Paul Kahan - Cooking for Good Times: Super Delicious, Super Simple [A Cookbook]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our sincerest thanks goes to Mary, Stephanie, Avery, Debbie, Eduard Koren, Jorge, Sontra, Giulietta, all the crews past and present at avec, Donnie, Thomas and Claire, Verena and the people of Gais (Switzerland), Mary and Robert, Aline, Janis, Rachel, Peden + Munk, Jan, Lorena, Lizzie, and the crew at Ten Speed Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAUL KAHAN is the executive chef of twelve distinctive and acclaimed Chicago restaurants and author of Cheers to the Publican , winner of a 2018 IACP cookbook award. He won the James Beard Foundations Best Chef Midwest award in 2004 and Outstanding Chef award in 2013.

AFTERWORD

Its coincidental that the project that ended up setting the stage for avec is one that never actually came to life. In the mid-90s, two years before my business partnersPaul Kahan and Rick Diarmitand I opened our first restaurant, Blackbird, we were looking at a space on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago with designer Thomas Schlesser. We wanted to open a restaurant called Table, with a single communal dining table right in the center of the room.

The dining room at Blackbird doesnt have communal seating, but the tables are so close together, you can still feel the sort of intimacy that comes from enjoying a meal with relative strangers. We never did end up opening Table, but the idea for that restaurant, combined with what wed observed in the early days of Blackbird, got us all thinking about how to create community and family around a dining table that exists outside the home.

The feeling we were after was one of warm familiarity, and, naturally, that took us to Europe. In the fall of 2003, avecs opening Chef de Cuisine Koren Grieveson traveled to France with Rick and me. We were there for inspiration; to experience the restaurants that had been doing communal dining before it was called that, which is where Benoit comes in. Benoit is a little oneMichelin star restaurant thats been in business for more than one hundred years. The space is super-tight; the tables cant be more than 4 inches apart. It reminded us of Blackbird, and we started to wonder what would happen if we pushed the tables together. We decided to take a shot at turning 24 x 30-inch tables into 96 x 30-inch ones, and avec was born, with five long communal tables.

That was fifteen years ago. The country was fragile in the wake of September 11, and having dinner at a big table in a small restaurant felt like a source of security rather than an ordeal. We opened avec with Koren as the chef, under Pauls mentorship and through the lens of his own travels across Spain, Italy, and France. They were cooking in an open kitchen, and Eduard Seitan was our wine steward.

Ill admit it wasnt perfect. In the beginning, it was difficult to get people to sit in the middle section of the communals. Everybody wanted to post up on the ends, so it was kind of like playing Tetris. Gradually, that changed. We loved watching people ask one another, Excuse me, but what are you eating? and the reply being, Those are the dates. Would you like to try some? I mean, where else does that happen? When we think about it, we like to believe that some wonderful conversations, and even a few bonds that extended past those small instances, grew from the words exchanged between neighbors at avec.

It is French for with, after all.

DONNIE MADIA GIANFRANCISCO, partner, One Off Hospitality

MAKE SOME FOOD TO EAT WHILE YOU COOK

Lets face it, whenever people come over to eat, everyone congregates in the kitchen. You could have a beautiful, super-comfortable living room, but everyone always ends up huddled around the kitchen counter, drinking wine and helping put the meal together. So the idea of having stuff that you can do really simply right before your guests get there, while dinner cooks (or in the case of brandade, the night before), is what this chapter is about. At avec, we have a big vat of marinated olives on the counter that we scoop into a dish and throw out for people to snack on while theyre deciding what to eat. When I have people over, its the same thingI set out some food for them to pick at while we wait for dinner to be ready. One of the inspirations for these kinds of recipes came from Gabrielle Hamilton. She does a super-simple dish with just Parmesan, anchovies, celery, lemon juice, and olive oil as something to nosh on while youre cooking. Bingo. It doesnt get more perfect than that.

I may have a tendency to overdo things, but I say no matter how many people are coming over, pick two or three of these recipes to make and at least one thing thats served with bread. Supplementing that with a plate of nice prosciutto or salami goes without saying. Or pick a recipe or two from chapter 2 (Add Some Cured Meats and Grilled Sausage). Or make a whole meal out of these first two chapterswho doesnt want to eat that way? There are no rules.

To Drink

Pour anything with bubbles, anything thats pink, really whatever is delicious and light on the palate that gets you salivating and ready to eat something a little salty (which describes most of the recipes in this chapter).

Honorable mentions go to:

• Pt Nat (Ptillant Naturel) because its lower in alcohol and a little tamer than sparkling

• A crisp, clean beer like a pilsner, lager, or session ale (nothing too hoppy or high in alcohol or itll clobber your palate)

• Provenal ros

• Spanish white vermouth (so cool and spicy, but the Italians do a good job, tooserve it on ice with a swath of citrus peel)

• anything light and bubbly from Greece, Italy, and Francethough this isnt the time for heady Champagne.

The Champagne of beers, Miller High Life, is always an option.

MARINATED OLIVES

MAKES ABOUT 2 CUPS

We started making these at avec out of necessitywe were getting so slammed that we needed something to drop on the table with the bread to buy us a little time when we got behind in the kitchen. So we got some high-quality olives, drained the liquid, and marinated them in oil, citrus rinds, herbs, and fennel seeds. Theyre virtually indestructible, so you can keep them, covered, in a cool place for pretty much forever and then you not only have this incredible flavored olive oil to use in vinaigrettes or drizzle over bread, but you also have the makings of a Holy Shit moment when you present a table full of hungry people with them alongside some warm bread. Its a nice mopping-up moment. Its the same at home if you keep a batch in your fridge. Im partial to olives that still have their pitsPicholine, Nioise, Lucquesbecause they dont get all mushy like most pitted ones, and while theyre a little bit more work to eat, theyre a great activity while having some wine and waiting for whatevers next.

2 cups mixed olives with pits

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Zest and juice of 1 orange

1 sprig rosemary, leaves stripped from the stem

2 fresh bay leaves*

2 teaspoons fennel seeds, toasted in a skillet until aromatic