Hyland Emily - Emily: the cookbook

Our first shared meal was a pizza. It was pepperoni and olive, eaten while sitting on the floor of Matts dorm room at school at Roger Williams in Rhode Island. Two days later, on a casual drive to a beach in Newport so Matt could snap shots for his photography class, we stopped for lunch and had more pizza together. A few nights later, Matt took me on a proper date to Al Forno in Providence, a place that was to become a beloved restaurant to us, where we shared their famous grilled pizza. We do eat other food (sometimes), but pizza has been the special fare we have enjoyed sharing since the moment our relationship began.

As soon as we graduated from college, we moved to New York City so Matt could enroll at the Institute of Culinary Education and begin his career as a chef. He has now worked for more than a decade in various restaurants across the city, where he has done everything from making pastry at Public, to smoking meats at the Smoke Joint, to spending his summer slinging pies for Pizza Moto at Brooklyn Flea. When we moved to Brooklyn a few years back, Matt stumbled on our neighborhood pizzeria, Sottocasa, in its opening days. The owner, Luca Arrigoni, invited him to join the founding team to practice the art of making pizza.

Immediately, Matt knew this craft was his path. Luca became Matts pizza mentor. Within a year, we decided it was time to take a chance and open a restaurant, which was the vision we had shared over a decade before as we ate our very first slices of pizza together. We worked to open our first, short-lived spot, Brooklyn Central, in Park Slope, which turned out to be a stepping-stone for us to emerge onto the pizza scene in New York. After learning some lessons and hitting some speed bumps, we took the opportunity to transition: We searched for a new spot to create a restaurant we could call home in our shared passion for artisanal, high-quality food while still specializing in pizza. It would simply be called EMILY.

While Matt would remain in the kitchen, I would oversee operations in the front and back of the house. If the restaurant was going to bear my name, it was important for me to be as visible as the culinary staff in our small, open kitchen at the back of the dining room. I would set the welcoming tone of EMILY, greeting guests at the door, stopping at the tables to check on the meals, and generally ensuring that the time spent with us would be fun and enjoyable for everyone.

In 2013, our search landed us in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that was home to many families and young professionals but had no local eatery. Everything about the location felt right to us. We spent a long autumn rehabbing a previous restaurant space to create a place that spoke of home, comfort, and warmth. This chance we took changed our lives forever. After enjoying the success and crowds at our Brooklyn location, we went on to serve EMILY pizza in the West Village in Manhattan, where we inherited one of the oldest working wood-burning ovens in the city, likely dating back to the late 1800s. After hard work that led to success for our first restaurant, we were blessed with the opportunity to expand, and we opened our sister concept, Emmy Squared, which serves Detroit-style pizza and some killer sandwiches and cocktails in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After that launch, we opened our first location outside of NYC in early 2018an Emmy Squared in Nashville.

No matter which location, Brooklyns Clinton Hill, or Manhattans West Village, or Nashville, our EMILY philosophy has always been based on the simple joy of eating great food together as well as having friends over for delicious meals in our home. Preparing meals is always about more than the food. Its about the experience of yoking craft and flavor with generosity of spirit. Hospitality, whether in a restaurant or in your home kitchen, is about embracing genuine character.

One of our favorite pastimes is to dine out and spend an evening talking through the nuances of each dish, how the food tastes with the wine we ordered, and how well the meal matches the ambience of the dining room. Matt loves to try new ingredients, see how combinations of flavors work together in unique ways, and find inspiration for playing and experimenting in his own kitchen. Accordingly, much of what he learns finds its way into the meals he makes for others. And we love to cook for others! EMILY is a large-scale version of what we love to do at home: Matt cooks, I host, we serve nice wine and entertain in the coziness of our apartment.

At EMILY, we believe in simple ingredients and simple recipes. Matts technique is an amplification of flavor. He follows a flavor profile he likesthe richness of dry-aged beef, for instanceadds salt, and suddenly, the funkiness of the meat is alive; he sauts Brussels sprouts with a splash of fish sauce, and suddenly the subtle sprouts are brightened and enriched by the addition. The recipes in this book employ many of the same techniques we use at the restaurant to help simple ingredients sparkle.