Meet the fine dining dropouts
While researching regional Indian food this summer, I ended up on the phone with Mohammad Tarique Khan, the owner of the Hyderabadi Zaiqa restaurants in Manhattan. We were discussing the architecture of biryani — layers of par-cooked rice, raw meat submerged below — when Mr. Khan revealed that he gleaned some of his techniques while working at Eleven Madison Park, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant. For Mr. Khan, and the many chefs like him, working in fine dining is hardly the end goal. A stint at a restaurant like E.M.P., rather, can be a valuable steppingstone. They learn how to run a disciplined kitchen under pressure. Then they go on to cook pizza, fried chicken, pineapple buns and biryani at casual restaurants of their own. Restaurants where, Mr. Khan reminded me, “we would spend our own time off.”
Chefs, they’re just like usWhat does cooking in a Michelin-starred restaurant have to do with sandwich making? Ask the chef Antonio Barbieri, an owner of Brown Bag Sandwich Co. in Greenwich Village and Flatiron. Like Mr. Khan, Mr. Barbieri also trained at Eleven Madison Park and was walking the fine dining path when the pandemic forced him to pivot. “I hung up my tweezers,” he told me. “I make sandwiches now.” From what I can tell, Mr. Barbieri is having a lot of fun these days. At Brown Bag, he indulges our basest desires and most nostalgic cravings with hefty “chopped sandwiches,” made by aggressively mincing chicken cutlet, prosciutto and other fixins to a tuna salad consistency, eliminating any chance of dry spots. And nothing but love to my 24-hour deli, but its chopped cheese doesn’t hold a candle to his loaded version, heaped with housemade bodega sauce, seasoned ground beef and French’s fried onions from a tub. The greatest guilty pleasure may be the hot roast beef with cheese and tangy sauce. A loving riff on Arby’s Beef ‘n’ Cheddar, it’s about as far from Eleven Madison Park as you can get. 218 Thompson Street (Bleecker Street), Greenwich Village, Manhattan 64 West 22nd Street (Sixth Avenue), Flatiron, Manhattan
A fine-dining alum, per seThe Malaysian chef Erik Cheah enjoyed all three months of his time at Thomas Keller’s Per Se. A culinary school intern, Mr. Cheah shucked oysters, seasoned stocks and trailed servers at the highest level of dining. Then, when he was offered the opportunity to stay at the end of his program, a dream for many aspiring chefs, he politely declined. “I wanted to open my own restaurant,” he said. Some 20 years later, Mr. Cheah now owns Wok Wok, an unpretentious Malaysian restaurant in Chinatown. Down a set of creaky stairs, he barbecues stingray and butchers poached chicken often while wearing a chef’s toque. His menu looks to Penang, Malaysia, where his parents labored for decades as hawkers, cooking white curry laksa in their backyard to sell to commuters. Here, the pale soup comes sloshing with a tangle of shrimp, poached chicken and two kinds of noodles in an herbal coconut milk broth that turns a striking orange from chili paste. And in the red corner? The Penang har mee, weighing in at who knows how much after the prawn heads, shells and pork bones have been boiled down into a dense broth. (The recipe is from a friend of the Cheah family, another hawker.) Order a bowl of each with a plate of stuffed roti murtabak to share. 11 Mott Street (Worth Street), Chinatown, Manhattan
Barker has biteAnd then there’s Henry Wright and Gracie Gardner, two line cooks who quit their jobs at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, N.Y., to move to a remote island off the coast of British Columbia. As they bottled hot sauces and sold sandwiches at local farmers’ markets, it struck them: “This is the most fun we’ve had cooking in years,” Mr. Wright said. Even if you don’t know their story, you’ll likely notice something is up when you walk into Barker in Bed-Stuy and see the small handwritten sign stating that all of the sauces are made from scratch and all bread is baked in-house, including the Pullman loaves for the kid’s grilled cheese. You probably don’t need me to tell you about the savory-sweet apple fritters, which sell out almost every day, but perhaps you need a reminder about the cold roast beef sandwich? While you take in the flavors of horseradish, fried potato and room temp beef on seedy pizza bianca, maybe you can help me answer: Where have these alums been our whole lives? 395 Nostrand Avenue (Putnam Avenue), Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
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