Isidori - Craft Burgers and Crazy Shakes from Black Tap

Black Tap may be a modern restaurant born in the Instagram age, but were all about nostalgia. Burgers and milkshakes are iconic American food, and the kind you love the best has a lot to do with how and where you enjoyed the ones you had as a kid and who you shared them with. For me, that was my dad.

My family is from the Belmont section of the Bronx, and I grew up watching my father and my grandmother cook in rough, tough restaurant kitchens. They taught me to make Italian-American classics like chicken Parmigiana and lasagna, and from a young age, I loved to try my hand at re-creating themmy way.

My father, Arthur Isidori, looked like a Carlitos Wayera Al Pacino with the sensibility of a charming Italian-American Anthony Bourdain. We didnt just cook together; I was his sidekick on eating tours all around New York City. We would get chow fun and pork dumplings at Wo Hop in Chinatown on Tuesday nights and hit Pasquales Rigoletto on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx before a Yankees game for the best pork chops with vinegar peppers. But best of all, we liked to go to Pipers Kilt in Eastchester for a cheeseburger deluxe platter: a cheeseburger served with lettuce, tomato, pickle, and french fries. One plate, one price. That burger deluxe has become the model for what we do today at Black Tap: one plate with a burger and fries, always with lettuce, tomato, and pickle on the side. But the way we play with the formula at Black Tap, adding layers of flavor, textures, and a fine-dining sensibility, would probably baffle the crew at Pipers Kilt.

When I was growing up, my father always accused me of being too fancy. Its never good enough for you! he would say with a laugh. Youve got champagne tastes on a Budweiser budget. He was proud when the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) gave me a scholarship at nineteen, but also suspicious: He said, Ive been cooking for forty years and I know how to do things and what makes money. You dont need to go to a school to learn how to cook. He had five thriving red sauce joints in and around the city at the time I graduated and was bewildered when I didnt want to take over the family business. I respected his food, but I was ambitious, full of fine-dining aspirations, and determined to set out on my own.

I went to Miami to work for Chef Michael Schwartz at Nemo, a New American restaurant with multicultural influences. I had learned classic technique at the CIA and had a lot of confidence from growing up around my dads kitchens but was still a bit of a bull in a china shop. Michael refined my technique and palate, and gave me an education about sourcing and creating sophisticated American food. He also introduced me to Shingo Inoue, the masterful sushi chef Michael hired when we opened Shoji Sushi. Watching and working with Shingo brought my skills to another level, and I give him all the credit when another chef watches me cook and says, I didnt know you trained in Japan.

Black Tap might not seem like it has much in common with those cooking experiences, but if the luncheonette-style burgers and shakes we serve are maybe a bit more dramatic or modern, a little healthier, or even more delicious than the ones you remember, its because they reflect what Ive learned about how to source quality ingredients and how to handle them properly and balance their flavors.

My own style of cooking, though, really came into focus when I helped open Southfork Kitchen, a sustainable seafood and local ingredient restaurant that celebrated the East End of Long Island. Shortly after we opened, sadly, my father had a heart attack and died while working in his kitchen. After taking a few weeks off, I returned to Southfork on Christmas Eve. My sous-chef, Jimmy, who had been running the show in my absence, asked me if I was okay. Not really, I told him, but Im gonna cook. And with that I started re-creating all my fathers dishes, improvising with the ingredients on hand. I sent out lobster fra diavolo, fried sardines with salsa verde, and roasted salmon with anchovy caper sauce. In the middle of this whirlwind, Bruce, the owner, came busting into the kitchen: