The following is online extra from our October issue, on newsstands now.
Little Saint’s The Return of the Token Vegan features rainbow carrots, radicchio, grilled scallions and fingerling potatoes. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Until recently, carrots were Alex Enggist’s Achilles heel. But despite his disdain for this particular root vegetable, the executive chef at Little Saint has crafted a vegan dish that captures its essence in an atypical fashion. The carrots are first roasted in the oven and then transported to the grill before finishing in the fryer. Hugged by a raw radicchio cup and resting atop brined and crisp fingerling potatoes, the carrots require a few seductive final touches: Charred scallions, a hickory syrup and tangy mustard sauce are added to the dish, creating a marriage of spicy, sweet, smoky and salty flavors. Read on for the full story of how Enggist created the dish.
We all have at least one food we hate. But have you ever thought that chefs have “no-go” food lists, too? Well, they do.
Chef Alex Enggist, of Little Saint in Richmond’s Museum District, is no fan of carrots. How can that be? Carrots are a backbone of American cuisine, and, knowing Enggist is a self-proclaimed Virginia-inspired chef, I was floored when he revealed his culinary kryptonite.
I had begun chatting with Enggist so that I could follow a restaurant dish from conception to dinner plate. It’s more complicated than the average diner realizes, and knowing the craft behind it all can make a meal a more treasured experience.
Imagine my surprise when Enggist tells me that the base for the dish he’s going to take me through would be carrots. How did that happen?
I’ve had my share of palate-changing moments. I claimed to hate cauliflower until my early 30s, when the now-defunct Dominion Harvest delivered several heads to my front door. I needed to figure how to love those things — and I did. Roasted cauliflower is now my culinary crack.
Chefs get inspiration from myriad sources just like you and I do. Cookbooks, TV shows, friends and family all serve as fodder for the kitchen. But their fellow chefs, other masters of the craft, influence their peers most profoundly when it comes to signaling a new take on a dish. For Enggist, his hatred of carrots was challenged by a dish at The Dabney in Washington, D.C.
It was a cold night in late winter 2018 when Enggist’s dining companion insisted they order hearth-roasted carrots. Skeptical but willing, Enggist found an appreciation for carrots in a simple yet transformative application in which the hearth-roasted carrots delivered an earthy, smoked quality balanced by a honey-mustard glaze. That combination of flavors and cooking method stayed with him for months.
In March 2018, at a charity dinner for SCAN (Stop Child Abuse Now), Enggist tried a nod to the life-changing Dabney dish — and it worked. From there, he continued to play and think. Winter fell away, spring drifted into the high heat of July, and suddenly Enggist needed a new vegan dish on the menu at Little Saint. Enter carrots — oven-roasted ones.
Little Saint is exactly that: It’s little. The space in which to cook and clean is tight. With three people, it’s almost overcrowded. There is no hearth or wood-fired stove, and the one oven can be finicky. But these are the conditions in which most chefs thrive, and Enggist certainly does. Something in a chef’s blood demands that they have hills to conquer in their daily prep. It might just be a sadistic trait.
Still, those carrots kept calling to Enggist, so he began the second installment of a 12-step process to get his inspiration to your table. Though the idea had begun percolating in late winter, which was Step 1, by July, Enggist was ready to commit something to paper for Step 2, starting with how to round out the dish and make it a full meal
Enggist prides himself on thoroughly thinking through his vegetarian and vegan options. He believes that these diners deserve as much thought and process in their dishes as do the meat and dairy eaters of the world. And he insists on keeping to his restaurant’s “thoughtfully sourced food and drink” concept. This meant that the honey flavor he tasted at The Dabney would be replaced with hickory syrup, a mild sweetener made from Virginia’s indigenous Shagbark hickory trees at Falling Bark Farm in Clarke County. This thoughtful sourcing is Step 3. This step can kill the concept outright. If an ingredient is too expensive or just not viable in his area, then this can easily become the end of the road for a dish. Luckily for Richmond vegans, this particular dish seemed doable.
Step 4 is where playing in the kitchen becomes real. Here, Enggist attempts different application methods, trying to perfect the texture, flavor and color that he’s established in his mind. He tried oven roasting, grilling and frying the carrots to achieve his vision. But the carrots would not be the only thing on the plate for this dish. The “meat” of the dish would come from “salt mine” potatoes, which Enggist describes as tasting like “a potato chip and mashed potatoes at the same time.” They are fingerling potatoes boiled in a pot with a pound of salt, which allows them to form a salty crust as they leave the briny water and cool for plating. Because staff had to be trained to execute this dish, Enggist needed to ensure that the steps could be easily achieved from day prep to night service. This execution step might be the most crucial for Little Saint’s little kitchen, where Step 5 equates to “Step 5 to stay alive.”
Enggist’s creativity led him to finish the dish in a raw radicchio cup, which holds the oven-roasted carrots. He topped the dish with charred scallions and placed it all on a pool of hickory syrup and mustard sauce. This vegan dish sings. The perfect bites gave me the creaminess of the potatoes, the light sweetness of the carrots, the earthy smoke of the scallions, the crunch of the radicchio and the spicy-smooth dip of that sweet hickory syrup and mustard sauce. I would order this dish over a pork chop any day.
Next, the dish was given to the owners and administrative team for Step 6, in which it undergoes a tasting and may be killed, updated or accepted as is. Step 7 quickly follows — any tweaks coming from the tasting round are applied, and another tasting is prepared. “It tastes like money” are the words Enggist wants to hear at this stage because when the owners like it, he knows he can sell it — well, after a few more steps.
Step 8 includes the paperwork, that not-so-sexy but crucial piece that ensures all the dish’s elements are ordered and stocked before the printer ever sees the menu that ends up in your hand.
For Step 9, all the kitchen players are trained to create and plate the dish. A single dish passes through many hands on its way to your table. For this vegan installment, all components save the charred scallions are prepped during the day. During dinner service, staffers rely on those who came before them to have prepared the elements properly so that they are ready to go.
Enggist believes in the “story” behind his food. This dish sings to him because he never thought he’d like a carrot, much less feature it in a dish he’s proud to serve. And this story is vital to what he wants you to know, but you can’t get that knowledge unless he educates his servers in Step 10 to tell you the progression of this humble veggie-filled plate.
After six months, Step 11 is where Enggist finishes, with the dish winding up on your fork. Here is where your hands hold the menu, your eyes scan the selections, your mouth waters at descriptions, your ears listen to background stories, and your server places something belly-filling in front of you.
But I think there is one more step, Step 12, the stage where a dish lives beyond the walls of a restaurant, inspiring us amateur cooks to go home, boil some carrots (like our momma did) and smother them in honey and butter and salt. They won’t taste like Enggist’s, but they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to taste like the memory of your childhood and of a dish you had at a nice restaurant where much more time and effort went into bringing that meal to your table than you ever even considered possible before reading this article. May you cherish every bite of your next dinner out — and give your compliments to the chef and all the many hands at play.
