You can find pork from Autumn Olive Farms all over town, but why is it just a little better at Restaurant X than Restaurant Y? It’s the laborious details that make the difference.
Take stocks and spices — crucial to the cuisine at the Indian restaurant Lehja.
To create “the real backbone” of his food, owner Sunny Baweja and his chefs make vegetable stocks from scratch, a process that can take up to 48 hours in order to “extract all the veggie flavors” integral to Lehja’s dishes. Equally time-consuming is spice preparation, from cumin to coriander — toasted to maximize flavor and then ground in-house.
Achieving just the right taste and texture is what buttresses the crust on the candy bar pie at Secco Wine Bar. A gingerbread crust might be something many of us have made, but how many of us bake our own cookies and then crush them? Chef Julie Heins does. It’s the only way she knows to allow the ginger to “bloom” and create the deep flavors she’s looking for.
Over at French-inspired L’Opossum, Chef James Garland isn’t satisfied with putting just any preserve on the seared foie gras. No, he makes hoshigaki, aged persimmons, to add the sweetness that the foie cries out for. Of course, you can’t simply hang peeled persimmons by a string and let them do their thing over five or six weeks. In order for the sugars to evenly distribute and crystallize on the outside, you’ve got to massage each fruit every few days, resulting in an intense, almost smoky sweet flavor.
