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Swordfish with banana squash and pickled peppers
At Lafolia in Midtown East in New York City, chef de cuisine Mirra Sims uses many distinctive local ingredients to dress her swordfish, which is line-caught off the coast of New Jersey. She gets habanada sweet peppers from Norwich Meadow Farms in New York’s Chenango County and pickles them in a solution of three parts rice wine vinegar to two parts water and one part sugar.
She slices what she calls “extremely delicious” banana squash into crescent moon shapes and rubs them with olive oil and salt and roasts them until tender.
She makes a salsa verde of roasted tomatillos, jalapeño peppers, onion, and garlic blended with blanched cilantro and scallion.
She sears swordfish loin in olive oil and finishes it with butter, thyme, garlic and lemon juice along with a little water to make a pan sauce which she uses to baste the fish.
Meanwhile she sears the roasted squash in olive oil and finishes it with a little lemon juice.
She plates the squash and swordfish over the salsa verde, drizzles the pan sauce over the fish and garnishes it with roasted pumpkin seeds, the pickled peppers and cilantro
Price: $32
Buttermilk fried quail with corn salsa
At Pompette, which opened in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood in October, co-executive chefs Katie Wasielewski and Aaron Patten remove all of the bones from two quails except for the leg and wing bones and brine them overnight in buttermilk seasoned with salt, pepper and a hot sauce made with Calabrian chile, piquillo peppers, juice form their house-made giardiniera, garlic, honey, and mustard emulsified with olive oil. They dredge them in flour — mostly all-purpose with a little potato starch and cornstarch added for extra crispiness — heavily seasoned with garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, chile flakes, cayenne pepper, salt, and pepper, and fry them. Then they toss them in their hot sauce.
They make a corn salsa by cooking corn on the cob on their charcoal grill and mixing it with red onion, Fresno chile, lime juice, cilantro, and their own spice blend.
They plate the quail and salsa with honey and chives.
Price: $19
LaLa Land
At Laurel in the Austin suburb of West Lake Hills, Texas, food & beverage manager Lance Posey developed this drink made with Empress 1908 Gin, a product from Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada that is made with traditional botanicals as well as black tea and butterfly pea flower that gives it a deep indigo color. He combines 1.5 ounces of that with half an ounce each of lavender syrup and lemon juice along with ¾ ounce of oat milk. He shakes it with ice, strains it into a chilled coupe glass, and garnishes it with a paper butterfly and edible flower.
Price: $18
Venezuelan Tequeños
The recipe for this dish, which is on the menu at Joy by Seven Reasons and Quadrant restaurants at the Ritz-Carlton, Washington, D.C., was given to chef Enrique Limardo by fellow Venezuelan Maria C. de Polini, who came to Washington to visit her daughter in March of 2020 and was unable to return home due to the pandemic. She spent her time there perfecting her version of this traditional dish, for which she makes a puff pastry dough that is run through the laminating machine several times to make it very thin. That dough is wrapped around fresh white cheese and fried.
Price: $23
Rabbit Alfredo
At Carson Kitchen, which has three locations — in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Alpharetta, Ga. — chef and owner Cory Harwell roasts rabbit in a pizza oven with garlic, shallots, lemons, thyme, olive oil, salt, and pepper.
Separately he sweets garlic and shallots in a pan and deglazes it with white wine. Then he adds heavy cream and charred and peeled poblano peppers. He slowly adds Parmesan cheese until it thickens, then purées it in a blender and cools it.
He makes Parmesan cheese crisps by toasting the cheese with chives, onion powder, garlic powder, and dill.
At service he heats the Alfredo sauce with the rabbit in it and then adds cooked fettuccini and julienne charred poblanos. He garnishes it with the Parmesan crisps.
Price: $16
