Danny Meyer - The Union Square Cafe Cookbook: 160 Favorite Recipes Fron New Yorks Acclaimed Restaurant

160 Favorite Recipes from New Yorks Acclaimed Restaurant

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T o our parents, with love

T wenty-five minutes before the mahogany door to Union Square Cafe swung open for the very first dinner on October 21, 1985, I broke into sobbing tears, brimming with bittersweet emotion. On one hand, the restaurants debut marked the realization of a lifelong dreamever since it was clear I didnt have what it took to be a major league baseball player or play-by-play announcer. I had worked toward and focused on this very moment for the previous three years, and perhaps for my first twenty-seven years as well. Nothing should have made me happier and prouder than this day. But something was troubling me. I had absolutely no business opening a 125-seat restaurant in the middle of New York City, and for the first time, at just that moment, I knew it.

I had grown up loving to cook, remembering practically every meal I had ever eaten, adoring festive family get-togethers, longing to try new restaurants and to return to old favorites, savoring the anticipation of every next meal, equating each one with great adventure. Friends and family found it odd when I would mix and match every ingredient and flavor on my dinner plate, trying to come up with something new, something better. A bite of lima beans always tasted better with a forkful of buttered egg noodles than it did on its own. And the noodles improved when I chewed them together with my mothers broiled chicken thighs with herbs. It was a gastronomic epiphany for me when, as a six-year-old, I discovered the taste combination of buttered spinach noodles sprinkled with Kraft Parmesan.

By the time I was seven, my palate began to find exciting stimulation. My fatherwho always included me in his cooking exploitswas in the business of custom-designing driving tours through the French countryside, and our Saint Louis home was like an ongoing foreign-exchange program, hosting daughters and sons of the Relais & Chateau patrons with whom he did business. Many meals at home had a French touch, and no dinner began without a bottle of Beaujolais-Villages. In 1965 I took my first family voyage to France, and I was forced by my parents to keep a diary. One days entry highlighted my fascination with the wonderful quiche Lorraine I had tasted in a private home in Nancy. In another, I remarked about loving fraises des bois and crem fresh [ sic ] in Saint Paul-de-Vence. This is not my first book on food!

Back at home, it had become my household responsibility to feed my familys pet dog, a neurotic and epileptic French poodle named Ratatouille. Third-grade friends looked at me with disbelief when I tried to explain the meaning of his name. I enjoyed slipping Rata my leftover tastes of things like steak tartare, spicy tacos, Usingers Milwaukee braunschweiger and Wilno kosher salami, because it was important to me that he could enjoy my favorite foods in addition to his foul-smelling Alpo. Once I even tried feeding him peanut butter. He ate it, but it took him at least ten minutes to quit smacking his tongue and get it down the hatch. In retrospect, Ratatouille was my first regular customer. It made me happy to please him with good food. I may not have known it then, but thats about all it takes to be a successful restaurateur.

Success was a long way off, however, for Union Square Cafe. On the first night of business we served just twenty-eight diners. Never mind that sixteen were well-wishing guinea pigs who had been invited with our compliments, another two had come primarily to teach us how to use our computerized cash registers, and of the ten intrepid diners who actually qualified as true restaurant pioneers, two ended up walking out of the restaurant hungry and angry because the food they ordered never arrived.

It was on that night that I realized what an orchestrational miracle it would one day be if we could ever figure out how to deliver the right food at the right temperature to the right person at the right table at the right time. I reasoned with myself that others before me had solved this mystery, but I knew that we were a long way off.

Union Square Cafe opened with an abundance of good intentions, yet with a sad dearth of hard restaurant experiencefrom the top down. My idea of a successful restaurant had been one where I took the orders, cooked the food, and then did the dishes. That quickly changed. I was a complete novice, having had only eight months training as an assistant manager at a downtown Manhattan restaurant, which is where I met Michael Romano. I had spent another handful of months chopping shallots, opening oysters, and observing as a kitchen stagire in Italy and Bordeaux.

Our first chef, a twenty-six-year-old named Ali Barker, had certainly cooked in some good restaurants in his short career, but had no previous chefs experience, and in fact had never even attained the rank of sous-chef . The general manager, Gordon Dudash, had once been a decent bartender, but had never managed people; the head bartender, Paul Bolles-Beaven, came from a distinguished family of clerics yet had never mixed a cocktail; and the bookkeeper, who was undeniably honest, had never so much as balanced his own checkbook. And yes, the first waiter I hired thought it proper to use a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne. For other reasons of ineptitude, he was also the first person I ever had to fire.

Union Square Cafe has come a long way since those early days. The restaurant has always attracted an ambitious and caring family of staff members bent on making good things even better. Weve been fortunate to have a loyal following of friends who always let us know when we need to improve and are equally quick to praise us when we do.

When Union Square Cafe needed to find a chef in 1988, I immediately thought of Michael Romano. We had worked together for a short while in 1984 at the now-defunct Pesca. Michael had just returned from several years of cooking in Michelin-starred restaurants in France and Switzerland and I remember being terribly impressed with his knowledge, patience, crisp presence, and talent. While Union Square Cafes cooking was rustic and straightforward from day one, in Michaels hands comfort food has become excellent food.

My collaboration with Michael has included several trips abroad, dining in too many restaurants, tasting in more than our share of dark, dank wine cellars, innumerable seasonal menu changes, and thousands of lunches and dinners served. But this cookbookan anthology of Union Square Cafes cookingis the highlight of our years together and makes me especially proud.

U NION S QUARE C AFES E SSENTIAL I NGREDIENTS

The Role of Hospitality

Service has become a restaurant buzzword of our time, and while most people agree on how bad things are when service is miserable, the public hasnt arrived at a consensus about great service. The point is, there are thousands of kinds of good service, and every industry defines it slightly differently. A bank can provide it by giving you your own private account representative, even though youre not worth a million dollars. A shoe store clerk can do it by urgently trying to please, even after hes just gone to fetch the fifth pair of shoes for you to try on. Your butcher can give good service by voluntarily trimming that extra ounce of fat youd just as soon not pay for. When Union Square Cafe won the first-ever James Beard Award for Service Excellence in 1992, we were proud, but a bit humbled and mystified. It was crystal clear to all of us that many other restaurants provided better service than we didas the term had classically been defined. We dont wear tuxedos, we dont fillet fish or sauce pasta at tableside, and though we do decant our nicest bottles of red wine, we dont have a sommelier with a silver-plated tastevin hanging around his neck, and we dont force our guests to sniff the cork.