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To serve, divide the fish among four shallow bowls and top with the orange segments and shaved fennel, olives, and some of the curing juices. Garnish each serving with a few cilantro leaves, a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, and a sprinkling of coarse sea salt.

Starting Out

When I graduated from the CIA in 1990, I wanted to return to my hometown and family. I’d cooked at various restaurants in New York, which was exciting, but the things that mattered most to me were in Cleveland.

The key, I knew then, was to be humble and take the job that would teach me the most, not the one that paid the most. But I knew I had to stay focused and keep my eye on the prize, which was to one day own my own restaurant. It was then, and still is, all about the food.

After searching for weeks in Cleveland for the right fit, I landed a job at a restaurant called Players, in a close-in suburb on the west side of Cleveland, under chef-owner Mark Shary. I talked to chefs all over the city and Mark was really the only one, in 1990, who I felt was truly one hundred percent passionate about food. Even though he was a completely self-taught chef, his passion was just so evident, so obvious, that I knew I wanted to work for him. And a few things happened at Players that were critical to my development as a cook—moments of understanding that are important for any cook to go through.

It was at this restaurant that I first learned how to salt food. Mark taught me not only how but, more important, when. If you’re making a sauce or any preparation that involves sweating aromatic vegetables—cooking onions and garlic until they’re translucent but not brown, one of the most common techniques in the kitchen—salt them immediately; don’t wait until all your ingredients are in the pot. Salt your vegetables as they sweat.

It was from Mark that I learned—saw, tasted—the importance of roasting food on the bone, whether it’s chicken, fish, or a short rib. It’s the best way of cooking the food evenly and keeping it juicy and flavorful. Mark taught me the finer points of braising—the importance, for example, of infusing a stock with additional aromatics before the seared meat goes into it. These may seem like small issues, but it’s these details that, when they all come together, make the difference between good cooking and great cooking.

There was no such thing as a good shortcut for Mark. We would go through ten gallons of roasted garlic a week and he still would absolutely refuse to buy peeled garlic, a rule I still live by. We would roast five big sheet pans of red peppers, every day, then peel and seed them rather than buy preroasted ones.

But maybe the most important thing Mark showed me was where great cooking comes from. He was a self-taught chef; he learned by traveling and reading and doing. He was a pure cook, no compromises. He showed me how to bring your soul to the food. I was a passionate person, always had been; but Mark showed me how to apply that passion to food.

CRISPY PIG’S EARS WITH PICKLED VEGETABLES

One of the amazing things about the pig is that it gives us so many different products: the belly for bacon, the shoulder for braising or smoking, scraps for sausages, the hams, the hocks, the offal. We too easily get sucked into only considering the main cuts of meat, when the entire creature is edible. After the belly, maybe my favorite part of the pig is its ears. I first had them at the Spotted Pig, a great restaurant in New York run by April Bloomfield. I had cooked and eaten pig’s ears several times, but never thought much of them until Mario Batali, a partner of the restaurant (and an Iron Chef), told me to confit them first instead of braising or boiling them. That’s when I truly fell in love with these crunchy morsels and knew immediately I had to serve them in Cleveland. At first they were a tough sell, but gradually word caught on and now they sell out whenever we put them on the menu at Lolita. People say, “These are what I see at the pet store—I can’t believe how