We will be releasing our photos and videos over the course of the next week so please stay tuned. We are committed and determined to push ahead, boats against the currents, providing unique and unforgettable experiences… And so we leave you to ponder what might be next…

Michael J Cirino

Founder – a razor, a shiny knife

Thyme brush and butter

NYC Delft Table Settle. Designed by Demian Repucci

A simple solution to a problem that we hadn’t known we needed to solve. Lost in the striking rush of action in the kitchen of Norwood, I stumbled through the final steps that I needed to perform before our me

al was to begin. Three floors above us, forty locally-made delft china settings, neatly wrapped in bright red string were awaiting their guests. As I was imagining them battling the brisk chill of the early autumn evening and Jonny’s humor, I collected a tray of mis en place and saw this out of the corner of my eye.

Discarded by its creator twenty minutes earlier and left to wallow as the task at hand moved to the toasting instead of the buttering of the bread. Stacks of quart containers blocked it from clear view and it was starting to get dangerously near the back edge of the prep table.

Thyme brush buttering toast. ©2009 Andy Buck

In the haze of the night, I didn’t remember the bunch of time and the smile the simple idea brought to my mind until Andy sent over these photographs. Mike Lee has done some amazingly creative things before and I have laid witness to an every growing portion of these (thanks to twitter) but this is one is exceptionally elegant.

Thyme brush buttering toast. ©2009 Andy Buck

It is our distinct pleasure to announce our next series of events in Los Angeles. With this adventure we will be hosting two types of events, please follow the links below to get more information about these upcoming dinners.

Cooking workshops – Half-day cooking workshop at Surfase
Thursday, December 2nd
Friday, December 3rd

Corn Tasting Menu – Cooking workshop, performance, dinner and adult beverages
Saturday, December 4th

One year ago I woke up not feeling great. I had just returned from Los Angeles and a speaking date at the Dwell on Design Conference. I had arrived the morning before, after an overnight flight and flew headlong into a twelve-hour workday. As morning broke, a slight shiver crawled over my skin, which I fought off with a hot shower and a slow walk in the summer sun to the subway.

My day was slow but was punctuated with two large engagements. First I was to speak on the radio; a long-distance interview with a lovely lady in Los Angeles about modern home cookery and my presentation at that weekend’s design conference. Second, I was scheduled to say goodbye to two of my closest friends, who were preparing to move to Colombia to open a restaurant and plan a Texan wedding.

I arrived at the radio station, with the chill creeping all over my body with relentless attention to detail. In took a nap, bumped into a friend who manages one of your favorite rock and roll bands, and had a glass of water as I stumbled into the freezing studio. The disembodied voice a few thousand miles away poured into my ears and awoke my senses. I tried my best to conjure up some fire and passion, some connective energy to bring my hollow voice to the thousands of listeners who were driving around LA.

It went well, to say I told a joke and conveyed some interesting, if not somewhat longwinded explanations and stories. I stumbled back into the heat of the day hoping for the sun to overcome the cold in my bones. I found Shamus’s restaurant around the corner and although he wasn’t there I filled my shivering shell with soup and starchy deliciousness I was sure would break the cold.

Time swept away and as I finished my last bite I began to meander uptown not in a particular rush to find my wayward friends. It was hot, the kind of hot reserved normally for Augusts in New York. Sticky, offensive and completely unsatisfying to my cold blood, I fell over some where in the mid-twenties. I was in the sun and next to a tree that had the most delicate pink blossoms. I lost an hour next to that tree; awash in sunlight, freezing to the core.

A cab dragged me uptown and dropped me off on the couch of my friends surrounded by boxes in mid-pack. Dinner plans we confirmed and I slept shaking under the slight breeze of the massive air conditioner. As the sun fell I crawled back to the village, surrounded by loved ones but lost to the world.

As I said my goodbyes, after beers and hot sandwiches I struggled my way into bed and a fever that would not break for another thirty days. With a dog-shaped cow by my side, I shivered my way through fifteen days with rumors of swine flu and the vibrations became unbearable. So on the fifteenth of July 2009 I found myself in an emergency room uptown with the hopes of finding out the mysterious monster that was attacking my insides.

It was there that I almost died.

After two long weeks the vicious monster was tracked lingering around, with its guard down, complacent with the total devastation it had wracked upon my body. With a strong blast of chemicals nastier than you could imagine my breath was back. The chill was gone, the shakes were broken and beaten back, but I was ruined and barely able to speak or walk.

Just a few days after my triumphant release I met up for the logistical planning of a super-weapon that was to rain damage upon the meatball world. Laden with a daily toxic intake and a shattered body, I, for the first time in six weeks, was able to look to the future and to all of the things I was so excited to accomplish.

Thank you all for your help and support. Thank you for always being there. Thank you for phone calls, visits, Turkish Food, tears, and letting me beat you at word games!

A Christmas Feast at The Brooklyn Kitchen

Like many an Italian-reared-child, I grew up learning to cook on the heels of my grandparents and parents. Every year, in honor of my grandparents, a razor, a shiny knife prepares two meals around the holidays. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day feasts mark the pinnacle of traditional Italian cookery — even for those of us who are not pious or religious. Tradition dictates strict rules for appropriate ingredients, preparations and recipes. This in turn creates greatly anticipated dishes with a similarity of desire to smell pies baking and to eat turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy at thanksgiving. So distinctly defined by each side of my family were these meals that I have done my best to incorporate elements of both sets of regional influences while adding a modern flavor and elegant execution to tradition.

These two separate meals are defined by the stringent set of rules governing their possible ingredients. La Vigilia is the feast on Christmas Eve most recognized as the Feast of the Seven Fishes (The 10 dishes represent the ten stations of the cross). Christmas Eve, like Good Friday, is a vigilia di magro, or a lean day during which meat is prohibited. Il Pranzo (the Lunch) on Christmas day is a celebration of meat, cheese and sweets.

Both meals are decadent and extravagant in their own ways, but the real beauty of these traditional events is the social interaction around the preparation and service of the meal. You would never simply show up at your Italian family’s house to eat. Rather, you engage with each other in the kitchen. This type of participation is one of our founding tenets and a clear example of the most enjoyable functions of the social aspect of cooking and food.

We were also proud to host the meal at the Brooklyn Kitchen with our good friend Jonny Cigar, who, in addition to using a beautiful electric knife to slice the goose, also performed his adaptation of the Charles Dickens masterpiece, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas with a slight tinge of ginzano.

These meals are hosted early in December so we can donate the proceeds from these events in memory of my grandparents to their a favorite charity Feeding America. www.feedingamerica.org

Here are the menus from both meals as well as a collection of photos, a short audio story of the evening by Food Thinkers as well (Listen Here) and a time lapse of the evening prepared by Michael Lee from Studiofeast.

From this point on we will try our best to speak Italian where possible

Menus:
Christmas Eve – La Vigilia
Antipasto di Mare – Baccalà, Arsella, Ostrica, Gambero, Capesante, Scungilli
Antipasto di Mare – Salt cod, clams, oyster, shrimp, scallops, whelks

Zuppetta di cozze con funghi
Mussel soup with mushrooms

Tagliolini di Bottarga
Tagliolini of Mullet Roe

Anguilla Fritte con cavolo croccante
Fried eel with crispy kale

Branzino al sale con una quantità oscena di piattini
Bass in salt with many side dishes

Granita di Aperol

La collana del prete e una selezione di tradizionali pasticcerie italiane
Dried and fresh fruit and a selection of traditional Italian pastries

Christmas Day – Il Pranzo
Antipasto –Formaggio, Salumi, Sottaceti, Fegatini, Lepre
Appetizer-Cheese, Salami, pickles, chicken livers, hare

Fagottini di manzo in brodo
Beef dumplings in broth

Ravioli alla ricotta freschi con ragu di carne – Braciole, Salsiccia, Cappone, Polpetta
Fresh ricotta ravioli with meat sauce – Pork, Sausage, Capon, Meatballs

Zampone con mostarda
Stuffed pork knuckle with fruit mostarda

Arrosto d’oca con una quantità oscena di  piattini
Roast goose with many side dishes

Amara insalata verde
Bitter Green Salad

Granita di Aperol

Struffoli e una selezione di tradizionali pasticcerie italiane
Struffoli and a selection of traditional Italian pastries

Menu was written with Daniel Castaño, Laura and Joseph Cirino, Gilda and Gerald Contento, Mike Lee and Andrew Rosenberg

The home for finished meatballs before the get frozen

Daniel and I designed these meatballs with Josh Ozersky to compete in the 2009 NY Wine and Food Festival Meatball Madness.

Meatballs

It was essential that we include all three main meats in our meatball for flavor but instead of mixing the ground meat together we allowed each meat to express itself  in a different layer of the dish.

The center of the meatball is a veal ragu made from veal bones and ground veal cooked into a smooth tomato deliciousness with onions and garlic. It was then set with 2% gelatin and placed into a mold.

Veal Ragu

Gelatinzed Veal Ragu

Gel Centers

We wrapped the ragu molds with pork, herbs, spices, grated cheese, breadcrumb, and eggs.

After, we rolled them in flour and egg, and covered them in coarse breadcrumbs. Next, we froze them.

While they were freezing we rendered out 20kg of beef tallow. Once frozen, they were deep fried in beef tallow and seasoned with salt, locatelli cheese, and beef bone marrow fat that had been powdered with n-zorbit tapioca maltodextrin.

Beef Tallow

Beef Tallow Rendering

We didn’t win but Giada did get hot sauce all over her face because she refused to listen to me tell her to eat it in one bite. Happens…

Finished Meatballs

A time lapse video of our 24 hours of cooking this past weekend. Thank you very much to Colin McCabe and Mike Lee / Studiofeast for putting this together. Thank you to everyone who made this possible, especially those at 90N 5th for the space! www.aptsandlofts.com

More to follow.

Welcome to San Francisco - Welcome to the Houseku

We left Chicago exhausted but with a profound sense of accomplishment. We had lost Mayur to rug replacement and some kind of warranty battle with an ice cream maker and we made our way to the smaller of the city’s two airports. Excited by heading home and being able to get some Potbelly’s sandwiches and Chicago style hot dogs before our flight would leave.

Without rest or comfort, just hours after we woke, we fought with all our strength to not overwhelm our conversation with talk of our trip to San Francisco the following weekend. There were many things we had learned over the past 72 hours and many new challenges that lay ahead. Spurred on by the staff of Alinea and our new-found confidence in our recipes, we set forth into reworking our next event to try and overcome that last 20%.

Cathy Erway

It was decided that we would be hosting one large meal in San Francisco as the space was large and majestic with two separate kitchens that could handle the task of serving thirty people twenty-five courses. We would be executing two dishes that required finding 20 liters of liquid nitrogen, which because of work and scheduling issues, we would not able to test until the day of the event.

Daniel was not going to be able to make it, as he had to return Colombia to check on Emilia Romagna and finalize some details for the new restaurant he would be opening in Cartagena that summer called Vera.

Jonny Cigar

Mayur as well had to succumb to the demands of real life and was relegated to cooking with us every night in preparations for the event but was not able to come with us.

In their place were three of the most enjoyable human beings I have ever met, Andrew Rosenberg, Cathy Erway and Jonny Cigar. Along with two San Francisco locals Keiko Takano and Jen Freeman as well as Melissa M. Martin, a friend of a friend who flew in from New Orleans we had assembled a formidable team to once again try to climb this great mountain of a meal.

Andrew Rosenberg

Once again our flight was scheduled to leave at some ungodly hour and having learned from our last experience with TSA, we were much better prepared for travels. It had been three weeks now where I was sleeping less than a handful of hours during any given night and the long sparsely filled flight was the perfect place for me to fall off into oblivion. All of my dreams were laced with frozen spheres of chewy candy canes or licorice syrup and seared scallops fueled by Brian and Akiko’s heated discussion of the best process and procedure for tackling this new menu. Jonny sat quietly a few seats away polishing his tie and reciting what I assumed was French poetry – delicately dancing with the elegant pronunciations in a way that was only possible by a man that learned to speak English in upstate New York farm country.

San Francisco provided us with the exact opposite weather conditions from Chicago, welcoming us with warm sunshine and soft floral sea breezes that made Jonny’s poetry seem all the more salient, I would assume. We picked out another very nice late model Minivan in a glistening shade of metallic dirty and headed off to find the Houseku and home for our final recreation.