Katie Sokoler/Gothamist
So when did you know you wanted to be a chef professionally? Was there some moment of epiphany? Well, I was a latch-key kid with two older brothers, and for whatever reason I ended up doing a lot of cooking at a very young age. This was when I was around six, seven, eight years old. They were ten, eleven or thirteen and fourteen and for whatever reason I was cooking dinner for the three of us. It was at a very young age. My parents exposed us to a lot of different kinds of culture, and food kind of fell alongside dragging us to the opera or taking us to the museum. They felt like food was another thing that we should really be exposed to. That was also was right at the beginning of the sushi thing, and my parents were taking me to experiment with eating things like that.
So I was exposed to food in a practical way but also in a very structured restaurant situation as well. It really probably started there, and at some point I went to college for a year and that didn't really work out; it really wasn't for me. And I decided to take a year off and figure out what I wanted to do. I actually got a job at Regine's on Park Avenue. It's not there anymore; it was a very old school French supper club. The time for that kind of place has passed. But I went in there, faked a resume and just got my ass kicked and worked there for a year and learned the basics. It was sort of off to the races from there.
Do you still go back to the old neighborhood to check out some of the restaurants? Yeah, it's amazing what's happened there. Actually, when we opened Almond in the city, I hadn't been back for a long time. My parents still live in the neighborhood. So when we opened up the place in the city, I started subletting a place in Park Slope, mainly because we have a ten-month-old, so you need that "it takes a village" spirit, so my baby's grandparents have been helping out with the kid. So we live in the Slope now. The Fifth Avenue restaurant scene is great. After my mom and my dad split up in 1986, my mom moved to Carroll Street right off Fifth Avenue. And we were like, "Whoa, that's right on the edge, Mom. You're living there all by yourself?" And of course she was visionary. Al di la opened up across the street, Blue Ribbon is on Garfield and Fifth, so it's amazing, what's happening. It used to be that Fifth Avenue was kind of a restaurant ghetto because everyone was trying to open up restaurants on Seventh Avenue; it was kind of the way the Upper West Side used to be on Columbus Avenue. These really bad Chinese restaurants, and places would open and close within four months, but someone realized at some point how to make it work.
Had you not become a chef, is there any other career you've contemplated? The reason I originally went to college was sort of against my better instincts. I did extraordinarily well on the math portion of the SAT and some other math standardized tests. And I was thinking at some point about engineering, so I went to Vanderbilt and got a pretty good deal down there. The engineering program is sort of exclusive so I was like, "Well if they want me, I guess it's something I must want to do." So I'm mathematically inclined. I wouldn't mind maybe at some point, if it went differently I would have done some sort of math, engineering thing, I'm not sure really what though. Either that or politics! [Laughs.]
How would you describe the cuisine at Almond? Obviously, my heart is in the northern Italian and French technique and flavor, but at the end of the day, I'm really interested in taking three or four ingredients that I believe in, that are in season, and that I can get from a source that's relatively direct. Out in the Hamptons I'm fortunate enough to have a community of ten, twelve different farmers that I literally visit on the way to work and pick up a sack of corn and put it on someone's plate that day. There's no middle man. It's a little bit harder to do that in the city, but I have the farmer's market that's down the block. So you know, to me it's about believing in the ingredients, processing them minimally, and then to just anoint them with oil or vinegar that you also have a lot of faith in and then walk away. As far as I'm concerned, the less that's done to the product, the better. I don't hide behind a lot of theater when it comes to the food we do. To me, it's about the ingredients not as much the technique. It's about putting the ingredients on the plate and letting them speak for themselves.
Katie Sokoler/Gothamist
What have you done to sort of balance that with also being recession-minded and buying ingredients on a budget? Yeah, I think fortunately we've been busy and we're able to pay the rent. I know there are some tough times out there, you hear about some restaurants not doing very well. But our philosophy is largely about frugality, and it's largely about preparation and presentation. I don't really deal with a lot of high-end type stuff and our prices kind of reflect that. So I think it sort of dovetails. That philosophy of being ingredient-based and keeping it as seasonal, as local as possible dovetails pretty well with frugality. I think the era of frivolousness is behind us, and it's more about something straightforward and sort of honest.
Are you concerned about the economy impacting the restaurant in Bridgehampton? Yeah, actually it largely already has. I mean thank God, Almond has been open nine years now because we're kind of an institution and people look at us that way. And I feel like our clientele is well off enough that they're going to be there with us. But it's been a slow winter out there, for sure. It's quiet out there, there's no doubt about it. But what we do out there, again, it's very straightforward and the prices are not expensive. We've always been kind of the non-Hamptons place; you don't have the attitude when you walk in there, we're not a celebrity haunt, we just don't have that going on. We're just a place that's trying to give them some straightforward food so I think we'll be all right. But it's a nerve-wracking time everywhere.
Do you serve lunch at the Manhattan Almond? Yeah, we just started actually. This is week two; we just started last week.
How's that going? It's going good. I think it'll build. We're doing it sort of like a soft opening. We're using the upstairs kitchen, which is a small kitchen but it's certainly well enough equipped. I have this whole downstairs thing which is like a football field, where I do smoking and I have meat rooms and I have seven walk-ins. It's crazy. But upstairs is very self-contained, so I'm doing the whole lunch menu from up there so we can keep producing downstairs during the lunch hours. We're still working out some kinks, but so far it's going well.
The shrimp are huge. Where do you get such gigantic shrimp? There are some issues with farm-raised shrimp, so I try to keep away from them. The problem is getting shrimp that big. It's hard. I actually sourced out; they are from Panama and they are wild caught. The problem with farm-raised is not really the shrimp themselves; it's the havoc they create ecologically. What they end up doing is decimating mangrove forests to put in these ponds in wetlands to farm these shrimp, which is really a terrible practice. The tsunami that happened in the far East a few years ago, a lot of the damage that was done was because there was no buffer. There were no mangrove forests, there was no wetland. That's like in Indonesia, it's all about shrimp farming there. So I want to keep away from that at all costs, and at the same time I don't want to sacrifice the flavor. And the quality with farm-raised shrimp, from that perspective they're actually not a bad product. But I found these people in Panama who catch these shrimp wild. They are amazing and they're really consistent and, like you said, they are big, which is great.
What's the most popular item on the menu? We sell a lot of mussels and a lot of fries, as you might expect. We're a bistro; that's the kind of thing we're known for. But I also do a pure and smoked meat program. At lunch, we're doing a lot of pastrami, platter pastrami with braised savoy cabbage, crispy potatoes and au gratin mustard. At dinner we have a lamb, going through a lot of that too. It's a lamb belly that we braze and serve with saffron pasta. We've got three different varieties of steak frites and four different sauces; that does well, too.
The restaurant seemed very crowded when I was there. But there is a reputation or curse in that space. Previous high-profile restaurants have tried and failed. Why do you think so many people failed in that space and what are you doing to try and lift the curse? The space is great, but it's really big. What we tried to do is break up the room a little bit so it didn't feel like a bowling alley. And we did it with the lighting, and by setting up some of the booths and tables a certain way. We didn't do too much. It was obviously a different kind of decor when it was Borough Food and Drink. But we didn't change much except the floors, the ceilings and the walls. That sounds like everything!
But really there wasn't a lot that needed to be done; the structure of the place was in pretty good shape. We just had to try to warm it up a little bit. I think when you have a space that big it's hard to make it feel warm and intimate. Eric [Lemonides, co-owner] and I also needed to share our philosophy with the staff, which is that the dining experience should not be laden with any sort of intimidation at all. I find I go out to eat and I often feel intimidated on some level—and I'm in the business. We're trying to get away from that to be sure.
But I really don't know. Honestly that block could be considered a tough block and it can be a little bit quiet at night. You kind of have to know about us to get here. It would be nice if it was a little bit closer to the corner, but Tamarind's been here forever and they do fine so I don't really know. Knock on wood, so far so good. It's a work in progress but I think it's all going pretty well so far.
You don't wear a chef's jacket. Why is that? It's not anything that's sort of... I generally don't wear a chef's jacket. I find long sleeves a little bit constricting. I'm running around a lot. Especially because it's such a big place, I find myself running around a lot and kind of working up a sweat, so I like to be comfortable. I just find myself comfortable in a T-shirt. It also goes back to how the dining experience can often be intimidating. I wouldn't feel right being in a starch jacket with my name on it. It always felt a little bit military or something; that just doesn't jibe with what I want to do and how I want my customers to feel.
What's your worst kitchen scar? Hm, I'm just looking right now, looking at what I have and what's the worst I got. One of my first jobs actually was down the block at Coffee Shop at Union Square. When I was working there in the '80s it was a crazy model haunt, maybe it still is. It was a great job for someone who's 22 years old; it was awesome. But anyway I was shucking oysters, and I slipped and the knife just went in. The thing about shucking oysters—especially if there's one that's hard to open—the way you are doing it is you're kind of taking all your energy and pressing it into this little, tiny opening in the oyster to pop the thing open. An experienced oyster shucker says, "Okay, I'm exerting myself and pressing into this one little spot but at the same time I have to be ready to snap back as soon as I feel it pop open." I wasn't really down with that yet, and of course the oyster knife went a good two or three inches right into the base of the thumb. There was literally a mini-geyser coming out. It wasn't just oozing blood. It was squirting out like a solid inch out of my hand before dropping down. I was not used to seeing that much blood and I hit the deck. I woke up in the emergency room at Beth Israel, which is of course right across from Union Square so it got taken care of pretty quickly. But that would have to be it. I got a knife into my hand, squirting blood, I went white, everything went black and I woke up in the emergency room.
Special thanks to Gothamist's Amanda Spurlock for the help.
