finance, but that wasn’t a good fit. e kitchen, with its controlled chaos, its late nights, was more appealing. “You don’t do it in a suit and a tie. You buy into it a little better.” And it requires discipline. At his level, there’s no room for an aggressive lifestyle, no forgiveness for hangovers. It’s a no-excuses job. “It has to be right for you. It will consume you. It doesn’t end.” Dorrler is a demanding chef, and cooks don’t want to be found lingering. He’ll ask them to learn something new. “You’ve made every loaf of bread? Maybe spin some ice cream.” He doesn’t want to be feared in the kitchen; he thinks a good leader is confident but also humble enough to be able to learn something from a dishwasher. “If you don’t carry a little bit of that humility with you, it’s not going to work.” His other philosophies: “We’re not in a race. We’re in a marathon. It’s a challenge to stay motivated. It’s a challenge to keep it fresh. I need you to be consistent and passionate.” Dorrler is quiet, intense, a man who likes to run to stay fit and clear his head. ( “Please go for a run tomorrow,” his staff will beg, “because you’re killing us.” ) He’s not a superstar chef in the kitchen, in the big ego, showman sense of the word. On the other hand, being in the kitchen makes him feel invincible. Outside the kitchen, he’s human again, with frailties and weaknesses. Pastry chef here is Denise Cinque ( her tiramisu is all rich and creamy and comes in a gleefully oversized Alice in Wonderland cup). She and Dorrler have a baby daughter. “If I can hold her all day long, that’s the best day.”

SECRET: Passion. “It doesn’t come out the same if you don’t have passion.”

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CRISPY ZUCCHINI FLOWERS, BUFFALO MOZZARELLA, POMOD ORO, ANCHOVY

serves 4 ½ cup all-purpose flour ½ cup cornstarch Pinch salt 1 egg, separated ¾ cup club soda 12 zucchini flowers, trimmed 5 ounces mozzarella cut into sticks (about the same size as the zucchini flowers) 6 basil leaves, halved 6 anchovy filets, drained and halved Toothpicks Vegetable oil (for frying) Pomodoro sauce (recipe follows) Fresh basil for garnish Combine flour and cornstarch. To make the batter, combine cornstarch mixture, salt, egg yolk, and add club soda to form a fairly runny mixture. Let stand for 30 minutes. Whisk egg white in a bowl and fold into mixture. Set aside. Fill each zucchini flower with 1 stick of mozzarella, ½ basil leaf and ½ anchovy filet. Close with toothpick. Heat oil in large pot. Dip flower in batter and fry until golden brown. Serve three flowers to a plate with warm pomodoro sauce and fresh basil. Pomodoro Sauce

1 onion, small dice 3 to 4 cloves garlic, slivered 7 to 8 tablespoons olive oil Two 32-ounce cans plum tomatoes Salt Pepper Fresh basil, 1 bunch

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Sweat onion and garlic in olive oil until transparent, about 4 to 5 minutes. Add tomatoes, crushing by hand with a wooden spoon. Simmer 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. ( If any tomatoes stick to the bottom, don’t stir them up; they will give the sauce a burned taste). Season to taste with salt, pepper, and fresh basil.

BRANZINO MARINATO AL GRIGLIA CON GAMBERI (Grilled Marinated Sea Bass with Shrimp)

serves 4 4 servings Branzino, butterflied and cleaned, 18 ounces each with head; 12 ounces without ( Branzino usually comes with head) ( Rainbow trout is a good substitute) 5 tablespoons olive oil 1 sprig thyme 1 bay leaf 2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil 2 cloves garlic, whole 1 bunch broccoli rabe, blanched and cut in 1-inch pieces Chili flakes to taste 1 tomato, diced 2 ounces black olives, pitted and chopped ½ pound laughing bird shrimp, peeled and deveined (or any high-quality white shrimp) Salt Pepper Marinate the fish in a nonreactive glass bowl with olive oil, thyme, and bay leaf for up to one hour. Preheat grill to high heat. Rub oil with a towel on grill grates to prevent sticking. Place fish flesh-side down, so that the fish lies 10 o’clock to 4 o’clock. ( First, shake off any excess oil to prevent fire.) Cook approximately 2 minutes and then rotate fish to face 2 o’clock and 8 o’clock. Cook approximately 2 minutes more. Flip over the fish, so skin-side is down. Cook 2 minutes longer. Remove fish from grill and keep warm.

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In sauté pan on high heat, add oil and garlic. Cook until lightly browned. Remove and discard garlic. Add broccoli rabe, chili flakes, tomato, olives, and shrimp. Cook until shrimp are brightly pink or for approximately 3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Place fish on plate and top with broccoli rabe and shrimp mixture. Drizzle with olive oil. Serve.

FRESH CHITARRA SPAGHETTI WITH LOBSTER, SHRIMP, FRESH TOMATO GARLIC, AND CHILIES

serves 4 ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil 1½ pounds uncooked lobster tails 20 jumbo shrimp, peeled and deveined 3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced ¼ cup brandy 2 cups grape tomatoes, quartered 2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon Pinch of red pepper flakes ½ cup dry white wine Sea salt and fresh ground black pepper 1 pound basic spaghetti, store-bought fresh or dried pasta Julienned flat-leaf parsley, for garnish Heat the olive oil in a large deep skillet over medium-high heat. Add the lobster pieces and sauté until they turn red. Add the shrimp, season to taste with salt and pepper, and sauté until they turn pink. Stir in garlic for about 2 to 3 minutes. Pour in the brandy. Turn the heat to high and carefully ignite the liquid. When the flames subside, stir in the tomatoes, tarragon, pepper flakes, and white wine. Bring the liquid to a boil and cook until reduced by half, about 2 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer sauce to a large bowl. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Stir in the pasta and cook until al dente. Drain the pasta. Add the pasta to the bowl with the lobster and shrimp sauce, and gently toss. Now taste and season if necessary. Divide among 4 plates, and serve immediately, garnished with a little parsley.

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GARGANELLI CON PROSCIUTTO, PISELLI E PANNA ( Pasta Quills with Prosciutto, Spring Peas, and Cream) Pasta Dough

1¾ cup all-purpose flour 2 eggs Salt Si flour and salt into a mound on counter. Make a well in the center and add the eggs. Knead with hands for about 10 minutes. If mixture is too so, add flour; if too firm, add water. Shape into a ball and rest for 30 minutes. Roll dough into a thin sheet. Cut into squares. Wrap squares around a small cylinder—a pencil or wooden spoon handle. Pinch together in quill shape, using a dab of egg wash if needed. Sauce

½ cup heavy cream 2 tablespoons truffle butter 4 ounces spring peas, shucked and blanched 2 ounces prosciutto di parma, julienned 1 tablespoon Parmesan cheese Salt and pepper to taste Heat salted water to cook the garganelli. In a hot sauté pan, add cream and butter and reduce to half. Add peas, prosciutto, Parmesan, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook pasta for approximately 2 to 3 minutes and add to sauce. Taste for seasoning.

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DAVID C. FELTON Ninety Acres, Peapack-Gladstone

When a bat flew into the restaurant, the cavernous restaurant that was once a carriage house for the king of Morocco, the restaurant that is now part of Sir Richard Branson’s extravaganza that is Natirar, it was the job of Chef David C. Felton to take care of it. Not that bat duty really falls under the umbrella of the chef’s responsibilities. It’s just that Felton, who loves animals, who’s a preservationist, who believes in and champions a sustainable, organic philosophy, whose wife works for the park service—knew exactly what to do. Just pick up the bat gently with a towel, and release it again to the wild. Bats, he says, are not really scary creatures; we just allow ourselves to be scared. Felton, in fact, has built a bat box in a tree at his home in Fanwood—it’s an excellent way to keep away the summer mosquitoes. Felton had impressed the New Jersey food world for several years with his remarkable and innovative cuisine at the Pluckemin Inn. But when he heard about the Branson project, he was more than resourceful in landing a meeting with the principals. He wanted to be part of it. “You’re building my dream restaurant,” he told them. “Even if I were a dishwasher, I would want to be here.” e Felton dream that is realized at Ninety Acres is the philosophy of the place. Fresh, local, sustainable, organic—to the nth degree, with a respect for the earth and the animal that would please the Sierra 142

Club. Indeed, Ninety Acres redefines “local” in many cases to mean “backyard.” Raised beds sit outside the kitchen door; cooks can walk outside to pluck garden greens for a just-ordered salad. A green house provides year-round growing space. Cows, pigs, and sheep graze the property, and some will be part of someone’s dinner. Chickens provide fresh eggs. In the kitchen, the cooks save all their vegetable trim—gallons of peels and leaves are served daily to the animals. And manure provides garden fertilizer. “It’s a nice circle all the way around.” Felton’s goal is a kitchen that gets 80 percent of what it needs either right outside the door or somewhere in New Jersey. (Coffee, for instance, could never come from New Jersey beans.) Meat served at Ninety Acres will be free of antibiotics and hormones—Felton seeks a

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“never-ever policy,” because oen such hormone-free claims apply only to the last three hundred days of an animal’s life. Being part of it all, well, it’s a pinch-me kind of feeling, says Felton, so overwhelming and exciting that every day is like your first day. To be sure, when you make the turn off Peapack Road into the estate of Natirar, it’s as if you’ve somehow driven into the pages of some historical novel, a book about the extremely wealthy scions of business in the early 1900s. e sky here seems vaster, or perhaps you’re just now noticing it. And, even in late fall, the grounds are pristine, with not a stray leaf anywhere, not even among the stones and bramble along the riverbank. It’s quiet; you feel compelled to whisper. You wind alone along the curvy path, and, as it ascends slightly with the grade of the hill, you feel a thrill of excitement. Something grand awaits. e five-hundred-acre estate that is Natirar was owned originally by Walter Graeme Ladd and his wife, Catherine Everit Macy Ladd. eir home, completed in 1912, was designed by architects Guy Lowell ( Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and Henry J. Hardenberg ( New York’s Plaza Hotel). In 1983, King Hassan II of Morocco bought the property for $8.5 million. Today the estate—so named because it’s an anagram for Raritan—is under a public-private partnership between Somerset County and Sir Richard Branson and Bob Wojtowicz. At the top of the hill sits Ninety Acres, the vast and cavernous dining facility that houses the restaurant and the cooking school. But don’t be mistaken; this huge grandiose building is not the main mansion— it’s actually the carriage house garage. And right inside the main entrance is a symbol of the philosophy here, that idea of environmental integrity—a dramatic wood sculpture made from the trees that were cut down to make room for the parking lot, with each slab positioned alongside the next as it did originally in the tree, allowing you to see the sequences of rings. e culinary vision that is Ninety Acres is equally grandiose. e idea here is to create an epicurean oasis. It’s beyond farm-to-table dining—it’s a table at the farm. Plus a cooking school meant to showcase local and national top-name chefs and host James Beard dinners. It’s all quite heady. And Felton was barely in his thirties when he took the job. Felton is London born and loves to snowboard—two facts that seem quite illuminating when considering his food and his skill at 144

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reinterpreting the classics. His dishes are adventurous and creative; he takes an old-school favorite and re-forms it, making it thoroughly fresh and modern, yet somehow retaining its original sophistication. It’s like the folks who reinvented the house of Burberry, taking their stuffy plaid overcoats and turning them into something edgy, thoroughly updated and entirely runway worthy. (Or, for a more direct metaphor, like the folks who took the refined sport of skiing and gave us the bold fun of snowboarding.) How does he do it? It’s an erratic process, he says. He’ll get an idea in the middle of the night and it won’t allow him to sleep. He’s inspired by his volumes of food magazines and cookbooks—a recent obsession was Ma Gastronomie by Fernand Point. Felton always loved food and cooking. “It’s my mother’s fault,” he says. Felton’s mom cooked full-course meals every night. “If you weren’t home at six o’clock for dinner, it’s not like you were in trouble, you were missing out.” Dinner was something simple but good—roasted chicken with roasted potatoes—but Felton’s mom is also the kind of adventurous cook who makes wild game stew with bleu cheese dumplings. ( Her liver paté is on the Ninety Acres menu. “It tastes right to me. It’s a food memory I want to share with everyone.” ) But it was his time as a chef in the Midwest during the early 2000s that Felton honed his current food philosophy. In the middle of the country, the concept of farming—planting a seed, watching it grow, harvesting the produce—is part of everyone’s lives. But then there are the factory farms, where the soil seems flat and dead, where the livestock are simply herds. “When you go to a sustainable farm, it’s like night and day. A happy cow looks like a happy cow. ey smile at you.” Felton is a serious man, earnest and so-spoken, with just a hint of a British accent, sounding a bit like, say, Pierce Brosnan. He spends his mornings trying to teach his chocolate Lab to retrieve a ball, his off hours reading novels ( his favorite authors include Khaled Hosseini, Yann Martel, Vikas Swarup) and books about food ( he likes researcher Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish at Changed the World, Salt: A World History, and e Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell ). “I probably read too much,” he says. “When I pick up a book I have to finish it.” In jeans and a thick heathery sweater, he looks like a man who belongs on an estate, a man who oversees acres, a gentleman who farms.

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But he’s also a Jersey boy, and his first job was at a pizzeria in Demerest. He still loves making pizza best, and immediately volunteers to jump in to help spin the dough when the kitchen gets flooded with orders. Making pizza is tactile, and comforting, he says. In fact, food that is comforting and familiar is a big part of the menu at Ninety Acres, including pizza from the kitchen’s wood-fired oven (tomato and cheese, but also pork belly and farm egg). Other familiar dinners include fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken pot pie with root vegetables or shrimp, and lobster mac and cheese. “Good food is good food,” says Felton. Food should be approachable. Plus the difference between fried chicken that’s done well—with Griggstown farm chicken and served with local potatoes—can be an amazing culinary experience. Of course, the more adventurous diner finds a home at Ninety Acres as well, with hamachi, bacon-wrapped quail, ricotta and kabocha ravioli, venison carpaccio and a wood-fired, dry-aged Niman Ranch cowboy ribeye. For the truly adventurous, the restaurant offers the “Bring Me Food” concept, dinner at the whim of the chef. And Felton, the man who had a fig tree and an apple tree in his Hoboken backyard, the man who grows tomatoes—really big ones—in his front yard in Fanwood, has never been happier. He’s realized his dream, and has told the owners there’s only one way he’d leave. “You’d have to kill me.”

SECRET: “I don’t like tomatoes.”

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PUMPKIN RICOTTA PIZZA

serves 2 to 4 Two 10-inch pizza shells, par-baked 1 cup fresh ricotta cheese 1 lemon, zested and juiced ½ teaspoon nutmeg ⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil 4 cloves garlic minced ½ bunch lacinato kale, chiffonade 1 cup grated pumpkin, blanched ¼ cup maple syrup 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese 2 tablespoons pumpkin seed oil Preheat oven to 450 degrees. If you have a pizza stone, place it on center rack. Mix the ricotta with the lemon juice, zest, nutmeg, and cinnamon. In a large sauté pan, heat olive oil and garlic over medium heat until garlic is fragrant. Reserve half the flavored oil and add the kale to the pan and sauté the kale over medium heat until tender. Cool and reserve. Mix the blanched pumpkin with the maple syrup and sherry vinegar. Brush each pizza shell with toasted garlic oil. Spread the ricotta cheese mixture evenly over each pizza shell. Sprinkle pumpkin and kale mixtures evenly over each pizza, and then top with grated Parmesan. Bake in oven about 10 minutes or until cheese is melted and pizza is crisp. Drizzle with pumpkin seed oil, slice, and serve hot.

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BRAISED BOAR SHOULDER WITH GARGANELLI PASTA AND RICOTTA SALATA

serves 8 to 12 4 pounds wild boar shoulder, boneless and cut into ½-inch slices ¼ cup boar spice rub (recipe follows) ¼ cup blended oil 1 yellow onion, ¼-inch dice 5 cloves garlic, smashed Two 28-ounce cans whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand

1 quart veal stock 1 orange, zested 4 sprigs rosemary 2 sprigs fresh thyme 1 bay leaf 4 pounds garganelli pasta ½ pound ricotta salta cheese, grated

Rub boar shoulder down with spice rub and let marinate 24 hours. In a large rondeau over medium heat, add blended oil and sear meat on all sides. Remove meat from pan and turn heat down to low. Sweat onion and garlic till so and add crushed tomatoes and veal stock. Bring to a boil, add meat, bring back to a boil, and reduce heat to a simmer. Tie the orange peel, rosemary, thyme, and bay leaf together and add to the simmering pot. Simmer boar till tender, about 2 hours over low heat. Don’t cover pan as the sauce must reduce while the meat is cooking. e meat and sauce are ready when the meat shreds apart like pulled pork and the sauce is thick like Bolognese. Remove the herb parcel and reserve warm. In a large stock pot bring 4 gallons of salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook until tender. Drain pasta but reserve a little cooking liquid, about 2 cups. Add pasta to sauce and use the leover cooking liquid to loosen the sauce to make sure it coats the pasta. Portion the pasta and sauce into hot bowl and sprinkle with ricotta salta. Boar Spice Rub

3 tablespoons juniper 2 tablespoons coriander 1 tablespoon allspice berries

1 tablespoon black pepper 1 tablespoon red chili flakes

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RISOTTO

serves 4 3 tablespoons plus 1 tablespoon butter 1 shallot, minced 3 cups arborio rice 2 cups champagne or sparkling wine 1 quart chicken stock, brought to a boil and set aside 1 tablespoon chopped black truffles ¼ cup Parmesan cheese, grated ½ cup heavy cream, whipped firm 16 U10 dry-pack scallops Blended oil Salt, pepper to taste 1 cup assorted herbs ( like parsley, chives, chervil, tarragon) Heat a heavy-bottomed soup pot over medium heat. Add 3 tablespoons butter and minced shallots. Sweat shallots for 1 minute without browning. Add rice and stir for several minutes. Let rice lightly toast. Add a pinch of salt. Add 1½ cups champagne to the rice; stir until the champagne is nearly evaporated. Add chicken stock gradually, stirring well until liquid is absorbed. Repeat these steps until the rice is nicely al dente. When rice is ready to be served, stir in truffles, Parmesan cheese, and last ½ cup of champagne and the whipped cream. Season scallops with salt and pepper. Heat a large heavy-bottomed skillet over high heat. Add splash of blended oil and 1 tablespoon butter to the pan and then add the scallops. Don’t shake or move the scallops for at least 1 minute. You will see the browning on the sides of the scallops. When the scallops are golden brown on one side, flip them and let them cook for 30 to 60 seconds on the other side. Remove from pan and let drain on a paper towel. Spoon the risotto on the center of four plates and set the scallops on the risotto. Garnish with fresh-cut herbs tossed in olive oil.

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COREY HEYER Bernards Inn, Bernardsville

“We don’t allow kids.” It was the late 1970s, and that was the message from La Panetiere, the Philadelphia restaurant that started a culinary evolution in that city, the restaurant that had hired as sous chef the acclaimed Georges Perrier, the man who would later open Le Bec-Fin. Corey Heyer’s father was undaunted. “My kids like food.” Aer some debate, the restaurant agreed to allow the children—but only if the family dined early, at 5:30 p.m. e children—who were under age ten—ate escargot and rack of lamb, and impressed the staff with their grown-up behavior. “We were very fortunate that they would not leave us at home,” says Heyer. It was just one of the excursions of his childhood, a childhood filled with culinary adventures, anksgiving weekend lobster dinners, dinners at Susanna Foo and Le Bec-Fin, trips to Panama, Mexico, and Canada. But the most important culinary experiences were the Saturday night dinners, the calm in the storm of a hectic family schedule, the night when everyone was together and dinner was the focus. And what a dinner—with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, lamb chops and smoked salmon, foie gras and paté. e family would eat late, and nothing was permitted to interrupt. ( Even when he was older, Heyer was not permitted to go out with friends until aer dinner.) 150

So it makes sense then, that today Heyer works to make dinner an elegant affair, an oasis of sorts, a night of relaxation and sophistication. Heyer is a so-spoken man, the kind of man who wears a turtleneck and looks for all the world like he grew up in a well-heeled seaside town—which he did. He is executive chef at the Bernards Inn, a genteel and historic place (it’s more than one hundred years old), with white tablecloths, stone fireplaces, high ceilings, gleaming woodwork. ere’s a piano bar, a stone terrace lush with greens. anks to an overwhelmingly extensive and expensive renovation by Jeffrey Haines of Far Hills, the inn has such a gracious old-Hollywood feel that you almost expect to see Grace Kelly or Humphrey Bogart at the next table over. e Bernards Inn feels like a restaurant for the beautiful people, for men who wear silk pocket squares and women in couture gowns. ( e restaurant used to host a Princess Tea one Sunday each month, and girls were invited to wear their tiaras and pouffy organza dresses for finger sandwiches, fruit, tea, and sweets. How precious is that?) As executive chef, Heyer is analytical, the kind of chef who is constantly asking for feedback. He wants to know what others think—from the dishwasher in the kitchen to the guest in the dining room. It’s all part of his effort to create the most perfect environment, the most perfect meal. “It’s really important to listen to what they say.” Because, for Corey Heyer

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Heyer, it’s not just food that’s the experience, it’s the experience that’s the experience, with service and ambience being an equal part of the equation. e chef is just one part—an equal part—of a successful business plan. He tells the story of his suckling pig, a recipe that takes forever— dry rub it for a day, braise it for a day, let it cool, debone it. When it was all said and done, the staff didn’t like it. “We really feel it’s kind of dry.” ey were right, and he adjusted the recipe. “It was a really valid point.” e feedback, the analysis—it’s all part of his effort to control every single aspect of the job. He’s the kind of chef who keeps tabs on every detail. “A little anal retentive has been mentioned.” But a kitchen can be crazy, chaotic, wild. Heyer works to make sure it is not, creating order out of chaos, anticipating problems. For tasting dinners, for example, where the kitchen is expected to produce 850 plates, Heyer will put together a back-up dish, a terrine of rabbit, say, with a black truffle sauce. It’s a complimentary interlude from the chef, available as a safety net for guests who might, for some unexpected reason, have a long interruption between courses. “ey have no idea they’re waiting,” he says. It’s not a big undertaking—he’ll put together only sixteen of them. It’s a simple thing, a small precaution that can offer big rewards in a crisis. Heyer started to cook when he was a teenager—his mother went off to the University of Pennsylvania to become a veterinarian, and he either had to learn how to cook or eat frozen food. But it was also a family that loved food, and had high expectations of a child’s palate. He remembers a trip to Panama, eating ceviche. His father didn’t tell him what it was. It was eye-opening. And he remembers the Friday after anksgiving weekend, with its annual raucous family get-together, dozens of people, forty-eight lobsters, smoked salmon, clams, venison chili, beach football outside and the Dallas Cowboys inside. It’s that culinary legacy that he tries to re-create at the Bernards Inn. e menu here is filled with the kinds of foods associated with wealth and luxury—foie gras, pork belly, carpaccio, duck, truffles, lobster, sweetbreads. e inn is in the heart of one of the wealthiest sections of the state, and his clients are accustomed to a certain level of attention and sophisticated, a certain kind of food at the table. But Heyer also makes a peanut-butter-stuffed date, wrapped in bacon, a 152

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restaurant favorite that came straight from his family’s anksgiving weekend lobster feast. Heyer’s resumé includes the Fromagerie in Rumson, Restaurant Nicholas in Red Bank, and Daniel in New York. But Heyer is clear that his kitchen abilities are just one piece of the puzzle, and the Bernards Inn is the kind of place where impeccable service and flourish are paramount. Heyer believes a restaurant should be an oasis from the chaos of your life. It’s all about being pampered, that two or three hours that you can get away—almost like a spa experience. Heyer talks a lot about the calm in the storm, getting away. “e Northeast is so stressed.” As a kid growing up in Bay Head, he was a surfer, in the ocean at the crack of dawn every day. At Christmas, the family escaped to Vermont. He talks of camping trips, weeks and months on the road, going to Maine, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. It was on the observation deck of Bromley Mountain in Vermont where he proposed to his wife. Even now, his idea of a dream getaway is a campfire in the Poconos, surrounded by wine and fine cheeses. But now there are three kids—and it’s a scheduling nightmare to make something like that happen. Yet Heyer does make sure he continues his culinary heritage. And, at eighteen months, his son was eating foie gras and sweetbreads.

SECRET: “If you want to be successful, you have to make it happen.”

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PEANUT-BUTTER-STUFFED DATES WRAPPED IN BACON

yield: 20 hors d’oeuvres 6 tablespoons creamy peanut butter 20 dates, pits removed 10 slices bacon, cut in half 20 toothpicks Put the peanut butter into a pastry bag that has a small round tip. Carefully stuff each date with approximately 1 teaspoon of peanut butter. Wrap each date with a half slice of bacon and secure with a toothpick. e dates can be made one day in advance and kept in the refrigerator. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Spray a cookie sheet with cooking spray and arrange the dates on the sheet so they are not touching. Cook the dates for approximately 3 minutes. Flip all of the dates over and cook until the bacon is crispy, approximately 3 more minutes. Carefully remove the dates from the oven as the bacon will leave a lot of grease in the bottom of the pan. Place the dates on a paper-towel-lined plate and allow to cool for 2 minutes. e peanut butter will be extremely hot, and it needs to cool before being consumed. Arrange on a platter and serve.

PEEKYTOE CRAB SALAD

serves 6 as an appetizer 1 pound Peekytoe crab, leg meat only 1 cup cantaloupe, brunoise, divided 1 tablespoon sunflower seeds, toasted 1 teaspoon tarragon, chopped 1 teaspoon chives, chopped 2 tablespoons lemon and tarragon vinaigrette, divided (recipe follows) Salt, white pepper to taste 12 pieces sunflower seed flatbread (recipe follows) Micro tarragon

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Combine the crabmeat, ½ cup cantaloupe, sunflower seeds, tarragon, chives, and 2 tablespoons of the vinaigrette in a mixing bowl. Season the crab salad with salt and white pepper to taste. Divide the salad between 5 chilled plates. Drizzle the remaining 2 tablespoons of the vinaigrette around the salad. Scatter the remaining ½ cup of cantaloupe brunoise around the salad and garnish each plate with 2 pieces of sunflower seed flatbread. Lemon and Tarragon Vinaigrette

Juice of 1 lemon 1 egg yolk 1 cup olive oil Salt and pepper 2 tablespoons chopped tarragon Mix lemon juice and egg together and emulsify with olive oil. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and finish with chopped tarragon. Sunflower Seed Flatbread

2 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons sugar 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper 1 teaspoon white sesame seeds 1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds ½ cup sunflower seeds 2 tablespoons cold butter ½ cup heavy cream Combine flour, sugar, salt, pepper, sesame seeds, mustard seeds, and sunflower seeds in robo coupe and pulse until well combined and seeds are broken down. Add butter and pulse till combined. Add heavy cream and pulse to combine. Wrap in plastic and let rest at room temperature for 20 minutes. Roll out as thin as possible, cut into rectangles, and bake on parchment at 350 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes.

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PACIFIC KING SALMON WITH CAULIFLOWER CREAM, BLACK TRUMPET MUSHRO OMS, BRAISED ROMAINE, APPLE CIDER, AND PINK PEPPERCORN GLAZE

serves 4 2 cups apple cider 1 tablespoon pink peppercorns 4 yellow beets, 2½ inches in diameter 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon olive oil Sea salt to taste 2 cups cauliflower florets 2 tablespoons sweet unsalted butter

8 ounces black trumpet mushrooms, cleaned well 1 heart of romaine, cut into 1-inch pieces 2 tablespoons water Four 6-ounce portions King Salmon

Reduce the apple cider over medium heat until thick and syrupy. Add the pink peppercorns and reserve warm. Wrap the beets individually in aluminum foil and roast them in a preheated 350-degree convection oven for approximately one hour or until fork tender. Remove from the foil and peel the beets while still warm. Slice into half-dollar size pieces, coat with 1 teaspoon of olive oil and season with salt, reserve warm. Boil cauliflower in water seasoned with salt until tender, approximately 6 minutes, and purée in a blender with 1 tablespoon of butter until smooth and creamy. Adjust seasoning with salt and reserve warm. Sauté the black trumpet mushrooms in 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium-high heat for approximately 3 to 4 minutes or until tender. Season the mushrooms with salt and reserve warm. Braise the romaine over medium-high heat in a sauté pan with 2 tablespoons of water and 1 tablespoon of butter for approximately 4 to 5 minutes or until tender. Season with salt and keep warm. Season the salmon with salt and sauté in 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a nonstick sauté pan until golden brown on both sides, approximately 2 to 3 minutes per side. Lay the salmon on a baking sheet and glaze the top of the fish with the apple cider and pink peppercorn glaze. Finish cooking the fish in a preheated 400-degree convection oven until just cooked through, approximately 4 minutes. 156

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Pool the cauliflower cream in the center of four plates. Place the braised romaine in the center of the cauliflower and place the salmon on top of the romaine. Spoon the mushrooms around the salmon and place the beet rings against the mushrooms.

SCALLOPS WITH LEMON SUNCHOKE PURÉE

serves 4 2 tablespoons olive oil 12 U-16 scallops Micro fines herbes (chives, parsley, tarragon) Sear scallops until golden brown and desired doneness. Put a small amount of sunchoke purée in the center of each plate. Place the scallops around the purée and drizzle the citrus basil vinaigrette, 2 tablespoons per plate, around the scallops. Garnish with micro fines herbes (chives, parsley, and tarragon). Lemon Sunchoke Purée

4 lemons 1 cup water ½ cup sugar 1 pound sunchokes 1 teaspoon cold butter Water, sugar, and salt, to taste Peel lemon skin from lemons, making sure to remove all the white pith. Cover with 1 cup cold water and ½ cup sugar. Bring to a boil, strain through a fine mesh strainer, and cool with cold water. Repeat this process three more times to remove the harsh rind flavor of the lemon. Put the lemon peels in a blender and puree with a small amount of simple syrup (2 parts water and 1 part sugar that has been simmered to dissolve the sugar and cooled completely). Reserve this lemon puree. Peel the sunchokes and put into lemon water to keep from browning. Bring a small pot of salted water to a boil, cut the sunchokes into small pieces, and simmer until tender. When tender, add the sunchokes to the blender and add a tablespoon of the lemon puree and a teaspoon of cold butter. Purée till smooth. Add more lemon purée if needed, season with salt if necessary. Corey Heyer

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Citrus Basil Vinaigrette

1 quart orange juice 1 clove garlic, chopped 1 shallot, chopped

1 bunch basil leaves, cleaned 2 cups grapeseed oil, cold Salt

Add chopped garlic and shallot to orange juice and simmer until reduced to 1 cup. Cool completely. Add basil leaves to orange juice reduction and puree until smooth in blender. With motor running on low speed, drizzle cold oil into top to emulsify the vinaigrette. Season with salt. A few notes to keep in mind with this vinaigrette: Make sure the oil is very cold (it will help the vinaigrette stay bright green); do not let the blender run for too long while making the vinaigrette (it will get hot and turn the green brown); take care when adding the oil (it may splash up in the beginning).

HEIRLO OM TOMATOES WITH PINE NUT VINAIGRETTE Baby arugula 2 medium-size shallots, minced 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Salt and pepper to taste 4 medium-sized heirloom tomatoes, sliced thin 2 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted Toss arugula, shallots, and olive oil together and season with salt and pepper. Reserve at room temperature. Make vinaigrette (recipe follows). To serve, toss baby arugula mixture with pine nut vinaigrette and place in center of plate. Arrange tomatoes on top of salad and drizzle pine nut vinaigrette over tomatoes. Garnish with toasted pine nuts and micro basil if available. Pine Nut Vinaigrette

1 cup pine nuts, toasted 4 tablespoons tomato vinegar or sherry wine vinegar

2 cups olive oil Salt and pepper

Purée pine nuts and vinegar in blender until smooth and slowly add olive oil to emulsify. Season with salt and pepper.

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JAMES LAIRD Restaurant Serenade, Chatham

A larger-than-life portrait of Chef James Laird overlooks the cozy yet sophisticated bar at Restaurant Serenade. It’s an homage that seems thoroughly arrogant and egotistic. Yet anyone who knows Laird would agree: Such personality traits most certainly do not apply. Yes, Laird is confident in the kitchen, passionate, driven, entrepreneurial. But he is also quiet and somewhat unassuming, a chef who likes his food to speak for itself, a chef who modestly—and somewhat frequently—apologizes for being so skinny, as if his weight somehow reflected poorly on his kitchen skills and wasn’t instead the result of his intense squash matches and equally intense yoga practice. Laird likes to tell the story of the portrait, how he won a 2000 Robert Mondavi Culinary Award of Excellence and the artist, Rise Ochsher, was part of his reward, how she spent the day painting, and complained that he couldn’t stand still. “How long does it take to paint something like that?” someone asked her the night it was unveiled. “Darling, a lifetime.” It’s a great analogy for Laird himself, whose talents in the kitchen have been evolving since he became a dishwasher at the Roundup Family Restaurant in Middlesex at age fourteen, whose skills are so natural that he knows instinctively what to do when he’s putting together a dish 159

with, say, quail, fig, and prosciutto. It’s like riding a bicycle or learning classical ballet at a very young age—it stays with you forever, so much a part of you that it’s just natural, an instinct. Don’t think about it, says Laird. If you don’t think about it, you have no fear. Of course, Laird learned from the best, and, if you give him the slightest invitation whatsoever, he’ll talk nostalgically about the eight months he spent working as a nineteen-year-old at a three-star restaurant in Provence, in a restaurant that was once a monastery at the top of a mountain, a restaurant with its own garden in the back and chickens in the yard. Laird had saved five thousand dollars from his Jersey restaurant jobs ( by then he was already working at the famed Ryland Inn) so he could afford the experience, and he was sure to make the most of it. Mornings and evenings were hectic, but aernoons were mostly free. So Laird spent them driving the French countryside to dine at all the other great restaurants in the area—a two-and-a-half-hour trip for lunch was no big deal. On his days off, he would drive to farmer’s markets in Paris, which only inspired even more excursions—to find the origin of the goat cheese or to visit the farm that was selling the chickens. 160

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Today, if you see Laird in the morning before Serenade opens, he’ll seem more like a granola-crunching New England boutique farmer than a business-savvy owner and executive chef of one of New Jersey’s finest restaurants. Maybe it’s because he needs a shave and is wearing plaid fleece; more likely it’s because of the passion he has for everything in the field, from organic compost to golden purslane. Truth be told, Laird is both farmer and chef; he tends a quarteracre plot at his home in Harding Township, all of it sustainable and organic, a project he lovingly calls his farmette. Laird has twenty-five chickens in his backyard. Sometimes he and his wife, Nancy, entertain guests with cocktails and nibbles at the chicken coop, which Laird built. His farmette is a nod to his time in France, and Laird’s chickens are beautiful, award-winning chickens, chickens that could win the chicken equivalent of the Westminster Dog Show, says Laird. ey’re regal and amusing, importantly pecking at one thing and then another, as if they were as busy as the president himself. ey’re also shy and friendly, running from you and then taking food from your hand. And the quality of the eggs? Enough said. ( Laird is working on a user-friendly guide to living the life of an organic chef—how to grow the backyard garden, build the chicken coop, cook the dinner, entertain guests. Laird is also developing a television pilot with the same sort of concept—James at home, cooking from his own garden.) Farm-to-table dining is an idea that many modern U.S. chefs embrace, oen with a rustic touch to add a flair of authenticity. But Laird was farm-to-table well before it was chic—in France, he shrugs, it’s just standard procedure. And at Serenade, farm-to-table is far from rustic; here, it’s a sophisticated notion, all French, romantic and refined. Many food lovers in the state know the history of Serenade: James and Nancy met and fell in love when they worked at the Ryland Inn; in 1996, they got married and bought and named their own restaurant as a love song to both their passion for each other and the restaurant business itself. at both the restaurant and the marriage have been so successful for so long is something for which they clearly—and rightfully—are proud. eirs is the kind of marriage that works not in spite of the restaurant but because of it. ey’re partners in life, partners in business. “I love my wife,” says Laird simply. “She’s beautiful.” ey complement each other—at the restaurant, he’s the chef and

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she runs the front of the house. At home, she’s the chef and he tends the garden. And they understand the value of the big statement. Laird seems to love to surprise his wife on her birthday; one year, he had a car waiting outside at 5 a.m. ready to whisk them to the airport for a flight to South Beach. ey apply the strengths of their marriage to the running of the restaurant. Integrity, devotion, attention to detail— they’re important in love, important in business. Serenade is an enchanting place, cozy, luxe, and elegant, with intimate club seating, white tablecloths, and a warm fireplace. e food is French influenced, and the service is oh-so-solicitous. Yet Restaurant Serenade is not fussy. Despite the white tablecloths, the crowd here does not seem to be a hushed-tone, white-tablecloth crowd. ese people are younger than you might expect, and more lively. e folks here laugh, often loudly. ese are the people who seem to know how to live the good life. Somehow, Restaurant Serenade seems symbolic of both success in life and success in the restaurant business. But restaurants aren’t opened on a whim, and Laird, who opened Serenade at the tender age of twenty-seven, did not come from a wealthy family. He is hard working ( being so dependable that at age fieen he was given the keys to the restaurant) and earnest—traits that are immediately recognized. But it wouldn’t work without the passion, and Laird unabashedly gushes when he talks about food. Take the carrot, for example. A carrot is a sensual food in the kitchen at Serenade, and Chef Laird extols the virtues of this common orange root vegetable as if it were as rare, exclusive, and coveted as, say, an earthy porcini mushroom or a rich black truffle. Most chefs steam their carrots. But, says Laird, if you’re steaming your carrots, you’re not doing them justice. Plus steamed carrots get tossed into ice water to stop the cooking process, which means all those great carrot nutrients just leech out. Laird is warming to his argument now, and leans closer, preparing to cinch the debate, gesturing a bit for emphasis. Roasted carrots never touch water, he says, as if it’s an incredible fact. Roasting brings out the natural sugars of a vegetable, caramelizes a vegetable, and the result is a fully developed natural sweetness. Laird suddenly seems slightly embarrassed by all his enthusiasm and leans back again in his chair. “It’s a simple thing, really,” he says. “Who would think that about a carrot?” 162

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e chef has become a bit more matter-of-fact now, but it’s too late. You’re already hooked and secretly hope he’ll reveal his roasting secrets; how might I, too, make those amazing carrots? Please, chef, do tell. Laird so loves his vegetables that he actually designs his dinners around them. ( It’s not so absurd, really; it’s like building an outfit around a truly amazing pair of shoes.) He does other things that seem to flaunt the standard restaurant business model. He won’t overbook on a Saturday night. ( It’s too risky, he says. Each dinner on Saturday night is like free marketing; do a great job and your customers will tell a few of their friends, but do a lousy job and your customers will tell many friends.) Instead, he promotes dinners on other days, with half-priced bottles of wine or a hundred-mile menu of local ingredients only for thirty-five dollars. e Lairds oen call the restaurant their baby—a project that required lots of time and energy during the early years, but one that continues to evolve and grow, and whose needs change. It’s part of the reason for their success, that ability to both stay true to their vision but also to evolve with the times. So Serenade is still a romantic spot where couples get engaged and celebrate wedding anniversaries. But now the bar is also a hip place for a more casual date, with sophisticated cocktails and a lower-priced bar menu. ( Laird tested twelve meats before deciding on the right one for his bar burger, serving it on an English muffin with homemade cole slaw, a homemade pickle, and homemade fries.) Laird doesn’t fear giving away his secrets. Technique is easy; it’s the romance that can’t be taught. “ey can duplicate the recipe, but they can’t duplicate the love,” he says, without sounding at all corny. “Cuisine is about heart.”

SECRET: Laird likes to indulge in supermarket-brand icecream sandwiches in bed, while watching the Golf Channel.

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JUNIPER-DUSTED VENISON WITH AUTUMN FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

serves 4 1 tablespoon butter 2 Golden Delicious apples, peeled and quartered 24 seedless red grapes, peeled 1 cup pearl onions, roasted 1 cup brussels sprouts, roasted 4 roasted chestnuts, shelled Four 5-ounce boneless venison medallions, from saddle Salt and pepper to taste 3 tablespoons crushed juniper 1 tablespoon canola oil 2 sprigs fresh thyme Melt butter in warm sauté pan. Cook apples until tender and caramelized. Add the grapes, onions, brussels sprouts, and chestnuts. Place in a 375 degree oven until all are hot. Dry and season the venison with salt, pepper, and the juniper. Heat oil in hot sauté pan. Add venison and sear for one minute on all sides until medium rare. Take care to turn frequently; add thyme sprigs while cooking. Divide up vegetables among four plates and place one venison medallion on top of vegetables.

AUTUMN TUNA TARTARE

serves 4 Tuna

8 ounces sushi-quality yellow fin tuna, diced small 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 teaspoon chive oil 1 tablespoon chopped fresh shallots 1 tablespoon chives ¼ cup fine dice of onion, apple, butternut squash, lightly sautéed 4 ounces radish sprouts

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Combine first 6 ingredients in bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Place in small mold, making indentation in the center of the tuna mixture. Dress radish sprouts with olive oil and black pepper. Place decoratively in indentation. Sauce

¼ cup unsweetened coconut milk 1 teaspoon lime zest 2 limes, juiced 1 teaspoon honey 1 pinch cayenne pepper ¼ teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sesame oil 1 tablespoon soy sauce Combine all with hand blender. Spoon around tuna.

LOBSTER CANNELLONI WITH ORANGE-SCENTED SQUASH PURÉE AND SHAVED FENNEL SALAD

serves 4 Cre ˆ pes

1 cup milk ½ cup flour 2 eggs 2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon 8 ounces clarified butter Combine all and pass through a china cap. Heat creˆpe or omelet pan. Cook 2 ounces of batter in clarified butter until creˆpe is golden brown. Reserve. Squash Purée

4 ounces honey 1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice 2 cups skinned and cubed butternut squash 2 tablespoons ginger juice 2 tablespoons butter Salt and pepper

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Caramelize the honey. Add the orange juice and reduce by half. Add the butternut squash, ginger juice, and butter and cook until tender. Purée in blender. Season with salt and pepper. Reserve hot. Fennel Salad

½ head fennel, thinly sliced 1 tablespoon fennel hair 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil ½ teaspoon chopped chives Combine all and season with salt and pepper. Consommé

4 ounces lobster glace 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar 10 strands saffron 4 ounces extra-virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice Combine all and emulsify with handheld blender. Keep warm. Cannelloni

Four 1¼-pound lobsters, cooked and removed from shell 1 zucchini, cut in ribbons, cooked until tender 1 yellow squash, cut in ribbons, cooked until tender 8 tarragon crêpes Alternate zucchini and squash ribbons on crêpes. Place half a lobster on creˆpe and roll. Cut ends and place in 300-degree oven until warm. Place two cannelloni on a small bed of squash purée. Spoon the consummé around and top with a small amount of fennel salad.

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HEIRLO OM TOMATO SALAD WITH TOASTED ORZO is dish can also be prepared cold by not warming the tomatoes and by cooling the orzo before serving.

serves 4

Tomatoes

1 medium purple Cherokee tomato, quartered 2 medium German candy-striped tomatoes, quartered 2 small green zebra tomatoes, cut in half Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper Extra-virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon opal basil leaves, chiffonade Combine tomatoes in nonreactive baking dish. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Toss lightly in olive oil. Place in medium oven until just warm. Remove from oven and toss with basil. Orzo

½ cup orzo 1 tablespoon minced shallots 3 tablespoons butter 1 cup chicken stock, hot 1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese 2 tablespoons basil purée Sea salt and freshly ground pepper Spread orzo on sheet tray and toast in oven until golden brown. Sweat shallots in 1 tablespoon butter until tender. Add orzo and stir to coat with butter. Add half of the chicken stock and cook until reduced. Add remaining stock and cook until tender. Finish with remaining butter, cheese, basil purée, and salt and pepper. Divide among 4 warm bowls. Top with equal amounts of warm tomatoes.

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PECAN-CRUSTED WARM CHO COLATE TART WITH SECRET CENTER

serves 4 Chocolate Pecan Dough

8 ounces unsalted butter (2 sticks) 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 cup flour ¼ cup cocoa powder 1 cup ground pecans Cream butter and sugar well. Mix in eggs one at a time. Add in flour, cocoa powder, until just mixed. Mix in pecans. Chill well. Divide into four equal portions and roll into one-quarter inch thick discs. Press into individual tart shell and bake for five minutes at 350 degrees. Cool. Chocolate Filling

7 ounces chopped dark chocolate 3 ounces unsalted butter 3 eggs ⅓ cup sugar Melt chocolate and butter over bain marie (warm-water bath). Whisk together eggs and sugar. Stir egg mixture into chocolate mixture. Chill. Optional: Place one secret center square (recipe follows) in center of shell and fill with chilled filling. Bake at 350 degrees for 8 minutes. Serve with vanilla ice cream. Secret Center (Optional)

3 ounces praline paste 3 ounces feuilletine 3 ounces white chocolate Melt chocolate over double boiler. Add praline paste and mix to combine. Add feuilletine and mix to combine. Spread mixture 1 inch thick on plate or in small dish. Chill and cut into 1-inch square pieces.

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JOE ROMANOWSKI Bay Avenue Trattoria, Highlands

Joe Romanowski vividly remembers Klaus Reinecke, the maitre’d at the Plumsteadville Inn outside of New Hope, Pennsylvania, a man so full of character he should have been in the movies, a man who looked like Santa with black hair, the kind of man who could carry alo—with just three fingers!—a heavy silver tray of water glasses all filled to the brim, zooming around the dining room with a flourish. ose were the days of fine dining, says Romanowski, days of pomp and circumstance, flambé and Beef Wellington. Men such as Reinecke didn’t view their work as a job—it was a career, a lifestyle. And Romanowski, a fieen-year-old busboy hoping to earn enough money to buy a car, fell in love. Plus Reinecke knew Chef Tell—Friedemann Paul Erhardt—the famed German-born television chef. Which meant Romanowski got to work with Chef Tell, at his Harrow Inne in Ottsville, Pennsylvania, and at prestigious Chaine dinners. ( is is the original gourmet foodie club, a society dedicated to fine dining—the Confrérie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs—based on the traditions of the French royal guild of goose roasters, dating from 1248.) Romanowski remembers Tell as burly, commanding. And the food, well, it was over the top.

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“It wasn’t like I started off in a diner flipping eggs. I started at the very high end of the business. I was hooked.” Romanowski started as a busboy, then became a pot washer, where he begged so much to help that he was given first grunt kitchen work, then more responsibility, until finally he was trusted to cook a steak or pan-roast some seafood for a bar customer who wanted something to eat aer the kitchen had closed. It was a heady time for a teenager— good money, gourmet food, fancy clientele, pretty waitresses. “Wow,” he thought. “I’m having fun. And I’m getting paid.” e culinary world at these classic European kitchens was thoroughly different from the one in his own home. Romanowski grew up in a big Polish family, where get-togethers meant forty, fiy, sixty people. All the mothers and aunts cooked, and all the children were expected to help; nine-year-olds made perogis, chicken, salads. Romanowski, being the oldest of five boys, was also charged with getting the family dinner started when he came home from school. It was nothing fancy; good food, family food, dinner on a shoestring. Knowing all that, then, it seems logical that Romanowski would someday combine the two concepts, the gourmand and the family cook, into a restaurant that everyone could embrace, a sort of uptown/ downtown thing, part classic European, part family comfort. It wasn’t necessarily done with intent—Romanowski originally sold pizzas at his Bay Avenue Trattoria—but perhaps it’s by market-savvy instinct that he serves osso buco and crabcake with remoulade as well as meatloaf and mac and cheese. Romanowski calls his Bay Avenue Trattoria a neighborhood restaurant, and surely it is. But it’s also a seafood bistro and a working man’s luncheonette. More important, for the modernday foodie at least, it’s a destination restaurant as well. Because Romanowski is a bit of a culinary legend, having been consistently nominated for a prestigious James Beard award. Romanowski, graciously, humbly, with a smile on his face and sounding just like someone at the Oscars, says he’s honored for the recognition. “Just to be put in that class of chefs? at’s hot. Aer thirty years of practice, I’m starting to get good at what I do.” e kitchen is open, and if you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of Romanowski, who also teaches cooking classes at Taste and Technique, Mumford’s Culinary Center, and Bonnie Soleau Catering. He’s

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the one with the kamikaze headband ( his term), which has been part of his wardrobe for decades. “I don’t feel right if I don’t have it on.” His Mediterranean-inspired menu offers a loose mix of classics, comfort food, and modern interpretations—a pan roast of Wellfleet clams and oysters Rockefeller share menu space with meatloaf and mushroom gravy, which in turn shares space with grilled hearts of romaine and garganelli with prosciutto, peas, truffle butter, and Romano cream. Aer the Plumsteadville Inn came culinary school, and then Romanowski spent some time in other prestigious East Coast kitchens— including Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia, which had just opened and where Georges Perrier was just beginning his culinary revolution in that city. Romanowski offered to work for free, peeling potatoes, cleaning the basement, washing dishes, whatever. “He was the original Gordon Ramsay.” Indeed, most kitchens at that time were cutthroat, abusive kitchens. “I grew up in hell’s kitchens,” says Romanowski. “A couple of guys I worked for could make Gordon Ramsay blush.” Romanowski tells the story of a friend who went to work in a European kitchen and was greeted the first day on the job by a whack on the cheek with a spatula.

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“Welcome to my kitchen,” the chef said. Working in an important kitchen was like being in the military, very serious, very guttural. “A lot of time they would abuse you right from the start to see what you’re made of.” Chefs have to be more politically correct these days, but they still need to run a disciplined kitchen. Romanowski has an advantage—he’s more than six feet tall, with a serviceman’s crewcut. He treats his staff like a football team. A football player can’t be afraid of pain; neither can a chef. You’ll get burned, you’ll get cut, you’ll get yelled at, you’ll work so hard it will physically hurt and you’ll feel like quitting. “If you can deal with all those things, you might have a chance.” And then, of course, you have to know how to cook. Romanowski has a standard: “Would I be happy if that was put in front of my mother for her birthday?” If not, if a chef gets that deer-in-the-headlights look, the food gets tossed, and you try again. Before Bay Avenue Trattoria, Romanowski owned Joe & Maggie’s Bistro in Long Branch, a much-acclaimed restaurant that comes with its own piece of interesting history. Romanowski, then chef at Margaux in Colts Neck, came to work one morning to see the boss’s luxury car in the parking lot. His boss, owner of several restaurants in Monmouth County, was in early; Romanowski and his staff were about to be fired. “I know you’re going to open a restaurant someday,” Romanowski was told. Consider this some incentive. It wasn’t the incentive Romanowski wanted, but seven months later, Romanowski and his wife, Maggie Lubcke, opened their doors. ey did it with $125,000—a bit of their own money, plus a loan from both sets of parents, who each took out a $50,000 second mortgage. In hindsight, it was a real risky move—like putting $1,000 on black. “Sometimes being smart is good. Sometimes being stupid is better,” says Romanowski. It was scary, exciting, nerve-wracking. And there was no Plan B. “I can’t lose my father’s money.” e first Saturday night they served forty—which felt like four hundred. But it wasn’t a fiasco, and soon the restaurant was doing two hundred dinners on summer Saturday nights. Still, it was eighteen months before the restaurant was doing well enough for the couple to collect a paycheck. And yet, despite all the work, the hours, the stress, it’s still something they love. ey sold Joe & Maggie’s years later, only to discover 172

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that they missed the business. Florida was great, says Romanowski—the golf, the fishing—but aer two months he was bored to tears. e trattoria turned out to be a great idea, a smaller space, a byo, less formal—it all seemed to fit the demands of the market. To say this is an informal dining space is to make an understatement: “As long as there’s not a lot of sand on your feet, come on in.” Yet the food here belies the setting; this is food that will be wholly familiar to you on the menu and on the plate, but is, for the most part, unusually and thoroughly sparkling in its preparation. Romanowski emphasizes simple, fresh, local, and seasonal (sometimes he’ll serve bass he caught that morning). All of which makes this a comfortably highbrow and lowbrow spot, the kind of place where local fishermen and laborers can expect a good sandwich and oyster stew, but also where a stressed-out Wall Street broker just off the nearby ferry can bring a client to impress. And business, surprisingly, is better than expected. Romanowski and his wife scratch their heads, but the 40-seat trattoria somehow brings in as much revenue as did the 160-seat restaurant. Other things about the business surprise them as well—pork shank, for example, has become so well loved that when Romanowski took it off the menu customers marched into the kitchen demanding its return. It’s hearty comfort food, served on a big bed of broccoli rabe with fennel sausage. Even petite women are cleaning their plates. Does the popularity of pork shank say something about the times we live in? e culture? e economy? Who knows? Romanowski is just trying to make good food because he loves to do it, thank you very much, food that you don’t have to think about too much, analyze too much, food that makes you feel good. As far as the culture and the times are concerned, Romanowski will make one pronouncement. He doesn’t go as far as to sound the death knell for elegant restaurants, but he does agree that their heyday has passed, at least for now. “Fine dining is dormant. People don’t want to get dressed up, make a whole evening out of it.” On the other hand, people are more savvy about food than ever. Back in the day, a chef could serve pork parmesan and charge a customer for veal. Today the customer is very educated about food. e pomp and circumstance may be gone, but the customer still wants a four-star dinner. “Once you’re labeled an expensive restaurant, you give yourself the

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kiss of death.” Maggie Lubcke, who runs the front of the house, has announced that she plans to retire in 2011. Romanowski makes no such promise. “I see myself with the finger in the pot for a long time.” And he’s still enjoying the mix of good food from different ends of the culinary spectrum. A perfect day off might be a barbecue with the extended family at his house. He doesn’t always man the grill. “My brothers will come over and burn some stuff for me.”

SECRET: Being a chef is not a job. It’s a cra, like being a stone mason or a master carpenter.

SUPPLI A TELEFENO ( Prosciutto, Mozzarella, and Truffle Rice Balls)

serves 10 to 12 Croquettes

2 tablespoons olive oil 2 tablespoons sweet butter ⅓ cup chopped sweet onion 1 pound carnaroli or arborio rice 4 ounces small dice prosciutto A splash of white wine 1½ cups water (simmering in a pot with a pinch of salt and 3 bay leaves) 1 cup grated romano cheese 3 tablespoons truffle oil Salt Pepper ½ pound fresh mozzarella torn into pinky-sized cubes Batter

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Place a wide deep saucepan over medium heat and add the olive oil and some butter. Let it get warm. Add the onion and sauté till tender, about 3 to 4 minutes on a low flame. Add the rice and prosciutto. Stir and coat with the rest of the butter. Add a splash of white wine. Add the hot water in one-third increments to the rice while constantly stirring. is will take about 15 to 20 minutes. Add the Romano cheese and truffle oil and stir. Make sure the rice is very tender. Taste for seasoning. Lay the rice out on a cookie sheet and cool. Using wet hands, form the rice into little ping-pong-sized balls with a concave interior. Place a piece of mozzarella inside and form the rice over top to make sure it is encased. Finish all the balls and set aside. For the batter: Place the flour and water in a bowl and whisk until you have a thin batter. Place the breadcrumbs and salt and pepper in a separate bowl. Dip the croquettes in the batter and then the breadcrumbs. Lay on a cookie sheet. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, add enough olive oil to come to about 3 inches. Heat to 325 degrees and fry off the croquettes until they are nice and golden brown. Can be done a few hours ahead of time. Serve with fonduta (recipe follows) or a nice marinara sauce.

Fonduta ( Italian Cheese Fondue)

½ pound young Fontina cheese or caciovavollo 2 cups chicken stock ½ cup heavy cream Place all the ingredients in a heavy-bottomed saucepot and melt on a low flame until creamy. Keep warm. Place a small spoonful of fonduta on the plate, rice balls on top. Sprinkle with Romano cheese and serve.

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ROASTED CANDY-CANE BEETS WITH CURRANTS, PEARS, AND G OAT CHEESE CRESPELLES WITH SABA VINEGAR

serves 4 2 pounds candy-cane beets (scrubbed) Kosher salt Water ½ cup rice-wine vinegar ¼ cup sugar 1 orange, zest and juice

Salt, pepper 1 ripe pear, julienned ¼ cup currants, warmed in a little red wine Handful of your favorite greens Crespelles (recipe follows) Saba vinegar for drizzling

Place the beets in a baking pan or casserole and sprinkle liberally with salt. Add about ½ inch of water to the pan and cover tightly with tin foil. Place in the oven and roast for about 45 minutes. Check the doneness with a toothpick. It should be like checking a baking potato. Let the beets cool and then just slip the skins off. Slice or dice the beets and put in a bowl. Combine the vinegar, sugar, orange, and salt and pepper. Mix well and pour over the beets. Toss thoroughly and refrigerate. Before service, assemble the salad. Place the crespelles in the oven for about 4 to 5 minutes to warm through. Place the crespelle on top of the greens and drizzle with the saba vinegar. Crespelles

4 store-bought crêpes 1 log fresh goat cheese 4 ounces cream cheese

Salt, pepper Fresh thyme 2 tablespoons sweet butter

In a mixing bowl, add the goat cheese, cream cheese, salt and pepper, and ½ tablespoon fresh thyme. Let come to room temperature and gently mix. Melt the butter in a pan. Lay the crepes in front of you and lightly brush with the melted butter. Place about 3 to 4 tablespoons of the cheese mix horizontally along the crêpe. Fold up egg-roll style and then brush the outside with the melted butter. Set aside.

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LAMB CHOPS “SCOTTA DITA” (Roman-Style Lamb Chops)

serves 4 4 tablespoons Dijon mustard 3 cloves garlic, sliced 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar Kosher salt Fresh black pepper ½ cup olive oil 2 sprigs rosemary 12 large single-rib lamb chops, trimmed of excess fat In a nonreactive bowl, combine the mustard, garlic, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Slowly whisk in the olive oil to form a creamy marinade. Add the rosemary sprigs. Add the lamb chops to the marinade and toss to coat. Let them sit for at least 1 or up to 3 hours. e vinegar in the marinade will cook them if le in too long. Preheat a grill, grill pan, or barbecue to very hot. Wipe off the excess marinade from the chops and grill for about 3 minutes per side for medium rare, slightly longer for well done. Transfer to a platter and serve.

PORCHETTA ROAST (Stuffed Pork Loin with Broccoli Rabe and Sausage)

serves 6 to 8 ½ cup sugar ½ cup salt ½ gallon water One 3-pound boneless pork loin, butterflied like a book and lightly pounded 4 cloves sliced garlic Olive oil 1 head broccoli rabe, chopped and blanched ½ pound fennel sausage, cooked and crumbled ¼ cup hot cherry peppers 1 cup sun-dried tomatoes 2 eggs

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½ cup chicken stock 1 cup breadcrumbs Marinade (recipe follows) Two days ahead: Place the sugar, salt, and water in a pot of water. Bring to a boil and let cool. Place the prepared pork loin in the brine and refrigerate overnight or preferably for 24 hours. Aer allotted time, remove the pork from the brine and dry off. In a large sauté pan, toast off the garlic in olive oil until nice and brown. Add the broccoli rabe and toss together. Place in a large bowl and, add the sausage, peppers, and sun-dried tomatoes. Add the eggs, stock, and breadcrumbs and mix together. Taste for seasoning. Lay the pork in front of you and place the stuffing down the middle of the loin. Roll up jelly-roll fashion and tie with butcher twine. Marinade

1 head of garlic, peeled 4 branches rosemary, stripped 1 bunch Italian parsley, fronds only 1 cup olive oil Salt, pepper Place all the ingredients in a food processor and zap for 30 seconds. Rub this all over the pork loin and marinate overnight. To finish the dish, place the pork in a 350-degree oven and roast for about 35 to 40 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 140 degrees. Let rest for 15 to 20 minutes and thinly slice. Arrange on a platter and serve.

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SUMAC-DUSTED TUNA WITH BLACK-OLIVE POTATO SALAD

serves 4 Olive oil 1 pound piece No. 1 tuna, sushi grade Kosher salt Pepper Ground sumac Rub a little olive oil on the fish and sprinkle liberally with the salt and pepper and sumac. In a hot grill pan or sauté pan, gently sear the outside of the fish. Let cool. Slice into medallions. Potato Salad

2 pounds red potatoes or fingerling potatoes ½ cup balsamic vinaigrette ½ cup chopped kalamata olives ½ red onion, diced small and sautéed until tender Salt and pepper A few sprigs fresh thyme 1 cup cooked sliced green beans Extra-virgin olive oil Sea salt Chopped Italian parsley Place the potatoes in a pot of cold water. Add a good handful of salt. It should taste like the ocean. Bring up to a simmer and cook potatoes until tender. Check with a toothpick for no resistance. Drain and let air dry until cool enough to handle. While the potatoes are still warm, add vinaigrette, olives, onions, salt and pepper, and thyme and mix well. Fold in green beans Top with the sliced tuna and drizzle with a little good olive oil, garnish with sea salt and parsley, and serve.

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JOE CERNIGLIA Campania, Fair Lawn

People oen wonder what chefs keep in their home freezers. Some secret sauce from a well-guarded family recipe? A rare and expensive ingredient? At Chef Joe Cerniglia’s house, the freezer holds science experiments. So don’t toss a Cerniglia ice cube into your summer drink, because it’s likely to be encapsulating a frozen insect, suspended in all its gory glory, courtesy of one of the Cerniglia boys. e Cerniglia boys are three in total—Evan, Michael, and Nicholas—which means the energy in that household is measured exponentially. But rather than rein in all that testosterone, Cerniglia seems to relish and encourage it, proud to share his children’s antics, their rambunctious, eager, charming, and mischievous ways. Two of his sons are already precocious rock ’n’ roll alumni, having played in the preadolescent—and quite successful, considering the genre—North Jersey band called Generation Rock. ink Sponge Bob with an edge, says Cerniglia. ( e band had political differences, and broke up.) Meet Joe Cerniglia and you see that all that boyhood mischief must be hereditary. Cerniglia is boyish himself, looking hardly old enough to be married, much less a father of three, but charming and winsome in a scruffy skater-boy sort of way. Cerniglia is the kind of man who’s always testing the water and pushing the envelope, and you can practically see the ideas taking form—and the mischief brewing—in the spark of his eye.

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Cerniglia is a rock alum himself, having played in a garage band as a teen—and thinking then that it would be his career for life. “You can’t ignore the parallel between food and music,” he says. “Walk into any kitchen and a good percentage of cooks will be musicians.” Cerniglia’s adjectives to describe food are the same adjectives that crop up in liner notes. One dish he’ll call gutsy and smoky, another rustic. An appetizer is delicate and ethereal. Sometimes, he says, you want an ingredient to speak for itself, to be acoustic; other times you want to enhance it with bold undertones. Writing a menu is like writing a song, he says, and both music and food are creative extensions of self. Cerniglia loves indie music. Which is to say that he loves all types of music, as long as it’s original and genuine, honest and authentic. And the indie analogy is a good one for the food at Campania, where Cerniglia works hard to keep it real, whether he’s preparing one of his progressive and innovative dishes, or whether he’s making old-school veal Marsala. is is a kitchen that produces the most amazing meatballs—many will argue they’re the best in the state—but it also features rare and exquisite honey from local beekeepers that can cost nearly thirty dollars an ounce. Make no mistake, keeping it real does not translate as Cerniglia copying some tired old recipe just because it’s always been done that way. e 184

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meatballs, for example, Campania’s must-have dish, are meatballs that even Pasquale’s Sicilian grandfather would humbly respect. But they’re not traditional meatballs. Cerniglia won’t divulge his recipe, but will say that he doesn’t believe in the holy trinity of meats; beef, he says, makes a meatball taste too much like meatloaf, so he just uses pork and veal. And the honey? Well, that’s thanks to a Cerniglia food epiphany. A local food competition required entrants to use honey as their secret ingredient, so Cerniglia met with eight master beekeepers in the area. Honey is a much bigger world than you might think, he says, with almost as many nuances and variations as wine. ere’s light and dark honey, black locust honey, orange blossom honey. Cerniglia won the competition—he was named the Ultimate Chef of Bergen County in 2008—and now his restaurant uses honey in both its bruschettas and its desserts. Cerniglia is always having food epiphanies—“We all need a moment like that”—and bringing new ideas and ingredients into the kitchen. ( His staff will attest to the intensity and frequency of these epiphanies, sometimes with a slight roll of the eyes.) Campania, despite its strip mall location and its décor of lace curtains and Mediterranean pottery, is not your typical Jersey red-sauceand-eggplant-parm Italian restaurant. Campania is the kind of place where scapes come out of the kitchen, carried to the table by a rock ’n’ roll waitress whose band just returned from its European tour. (Scapes, for those who may have missed the season, are the curly tendrils that shoot from the garlic bulb, and are available just a few weeks in the spring. Farmers used to toss them, but savvy chefs covet them—for a tender and mildly garlicky accompaniment to the main course, or even as the primary ingredient in pesto.) It’s a fascinating business model—reinvent the typecast Italian restaurant in such a way that the ninety-year-old North Jersey Italian grandmother still comes here for lunch, but also put enough innovative and adventurous foods on the menu to appeal to the progressive twenty-eightyear-old foodie who just vacationed in California’s Napa wine country. “To excite people, you have to take the idea and push the boundaries of that idea just enough so they come along for the ride, but not enough that you leave them in your wake.” Cerniglia made it all happen with a bit of big-name help. In fact, you may remember Cerniglia from his fieen minutes of fame on Kitchen Nightmares, that Gordon Ramsay show that rescues failing restaurants

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by restructuring them—with more than enough curse words in the process. Cerniglia invited Ramsay in, with all his celebrity rancor and his attitude, to reverse a business that, as Cerniglia described, was sucking wind. Cerniglia was thirty-three years old when he bought Campania, a somewhat popular neighborhood restaurant. But it was a big financial risk, and he needed an immediate uptick to survive. Yet he feared drastic changes—higher prices, smaller portions, and a streamlined menu— would scare away loyal customers. Enter Ramsay, who gave Cerniglia the foil to do what had to be done. e encyclopedic five-page menu was severely edited, portions were reduced, costly dishes eliminated. ( Plus Cerniglia took a few embarrassing televised knocks.) Yet if Cerniglia had done it on his own, it would have been the kiss of death, he says, too brash for a young chef, bad PR. “For Gordon Ramsay to come in and do that, it was good PR for me.” e minute Kitchen Nightmares went off the air, the telephone began to ring. “It didn’t stop for a long, long time.” Cerniglia seems to represent a new genre of chefs, people who know that today it’s not enough to just be able to make a good dinner, that you also must finesse your public persona. Cerniglia chats with guests in the dining room, writes a blog, does cooking classes and demonstrations, sells hats and T-shirts. “It’s one thing to have the chops, but you’ve got to be a self-promoter.” Like many Italian Americans from North Jersey, Cerniglia grew up with food as his nucleus. “I was completely fired by food. It was the epicenter of my life.” His mother, who made amazing dinners on a very tight budget, taught him everything, he says. His mom, obviously proud of her son, refuses to take any credit. “I don’t even know what a chiffonade is,” she’ll say. “I don’t even know what a reduction is.” But what she did do was inspire him, and her enthusiasm was contagious. “We stopped and contemplated each meal.” Cerniglia is an Italian American, but he’s third generation; as a chef, he doesn’t try to replicate some dinner from some far-off restaurant in Italy. He uses American methods, and New Jersey produce, local honey. He was influenced by food guru Alice Waters, is a member of the Slow Food movement. How does all that spin out at Campania? First, it translates into a restaurant where traditional Italian dishes are brightened with a modern energy—Cerniglia makes a stunning homemade orecchiete with 186

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lentils, sausage, and Pecorino, for example, as well as a more-thansatisfying veal saltimboca. But it also means prosciutto-wrapped shrimp with a Bing cherry sauce or a winter salad of fresh arugula with pine nuts, Pecorino—and pineapple. And then there’s pastry chef and restaurant partner Jessica Marotta, a Rutgers art grad who falls asleep with a cookbook in her hands and seems far too young and skinny to be as talented as she already is. She bakes all the bread for the restaurant, all that lovely foccacia and ciabiatta, and makes her own mascarpone cheese and homemade reinvented tartufo. Her own favorite foods include cucumbers and chocolate, and, as pastry chef, she is constantly working to take a familiar dessert to another level—an artistic level, a creative level, a level with a bit of an edge. In the basement of Campania is a small room crammed with a drum set, a bass guitar and a keyboard. At the end of a long night, the staff sometimes has jam sessions here. It’s a dark place, in the moody sense of the word, nothing like the crisp brightness upstairs. But you get the sense this is where that paradigm shi happens, where the artists that are Cerniglia and Marotta think about tradition and shake it up a bit. And why not? Who says Italian food—or Italian American food—has to stay forever the same? Cerniglia will tell you he shakes things up because he’s a Leo. “We just push against the current.” Or that it’s just the way he was made. “I don’t like rules.” Whatever the reasons, Campania is the kind of place that offers traditional Italian American dishes prepared with such clarity that they seem to transcend their origins. And the kinds of innovative, progressive dishes that can only come from a man with an indie soul.

SECRET: “It’s all about doing what you love. Stick to that like glue.”

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GRILLED TREVISANO RADICCHIO WITH CRIMSON PEARS, ROASTED PISTACHIOS, PECORINO, MEYER LEMON, AGED BALSAMICO, AND EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL Take the time to source excellent ingredients; if you do, serves 4 there is simply no need for exotic techniques or useless culinary trickery. Trevisano radicchio is the cousin to the more common round radicchio found in most supermarkets. e oval-shaped Trevisano is more mild and complex, and, when lightly grilled, a wonderful component for salad or accompaniment to a nice piece of fish. e rest of the ingredients here work as wonderful counterpoints to the grilled radicchio. Find a nice young piece of Pecorino for shaving— a good cheesemonger should have plenty. Roasted walnuts or almonds work just as nicely as pistachios, and, if you can’t find Meyer lemons, regular lemons will work just as well. 1 head of Trevisano raddichio, cut in half lengthwise, bottom core removed About 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided Sea salt, as needed 1 Crimson pear or any other ripe pear, cut into ¼-inch-thick slices ( leave skin on) 2 tablespoons lightly toasted pistachios 1 teaspoon Meyer lemon juice (or regular lemon juice) 1 teaspoon good aged Balsimico di Modena Olive oil Freshly ground black pepper 5 to 6 thin shavings of young Pecorino cheese ( Pecorino Romano, di Sardigna, Pepato) Heat a grill or a stove-top grill pan until very hot. Brush both halves of the radicchio lightly with olive oil and sprinkle lightly with sea salt. Place radicchio, cut side down, onto grill and cook for about 1 minute or just until light grill marks appear. Turn radicchio over and cook for another 30 seconds. Remove from grill and chop coarsely. e radicchio should be so and grilled on the outside but should still retain a slight crunch in the very center. Transfer the radicchio to a bowl, along with the sliced pears and 188

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toasted pistachios. Add the Meyer lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, and approximately 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Season with a very small pinch each of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Toss well. Transfer salad to the center of a cold salad plate. Garnish with shavings of Pecorino and drizzle with a little more extra-virgin olive oil (optional).

EGGPLANT CAPONATA Undoubtedly one of our favorite snacks in the kitchen at Campania— we dab it on our sandwiches, spoon it on some of Jessica’s crusty bread with some good olive oil, or place it alongside just about anything that we’re eating. Unlike the tomato-based caponata that I grew up on, this version is void of a single tomato. Instead, its flavors and textures are picked up simply by some good vinegar, honey, basil, and a hint of cocoa for complexity. Approximately ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil 1 medium-size eggplant, cut into ¼-inch dice, skin le on 1 medium-size green zucchini, cut into ¼-inch dice 1 red pepper, cut into ¼-inch dice ½ Spanish onion, cut into ¼-inch dice ½ cup honey ⅓ cup red wine vinegar 1 cup good olives, pitted and cut in half ( kalamata, cerignola, calabrese, etc.) ⅓ cup capers (rinsed, preferably salt packed) 1½ teaspoons cocoa powder 4 to 5 leaves basil, cut into ribbons Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat until very hot. Add eggplant and cook, stirring frequently, until edges just begin to turn brown. Remove from heat and transfer to a baking sheet until cool. Add another 2 tablespoons of oil to the pan and heat until very hot. Sauté the zucchini just until edges begin to turn brown (don’t allow the zucchini to cook to the point at which it no longer holds its shape). Transfer to a baking sheet until cool. Joe Cerniglia

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Add another 2 tablespoons of oil to the pan and sauté the peppers and onions just until cooked throughout (do not brown). Transfer to the baking sheet until cool. Wipe the sauté pan clean and add the honey and vinegar. Cook over high heat until reduced by ⅓ of its original volume. Remove from heat. Combine the cooked vegetables in a bowl and add the olives, capers, honey-vinegar mixture, cocoa powder, and basil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. e caponata should have a good balance of acidity and sweetness. Adjust with more honey or vinegar as needed. For a nice addition of texture and flavor, add a handful of toasted pine nuts to the caponata.

NOTE

THE “TABLE 29” PANINI is sandwich evolved during late-night poker games at our staff ’s family table (table 29). It encompasses all of our favorite ingredients and has now become a favorite of our paying customers. One 4-inch-wide section of ciabatta bread or other good Italian bread 4 ounces thinly sliced prosciutto di Parma 3 to 4 slices fresh mozzarella, about ¼ inch thick Shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, to taste About ½ cup eggplant caponata (recipe above) Handful of arugula, rinsed, dried, and torn 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil About 2 teaspoons red wine vinegar About 1 teaspoon lemon juice 3 to 4 basil leaves, torn Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste Slice bread in half lengthwise. On the bottom piece, layer the prosciutto, mozzarella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and eggplant caponata. Toss the arugula with the olive oil, vinegar, lemon, and basil. Add to the sandwich. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Place the top half on the sandwich. Press the sandwich in a panini press until cheese is melted. Cut in half and serve. 190

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At the restaurant, we love to serve this sandwich with crispy fries laced with garlicky oil, grated pecorino cheese, fresh chopped parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper.

NOTE

MUSSELS WITH PANCETTA, WHITE WINE, CHILIES, BASIL, AND CREAM Until very recently, this dish had never made its appearserves 4 ance on any of our menus at Campania. Because of its long execution time, it always remained one of those dishes that we only sent to our closest friends and family. But requests for the dish grew in number week aer week until we finally caved in and added it to the menu, telling our guests that they’ll simply have to wait longer for the dish. e combination of flavors and textures is perfect— the fresh, plump mussels soak up the flavors of browned pancetta, basil, chilies, scallions, wine, and cream. Aer the mussels have been devoured, the leover is soaked up by a chewy loaf of well-made bread. 4 tablespoons unsalted butter 2 ounces of pancetta, cut into about ½-inch × ⅛-inch × ⅛-inch strips 1 shallot, sliced into ⅛-inch-thick strips 1 to 2 teaspoons slivered hot fresh chili (red Holland chilies work wonderfully here) or as needed 1 pound Maine or Prince Edward Island mussels, cleaned, beards removed ½ cup white wine ½ cup clam juice About 1 cup heavy cream 4 to 5 leaves of fresh basil, torn About ¼ cup slivered scallions Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste Heat butter in large heavy-bottomed pan ( large enough to hold all of the mussels comfortably) until melted. Add pancetta and shallots and cook over medium high heat until both the shallots and the pancetta are slightly browned around the edges. Add the chilies (if using) and cook for a minute. Add the mussels and wine and cook until wine is reduced by half. Add the clam juice and cream and cook over medium heat until cream is slightly thickened. Joe Cerniglia

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Stir in the basil and scallions and season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

POLENTA PIE ( PASTUCCIA) WITH SAUSAGE AND FONTINA, ARUGULA IN FIG VINAIGRETTE Polenta is such a versatile staple in our kitchen—we do serves 6 to 8 just about anything with it. Here, we’ve come up with our own version of a traditional polenta pie and paired it with what we think is the perfect counterbalance. A nice rich wedge of polenta with Fontina and sausage alongside a bright salad of peppery arugula, honey, lemon, and figs. Serve the polenta wedge warm with the nice cold salad as a first course. Polenta Pie

2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil 2 cups milk 3 cups chicken stock (low salt) 1 sage leaf, finely chopped 2 cups good-quality polenta 3 egg yolks ⅔ cup grated Pecorino 2 tablespoons butter Salt and pepper, to taste ¼ cup heavy cream 1 pound good-quality sausage, removed from its casings 8 ounces shredded Italian Fontina cheese Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Oil a heavy-bottomed 12-inch pie dish. Transfer milk and stock and sage leaf to a heavy-bottomed sauce pot and place over medium-high heat. Slowly whisk in polenta and continue stirring vigorously until the polenta comes together and leaves trails behind the whisk. Lower heat to medium and cook, stirring frequently, for approximately 20 minutes or until grains are so and plump. Remove from heat and stir in 3 egg yolks, grated Pecorino, butter, salt, pepper, and cream. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed sauté pan until very hot and add sausage. Cook, chopping with the back of the spoon, until browned and cooked through. 192

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Pour half of the cooked polenta into the pie dish, then add the sausage in an even layer. Cover with the Fontina, then cover with the remainder of the polenta. Bake in the middle rack of an oven for approximately 30 minutes or until golden brown on top. Let cool to room temperature, then serve with the salad (recipe follows). Salad

1 tablespoon finely chopped shallots ¼ cup balsamic vinegar 1 cup chopped dried figs (¼-inch dice) 1 cup water 1 cup red wine 2 tablespoons honey 1 bay leaf

½ cup soy oil 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Water (to thin vinaigrette) 1 tablespoon lemon juice Salt and pepper, to taste Arugula Pecorino shavings

To make the fig vinaigrette: Place 1 tablespoon chopped shallots and the balsamic vinegar in a medium-size mixing bowl and let stand. Transfer the chopped figs and 1 cup of water to a heavy-bottomed sauté pan and place over medium-high heat. Cook until water is nearly evaporated. Add the red wine, honey, and bay leaf and cook until wine is thick and syrupy. Remove the bay leaf and let cool. Add the fig mixture to the vinegar/shallot mixture and stir well. Slowly whisk in the soy oil and olive oil, adding water at any time to keep it at the desired consistency (the vinaigrette should be thin and should pour freely). Finish by adding lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste. Coat some arugula with the fig vinaigrette and set a small amount of salad on a plate. Transfer a wedge of the warm polenta pie and garnish the salad with shavings of Pecorino.

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KARA DECKER A Toute Heure, Cranford

Kara Decker is heavily pierced, with jewelry in her eyebrow and her lip and a row of metal punctuating her ear. e skull that’s tattooed on her le arm is underscored by a chef’s knife and a sharpening steel; it’s one of her eight tattoos, including a lightning bolt on her spine and a Led Zeppelin symbol on her stomach. On Saturday nights, she parties with her lover into the wee hours at Manhattan’s famous Spotted Pig (that Michelin-starred West Village gastropub/celebrity hangout—where Jay-Z, Beyonce, and Kate Hudson go). She spends summer Sunday aernoons at her beach house obsessively reading—and rereading—the dark, alcohol-soaked renderings of poet and author Charles Bukowski, the man Time magazine called the laureate of American lowlife. Her iPod is filled with German industrial music, and she drives a silver BMW coupe that she spent way too much money on, but it’s really powerful, and she absolutely loves it. It’s perhaps not the mental picture you might have of a classically trained French chef, the kind of woman who fusses for days over her braised short ribs or who is so crazy strict about her lusty veal stock that she produces both an A version and a B version (they have entirely different uses, she says). But it is how you might picture a revolutionary, and Kara Decker, standing all of five-foot-three and working in the bucolic little Union County town of Cranford, is most certainly one of 194

the leaders of a band of rebels in the restaurant business, a group of people changing the way we eat, one dinner at a time. A Toute Heure might not raise eyebrows in Berkeley, California—or even Los Angeles, for that matter—but it is surprisingly unique and avant-garde for a place that proudly calls itself the Garden State. A Toute Heure is a restaurant that insists on fresh, local ingredients. A simple premise, really, and a promise made frequently by restaurants these days, but here it’s not just a nice thought or a gesture, an occasional nod to the first asparagus of spring or the welcoming of the beefsteak tomato season. Here it’s an obsession, a kind of Alice Waters fever, a mantra, a raison d’être, and the restaurant keeps itself honest by listing each of its purveyors on a chalkboard in the dining room. One giant blackboard in this tiny yet crisp European-styled restaurant is devoted to the daily specials; another lists the local network of suppliers. And a few of those suppliers are so local you could walk to them. Dreyer Farms, the source of many fruits and vegetables; Breadsmith, a specialty gourmet bakeshop that supplies the baguettes; and Jack’s Run Garden, co-owner Andrea Carbine’s own backyard space full of specialty greens and herbs—are all in Cranford as well. You won’t get haricots verts in January, and, if you’re eating

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tomatoes in the winter, you can be assured that they are local tomatoes that were canned by Decker herself during the dog days of summer. And on days when it’s pouring at 5 a.m. and the Holland Tunnel is unexpectedly closed, don’t think that Carbine pointed her truck toward Restaurant Depot to buy her crates of vegetables just to make things a little easier. It might be tempting to skip the best that Union Square farmer’s market has to offer, but, under the restaurant’s philosophy, it’s just not possible. Carbine was inspired in part by Alice Waters, who revolutionized the restaurant business with her fresh-from-the-market philosophy at the now-iconic Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Carbine also worked several years in the restaurant industry on the Le Coast, and brings along that progressive Seattle/California philosophy toward food. She’s stunned that we’re not as progressive. “I’m surprised that there aren’t more places like this—especially given the number of farms in New Jersey.” Carbine does what Waters does, which is to say that she shops first for ingredients, looking for what’s fresh, what’s best, what’s local—and then builds her menu around them. Truth is, she likely bumps into many of her New Jersey colleagues at the Fulton Fish Market or the New York farmers’ markets. But while many of those guys are buying fresh, local ingredients to complement their menus, she’s buying for her core components. It can be scary sometimes to base a menu on the daily vagaries of the market, and Carbine has high praise for the adventurous skills of Chef Decker. It can also be scary in the winter months, when the markets offer little more than potatoes and onions and you’re grateful to spot, say, some fennel. e menu changes daily according to what’s fresh, and even foodies won’t always recognize the ingredients on the menu. Breakfast radish? Chiogga beets? Carbine’s reverence toward her ingredients extends beyond the market. What’s the point of a high-quality fresh scallop if it’s not treated really well in the skillet by the chef? e dishes here are simple, intended to bring out the best of the ingredients, not to hide or overwhelm them. “Who doesn’t like a perfect veal reduction?” asks Carbine. But that’s not what’s featured here; don’t expect old-school French, with lots of sauces and preparations that force ingredients to submit; here the ingredients star.

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Decker honed her French culinary techniques at Westfield’s Chez Catherine, first under the legendary and famous Catherine Bourdeaux (the woman who first brought French cuisine to the middle of New Jersey), and then with Didier Jouvenet, who took over the restaurant aer a career at New York’s La Grenouille. Jouvenet had a strict interpretation of French food—classics only and done properly, thank you very much—but at A Toute Heure, Decker is able, and expected, to experiment. Popular dishes include pork and clams, a Portuguese favorite that’s elevated to a different level with fresh littlenecks (from Westfield Seafood), heirloom tomatoes (which are oven roasted), and pork confit. Other menus boast a slow-cooked spice-rubbed brisket sandwich, with heirloom shredded cabbage, horseradish cream, and oven-roasted sweet potatoes. Desserts, too, are local and fresh, and William Mauceri and Luis Zambrano—yes, there are two pastry chefs!—make all the ice cream by hand. Other Le Coast sensibilities are at work here too. When Kara was named executive chef, Carbine and her husband, Jim, threw a big party at the restaurant, inviting family, friends, and frequent customers. Jim made the toast with his wedding-day wine, bought from the Napa vineyard where he and Carbine were married. Decker’s parents beamed. It wasn’t your father’s promotion. Nor is this an old-school business model. Money isn’t everything (!) and the Carbines define success not strictly by nightly turnover, but in a job done well, in repeat business, in accolades. ey’re not afraid of the hard work and many hours required in the restaurant business, but they also want to build a business that allows a personal life—for themselves and their employees. e employees themselves are not typical. e sous chef was once the dishwasher. e pastry chef was once a corporate drone in human resources. A line cook was once a schoolteacher. e staff has competitions to cut kitchen waste, and one Cranford driver, who retooled his Mercedes to run on vegetable oil, is grateful for the mileage he gets from the A Toute Heure kitchen. And if you peek into the restaurant at 4 p.m., an hour before it opens, you’ll see the staff gathered around one of the tables at the front, with plastic cups and plastic plates, having family dinner. Decker makes the meal; this night it’s breaded chicken tenders, served with homemade mashed potatoes in a tomato sauce and with melted cheese. And even this simple dinner, all fresh and free-range, local and

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handmade, will surprise you with its flavor, its intensity, it rich authenticity. You realize what processing has done to the food in America, how lifeless and deadened it is. Decker scoffs. “It’s chicken fingers.”

SECRET: Her veal stock. “It’s liquid gold.”

APPLE RUTABAGA SOUP

serves 6 to 8 ¼ pounds (1 stick) butter 1 cup chopped onion 1 cup peeled, chopped carrots 1 cup peeled, seeded, and chopped butternut squash 2 cups chopped rutabaga 1 cup peeled, cored, and chopped Granny Smith apple 2 quarts chicken stock 1 sprig rosemary 3 cups heavy cream ½ cup dark brown sugar Salt and cayenne pepper to taste In a large sauce pan over medium heat, melt the butter. Add onions, carrots, squash, rutabaga, and apple and cook, stirring occasionally until onions are translucent. Add chicken stock and rosemary and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20 to 25 minutes or until all of the vegetables are cooked through and tender. Puree the soup in a blender or food processor and strain through a sieve. Put back in the pot and add the cream, brown sugar, salt, and cayenne pepper. Bring soup to a simmer and whisk until smooth.

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MUSSELS WITH SAFFRON, CHORIZO, AND CREAM

serves 6 4 pounds Prince Edward Island mussels ½ cup olive oil 6 shallots, minced 8 cloves garlic, minced 10 links of chorizo, casing removed and broken up into pieces ¾ cup Dijon mustard 2 cups dry white wine 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes 2 pinches saffron 1 quart heavy cream Salt to taste Add oil to a large pot over medium heat. Add the shallots and garlic cloves and cook gently for 1 to 2 minutes. Add chorizo, mustard, white wine, and red pepper flakes and cook until the wine has reduced by half. Finish with saffron, heavy cream, and salt and simmer on low for 20 minutes. Rinse mussels under cold water and pull off and discard the beards. Add mussels to sauce and stir. Cover and cook for about 2 minutes or until the mussels have opened.

POTATO AND MANCHEG O CRO QUETTES WITH SMOKED PAPRIKA AIOLI

serves 10 to 12 3 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled, cut into cubes, cooked through and cooled 1 onion, minced and sautéed in ½ stick butter 2 cups grated Manchego cheese 6 whole eggs Salt and pepper 2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme ½ cup heavy cream 4 cups panko breadcrumbs 2 cups flour Kara Decker

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Put the cooked potatoes through a food mill and into a large bowl. Add onion, cheese, two whole eggs, salt, pepper, and thyme. Mix to combine. Whisk the remaining four eggs and heavy cream and pour into a bowl. Place the breadcrumbs and flour into separate bowls. Starting with a ball of potato mixture using your hands, form croquettes and dredge them in the flour, eggs/cream, and panko. Deep fry in 375-degree vegetable oil until golden brown. Smoked Paprika Aioli

2 cups mayonnaise 2 cloves grated garlic 3 teaspoons sweet smoked paprika

¼ cup red wine vinegar Salt and cayenne pepper to taste

Add all ingredients in a bowl and whisk until smooth. Serve a dollop of aioli with each potato pancake.

SLOW BRAISED RABBIT LEGS WITH ROASTED TOMATO, CAPERS, AND PICHOLINE OLIVES 6 rabbit legs Salt and pepper to taste ¼ cup olive oil 1 onion, diced 4 carrots, peeled and diced 3 celery stalks, diced 6 garlic cloves ¼ cup flour 2 cups dry white wine

2 quarts chicken stock 6 thyme sprigs 2 bay leaves 3 cups diced roasted tomatoes ½ teaspoon ground cumin ½ teaspoon ground coriander ¾ cups capers 1½ cup picholine olives

Season the rabbit with salt and pepper. Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven and sear the legs on both sides until dark brown. Remove the legs and add the onion, carrot, celery, and garlic and cook until translucent. Add the flour to the pot and stir for about a minute, then deglaze with the white wine and chicken stock. Add thyme, bay leaves, tomatoes, cumin, coriander, and salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and add the rabbit. Cover and cook in a 325-degree oven for 1½ to 2 hours. Add capers and olives just before serving. is braise should be prepared at least one day before serving to let the flavors develop. 200

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CHICKEN AND PORK BRINE is brine takes roasted chicken or pork to an entirely new level. Soak your meat for a day, and then sear and roast it as you usually would. is method works well for either pan-roasted or oven-roasted preparations. is recipe makes enough brine for about twenty chicken breasts, and can easily be halved. 1 gallon water ¾ cup kosher salt ½ cup honey 10 bay leaves ½ cup garlic, smashed 2 tablespoons black peppercorns 3 rosemary sprigs 1 bunch thyme 2 tablespoons coriander seeds Combine all ingredients in a large pot, cover and bring to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, stirring to dissolve the salt. Remove from the heat and cool completely before using. Refrigerate pork or chicken in brine for 24 hours. Rinse and dry. Mist before cooking.

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RYAN DePERSIO Fascino, Montclair Bar Cara, Bloomfield

Every fieen-year-old North Jersey Italian kid took the family car out for a spin when Dad wasn’t home. Most kids would drive around the block or perhaps to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. Ryan DePersio was the kind of kid who would drive the car to Pennsylvania. DePersio is a self-described Ferris Bueller, a man who doesn’t like to play by the rules, an impish, mischievous man, the kind of man who can—and has—charmed open the doors to his success. But charm, even charm dressed in an Armani watch and Prada shoes, can only go so far. And DePersio, who was just twenty-five when he opened his restaurant and who still seems a little surprised by all the fuss over it, has talent. DePersio offers a direct explanation: “Well, we’re Italian. Plain and simple. I shouldn’t have to say any more.” Family certainly matters. His mother is Cynthia DePersio, who was a caterer and food consultant, who developed recipes for Ladies’ Home Journal and Dr. Atkins cookbooks. His great-grandfather owned a restaurant in Newark called Paul’s Lunch. And DePersio grew up in a household of good food, in Nutley, with his earliest memories being the weekly family dinner at his grandparents’ home, the kind of robust, free-for-all Italian American Sunday dinners you see in the movies. DePersio sees nothing atypical about his childhood; it was just the way every Italian American grows up. “Even if you don’t become a chef, you have the love.”

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Today, family still matters. Mom is now the pastry chef at Fascino, making modified versions of the desserts she made for the kids growing up. (DePersio knows he was lucky: “I had a lot of friends over.”) Brother Anthony is a partner in the restaurant. Grandfather Paul Martino is the crasman behind the homemade orecchiette and cavatelli. And those weekly family dinners still exist, are still just as robust. “Everyone argues about something.” But don’t make the mistake of thinking DePersio is running some mom-and-pop operation, all homespun and quaint. is was a family, after all, that took its teenage children out to three-star restaurants in New York to celebrate their birthdays—to Bobby Flay or Gotham Bar & Grill. And DePersio has worked for some of the biggest names in New York—David Bouley, Bill Telepan, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten— and at acclaimed restaurants in Paris and Florence. At Fascino, which

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became a foodie favorite almost from the instant it opened in 2003, DePersio offers progressive Italian food made with a bit of French flair. e gnocchi, for example, seems to defy the laws of physics. ese are tiny clouds of pasta, wispy, light, and almost carefree, in a Bolognese sauce that’s so delicate it’s almost a tease. If you ask, DePersio will explain. It’s ricotta gnocchi; no potatoes are involved. And very little flour is used, just enough to allow the cheese to roll into a pastry. Yet, even with the explanation, it still seems like a magic trick, an illusion. Indeed, much of the food at Fascino seems magical. is is food that is both elemental and transcendent. It’s food that you know, but made with such a lighter hand that it seems almost to be an illusion, an ethereal version of the original. It’s all intentional; DePersio is a healthy chef, a guy who works out five times a week, who bested every trainer at his gym when it hosted a mini-triathlon. He’s not so interested in heavy sauces, big dinners. He does red pepper foams, pomegranate glazes. He cares about vegetables—a sweet potato puree, for example, is much more than an aerthought, and is prepared with Tahitian vanilla bean. A fall harvest soup is not heavy or earthy, as its name implies, but boasts at least a dozen fresh vegetables in a light broth, with beans and peas so alive with flavor you wonder if there isn’t a garden in the kitchen itself. Fascino even offers a vegetarian tasting menu, a rare thing for a restaurant at this level. DePersio is not big on fussing with ingredients, preferring to let the product itself shine. It’s how he eats himself; lunch, for example, might be a simple piece of cod, topped with raw clams. DePersio began cooking when he was thirteen; he was the first one home and followed dinner instructions from his mother. At first, he was given basic chores—pulling stuff out of the fridge, warming meals that had already been prepared. As time went by, he was given more responsibility, began following recipes and, then, improvising. But DePersio was the kind of kid who also skipped a lot of school and signed his father’s name on the excuses. ( e ink on his arm is of a guardian angel/fallen angel.) He always had a love of food, but he didn’t really have much drive. But he did have charm—and luck. At nineteen, he went to Bouley looking for a job. He wasn’t really qualified—he’d worked for a catering company, but that wasn’t exactly considered experience. Yet it was perfect timing; the restaurant was short someone just as he walked in, and he got a job instantly. Still, he was never the most 204

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dedicated staffer. Even later, when he was working for Vongerichten, he was the lazy one in the kitchen, the one who sought the easiest schedule, with weekends off, who didn’t stay an extra few hours like the others. DePersio will tell you he’s more streetwise than book smart. “If you asked me to make a Hollandaise sauce right now, I’d have to look it up.” What he did have, however, was a natural instinct. “I felt like I had the touch. ere’s this thing.” DePersio can’t explain. And he’s also a bit surprised at where his instincts have taken him. Just six months aer it opened, Fascino impressed the New York Times. DePersio hadn’t expected that; he was just doing what came naturally to him, improvising on the food he grew up on. In English, fascino translates as a “fascination.” In its strict definition, a fascination is a temporary fancy, a crush, perhaps, something shiny and distracting. It is not something substantial, with staying power. Yet DePersio has proven that his restaurant is more than a mere infatuation, and clamoring guests still must book well in advance for tough-to-get weekend reservations. As for drive, well it certainly kicked in. DePersio expanded Fascino and has opened a second restaurant—Bar Cara in Bloomfield, a bistro pub. He runs a catering company. And DePersio also seems to understand that it’s not enough these days to just be good in the kitchen, that it also helps to look good in front of the camera. He’s appeared on Good Morning America and e Today Show, among others, making pasta, sharing his expertise. DePersio is a guy who looks good on TV—all you need to do is watch the video clip on his restaurant’s Web site to notice DePersio’s instinctive flair. As a kid, he wanted to be an actor. As an adult, he’s perhaps a front-runner for New Jersey’s most eligible bachelor chef. And although he might blush slightly if someone were to bestow such a designation on him, the truth is, he’d be flattered about all the fuss. is is a guy, aer all, who, while working in Florence, would take several trains on his days off to shop at the Prada stores. A guy who hopes to someday make the cover of GQ, or perhaps Men’s Health. He’s a divorced father—his son is a preschooler, and DePersio would love it if the boy someday ended up in the business. And he sometimes likes to have a cocktail aer his restaurant closes at one of the lounges in the W Hotel in Hoboken.

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His idea of a dream date? Megan Fox. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

SECRET: “Whatever you love—soccer, your wife—put that into your cooking.”

AUTUMN BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP

serves 2 to 4 1 large butternut squash, cut in half and deseeded 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 tablespoon honey ½ of a nutmeg, grated 1 teaspoon cinnamon Salt and pepper to taste ¼ pound unsalted butter

Broth:

1 tablespoon olive oil 1 tablespoon unsalted butter 1 onion, sliced thinly 2 tablespoons sugar 2 apples, peeled and sliced ½ cup white wine 4 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable stock

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Lay squash down, cut side up. Score tops in diagonals. Drizzle with oil and honey. Sprinkle nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and pepper. Cut pats of butter and place on squash. Put in the oven 1½ hours or until fork-tender. While the squash is cooking, place a medium sauce pot on the stove on medium-high heat to make broth. Add oil and butter. When the butter begins to foam, add onions, sugar, and apples and sauté for 10 minutes, constantly stirring. en deglaze with white wine and reduce by half. Add the stock and scrape the inside of the squash into the broth. Simmer for 10 minutes and puree until smooth.

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PEEKYTOE CRAB–STUFFED ZUCCHINI FLOWERS WITH YELLOW TOMATO MARMELLATA

serves 4 as an appetizer 1 pound peekytoe crab 1 tablespoon sour cream 2 tablespoons lemon juice 5 leaves basil, julienned 1 tablespoon chopped tomato confit (or substitute sun-dried tomatoes) Salt and pepper to taste 10 zucchini flowers Dry crabmeat on paper towels. Mix sour cream, lemon juice, basil, and tomato confit in a large bowl. Gently fold in crab and season with salt and pepper. Place mixture in a pastry bag and fill zucchini flowers three-quarters of the way up. Refrigerate until ready to fry. Marmellata

2 teaspoons olive oil 1 Spanish onion, diced small 4 cups diced yellow tomatoes 1 teaspoon chopped garlic

¼ cup white wine 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar Salt and pepper to taste

Place a large sauce pot on medium heat. Pour in 2 teaspoons of olive oil. Add onion and sweat for 5 minutes. Add tomatoes and garlic and stir for a few seconds and then deglaze with white wine and vinegar. Lower heat and cook for 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with zucchini flowers warm or at room temperature. Tempura Batter

1 cup flour Pinch of baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder 2 cups sparkling water

Place flour, baking soda, and powder in a large bowl. Slowly whisk in sparkling water until you have a semi-thick nappe. Dip zucchini flowers in batter and drop in a 350-degree fryolater for 30 seconds. Take out and dry excess oil on paper towels and serve with marmellata on the side.

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KONA KAMPACHI CRUD O, GARLIC CROSTINI, AVO CAD O, AND CITRUS VINAIGRETTE

serves 4 to 6 as an appetizer ¾ cup olive oil ¼ cup yuzu juice 3 tablespoons soy sauce 1½ tablespoons mustard 12 slices of ficelle (a thin baguette) 2 garlic cloves 3 ripe avocadoes, diced small 12 slices of Kona Kampachi ( Hawaiian yellowtail fish) 2 tablespoons chopped chives In a mixing bowl, whisk ½ cup of olive oil, yuzu, soy sauce, and mustard together for the vinaigrette and reserve in a squeeze bottle in the refrigerator. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Brush ficelle slices with olive oil and scrape garlic cloves once on each ficelle round. Toast in oven until lightly golden. Press thin layer of avocado on bread and lay slice of fish on top. Drizzle citrus vinaigrette on top of fish and sprinkle chopped chives. Serve.

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BUTTERMILK-BAKED GIANNONE CHICKEN BREAST WITH OREGANO PESTO CRUST, BABY SPINACH, AND ROASTED CRIMINI MUSHRO OMS

serves 4 1 cup oregano, fresh 1 cup parsley, fresh 1 cup pine nuts 1 cup aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

2 cups extra-virgin olive oil Salt and pepper to taste 3 cups buttermilk Four 6-ounce chicken breasts

Make pesto: Combine oregano, parsley, pine nuts, and cheese in food processor for approximately 10 to 15 seconds. Add olive oil, salt, and pepper and blend for an additional 30 seconds. Store any unused portion in an airtight container and refrigerate up to one week. Make chicken: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Pour buttermilk into a small baking dish. Season both sides of chicken breast with salt and pepper and place skin-side up in baking dish. Bake in oven for 10 minutes. Add a thin layer of pesto. Place back in the oven for three more minutes. Serve. Spinach and Mushroom Side Dish

¼ cup olive oil 2 tablespoons sweet butter 4 cups sliced crimini mushrooms Salt and pepper

5 cups of packed baby spinach 1 teaspoon chopped garlic ¼ cup white wine

Place large sauté pan on stove and set on medium to high heat. Add ¼ cup of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter. When the butter begins to foam, add mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes, stirring every minute. Season with salt and pepper. If the mushrooms release water, cook until all has evaporated. en add spinach and deglaze with 1 teaspoon of chopped garlic and ¼ cup of white wine. Cook for three more minutes.

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FLORIDA POMPANO, WILD MUSHRO OMS, AND BLACK TRUFFLE BUTTER RISOTTO

serves 4 2 quarts low-sodium chicken stock ½ cup canola oil ½ pound sweet butter 1 onion, diced small 3 cups of carnaroli risotto 1 teaspoon chopped garlic 2 cups white wine 4 filets of pompano Salt and pepper to taste 1 cup of sliced shiitake mushrooms 1 cup quartered cremini mushrooms 2 tablespoons black truffle butter 2 tablespoons fresh chopped herbs ½ cup shredded Parmigiano cheese Place chicken stock in sauce pot and bring to a low simmer. Place a medium sauce pot on the stove on medium-high heat. Place 2 tablespoons of oil and 1 tablespoon of butter in pot. When the butter begins to foam, add onions and sprinkle a little salt. Sauté for 5 minutes. Add risotto and stir for 2 minutes or until tips of rice get translucent. Add garlic and deglaze with 1 cup white wine. Reduce all the way down and add ½ cup of stock every 2 to 3 minutes. Leave at least ½ cup of stock for later. Stir the whole time. When risotto is three-fourths cooked, lay out on a cookie sheet and allow to cool. Turn on oven to 450 degrees. Lay pompano on a buttered cookie sheet and sprinkle a little white wine over the fish. Season with salt and pepper. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. While the fish is baking, place a large sauté pan on the stove on medium-high heat. Add 2 tablespoons of oil and 2 tablespoons of butter. When the butter begins to foam, add mushrooms and cook for 10 minutes, stirring every few minutes. When mushrooms are caramelized, deglaze with ¼ cup of white wine. Reduce by half, add risotto and 1 cup of stock. Cook and stir until creamy. Add black truffle butter, herbs, and Parmigiano. Stir a few more times and serve with fish.

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RICOTTA GNO CCHI AND SWEET SAUSAGE BOLO GNESE

serves 6 to 8 Ricotta Gnocchi

3 pounds ricotta, drained 3 cups sied all-purpose flour 2 eggs Salt Pepper Nutmeg In a bowl, mix ingredients until a so dough forms. If the dough is a little sticky, you can add a little more flour to form a dough consistency. Take pieces of dough and roll, cut into gnocchi form. Blanch in boiling water and shock in ice water. On pickup, you can sear with brown butter or heat with melted butter. Bolognese Sauce

¼ cup canola oil 3 pounds sweet sausage, casing removed 1 Spanish onion, sliced 1 cup white wine 1 can whole tomatoes in juice Salt, red pepper flakes In a large rondeau, add canola oil. When the rondeau is hot, add sausage. Distribute around the pan evenly to get good color. Once the sausage has good color, add onion and stir every 3 minutes until the onions are caramelized. Deglaze with white wine. Reduce for 5 minutes and add canned tomatoes. Cook on low heat for 45 minutes. Use a potato masher to break up the sausage if it is still holding its shape. Season with salt and red pepper flakes, then cool in an ice bath. Serve over gnocchi.

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ARIANE DUARTE Culinariane, Montclair

Ariane Duarte is wearing worn jeans and a heathery turtleneck, tugging at the ends of her sleeves and looking for all the world like the protagonist in a Disney movie, that outdoorsy girl-next-door who is thoroughly lovable but a bit lost at the beginning of the story, but who puts her mind to things and, in the end, gets everything. In a way, Duarte is exactly that. She feels like one of the luckiest chefs in New Jersey these days, and it’s thanks to years of sweat, hard work, perseverance—and a little five-week risk called Top Chef. “It was hands-down the hardest thing,” says Duarte. Top Chef is a train wreck of a culinary reality TV show where contestants are judged harshly on their ability (or lack thereof ) to put together an impressive gourmet dish on a severe deadline with what seems to be seven weird ingredients and a short-circuiting hot pot. Duarte was thoroughly humiliated on the show—hitting rock bottom twice and fearing that she’d be tossed. “Please God,” she’d pray, “don’t make me go home today.” But then she made skate with pineapple—following her instincts to keep it simple—and was redeemed. One judge, Michelin-award-winning Chef Jean-Christophe Novelli, nearly jumped out of his seat to compliment Duarte on her ability to pan-sear fish to perfection. It almost made up for some of the brutal comments that had come before. Duarte didn’t win the competition. But she was a good sport, a 212

likable contestant, a personality easy to cheer. So when the show ended, her tiny thirty-seat restaurant in Montclair was bombarded; weekend reservations had to be made a month in advance and even the early spots on weekdays were being taken. Customers came, and then returned, and Culinariane, the little restaurant that could, had to expand; now there are forty-eight seats and a chef’s table. It was her sister’s fault that Duarte got on the show in the first place, egging her to fill out the twenty-six-page application. (Do you have a tattoo? What do you want the world to know about you?) She filled it out, but then watched the show for the first time, decided it wasn’t for her, and tossed the paperwork. en she heard from a friend of a friend that Top Chef was really looking for women, and filled out another application. “You never think you’re going to get chosen.” When she did get the call, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But then her father gave her good advice—just go and have fun with it.

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So before the show started, before she would be sequestered with her competitors for weeks without access to a telephone, e-mail, or television, she went out and got her nails done, her hair done. Everyone else was packing up their special ingredients. “I went with my truffle oil.” Duarte would never do Top Chef again—“I’m not really the first person to jump into things”—but she’s grateful for having done it, and not just because it’s brought her so much media attention. She was knocked down and had to rebuild herself. “It strengthened me as a chef,” she says. “I appreciate the business more. I don’t let things bother me.” Plus, she says, the show gave her perspective, reminded her that it’s easy to get stagnant if you don’t keep challenging yourself. Duarte is engaging, one of those women who have true charisma, with eyes so sparkly they seem to have been sprinkled with glitter dust. She has a conspiratorial air about her, and you suspect a bit of mischief or adventure is brewing. But she’s also a strong woman, self-sufficient, opinionated, tough. She’s the kind of woman who has to be as strong as the next guy—and she views that literally, reluctant even to ask a construction worker, for example, to li something. She was young when her parents divorced, and that’s part of it. But it’s also because she’s been one of the few women in a business dominated by men. She has to be better to be perceived as just as good. “You really can’t rely on anybody.” Duarte grew up in New Jersey, went to the Culinary School of America, married, and moved to Texas with her husband, Michael. She moved to Chicago, where she worked at Charlie Trotter’s. She had two babies and she was homesick. Back in New Jersey, she’s grateful for the support she gets from her mom, dad, and sister. It’s still a life that requires a lot of juggling, but, for now at least, she’s got a system that works. When she and her husband opened Culinariane, they never intended it to be a restaurant. ey wanted a spot for catering, but since the location also offered room for dining, they thought they might serve a few dinners. But then she got good reviews, and decided to keep it up. Her philosophy toward food is to keep it clean, simple, seasonal— and then add a bit of a sophisticated twist. Her jumbo lump crab cake, for example, is meaty but also slightly crisp and with a faint hint of 214

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cream. It’s the kind of dish that is both modern and retro, an echo of the mayonnaise-based crab cakes that came with the cocktail hour in the sixties, but made with outrageously fresh lump crab. It’s an impressive combination of tastes, light yet explosive. Another witty touch is Duarte’s garlic chip—a lovely marvel you wish you’d thought of yourself—a tiny crispy chip made of a thin slice of garlic. Michael Duarte is the pastry chef, and he adds his own bit of whimsy— caramelized bananas, for example, on a classic banana cream pie. Duarte also likes pretty things—silver and crystal on the table, artwork on the walls. Indeed, the tiny crystal salt bowls with their miniature silver spoons on the tables at Culinariane are so sophisticated and adorable that some customers have walked out with them. at aura of the good life is an aesthetic that she loves; it’s how they live at home, using the china and silver even on pizza days. It’s a long way from the teenage head-banger she once was, the girl who wanted nothing more than to be a backup singer for Pink Floyd. Today her parents are proud, and Duarte seems more humbled by that accolade than any other. Meanwhile, she’s happily watching her own teenagers grow up, come into their own. It’s a calmer life, and she loves her karaoke nights, ski vacations, and cheesy Nora Roberts novels. And she’s still a reality TV addict—Real Housewives of Atlanta is a favorite—but only from this side of the cameras. “I think my reality TV days are over.”

SECRET: To other women chefs she would say: “I want to be the voice. If I can do it, you can do it.”

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CORIANDER-RUBBED ROASTED PORK LOIN WITH APPLE CHUTNEY

serves 6 to 8 12 shallots, peeled 1 cup garlic, peeled 2½ cups brown sugar ¼ cup black pepper, ground 1 cup salt ½ cup coriander, ground 1 teaspoon olive oil 3 pounds pork loin Place all ingredients except pork loin in a food processor. Pulse and puree until smooth. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Rub pork loin with coriander rub. Roast at 500 degrees for 15 minutes. Lower oven to 325 degrees and cook for 40 minutes. Serve with apple chutney. Apple Chutney

6 Gala apples, medium diced 2⅓ cups brown sugar 1 cup dates, diced 1 cup golden raisins 1 tablespoon onion, minced ⅛ teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon ground cloves ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon ground allspice ¼ teaspoon garlic power 1 cup cider vinegar 1 cup almonds, sliced Mix all ingredients in a sauce pot and cook over low heat for 1 hour, until mixture is thick. Stir occasionally.

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BUTTERNUT SQUASH RAVIOLI

serves 4 2 butternut squash, washed and cut in half lengthwise 1 ounce olive oil 4 tablespoons melted butter ¼ cup brown sugar Salt and pepper

2 cups apple cider Rolled pasta dough (can be purchased frozen or fresh, ready to cut) ¼ cup Gorgonzola cheese Walnut cream (recipe follows)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Combine oil, butter, brown sugar, and salt and pepper. Coat the squash with mixture and place on sheet pan, cut side down. Pour any remaining mixture over the squash. Roast for 35 to 45 minutes until so. Allow to cool. Scrape the inside of each squash half into a bowl and season if necessary. Reserve. Reduce 2 cups of apple cider to syrup consistency. Keep warm. Using a 6-inch plate, cut four rounds of pasta. Wrap with plastic wrap until ready to use. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Boil water in pot. Divide the butternut squash into four equal parts on a sheet pan. Crumble Gorgonzola cheese on top of each mound of squash. Place into oven and heat until hot. While squash is heating, unwrap the pasta rounds and drop into boiling water. Place the heated butternut squash in center of plate. Cover with pasta round and pour walnut cream sauce over it. Finish with drizzle of cider reduction. Walnut Cream

3 tablespoons olive oil 1 quart walnuts 3 shallots, sliced Sugar to taste

Salt to taste ½ quart water 2 sprigs thyme ½ quart heavy cream

Sauté walnuts in olive oil until toasted. Add shallots. Add sugar and salt to taste. Cover nuts with water and reduce to almost sec. Add thyme and cover with heavy cream. Bring to a boil and then remove from heat. Let cool for 20 minutes. Pour cream sauce into blender and puree. Strain through fine chinois. Adjust seasoning.

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PAN-SEARED DAY-BOAT SCALLOPS, MUSHRO OM RAG OUT, WHITE TRUFFLE OIL, AND MUSHRO OM SYRUP

serves 4 ½ pound butter 2 shallots, sliced 1 pound portobello mushrooms, cleaned 1 pound oyster mushrooms 1 pound shiitake mushrooms 2 teaspoons chopped parsley 2 teaspoons chopped chervil Salt and pepper ¼ cup blended oil (extra-virgin and canola) 2 pounds fresh day-boat scallops White truffle oil Mushroom syrup (recipe follows) Melt butter in a sauté pan. Add shallots and sauté for 3 minutes until so. Add mushrooms and cook down until so and caramelized. Add fresh herbs, season with salt and pepper, and reserve. In another sauté pan heat the oil. Season scallops with salt and pepper. Let the pan get to the smoking point and then add scallops. Sear for about 2 to 3 minutes on each side. e scallop should li off the pan when it is caramelized on each side. Place warm mushrooms in the center of a plate. Place scallops around mushrooms and drizzle each scallop with truffle oil. Spoon about 1 ounce of mushroom syrup on top of mushrooms. Serve. Mushroom Syrup

3 pounds button mushrooms Water, to cover Place mushrooms in a large stock pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and reduce by half. Strain mushrooms and return liquid to a clean pot and continue reducing at a simmer until the syrup lightly coats the back of a spoon. Reserve at room temperature until ready to use. Refrigerate leover syrup.

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CHO COLATE SOUFFLÉ

serves 4 Small amount of butter for ramekins Small amount of sugar for ramekins 1 cup flour ¾ cup sugar 1½ cups milk 4 ounces flavoring (melted chocolate, raspberry purée, etc.) 6 eggs, separated 1 tablespoon vanilla extract Preheat oven to 400. Butter ramekins and sprinkle with sugar. Combine the flour and sugar in a saucepan. Stir in milk until smooth. Over medium heat and stirring constantly, cook the mixture until it thickens and boils. Cook 1 more minute. Remove from heat and at this point add flavoring (4 ounces chocolate, fruit purée, etc.) Rapidly beat in egg yolks all at once. Refrigerate until cool, stirring occasionally. Whip the egg whites on high until so peaks. Sprinkle in sugar as desired and beat until sugar is dissolved and whites form stiff peaks. Fold in flour mixture one-third at a time. Pour in ramekins and bake for approximately 20 minutes.

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DIANE PINDER Donna & Company, Cranford

It’s Valentine’s Day, and Diane Pinder is making orange flower-water marshmallows. She’s been working from 6 a.m. to midnight, on her feet longer these days than when she worked in a hospital. “Can I buy something before you officially open?” Pinder allows it. e phone is ringing, Frank Sinatra is singing, the display case is full of truffles, and a line is beginning to form outside the door. For this, the most chocolate day of the year, Pinder has made four hundred of each variety of truffle—and there are twenty-four varieties. ey’re sold in small packages, like jewels in a box. “It’s gonna be crazy today.” Meet artisan chocolate maker Diane Pinder, one-time hippie, Vietnam War protester, and former intensive-care nurse. She studied chocolate making with the masters in Tuscany and now sells truffles and chocolate treats in her shop, a tiny, quaint, old-fashioned spot filled with modern, sophisticated, and sometimes shocking flavors of chocolate—cinnamon chipolte, blue cheese with smoked almond and Tellicherry pepper, espresso lemon, drunken plum, balsamic, blood orange, sea salt and olive oil, even a ai chocolate, with peanut butter and red peppers. Eating these chocolates is an event—the layers of flavor, the texture, the undercurrents. She’s been noticed by e Today Show and Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? She’s also been noticed by the legendary chef Craig Shelton, 223

and the two have developed a tasting menu of six truffles as you’ve never known them—green tea and wasabi, lemongrass and mango, Indian pudding. Everything is handmade, and Pinder will dedicate an entire day to a batch of truffles. Take her Turkish Delight. White chocolate covers a filling of marshmallow, rose water, and rose petal jelly. But the marshmallow is hand made, as is the jelly ( Pinder gets her roses from an organic farmer in California). And then Pinder brushes the white chocolate onto the truffle, because dipping it would create a layer that’s too thick, which would just destroy the taste. e truffle is garnished with a tiny candied rose, roasted pistachios ( Pinder roasts the nuts) and fresh hand-roasted cardamom (she does that too). e hand-roasted cardamom is the truffle’s coup de grace. “Without it, it’s a wonderful chocolate, but I felt it lacked that signature melody.” at’s from Shelton, who downright lavishes Pinder with the kind of praise many great chefs have labored years to hear. Shelton is the kind of chef who uses words such as melody and couverture (a highquality chocolate with more cocoa butter). He can taste the difference between pistachios that have been hand-roasted and those that have not. 224

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And he knows exactly what note from the orchestra of flavors needs to be introduced to take something already delicious and put it over the top, into that rare realm of exquisite. Shelton had been looking for years for someone like Pinder, someone who has the technical prowess, the willingness to think outside the box, the courage to make the chocolates he had envisioned. e two spent months developing a tasting menu of truffles, a made-to-order box of chocolates meant to walk you through the luxurious pleasures of chocolate. It begins with a light truffle, the wispy, airy Turkish Delight, and ends on a dark note, the classic French bon-bon—a rich caramel, flavored with fresh Tahitian vanilla bean over an Armagnac-infused dark chocolate ganache. is is chocolate as you’ve never known it. But the most difficult was the Indian pudding truffle, partly because it’s a Shelton childhood favorite but also because of the tricky texture. Pinder tops it with real praline, which is cooked with raw nuts and raw sugar in a copper bowl—and then stirred forever. “It’s a wicked handstirring process,” says Shelton. But the taste? “It’s the difference between jug wine and a bottle of Chateau Latour.” Meet Pinder and you’re not surprised that Shelton’s a fan. She’s passionate and uncompromising. In fact, her standards have opened a new door—she is now working with American Hospitality Group, thanks to Shelton, and has closed her Cranford shop. Pinder worked hard for her success and didn’t just start a chocolate business on a whim. “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to be really credible about it.” So, Pinder, a former intensive care nurse who had also done pharmaceutical marketing for Saatchi & Saatchi, first did trend research, developed a business plan, took a course in New York. But she was really inspired by Ecole Chocolat, a professional school of chocolate arts, and a stint in Tuscany, where she learned from master chocolatiers. She speaks with awe about teachers like Roberto Catinari, the whitebearded godfather of chocolate, an idol in the Tuscany region. Pinder is fussy about chocolate’s origin, how it’s grown and processed. She makes each chocolate by hand. Artisan, to her, means clean, with noteworthy ingredients. And her scientific background—all those years running an intensive-care unit at Rahway Hospital, charting a patient’s progress—has

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helped her as well. “Chocolate is a funny animal.” A slight change in temperature, in humidity, and everything can go awry. All those outrageous flavors might be intimidating, but Pinder talks poetically about her chocolates, much as a sommelier talks about wines. Try the sea salt and olive oil truffle, she’ll urge. Really? Pinder explains. e sea salt opens your taste buds to the flavor of the chocolate. You won’t taste the olive oil, but it gives the truffle a velvety texture (compared to the pudding-like texture of chocolate emulsified with butter). It’s the kind of taste experience that surprises people, a truffle with so much spirit that it seems also to have soul. And it’s also the kind of taste experience that renders all other chocolate experiences—from Hershey to Ghirardelli, Godiva, even Valrhona—as flat and mundane. Pinder also sells a more fun line of treats—hand-dipped Oreos and pretzels made with imported Belgian chocolate. And the shop is open for a sit-down dessert—with homemade cake, gelato, and hot chocolate. e company is named aer Pinder’s sister, Donna, who was killed in a car accident at age fieen. It’s a way to keep her close. Pinder talks a lot about family; she grew up in Sayreville, a seventies Vietnam War protestor who somehow ended up with a military family. Her son served in Iraq and Afghanistan, her daughter at Fort Dix, and her son-in-law served three deployments in Iraq. When her son was away, she slept in his bed just to feel his presence. She knows she’s lucky to have him back—and nearly sobs when she talks about how much other soldiers need our support. She sells chocolate bars for Fisher House, a nonprofit that provides homes for family members when a solider needs medical care. And she invited local Girl Scouts to make hand-dipped Belgian chocolates to send to Walter Reed. It’s so much easier to make people happy making chocolate than tending them in an ICU. Pinder tells one of her new favorite stories—of the couple who came to her Cranford shop on their first date, and then, months later, came here to get engaged. And Pinder is making the wedding favors. And on this day, Valentine’s Day, right before the shop opens, Pinder gets her own gi. It’s a bouquet of flowers, from her husband. “To my favorite chocolatier, and a wonderful wife.” How sweet is that? 226

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SECRET: ose who know Diane Pinder and her liberal hippie past would be surprised to also discover she was a teen debutante. e day of the ball, she had her hair done by a local hairdresser—Jon Bon Jovi’s father.

CHO COLATE BREAD PUDDING

serves 10 to 12 I don’t use a loaf of bread for my bread pudding; instead I make a heavy cake. Once when I was making a chocolate genoise cake I made a mistake and ended up with very heavy chocolate breadlike cake. Trying to figure out what to do with it, I decided to use it for chocolate bread pudding and it was a hit! 1 (1-pound) of the heavy chocolate cake, cubed (recipe follows) 3 cups milk ¼ cup heavy cream ½ cup Kahlua 1 cup sugar 1 cup packed light-brown sugar

¼ cup cocoa powder 1 tablespoon vanilla extract 2 teaspoons Chinese five-spice 6 eggs, lightly beaten 8 ounces semisweet chocolate, grated

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Lightly grease a 9-inch × 13-inch baking dish and place the bread in the dish. In a large bowl, whisk together the milk, cream, and Kahlua. Using another bowl, combine the sugar, brown sugar, and cocoa powder and mix well. Add the sugar mixture to the milk mixture and mix well. Add the vanilla and Chinese five-spice to the beaten eggs. Combine the egg and milk mixtures and mix well. Stir the grated chocolate into the mixture. Pour the mixture over the cubed bread in the pan. Let the mixture stand, stirring occasionally, for approximately 20 minutes or until bread absorbs most of the milk mixture. Bake pudding for 1 hour or until set. Check pudding by inserting a knife through the middle; it should come out clean. Serve the pudding warm, or refrigerate and top with vanilla ice cream.

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Heavy Chocolate Cake for Bread Pudding

3 tablespoons hot melted unsalted butter or clarified butter 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 2 cups cake flour ⅓ cup unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa powder 4 large eggs ⅔ cup (125 grams) granulated white sugar Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter, or spray with a vegetable spray, a 9-inch × 13-inch pan, and then line the bottom with parchment paper. In a small bowl, combine the butter with the vanilla extract. Keep this mixture warm. ( If needed, rewarm for a few seconds just before using.) In a medium bowl si together the flour and cocoa powder. Set aside. In a large heat-proof bowl whisk together the eggs and sugar. Place the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Whisking constantly, heat the eggs and sugar until lukewarm to the touch (this will take approximately 5 minutes depending on the temperature of the eggs and the simmering water). Note: When warming the eggs and sugar, whisk constantly to ensure the eggs do not overheat and curdle. Remove from heat and transfer the egg mixture to the bowl of your electric mixer. Beat on high speed until the egg mixture has cooled, tripled in volume, and looks like soly whipped cream. e batter is beaten sufficiently when it falls back into the bowl in a ribbonlike pattern. Si about one-third of the flour mixture over the whipped eggs and fold in using a large rubber spatula or whisk. Fold in half of the remaining flour, and then fold in the rest. Do not overmix or you will deflate the batter. en take about 1 cup of the batter and fold it into the hot butter mixture with a small spatula. (is will lighten the butter mixture and make it easier to incorporate into the egg batter without deflating it.) When completely combined, use a spatula to fold the butter mixture completely into the rest of the egg batter. Pour the batter into your prepared pan, smoothing the top. Bake until the cake shrinks slightly from the edges of the pan and the top springs back when lightly pressed (about 20 to 25 minutes). Cool on a metal rack. When the cake has cooled completely, run a small knife or spatula around the edges to release the cake.

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OLIVE OIL AND SEA SALT TRUFFLE is truffle was inspired by my visit to chocolate yield: 96 truffles makers in the Tuscan region of Italy. I introduced this truffle at the Ninth Annual Chocolate Show in New York, and it was later featured on e Today Show. Although it appears simple, its quality is created by using unfiltered olive oil from the Tuscan region. e salt brings out the flavor of the extra bittersweet chocolate and the olive oil gives the ganache a very different mouth feel than a traditional ganache made with butter. 14 ounces heavy cream 16 ounces finely chopped 70 percent bittersweet chocolate 4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 teaspoon fleur de sel, extra to sprinkle on top of bon bon Tempered 70 percent chocolate for dipping Boil the cream. Drizzle the hot cream onto the chopped chocolate, stirring but not incorporating air. Add the olive oil, a little at a time. Add the salt. Pour ganache into form and leave to set for 24 hours. Cut into ¾ inch squares and dip in tempered chocolate. Sprinkle fleur de sel on top.

FLORENTINE HOT CHO COLATE is was also inspired by my trip to Italy. e first time I tasted their hot chocolate, I was astounded by the thickness and flavor. 5 tablespoons Dutch processed cocoa powder 2 tablespoons sugar Chili powder (optional)

serves 4

6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped 2 cups milk

Place the cocoa powder, sugar, and 2 tablespoons of the milk in a saucepan and heat until the sugar melts, stirring well to remove any lumps. Boil and add the remaining milk. Heat to steaming, always whisking to incorporate the chocolate mixture. Turn off the heat and add the chopped chocolate. Stir to melt the chocolate and let it sit. Reheat to serve, stirring well before serving. Sprinkle with chili powder for a fabulous flavor!

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CHEESECAKE is is a recipe I use from a cookbook given to me serves 10 to 12 by my mom. e book is a compilation of recipes by the Women’s Association, Circle No. 5, of the Sayreville First Presbyterian Church, dated 1959. e cookbook is yellowed and tattered, and I find little surprises in it all the time, sometimes by the creative cooking the ladies did, many times recognizing names from ages ago, bringing back memories of my childhood in Sayreville. At my lounge, I don’t make the cheesecake with the crust. I cook the batter so that I can scoop the cheesecake into a sundae dish and add any topping my customer may want. 1 pound cream cheese 2 tablespoons flour Pinch salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup sugar 5 eggs, separated ½ pint sour cream 10 graham crackers 2 tablespoons melted butter Blend together cream cheese, flour, salt, vanilla, sugar, egg yolks, and sour cream. Beat egg whites until stiff and then fold them into the batter. Make the crust from 10 graham crackers rolled out; add melted butter. Press crumbs into pan with removable sides. Spoon in batter. Bake in slow oven at 325 degrees for 1 hour.

PISTACHIO BRITTLE AND SEA SALT To graduate from chocolate school, I was required yield: about 20 to create several signature chocolates. For my caramelized creation, I made Pistachio Brittle and Sea Salt, making clusters of the nuts, dipping them, and then sprinkling them with sea salt. is was in 2005, and I think I was one of the first people to combine salt and chocolate. In making the clusters I would almost always severely burn my fingers, so I stopped making them for 230

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a while. But on a trip to Italy, I saw that Paul deBondt would spread nuts over the top of his chocolate bars. So I resurrected pistachio brittle and sea salt, this time in bars, and took them to the New York chocolate show. ey were so popular that each morning before I drove in to the city, I would get up O’Dark early to make about 100 bars. It continues to be one of my most popular chocolates today. 1 cup roasted pistachio nuts ( I bake them in the oven at 250 degrees for about 20 minutes; add some butter and salt to make them real tasty) 1 cup sugar Fleur de sel 70 percent tempered chocolate Caramelize the sugar in a large saucepan. Once all the sugar is melted and browned, add the nuts, take them off the heat and coat them thoroughly with the sugar. Place them on a silpat mat to cool. To temper chocolate: I use a commercial machine to temper my chocolate, but here is a very easy home method. You can use a microwave but you have to be very careful not to overheat and burn the chocolate, so I think the double boiler gives you the most control. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler while stirring to ensure uniform temperature. Once the chocolate has fully melted and reached a temperature of more than 105 degrees, remove it from the heat. At this temperature, all the chocolate should be melted. Add a piece of unmelted chocolate to “seed” the chocolate. ( e easiest way to explain seeding is that it helps to create the correct size of the chocolate crystals so that the finished product is glossy, has a snap, and melts smoothly in your mouth. is seed piece can be as big as 2 ounces—if you’re melting a sizable amount of chocolate—or can be chopped up into a few smaller pieces.) Stir until the chocolate’s temperature enters the tempering range, 88 to 90 degrees. e chocolate should be kept at this temperature until used. Once the chocolate is tempered, pour it into a bar mold or spread it onto a piece of parchment paper, and sprinkle it with sea salt and broken pieces of pistachio brittle.

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PHOTO CREDITS

Craig Shelton, Courtesy Craig Shelton David Burke by JIM PATHE /e Star-Ledger Scott Cutaneo by AMANDA BROWN /e Star-Ledger  David Drake by JENNIFER HULSHIZER /e Star-Ledger Dennis Foy by CATHY MILLER /e Star-Ledger  Jim Filip, Courtesy Jim Filip Maricel Presilla, Courtesy Maricel Presilla Scott Anderson by CATHY MILLER /e Star-Ledger  Anthony Amoroso by JOHN O’BOYLE /e Star-Ledger  Zod Arifai by ARISTIDE ECONOMOPOLOUS /e Star-Ledger  Anthony Bucco by JIM WRIGHT /e Star-Ledger  Humberto Campos Jr. by NOAH K. MURRAY /e Star-Ledger Bill Dorrler by JIM WRIGHT /e Star-Ledger  David C. Felton by SAED HINDASH /e Star-Ledger  Corey Heyer by MAHALA GAYLORD /e Star-Ledger James Laird by ROBERT SCIARRINO /e Star-Ledger Joe Romanowski by GEORGE MCNISH /e Star-Ledger Joe Cerniglia by STEVE HOCKSTEIN /e Star-Ledger Kara Decker by TONY KURDZUK /e Star-Ledger Ryan DePersio by NOAH K. MURRAY /e Star-Ledger Ariane Duarte by JOHN O’BOYLE /e Star-Ledger Diane Pinder by JOHN O’BOYLE /e Star-Ledger 

233

GENERAL INDEX

A Toute Heure, Cranford, x, 194, 195, 197. See also Carbine, Andrea; Decker, Kara Aerosmith, 104 Afghanistan, 226 Albert, Prince of Monaco, 29 Alger, Betsy, 38. See also e Frog and the Peach Alice’s, Lake Hopatcong, 40. See also Drake, David American Hospitality Group, 225 Amoroso, Anthony, x, 96–103. See also SeaBlue Anderson, Scott, 5, 89–95. See also Elements Arifai, Zod, 104–114, 118. See also Blu; Next Door Atkins, Dr., 202 Atlantic City, xi, 96 Auguste Escoffier Award, 18 Aux Delices, Greenwich, Conn., 55

Bar Cara, Bloomfield, 202, 205. See also DePersio, Ryan Batali, Mario, x Bay Avenue Trattoria, Highlands, 169, 171. See also Romanowski, Joe Bay Head, 153 Beard, James, 63, 71, 170 Bellagio, Las Vegas, Nev., 98 Bergen County, 185 Berkeley, Calif., 195, 196 Bernards Inn, Bernardsville, 150, 151, 152–153. See also Heyer, Corey Bernardsville, xi, 29–30, 32, 134, 150 Beyoncé, 194 e Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (Kurlansky), 145

Black, Jim, 38. See also e Frog and the Peach Black Forest Inn, Stanhope, 38 Bloomfield, 202, 205 Blu, Montclair, 103, 106, 118. See also Arifai, Zod Bobby Flay, New York City, 203 Bon Appetit magazine, 64 Bon Jovi, Jon, 227 Bonnie Soleau Catering, Little Silver, 170 Borgata, Atlantic City, x, 100 Bouley, David, 203 Bouley, New York City, x, 38, 40, 204 Boulud, Daniel, 30, 32 Bourdeaux, Catherine, 197. See also Chez Catherine Branson, Sir Richard, 142, 144. See also Ninety Acres Bromley Mountain, Vt., 153 Brooklyn Bridge, 17, 19 Brown, Amanda/e Star-Ledger, 233 Bryan, Jerry, 55 Bucco, Anthony, ix, 115–123. See also Uproot Bukowski, Charles, 194 Burberry, 145 Burke, David, 17–28, 39, 55. See also Fromagerie

Campania, Fair Lawn, 183, 185, 186–187. See also Cerniglia, Joe Campos, Humberto Jr., 5, 124–133. See also Lorena’s Campos, Lorena Perez, 126. See also Lorena’s Canada, 150 Carbine, Andrea, 195, 196–197. See also A Toute Heure

235

Carbine, Jim, 197. See also A Toute Heure carrots, steamed vs. roasted, 162 cassoulet, 52–54, 107 Castro, Fidel, 71, 75 Catherine Lombardi, New Brunswick, 116 Catinari, Roberto, 223 celebrity: Anthony Amoroso on, 99; David Drake on, 39; as defined by David Burke, 19–20; Gordan Ramsay as, 186 Cerniglia, Evan, 183 Cerniglia, Joe, 183–193. See also Campania Cerniglia, Michael, 183 Cerniglia, Nicholas, 183 Chagall, Marc, 21 Charlie Trotter’s, Chicago, 214 Chatham, x, 38, 55, 159 Chef Boyardee, 134 Chef Tell (pseud. Friedemann Paul Erhardt), 169 chefs: best, James Beard Foundation, 71; best in United States, 136; best new, James Beard Foundation, 136; camaraderie among, 118; celebrity, 19, 20, 39; cooking for spouse, 116; demanding, 137; and ego, 118; four-star, 3, 6; Ivy League, 55; Japanese, 106; most influential, x, 3; new genre, 186; New Jersey’s, as competitive with New York’s, x; old school, xi, 54; for Olympic Games, 29; pastry, 39, 52, 92, 137, 187, 197, 203, 215; plate-throwing, 92; politically correct, 172; pushing American cuisine, 89; as rebels, 104; Relais & Chateaux, 3; and responsibility, 100, 117, 142; as showmen, 39; superstar, 137; and tolerance for pain, 172; White House, 71; women, x, 215 chef’s coat, symbolism of, 20, 21

236

GENERAL INDEX

chef’s table, 92, 213 Chez Catherine, Westfield, 197 Chez Odette, New Hope, Pa., 37 Chez Panisse, Berkeley, Calif., 196 chocolate: can o’ cake, 17; Maricel Presilla on, 71, 74; truffles in the shape of the Brooklyn Bridge, 17, 19. See also Pinder, Donna Chopra, Deepak, 32 Christmas, xx, 153 Cinque, Denise, 137 e Claremont Tavern, Bernardsville, 29–30. See also Cutaneo, Scott Clydz, New Brunswick, 118 Coastal Grill, Virginia Beach, Va., 55 Cod: A Biography of the Fish at Changed the World (Kurlansky), 145 Codey, Gov. Richard, 118 Colts Neck, 172 Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs, 169 Corcoran, David, restaurant critic, New York Times, 5 Corzine, Gov. Jon, 118 Cranford, x, 194–195, 197, 225–226 Cucharamama, Hoboken, 71. See also Presilla, Maricel Culinary Institute of America, 18, 37, 74, 115, 126 Culinary Institute of Hudson County College, 98 Culinary School of America, 214 Culinariane, Montclair, 212–213, 214–215. See also Duarte, Ariane Cutaneo, Scott, 29–35. See also e Claremont Tavern; Equus

Daniel, New York City, x, 153 Daryl’s Wine Bar, New Brunswick, 36, 40 David Burke Townhouse, New York City, 17

Decker, Kara, 194–201. See also A Toute Heure Deep Purple, 104 Demerest, 146 Dennis Foy’s, Lawrenceville, 52. See also Foy, Dennis DePersio, Anthony, 203 DePersio, Cynthia, 201 DePersio, Ryan, 201–211. See also Bar Cara; Fascino Dino’s, Wildwood, 55 Donna & Company, Cranford, 223. See also Pinder, Diane Doris & Ed’s, Highlands, 61–62, 63–64. See also Filip, Jim Dorrler, Bill, 134–141. See also Due Mari; Due Terre Drake, David, x, 5, 36, 117, 127. See also Restaurant David Drake Dreyer Farms, Cranford, 195 Duarte, Ariane, 212–219. See also Culinariane Duarte, Michael, 214, 215 Due Mari, New Brunswick, 134. See also Dorrler, Bill Due Terre, Bernardsville, 134. See also Dorrler, Bill Dunkin’ Donuts, 202

Ecole Chocolat, 225 Economopolous, Aristide/e StarLedger, 233 Edison, 3, 40, 124, 127 Elements, Princeton, x, 89. See also Anderson, Scott Equus, Bernardsville, x, 29–30. See also Cutaneo, Scott Erhardt, Friedemann Paul (Chef Tell), 169 Esquire magazine, 136 evolution: from fussy to simple, 117; in fine dining, 116–117

Fair Lawn, 183 Fanwood, 142, 146 Far Hills, 151 Fascino, Montclair, 202–203, 205. See also DePersio, Ryan Felton, David C., 142–149. See also Ninety Acres Filip, Jim, 61–70. See also Doris & Ed’s fine dining: David Drake on, 38; death of, 40; death of, disputed, 117; as dormant, 173; at Fromagerie, 20; heyday of, 5, 169; Maricel Presilla on, 74; redefining in Philadelphia, 38; at the Shore, 63; as a sliver of the market, 40; society dedicated to, 169; at Stage Le, 115–116; at Uproot, 116–117 Fisher House, 226 Fishtail, New York City, 17 Flavorsprays, 17–18. See also Burke, David Flemington, 136 Florence, Italy, 205, 207 Florio, Gov. James, 118 Food Network, 99 Forrester, Doug, 118 Fort Dix, 226 Fox, Megan, 206 Fox & Friends (TV program), 32 Foy, Dennis, 52–60. See also Dennis Foy’s Foy, John, 128 France, 161 French Laundry, Yountville, Calif., 64 e Frog and the Peach, New Brunswick, 36, 38 Fromagerie, Rumson, 17, 20–21, 153. See also Burke, David Fulton Fish Market, 63, 196

Garden State, local produce in, 195 Garfield, 107 Gates, Bill, 29

GENERAL INDEX

237

Gaylord, Mahala/e Star-Ledger, 233 Generation Rock, 183 Ghirardelli chocolate, 226 Girl Scouts, 226 Godiva chocolate, 226 Golf Channel, 163 Good Morning America (TV program), 32, 205 Gotham Bar & Grill, New York City, 203 Gourmet magazine, x, 64 Gramercy Tavern, New York City, 136 Griggstown Farm chicken, 31, 146 Guantanamo Bay, 74

Haggland, Mattias, 94. See also Elements Haines, Jeffrey, 151 Hamilton Jewelers, 95 Harary, Nicholas, 118, 127. See also Restaurant Nicholas Hardenberg, Harry J., 144 Harding Township, 161 Harrow Inne, Ottsville, Pa., 169 Hassan II, king of Morocco, 144 Hershey chocolate, 226 Heyer, Corey, 127, 150–158. See also Bernards Inn Highlands, 61, 169 Hindash, Saed/e Star-Ledger, 233 Hoboken, 71, 74, 146, 205 Hockstein, Steve/e Star-Ledger, 233 Holmdel Park, 119 Hudson, Kate, 194 Hulshizer, Jennifer/e Star-Ledger, 233

International Olympic Committee, 29 Iraq, 226 Iron Chef (TV program), 97, 99

238

GENERAL INDEX

Jack’s Run Garden, Cranford, 195 James Beard Foundation, 136 Jasna Polana, Princeton, 117 Jay-Z, 194 Jean-Georges, New York City, x JFK Medical Center, Edison, 127 Jocelyne’s, Maplewood, 127. See also Lorena’s Joe & Maggie’s Bistro, Long Branch, 172. See also Romanowski, Joe Johnson & Johnson, 117 Jordan, Michael, 99 Jouvenet, Didier, 197

Kean, Gov. omas, 118 Kennedy, Jim, 39 Kissinger, Henry, 29 kitchen: abusive behavior in, x, 6, 172; controlled chaos in, 20, 137, 152; creativity in, x; cutthroat, 38, 171; disciplined, 172; French, 6; modern, xi; more humane, xi; motley crew of, xi; organic, 143; philosophy, 32; redemptive, x; Ryland Inn, x, 5–6 Kitchen Nightmares (TV program), 185–186 Kosovo, 105, 107 Kurdzuk, Tony/e Star Ledger, 233 Kurlansky, Mark, 145

La Grenouille, New York City, 197 La Panetiere, Philadelphia, 150 Ladd, Catherine Everit Macy, 144 Ladd, Walter Graeme, 144 Ladies’ Home Journal (magazine), 202 Laird, James, 5, 159–168. See also Restaurant Serenade Laird, Nancy, 5, 161–162 Lambertville House, Lambertville, 37 Lauper, Cyndi, 7 Lawrenceville, 52

Le Bec-Fin, Philadelphia, 37–38, 40, 150, 171 Le Bernadin, New York City, 64 Le Cirque, New York City, 30 Le Petit Chateau, Bernardsville, 30 Led Zeppelin, 194 London, 144 Long Beach Island, 125 Long Branch, 172 Lorena’s, Maplewood, 124–125, 127. See also Campos, Humberto Jr. Louca’s, Edison, 124, 126, 128 Lowell, Guy, 144 Lubcke, Maggie, 172, 174

Ma Gastronomie (Point), 145 Maine, 153 Maplewood, 124, 126–128 Margaux, Colts Neck, 172 Marotta, Jessica, 187 Martel, Yann, 145 Martino, Paul, 203 Maslow, Abraham, 5 Matisse, Henri, Open Window, Collioure, 89 Mauceri, William, 197 McGreevey, Gov. James, 118 McLoone’s Rum Runner, Sea Bright, 3 McNish, George/e Star-Ledger, 233 meatballs, 184–185 Metzner, Michael, 54 Miami Herald, 71 Michel Guérard, Eugénie-les-Bains, France, 30 Michelin restaurant guides, 97, 115, 119, 194, 212 Middlesex, 159 Miller Cathy/e Star-Ledger, 233 Mina, Michael, 97 Meilleurs Ouvriers de France Diplome d’Honneur, 18 Mexico, 150 Mondavi, Bob, 63

Mondrian, New York City, 55 Monmouth County, 115, 172 Montclair, 104, 106, 202, 212, 213 Moonen, Rick, 98 Morimoto, Masaharu, 97, 99 Mosimann, Anton, 30 Mumford’s Culinary Center, Tinton Falls, 170 Murray, Noah K./e Star-Ledger, 233

Napa, Calif., 185, 197 Natirar, 142, 144. See also Felton, David C. Navesink Country Club, 20 New Brunswick, x, 36–37, 40, 115–116, 118, 134 New Hope, Pa., 169 New Jersey: Anthony Bucco’s theory about restaurants in, ix; as comfort zone, 38; Craig Shelton as culinary icon of, x; as culinary destination, ix, 55; culinary revolution in, x, 52; diner rats, 2; fine dining in, 38; farms, 196; forefathers of fine cuisine, 52; great chefs, xi; great restaurants, ix; as home to foodies, x; locally sourced food, 100, 143, 186; most eligible bachelor chef, 205; in New York’s shadow, ix; rebel chefs in, 104; restaurateur of the year, 64; Ryland Inn as culinary flagship of, 3 e New Taste of Chocolate (Presilla), 74 New York: birthday celebrations in, 203; chocolate show, 231; daunting restaurant scene, 38; farmers’ markets, 196; overshadowing New Jersey, ix; restaurant tour, x New York Restaurant School, 117 New York Times, 5, 18, 39, 128, 205 New York University, 71 Next Door, Montclair, 106. See also Arifai, Zod

GENERAL INDEX

239

Niman Ranch (meat supplier), 146 Ninety Acres, Peapack-Gladstone, 142, 143, 144, 145. See also Felton, David C. Novelli, Jean-Christophe, 212 Nutley, 202

Obama, Barack, 71 O’Boyle, John/e Star-Ledger, 233 Ochsher, Rise (artist), 159

Palmer, Charlie, 19 Panama, 150, 152 Paris, 160, 203 parsnips, 106 pasta, homemade, 134–136 Pathe, Jim/e Star-Ledger, 233 Paul’s Lunch, Newark, 202 Peapack-Gladstone, 142 Pearl Jam, 118 Perrier, Georges, 38, 150, 171 Peter, Hubert, 20. See also Fromagerie Peter, Markus, 20. See also Fromagerie Petrasek, Ed and Doris, 61. See also Doris & Ed’s Philadelphia, 38, 100, 150, 171 Picasso, Pablo, 21 Pinder, Diane, 223–231. See also Donna & Company Pink Floyd, 215 Pluckemin Inn, Pluckemin, 142 Plumsteadville Inn, Plumsteadville, Pa., 169, 171 Poconos, 153 Point, Fernand, 145 Ponzek, Debra, 55 Presilla, Maricel, 71–85. See also Cucharamama; Zafra Primehouse, Chicago, 17 Princeton, x, 89, 91, 92, 95, 117 Provence, France, 160

240

GENERAL INDEX

Rahway, 36, 37, 39, 126, 225 Rahway Hospital, 225 Ramsay, Gordon, 171, 185–186 Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia, 100 Real Housewives of Atlanta (TV program), 215 Red Bank, 153 Reinecke, Klaus, 169 Relais & Chateaux, 3 Restaurant David Drake, Rahway, 36– 37, 41. See also Drake, David Restaurant Depot, 196 Restaurant Nicholas, Red Bank, 54, 118, 127, 128, 153. See also Harary, Nicholas Restaurant Serenade, Chatham, 159, 161–162. See also Laird, James revolution: at A Toute Heure, 194; in chocolate, 74; at Elements, 93; at Le Bec-Fin, 38; in New Jersey restaurants, 52; in restaurant theory, x; at Skylark Diner, 4; started by Alice Waters, 196; at e Tarragon Tree, x River Café, Brooklyn, 18–19, 39 Robert Mondavi Culinary Award of Excellence, 159 Roberts, Nora, 215 Romanowski, Joe, 169–179. See also Bay Avenue Trattoria Roundup Family Restaurant, Middlesex, 159 Rousseau, François, 5, 136 Ruiz, Don Miguel, 32 Rumson, 17, 153 Rundgren, Todd, 104 Rutgers University, 90, 187 Ryland Inn, Whitehouse: as chefs’ training ground, x, 126; culinary approach, 5, 6; and David Drake, 39; and François Rousseau, 136; and Humberto Campos Jr., 126; and James Laird, 160, 161; as leg-

endary, x, 3; and Nancy Laird, 161; and Scott Anderson, 91; standards of, 126. See also Shelton, Craig

Saatchi & Saatchi, 225 Salt: A World History (Kurlansky), 145 Sayreville, 226 Sea Bright, 3 SeaBlue, Borgata, Atlantic City, x, 96, 98, 99. See also Amoroso, Anthony Seattle, Wash., 196 Sciarrino, Robert/e Star-Ledger, 233 Shelton, Craig, 2–16; as chef to fear, 5–6, 126; as culinary icon, x; and David Drake, 39–40; and Diane Pinder, 223–225; influence of, 3; as Ivy League chef, 55. See also Ryland Inn; Skylark Diner Sicily, 115 Sierra Club, 142, 143 Sinatra, Frank, 223 Skylark Diner, Edison, 3, 4, 5, 7, 40. See also Shelton, Craig Slow Food movement, 186 Sofocli, Alex, 124–125, 128 Sotomayor, Sonia, 71 Spotted Pig, New York City, 194 Spring Valley Farm, Flanders, 38 Springsteen, Bruce, 3 Stage House, Scotch Plains, 36, 39, 46 Stage Le, New Brunswick, 115, 118 e Star-Ledger, 233 Steak ’n’ Ale restaurant chain, 62 Steele, Bob, 92 Stotler, Alex, 46 Stuff Yer Face, New Brunswick, x Susanna Foo, Philadelphia, 150 Swarup, Vikas, 145

Tarragon, Tree, Chatham, x, 38, 55 Taste and Technique, Red Bank, 170 Telepan, Bill, 203

anksgiving, xx, 152–153 ermo Circulator, 91 Today Show (TV program), 205, 223 Top Chef (TV program), 212, 213–214 Tuscany, Italy, 223, 225

Ultimate Chef of Bergen County, 185 Ultramarinos, Hoboken, 74 Union County, 194 Union Square farmers’ market, New York City, 196 University of Pennsylvania, 55, 152 Uproot, Warren, 115–116, 118. See also Bucco, Anthony

Valentine’s Day, 223, 226 Valrhona chocolate, 226 veal stock, 194–195 Vermont, 153 Verre, Patrick, 111 Vietnam War, 226 Vongerichten, Jean-Georges, 203, 205

W Hotel, Hoboken, 205 Warren, ix, 115 Waters, Alice, x, 186, 195 Westfield, 197 Westfield Seafood, 197 White, Michael, 98, 136 White House, 72 Whitehouse, 3, 5 Whitman, Gov. Christine Todd, 118 Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? (TV program), 223 Windows on the World, New York City, 117 Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, 63 Wojtowicz, Bob, 144 World Trade Center, New York City, 117 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 92

GENERAL INDEX

241

Wright, Jim/e Star-Ledger, 233 wu wei, 92

Yale University, 6 Yosemite National Park, 153

242

GENERAL INDEX

Zafra, Hoboken, 71, 74. See also Presilla, Maricel Zambrano, Luis, 197

RECIPE INDEX

Breakfast One-Skillet Country Breakfast for Two (Maricel Presilla), 76–77

Soups and Stocks Apple Rutabaga Soup (Kara Decker), 198 Asparagus Soup (Dennis Foy), 56–57 Autumn Butternut Squash Soup (Ryan DePersio), 206 Grandpa Shelton’s Clam Chowda’ (Craig Shelton), 8–9 Mushroom Stock (Scott Anderson), 94 Rhubarb and Cinnamon Soup with Strawberries and Candied Almonds (Anthony Bucco), 119–120 Spring Pea Soup with Chanterelles (Humberto Campos Jr.), 130–131 Vegetable Stock (Scott Anderson), 94

Sandwiches and Snacks Pumpkin Ricotta Pizza (David C. Felton), 147 Quiche (Dennis Foy), 59 e “Table 29” Panini (Joe Cerniglia), 190

Cocktails Amigo/Amaro (Mattias Haggland), 95 Luminor (Mattias Haggland), 95

Appetizers Asparagus in Bondage (Dennis Foy), 57 Eggplant Caponata (Joe Cerniglia), 189–190 Grilled “8-Hour” Moroccan Lamb Skewers (Craig Shelton), 9–10 Kono Kampachi Crudo with Garlic Crostini, Avocado, and Citrus Vinaigrette (Ryan DePersio), 208 Peanut-Butter-Stuffed Dates Wrapped in Bacon (Corey Heyer), 154 Peekytoe Crab Salad (Corey Heyer), 154–155 Peekytoe Crab–Stuffed Zucchini Flowers with Yellow Tomato Marmellata (Ryan DePersio), 207 Polenta Pie with Sausage and Fontina, Arugula in Fig Vinaigrette (Joe Cerniglia), 192–193 Prosciutto, Mozzarella, and Truffle Rice Balls (Joe Romanowski), 174–175

Salads Autumn Beet Salad (Jim Filip), 66 Endive and Watercress with Sauce Vert (Scott Cutaneo), 33 Heirloom Tomato Salad with Toasted Orzo (James Laird), 167 Heirloom Tomatoes with Pine Nut Vinaigrette (Corey Heyer), 158 Warm Ripe Plantain and Grilled Pineapple Salad with Smoked PaprikaJalapeno Dressing and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds (Maricel Presilla), 80–81

Fish and Seafood Angry Lobster on a Bed of Nails (David Burke), 22–23 Autumn Tuna Tartare (James Laird), 164–165 Barnegat Light Scallop Pansoti, Baby Artichoke, and Pickled Chanterelle Mushrooms (Anthony Amoroso), 101–103

243

Black Bass with Celery Root Puree, Trumpet Royale Mushrooms, Avocado, and a Lime Honey Gastrique (Anthony Bucco), 122–123 Crˆepe of Fresh Lump Crab and Field Mushrooms with Fresh Herb Emulsion (Humberto Campos Jr.), 129–130 Florida Pompano, Wild Mushrooms, and Black Truffle Butter Risotto (Ryan DePersio), 210 Florida Red Snapper with Zucchini and Red Pepper Risotto, Pea Shoot Salad, and Sauce Bouillabaisse (David Drake), 43–45 Herb-Crusted Salmon with Cucumber, Apple, and Radish Salad (Anthony Bucco), 123 Fried Crab Cakes, with Celery Root Remoulade and Farmer’s Greens (David Drake), 48–49 Grilled Halibut with Romesco Sauce (Jim Filip), 65 Grilled Marinated Sea Bass with Shrimp (Bill Dorrler), 139–140 Lobster Cannelloni with OrangeScented Squash Purée and Shaved Fennel Salad (James Laird), 165–166 Local Swordfish Confit with Crispy Prosciutto and Sage Brown Butter (Anthony Amoroso), 100–101 Mahi with Black Beans, Peanuts, Scallions, Sweet and Sour Glaze (Zod Arifai), 110 Mussels and Clams with Chorizo Sausage in an Orange-Scented Broth (Jim Filip), 67 Mussels with Pancetta, White Wine, Chilies, Basil, and Cream (Joe Cerniglia), 191–192 Mussels with Saffron, Chorizo, and Cream (Kara Decker), 199

244

RECIPE INDEX

Pacific King Salmon with Cauliflower Cream, Black Trumpet Mushrooms, and Pink Peppercorn Glaze (Corey Heyer), 156–157 Pan-Seared Day-Boat Scallops with Mushroom Ragout, White Truffle Oil, and Mushroom Syrup (Ariane Duarte), 218 Pretzel-Crusted Crab Cakes (David Burke), 24 Salmon Tartare with Wasabi Tobiko (Humberto Campos Jr.), 131 Scallops with English Pea and Mint Puree, Sugar Snap Peas, and Henof-the-Woods Mushrooms (Anthony Bucco), 120 Scallops with Lemon Sunchoke Puree (Corey Heyer), 157–158 Sea Scallops Benedict with Potato Cakes, Spice Sausage, and Lobster Foam (David Burke), 25–26 Sesame-Coated Yellow-Fin Tuna on Asian Slaw with a Soy, Ginger, and Garlic Sauce (Jim Filip), 68–69 Shrimp with Barrel-Aged Feta and Orzo (Jim Filip), 70 Steamed Skate Wing with Curried Spring Vegetable Succotash (Humberto Campos Jr.), 132 Sumac-Dusted Tuna with Black Olive Potato Salad (Joe Romanowski), 179 Vietnamese Garlic Shrimp (Craig Shelton), 14–15 Warm Scallops, Hibiscus, Fennel, Orange (Zod Arifai), 108

Meat Braised Boar Shoulder with Garganelli Pasta and Ricotta Salata (David C. Felton), 148 Chicken and Pork Brine (Kara Decker), 201

Coriander-Rubbed Roasted Pork Loin with Apple Chutney (Ariane Duarte), 216 Grilled “8-Hour” Moroccan Lamb Skewers (Craig Shelton), 9–10 Guinness Braised Short Ribs with Caramelized Candy-Striped Baby Beets and eir Greens, Potato Puree, and Braising Jus (David Drake), 46–47 Juniper-Dusted Venison with Autumn Fruits and Vegetables (James Laird), 164 Roasted Spice-Crusted Rib Roast with Mashed Potatoes and Worcestobaketch (David Burke), 26–27 Roman-Style Lamb Chops (Joe Romanowski), 177 Slow-Braised Rabbit Legs with Roasted Tomato, Capers, and Picholine Olives (Kara Decker), 200 Steak au Poivre (Craig Shelton), 12–13 Stuffed Pork Loin with Broccoli Rabe and Sausage (Joe Romanowski), 177–178

Poultry Braised Chicken Breast with Guatemalan Flavors (Maricel Presilla), 81–82 Buttermilk-Baked Giannone Chicken Breast with Oregano Pesto Crust, Baby Spinach, and Roasted Crimini Mushrooms (Ryan DePersio), 209 Chicken and Pork Brine (Kara Decker), 201 Chicken with Arugula Pistachio Pesto, Anson Mills Polenta, and Heirloom Squash (Anthony Bucco), 121–122

Duck Breast with Fig Caviar, Braised Turnips (Zod Arifai), 109 Duck Confit (Dennis Foy), 58 Roast Goose with Chestnut, Foie Gras, and Sage Stuffing (Craig Shelton), 10–12 Snail-Stuffed Quail with Quinoa, Braised Chanterelle Mushrooms, and Parsley Persiade (David Drake), 41–42

Pasta and Rice Barnegat Light Scallop Pansoti, Baby Artichoke, and Pickled Chanterelle Mushrooms (Anthony Amoroso), 101–103 Butternut Squash Ravioli (Ariane Duarte), 217 Fresh Chitarra Spaghetti, with Lobster, Shrimp, Fresh Tomato Garlic, and Chilies (Bill Dorrler), 140 Lobster Cannelloni with OrangeScented Squash Puree and Shaved Fennel Salad (James Laird), 165–166 Pasta Quills with Proscuitto, Spring Peas, and Cream (Bill Dorrler), 141 Polenta Pie with Sausage and Fontina, Arugula in Fig Vinaigrette (Joe Cerniglia), 192–193 Proscuitto, Mozzarella, and Truffle Rice Balls (Joe Romanowski), 174–175 Ricotta Gnocchi and Sweet Sausage Bolognese (Ryan DePersio), 211 Risotto (David C. Felton), 149 Risotto with Butternut Squash, Gorgonzola, Cumin Caramel (Zod Arifai), 111–112 White Truffle Risotto with Porcini (Scott Cutaneo), 34

RECIPE INDEX

245

Vegetables and Sides Crispy Zucchini Flowers with Buffalo Mozzarella, Pomodoro, Anchovy (Bill Dorrler), 138–139 Eggplant Caponata (Joe Cerniglia), 189–190 Grilled Trevisano Radicchio with Crimson Pears, Roasted Pistachios, Pecorino, Meyer Lemon, Aged Balsamico, and Extra-Virgin Olive Oil (Joe Cerniglia), 188–189 Malt Vinegar Fries with Parmesan (Craig Shelton), 13 Potato and Manchego Croquettes with Smoked Paprika Aioli (Kara Decker), 199–200 Roasted Candy-Cane Beets with Currants, Pears, and Goat Cheese Crespelles with Saba Vinegar (Joe Romanowski), 176 Truffled Taro Skillet Cakes with Braised Mushrooms (Maricel Presilla), 78–79

Desserts and Sweets Banana Mousse with Milk Chocolate Cream, Coffee Caramel, Brownie, and Candied Walnuts (David Drake), 50–51 Black Olive Cake with Basil Ice Cream (Zod Arifai), 113–114

246

RECIPE INDEX

Butterscotch Panna Cotta with Curried Caramel (David Burke), 28 Cheesecake (Diane Pinder), 230 Chocolate Bread Pudding (Diane Pinder), 227–228 Chocolate Souffle (Ariane Duarte), 219 Coconut Macaroons (Scott Cutaneo), 35 Coffee Panna Cotta with Biscotti and Lemon Zest (Humberto Campos Jr.), 133 Figs with Dulce de Leche (Maricel Presilla), 85 Florentine Hot Chocolate (Diane Pinder), 229 Hibiscus-Rum Glazed Baked Apples with Dried Fruits and Cashews (Maricel Presilla), 83–84 Molten Chocolate Cake (Dennis Foy), 60 Olive Oil and Sea Salt Truffle (Diane Pinder), 229 Pecan-Crusted Warm Chocolate Tart with Secret Center (James Laird), 168 Pistachio Brittle and Sea Salt (Diane Pinder), 230–231 Uganda Gold Vanilla Bean Ice Cream (Craig Shelton), 16 Warm Plum Tart (Craig Shelton), 15

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teresa Politano is a restaurant critic for Inside Jersey magazine and e Star-Ledger. She is an award-winning journalist and former newspaper executive who is lucky enough to be married to a personal chef. She lives in Cranford with her husband and their three energetic children.