Huli Lobster Rolls and a Meditation on Running the Tiniest of Sauce Businesses
I wrote a lot recently about sports and chili crunch (surprisingly, they exist on the same continuum in my life), and cooked a lot, too.
If you’re in Philadelphia this week (starting today), I’ll be collaborating with the legendary Oyster House on two menu items: A Huli Lobster Roll (Poi Dog Huli, Miso Mayo, Water Chestnuts, Nori) and Chili Peppah Water-sprinkled oysters.
A little Poi Dog history
We’re kicking things off at the Oyster House (1516 Sansom St.) with a happy hour today (Tuesday!) from 4-6pm and I’ll be there for at least 4-5pm (I teach virtually at Boston University Tuesday nights…so today will be a marathon of me switching identities between editor, writer, chef, and professor in a space of 8 hours). Proceeds will benefit Broad Street Ministry, which offers radical hospitality to those in need. This isn’t a random, one-off choice. Once upon a time, Poi Dog the restaurant (RIP) had a tight relationship with Rooster Soup Co. (also RIP and a few steps away from Oyster House which is the only restaurant in this newsletter which is alive and fine) which donated all its profits to BSM. We’ve fundraised together, put on a karaoke night together where we collaborated on menu items to raise funds for BSM, etc. Federal Donuts had lots and lots of chicken backs from well, serving lots of fried chicken. Rooster Soup would take those backs and turn them into matzo ball soup (which required chicken broth). After Rooster Soup closed, we at Poi Dog became the gracious recipient of Federal Donuts’ chicken backs for a time. They got turned into chicken broth at our location on 21st St and slipped their way into our gravies (Chicken Adobo gravy!) and sauces. Poi Dog also inherited Rooster Soup’s white and red enamel plates. If you ever came to my restaurant or came to my house this past week for the Progressive Hedonist potluck we threw with Dana Cowin, you ate off those plates. “Circular economy” is a term that’s thrown around a bit in the news these days, but it’s something I’ve been really committed to for years and hope to foster more and more of in my corner of the food world.
…with a side of danger
To make the Poi Dog x Oyster House collaboration even more exciting, both Chef Joe from the Oyster House and I are allergic to lobster. Ask me about developing this lobster roll when you see me tonight with my Epi-Pen in tow.
I’m indebted to both Joe and James from the Oyster House for the Huli Lobster Roll’s development (there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen for this one) and it will run as a special from today through Thursday.
A zip for your lip
Another example of Philly’s really cool circular food economy: Melissa Torre from Vellum Street is an absolute master of reimagining ingredients.
Last April, my very dear friend Caitlin McCormack and I cooked up a very stupid April Fools Joke - Chili Peppah Water Lipstick! A Zip for your Lip! Melissa saw it and was like oh, let me make that a reality with Vellum St. So she took solids strained off from us making Chili Peppah Water, combined them with beeswax and lard from my husband Ari’s restaurant Musi (third RIP) and created this gently warming lip balm. When Melissa came to pick up my Chili Peppah Water solids, she also picked up a truckload of glass from my garage on her way to Bottle Underground. Did you know 50,000-90,000 TONS of glass end up in landfills, generated by Philly alone? I typed out the zeros for you to comprehend. Bottle Underground collects glass jars and bottles and turns them into sand for conservation projects and also upcycles them into really cool looking new glassware. This also means that at this moment, Ari and I have to wade through our current empty bottle collection stacked in the garage, to get into the car. So many bottles. You have to make an appointment to drop off over 10 lbs of glass and our appointment is next week. I can’t wait to have the garage back. Right now, it belongs to glass.
The only bottles I can’t forfeit to Bottle Underground are Poi Dog sauce bottles. From this information, you can probably glean how our tiny plant cutting collection is housed. I know how much each label costs, how much each bottle cost me…it’s hard to let go.
Phoenixes and Sports
Ari just wrote about Melissa’s past life baking and current life producing bath and body products in his latest article — published yesterday — for Food and Wine: How to Make a Living After You Walk Away From Being a Restaurant Chef.
I can’t wait to tell you more about the Progressive Hedonist x Poi Dog party we threw this past weekend, but I’ll wait until I have photos to share! It was one of those nights where I barely took any photos (but PJ Agbay did). I was swept up, caught up in the magic, trying to talk to the nearly 50 people who managed to show up in my house and break no wine glasses (I did break one amaro glass but it was the following day when I was trying to finish cleaning in a post-party haze). I got to meet four of my BU Master’s students in person! Teaching for BU this semester has been one of the most exciting, thought-provoking experiences of my life, and to finally see a coalition of students towards the end of our virtual semester was the icing on this semester’s cake.
There’s been a lot of talk of restaurant deaths and rebirths in this short Substack and there’s about to be more.
Meet the Chef Who Feeds the Sixers is the latest in my series of being a sports reporter. (It’s not what you think, or maybe it is?) I love telling people I write about sports now. (And yes, I am the same Kiki who uses the words “goal,” “home run,” and “touchdown” interchangeably, without any regard to the sport I’m talking about. The Inquirer even let me put “backstage” in this basketball article which I believe is sort of like “court side.” Eli Collins ordered Poi Dog catering after Poi Dog catering folded, literally dragging me out of retirement so the Sixers and more importantly, he, could have SPAM Musubi. Read all about Eli, his Philadelphia chef name doppelganger, and his championing of Philly’s food scene in that article.
My two cents on the Chili Crunch Clusterfuck
Finally, the article I really didn’t want to write but Kat Kinsman more or less talked me into it. Who Owns a Condiment — a Company or a Culture? And I’m glad she did. I don’t see David Chang and Momofuku’s chili crunch controversy in isolation (in a text to me, Kat called it “Chili Clusterfuck” which prompted me to laugh very hard and spit out the coffee I was drinking in the process). I think the outrage that it stoked is unique and important. But can we also get just as mad over Wegmans and Osakana and like, Trader Joe’s in general? Read the article and tell me what you think about that. Chili Clusterfuck is just the latest in a handful of headlines announcing big brands stealing from itty bitty brands. Let’s connect them all and look at this issue as a whole.
Do you know how hard it is for a non-funded individual to bring a product to market? To watch it, market it, convince people to try it, convince buyers to carry it? It is a unique type of hard that will likely take many, many newsletters to explain. Successes feel remarkably temporary. Poi Dog grows with each success, which is also a challenge in disguise. This market chain wants how many cases? Woohoo! Okay, let’s get production in line for that. Find the money to pay for bigger and bigger production runs. Then eventually get paid. Then worry about the shipping, shelf life (mercifully mine are vinegar-based sauces so I fell backwards into a non-perishable category, thank God, because everything else I cook is highly perishable), labeling. Okay cool, now I have more and bigger accounts, I’ve figured out how to provide them with enough sauce. Okay crap, how do I grow from there and make sure all the sauce sells? And then oh, another market is interested in us, but they literally want the sauce for free? (This is a thing — it’s called free fill) so they can make money and we just give them the sauce for free? It’s confusing and it’s a world with so many acronyms and jargon that I’m only starting to wield with confidence. It’s a world that makes me feel like I’m operating in a language that isn’t English. Want to hear more about this? (I get my brain picked on this a lot.) Can I convince you to purchase some study materials first? They’re delicious!
I gotta go. I have two article deadlines today before I transform into a lobster roll maker.
Mahalo for reading,
Kiki