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Logan Atkinson, pastry chef of the Raleigh, N.C., locations of Indigo Road Restaurant Group’s Oak Steakhouse and O-Ku Sushi, combines a southern classic with an old-school fine-dining presentation for this dessert, which is offered at the steakhouse.
He starts with a rich roasted-banana ice cream swirled with caramel sauce. He pipes that into a hemisphere mold and tops it with a vanilla wafer dacquoise, which forms the base of the dessert. He freezes that solid, flips it over, removes the mold and pipes a salted vanilla meringue over it, covering it completely. Then he torches the meringue and serves it garnished with chilled peanut milk (toasted peanuts blended with milk, brown sugar, salt and vanilla and then strained), and peanuts spiced with piment d’Espelette, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, smoked paprika and lemon zest.
Price: $10
Brooklyn Chop House in New York City offers a variety of soup dumplings that borrow from non-Chinese cuisines including French onion soup dumplings and cream of chicken dumplings. Since it’s customary for Jews to eat Chinese food on Christmas and for Chinese people to eat dumplings during the lunar new year, which is January 25 this year, the restaurant is offering these dumplings, made by mixing matzoh ball dough — a combination of matzoh meal, eggs and spices — with gelatinized chicken broth. That’s wrapped in dumpling dough, steamed and served
Price: $14 for five dumplings
At Cultura in Asheville, N.C., executive chef Jacob Sessoms uses the leftover pods of his heirloom shell beans to make a broth. He roasts the pods with a mirepoix (carrot, onion and celery), adds house-made barley koji — related to the fungus used to make sake and soy sauce, among other things — and miso made from black eyed peas and simmers all of that in water to make a stock. Then he cooks the beans themselves in that broth and adds smoked squash, roasted mushrooms and a vegan sausage made by mixing cooked beans with breadcrumbs, raw white onion and celery leaf.
Price: $13
M.Georgina, a collaboration of chef Melissa Perello and restaurateur Robert Wright, opened in downtown Los Angeles in November. One of the menu highlights is this pita made with the restaurant’s sourdough starter colored with squid ink. It’s cooked in the wood hearth, and is more dense and chewy than typical pita. It’s served with an aïoli made with cold-smoked oysters blended and finished with crème fraîche and pickled onions and garnished with Tsar Nicolai trout roe.
Price: $17
Southern heritage, creativity and sustainability converge in this dish at High Horse, chef-restaurateur Katsuji Tanabe’s new restaurant in Raleigh, N.C. He takes the scrap from the three types of North Carolina country ham that he offers as part of a charcuterie plate and renders out the fat. Then he combines that fat with olive oil and makes an aïoli with egg yolk, garlic and lime juice. He serves that on North Carolina oysters grilled over the restaurant’s open fires.
Price: $9 for three oysters
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