Dinner at the Long Table: [A Cookbook] - Hardcover

Tarlow, Andrew; Dunn, Anna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1607748460 ISBN 13: 9781607748465

Publisher: Ten Speed Press, 2016

Synopsis

From the acclaimed owner of Brooklyn’s Diner, Marlow & Sons, Marlow & Daughters, Reynard, The Ides, Achilles Heel, She Wolf Bakery, Marlow Goods, Roman’s, and the Wythe Hotel comes this debut cookbook capturing a year’s worth of dishes meant to be shared among friends.

Andrew Tarlow has grown a restaurant empire on the simple idea that a meal can somehow be beautiful and ambitious, while also being unfussy and inviting. Personal and accessible, Dinner at the Long Table brings Tarlow’s keen eye for combining design and taste to a collection of seventeen seasonal menus ranging from small gatherings to blow-out celebrations. The menus encompass memorable feasts and informal dinners and include recipes like a leisurely ragu, followed by fruit and biscotti; paella with tomato toasts, and a Catalan custard; fried calamari sandwiches and panzanella; or a lamb tajine with spiced couscous, pickled carrots, and apricots in honey.
 
Dinner at the Long Table includes family-style meals that have become a tradition in his home. Written with Anna Dunn, the cookbook is organized by occasion and punctuated with personal anecdotes and photography. Much more than just a beautiful cookbook, Dinner at the Long Table is a thematic exploration into cooking, inspiration, and creativity, with a focus on the simple yet innate human practice of preparing and enjoying food together.

About this title

About the Author:

In 1999, ANDREW TARLOW opened his first restaurant, Diner, which serves locally sourced, New American food inside a refurbished 1927 dining car in the industrial neighborhood of South Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. Marlow & Sons, a restaurant, oyster bar, and general store soon followed next door, functioning as a cafe by day and a raw bar and restaurant by night. Other culinary ventures include Marlow & Daughters, a butcher shop specializing in locally sourced grass-fed meat; and Roman's in Fort Greene, an Italian-inspired restaurant. In 2012, Andrew and his partners opened the Wythe Hotel and its ground floor restaurant Reynard in a turn-of-the-century factory building in Williamsburg. He most recently opened Achilles Heel, a riverside watering hole in Greenpoint. He is publisher of Diner Journal, an independent magazine featuring original art, literature, and recipes. Tarlow grew up in New York and began his career as a painter and a bartender at the Odeon. He now lives in Fort Greene with his wife, designer Kate Huling, and their four children.
 
ANNA DUNN has been the editor-in-chief of Diner Journal since its inception in 2006, and a bartender at Diner, Achilles Heel, and Roman’s for just as long. She is co-author of the Saltie cookbook and is hard at work on her first crime fiction novel. She lives in Brooklyn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Eggs All Day: An Introduction
Kate Huling
 
I met Andrew in 1998 at the Odeon, in Tribeca. I was twenty and a new waitress and Andrew was twenty-eight and the senior bartender with a bad attitude and I was crazy for him from minute one. After a month of cheeky banter and snarky flirting, he asked me to come over to his house so that he could cook for me. I put on my red sparkly trousers as a good luck charm and got on the J train to Brooklyn. It was my first trip over the Williamsburg Bridge, and when I got to the other side and walked down the metal staircase, he was there waiting for me, and he kissed me for the first time on the cheek. 
 
He had already bought a skirt steak from Gourmet Garage in the city, and we went into the Korean produce market on Broadway and bought zucchini and cilantro and salad greens. Andrew had built out a six-thousand-square-foot loft on Broadway with his roommates Mark Firth and Martin Cohen. Martin was a mosaicist, and his tile work was all over the open bathrooms. Andrew’s paintings were hung on all of the walls. There were great windows looking out at the bridge and Manhattan, and there was a bathtub in the middle of the living area. 
 
Andrew made a cilantro pesto, marinated the skirt steak, tossed the zucchini with peperoncini, and then packed everything up and we climbed out the door onto the roof. He grilled the steak and the zucchini and made a salad, and then everyone started coming onto the roof. Martin and Mark and Sasha and South African Mark. We all sat around an old wooden door propped up on sawhorses and ate and watched the sun set over the city. It was Bastille Day 1998. 
 
Mark and Andrew had just signed the lease for the Diner, and I hadn’t really spent much time with Mark. I could chart his comings and goings by the presence or absence of stilettos outside his bedroom door, but otherwise, we only saw him when we went to visit him at Balthazar, where he was bartending. I was curious about why Andrew had chosen this reckless Don Juan for a business partner, not knowing that he would very soon become one of my most favorite people. 
 
They had just gotten the keys to the 1920s Pullman dining car on the corner of Broadway and Berry in Williamsburg. I would have followed Andrew to the ends of the earth, so if he was digging out the layer of fat-cured cockroaches under the dining car’s bar and demoing the kitchen, then that is what I wanted to do, too. We spent that summer covered in sweat, grease, and construction dust, so much so that Andrew made a habit of taking an afternoon swim in the East River in his underwear. 
 
After the demo was done, Andrew, Mark, and their friends Ken Reynolds and Eoin Kileen got to work with the tiling, plumbing, woodworking, and electrical, and even though I was still in college I didn’t have much to do. There was nowhere for them to eat lunch on the south side of Williamsburg, so I spent my mornings before class making food for the crew. I hadn’t really done much cooking, so I enjoyed teaching myself how to make bread and pastas and roast chickens with Andrew’s copies of the River Café cookbooks, and they all enjoyed taking a break and coming home to a big lunch. 
 
As winter approached, it was time to find a chef. I think that it is important to say that Andrew and Mark opened Diner because they wanted a place to eat and hang out, not because they wanted to own a restaurant. They sketched out menus with eggs all day, tuna fish sandwiches, bangers and mash, roast chicken, and pressed cheese sandwiches. They imagined a long line of bridge construction workers eating egg sandwiches at the bar, with themselves sitting at Table 1, playing backgammon and eating ham and cheese. What defines Diner and the food of all of our restaurants today is that stroke of magic that convinced Caroline Fidanza to be our chef after one dinner out with Andrew and Mark. She didn’t know us, and we had never tried her food. 
Caroline had left her post as sous chef for Peter Hoffman at Savoy, and while soul-searching about her next move, she was making the desserts at Teddy’s on the north side of the neighborhood. Maybe it was the kind of freedom that Andrew and Mark offered her that made her put her apron back on and become our chef. Maybe it was Andrew’s drive or Mark’s sense of humor. She signed on, and then we didn’t even sit down to cook together or talk about menus. The next time we saw her was when she and I painted the floor of the walk-in refrigerator just days before opening. 
 
On December 31, 1998, we didn’t have gas yet or an exhaust, but we knew we needed to get the doors open. Caroline and her sister Jackie arrived at the loft with a giant cassoulet pot, beans, sausages, and confit duck legs, and she prepared the most important meal of our lives, for all of the people who had worked for six months, mostly without pay, to build Diner. There were more than twenty of us and we sat at a very long table in the back room at Diner. Andrew, Mark, and I were at one end of the table. I watched Mark and Andrew take their first bites of Caroline’s cassoulet and look at each other as if they had just won the lottery. It will forever be one of my fondest memories. They hadn’t any idea of the caliber of the person, and chef, they had found to run their kitchen. In that moment, it became crystal clear that she could make anything happen for them. 
 
Caroline had made a giant watercress salad to go with the cassoulet, which was followed by large slices of manchego cheese and quince paste, and then a rum chocolate cake, though we were too full to eat it. We still didn’t know Caroline back on that freezing cold night, but after the crowds of people packed the Diner and South African Mark was blasting Radiohead and Jamiroquai and all of our guests were drunk from too many cosmopolitans and metropolitans, Andrew, Mark, and I found ourselves in the kitchen with Caroline, eating the chocolate cake with forks right off the platter. Our lifelong love affair with her began. 
 
ORIGINAL DINER MENU FROM JANUARY 1999 
Greek Salad (chopped romaine and herbs) 
Beet Salad (greens with grated raw beets and feta cheese) 
Goat Cheese Salad (greens with marinated goat cheese, roasted squash, and walnuts) 
Roast Chicken with Mash 
Hanger Steak with Mash 
Rib Eye with Fries 
Burger with Fries 
Chocolate Cake with Whipped Cream 
 
Every day after that first day, we woke up at 6 a.m. for garbage pickup and to receive the fish. By day, we worked in the kitchen with Caroline to help her prep. Then at 4 p.m. Andrew, Mark, and I ran down the street to take showers and came back to work the front of the house—Mark behind the bar and Andrew and me on the floor. We didn’t print out menus. Our menu was recited to the customers and written on the butcher paper of each table so that they could remember it. Caroline quickly felt comfortable running the menu and started making the specials that became the core of Diner’s offerings. Her list of specials grew, and the food on the regular menu dwindled. 
 
What we learned very quickly was that the core of Caroline’s cooking is her frugality. She bought local bluefish and mackerel because it was good and cheap. She went to the farmers’ market instead of ordering from food purveyors because it was better and cheaper; she didn’t garnish and she made her own crème fraîche and mayonnaise for the same reason. In most cases, plates only had three or four elements. There is a security about her food and what is good. That is how she defines a plate: by whether it’s good or not, whether it is in service of the ingredients as well as the season, not whether it will impress you. 
 
Her biggest challenge in the early days was that it was impossible to find hardworking, dedicated support in the kitchen. She felt that all of the talent was in Manhattan and that no one wanted to work in our shitty seventy-year-old Diner car underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. So much so that Andrew, Mark, and I continued to have weekly kitchen shifts. I sent out overdressed salads all night, while Mark and Andrew, with blue side towels wrapped around their heads, ditched their garde-manger duties and tried to weasel themselves onto the grill station. 
 
It felt like the Wild West on Broadway in those days. We could do whatever we wanted. If we had a long wait for the outdoor tables, we would just keep adding more of them down Broadway toward the East River. We built a tented room, back behind the dumpsters, with a poorly designed open fireplace and very illegally cooked Sunday dinners, with Caroline and me running a small menu that we had written. It was so smoky back there that we, along with the customers, would finish the night with red eyes and deep coughs, but somehow we still have fond memories of those dinners with overdressed salads (my specialty), crostini, grilled pizzas, and whole fish. 
 
Andrew and I were working hard in those years and didn’t do much cooking, eating, or living outside of the Diner, until I got pregnant in 2000 with Elijah. There was still smoking in restaurants, and the Diner dinner service took place in a cloud of smoke from start to finish. Andrew and I stopped cooking in the kitchen and closing the place at 3 a.m. and hired a couple of people. We started cooking and entertaining at home again. We also got to hang out with Caroline outside of work, which was a revelation. 
 
One night she invited the whole staff over to her house for sauce. We arrived in her Greenpoint apartment to bowls of rigatoni with meatballs, spicy sausage, rich meaty tomato sauce, and a spoonful of ricotta cheese. We all sat on the floor and ate first and then second helpings of the food that she would typically make with her family in Poughkeepsie, New York. Being in her house that night, we all got to see a different side of Caroline, the one that loved cooking and wasn’t overwhelmed by her weak kitchen staff and the pressure that Andrew always put on her to do more. This was a night that taught us how important it is to cook for and with everyone beyond the confines of the restaurant. 
 
Elijah was due in the spring of 2001. Inspired by a Greek Easter Meal, the day before his due date I decided that if I cooked a sacrificial lamb over an open fire, Elijah’s birth would come the next day as planned. Mark and I drove around the city buying the leg of lamb, snap peas, artichokes, potatoes, and large rosemary fronds for basting. We followed Lulu Peyraud’s recipe for leg of lamb roasted on a string over an open fire. We had invited a lot of people over, and since Andrew had wine tastings in the city, Mark and I worked all day in front of that fire, basting the lamb and cooking the potatoes and artichokes under the lamb drippings. When it was time to transport everything down to the house, and my back was breaking and my eyes were skinny slits from all of the smoke, Andrew poked his head around the gates, emerging from the dumpsters, giddy, half drunk and with black teeth from all of the wine and asked if he could help—just about eight hours too late. 
 
It was a good dinner and everyone had fun. I was pretty tired and cleanup wasn’t done until around 12:30 a.m. I still remember getting into bed that night aching from head to toe. Four hours later I went into labor with Elijah and he was born the following night at a birthing center in the city. We could only stay for twelve hours, so we slept there a couple of hours, and then packed up to take our tiny son home. On the way through Manhattan, Andrew was convinced that we needed to pick up some food to serve to people who were going to be coming to the house to meet Elijah, so we stopped into Ceci Cela for croissants and went by the restaurant for eggs and bacon. There was a constant trickle of visitors all day, and by nightfall, the house was packed. All of our friends were drinking pink Champagne and smoking cigars in the stairwell, and then at 11:30 p.m., everyone was hungry again. Caroline threw together pasta alla carbonara and we all sat and ate. 
 
When Elijah was three, we acquired the lease to the pest management and supply store that was next door to the Diner. Andrew and I had visited a wine bar in Rome and another in Paris that we wanted to reincarnate. Mark had always dreamed of spending his days in a soccer bar, so we thought we’d marry the two concepts and were all excited planning and dreaming of our new spot. All of us, except Caroline, who was seriously pissed at Andrew for signing that lease. She was already working every day and unable to attract good cooks, so adding the responsibility of finding and managing another kitchen staff was too much to take. 

When we first opened Marlow & Sons, it was the saddest place on the block. No one wanted to eat oysters and meats and cheeses for dinner, and there weren’t enough soccer fans to keep the place full. People would come in, sit down, look at the menu, get up, and walk over to the Diner to eat. We realized that we had to make a decision between turning Marlow & Sons into a bar with no food, or turning it into a restaurant and building a kitchen downstairs. We went for the latter, and in hindsight, it feels like everything changed overnight. 
 
Since I am writing the introduction, I will take this opportunity to take credit for as much as I can. That is part of the deal, right? I had been nagging Andrew about how great our waiter, Jason Schwartz, at the Diner was and kept asking him to promote him to management. Andrew likes to take things slower than I do, so he asked him to come over to Marlow to wait tables, even though it was Loserville over there. Jason believed in Marlow & Sons, and his intrinsic coolness convinced everyone else to believe in it, too. His music, his sense of humor, and his confidence in that place was exactly what Marlow needed. You can’t start a fire without a spark, or a Schwartz, as it were. 
 
Caroline finally got her prayers answered and kitchen talent started walking through the door. I remember the day in 2005 when Andrew and I were sitting outside at lunch and Sean Rembold jogged up to our table, squatted down in front of us, and accepted the job of sous chef. He was taking such a risk leaving his job working his way up the ranks at Bayard’s down on Wall Street, but he was bursting with excitement. I can still remember the burn from the high five he gave us when he decided to come on board. 
 
At Marlow we had been trying to run a wine bar menu featuring oysters, meats, and cheeses, which apparently wasn’t what our customers wanted. Sean had a new and exciting take on what the food at Marlow & Sons could be: fried corn with shrimp butter, rabbit burgers, braised pork over grits with a bright salad on top. Sean’s food was exciting: the electric mix of rich and meaty, buttery and fatty, bright and crunchy, and sweet all rolled together in one perfect bite. 
 ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Ten Speed Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1607748460
• ISBN 13: 9781607748465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336