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By Root 172 0

restaurant to fix what usually can’t be fixed—typically a lose-lose situation. On the West Side of Cleveland, a woman with some money who had always dreamed of owning a restaurant had opened up a little Italian place, hiring two cooks away from her favorite restaurant in Manhattan. The guys could put out OK food, but they knew the owner didn’t know what she was doing, they were sloppy in the kitchen (smoking cigarettes on the line, for instance), and they’d begun to steal from her, so she had brought me in to save the restaurant. Suffice it to say that after I’d pushed the two New York goons a little too far, one of my few friends there, a waiter, had shouted my name and I had turned to see one of the cooks behind me and the other coming at me with a chef’s knife.

That was when I went from consultant to head chef of a dying restaurant with no cooks.

I’d been chef of this restaurant for a few months when I heard through a friend that a new restaurant in the city was looking for a chef; this was my lifeline. The Caxton Café, forty seats and a tiny kitchen where I could do my own food. Business was slow, but it began to build from word of mouth. Within half a year we were doing enough business to increase the number of staff. I brought in the manager from my first restaurant, Liz Shanahan, and the dishwasher there who’d begun to cook, Frank Rogers. I called my friend Tim Bando, who’d been a manager at Piccolo. He’d come in early and wait tables at lunch and come back and work with me in the kitchen at night (Tim loves restaurants but hates people—so the kitchen is the perfect place for him!). These people would become my family, and are still family; Tim and Frank are as close to me as brothers, and Liz and I are married.

What I learned long ago at Giovanni’s was, first, that hubris won’t help you in a kitchen and second, that without the support of your staff, both back and front of the house, forget it. They are your family. From my next chef position on, my cooks and my waitstaff and my dishwashers all became family. Family had always guided me and it would continue to do so.

MASTER PICKLING RECIPE USING RED ONIONS

PICKLED CHERRIES

PICKLED CHILIES

PICKLED RAMPS

PICKLED GREEN TOMATOES

PICKLED CUCUMBERS, GREEN BEANS, OR YELLOW WAX BEANS

DILL PICKLES

TURNIP KRAUT

PICKLED LAMB’S TONGUE

If there’s a single element of flavor that I think cooks need to focus on when they’re working to improve their food, it’s acidity. Controlling the level of acidity in your dishes is one of the most important skills you can develop; often a simple squeeze of lemon juice is all a dish needs to go from good to great. Acid may be second in importance only to salt as a seasoning device.

One of my favorite means of elevating one of my dishes is to add some form of pickle to it. Whereas Western culinary tradition demands a rich sauce to accompany a steak, for instance—a bordelaise or a béarnaise—I prefer to “sauce” the steak with a small salad of pickled chilies and olive oil. Though the flavor and richness of fat really satisfy, they can’t truly be enjoyed unless they’re balanced by acidity. Pickles deliver not only this acidity, but also sweetness (which balances the acidity) and the flavors of the pickled ingredient: the earthiness of turnip, the fruitiness and heat of chilies, for example. And last but not least, pickles add crunch.

Simply put: pickles are a lesson in what makes a dish work. They teach us about all the things that make one thing taste delicious and another just OK. Pickles teach us about fat and acid, sweetness and spiciness, and texture—five of the fundamental components of our food that we always need to pay attention to. Pickles are like a volume knob on your food.

Pickled vegetables have always been important in my restaurants. We began pickling so that we could buy ingredients at the peak of their season and preserve them to use all year. Ramps, one of my favorite vegetables, are a perfect example. Ramp season is very short, a few weeks or so in early spring, but they grow in abundance. When they do,