Marriage on a plate
Agricola pop up, a marriage of flavors, a menu wall, the return of my rebranded S. Pellegrino FDL column
Using fig leaves at the former Poi Dog restaurant to mimic coconut flavors for daifuku mochi.
This past week, Ari combined two of my signature dishes/sauces on a plate: huli and mainland luau, but they’re funneled through a chef brain that works altogether differently from mine. So where I’d put rice, he took challah, made French toast, sprinkled it with raw sugar, bruleed it, and layered it over huli duck confit, the luau, and swirled pineapple champagne gastrique around the plate.
The occasion? He was hired to cook a super swanky mimosa brunch for Korbel in Brooklyn. There were champagne deviled eggs with caviar, Chili Peppah Water Caesar Salad with trout roe and bubu arare (I had introduced the crunchy rice balls to him years ago), and champagne and lilikoi sorbet. (CPW Caesar recipe here.)
It’s utterly fascinating to me to see my familiar flavors twisted up and recast in these ways — and I absolutely love it. It’s like Ari got into my brain and made me something I’ve always wanted but couldn’t articulate.
He’s doing it again in Philly at Agricola this Monday, March 10. You should come.
5-8pm, a la carte. There will be polenta fingers with Poi Dog Guava Katsu gravy, a Kiki-fied version of his famous silk chili bowties (so, togarashi bowties in mirin butter), and Huli Chicken Rotolo (probably the best pasta dish he’s ever made — he first made it for our Citrine x La Colombe Valentine’s Dinner …last year?)
There will also be a Fig Leaf Basque Cheesecake topped with a fig jam I’ve made, and cooked in the fig leaves from our garden. I published his recipe!
My writing about fig leaves also marks the return of my S. Pellegrino Fine Dining Lovers column. It used to be called The Next Course, now it’s Trend to Table. And fig leaves are up first:
Despite Philadelphia’s non-Mediterranean climate, fig trees thrive here in unexpected abundance. In late summer, local grocers celebrate the South Philly fig—thin-skinned, delicate, and sweet—plucked from neighbors’ backyards and increasingly from suburban orchards.
I planted a fig tree in my Philadelphia backyard about a decade ago after picking ripe figs off trees in Tel Aviv neighborhoods one summer. I had never tasted figs like that before—globes of jam growing on trees. Devouring them under those same trees, tossing the stems to the ground, formed a core food memory for me. A couple of years after the first planting, I added another tree, thinking the first needed a companion to bear fruit. For seven long summers, I shook my fists at my barren trees, wondering why they refused to fruit. Instead, they produced only branches that sagged with luscious, abundant, and—so I thought—utterly useless leaves.
Eight years later, I value the leaves as much as the fruit itself—and I’m not alone. They taste and smell downright tropical, a dead ringer for fresh, young coconuts scented with Tahitian vanilla. For years, I shuttled sacks of freshly picked leaves up the street to Poi Dog, my former restaurant, where we served food rooted in my childhood in Hawai’i. Can you imagine the sheer luck I felt when I realized that I could dupe Hawaiian flavors in the Mid-Atlantic? Brewed into tea, fig leaves matched our use of actual coconut everywhere else on the menu. (It was as economical as it was delicious—the leaves were free, and we were charging $4 per cup.) Lining bamboo steamer baskets, fig leaves infused our daifuku mochi with the aroma of coconut, eliminating the need for parchment paper. When I steamed rice in a rice cooker, I threw in a couple of leaves, achieving results akin to coconut rice.
I sank fig leaves into jars of vodka and vinegar, clipped them at their peak freshness and froze them for winter use. I layered them into dehydrators that perfumed the air of my restaurant, so we could package them into tea blends. And suddenly, in the last year, as I dined around in my post-cheffing career as a food writer, I realized I was not alone…
In more romantic news, I wrote about two eerily similar croissants and jammy egg pastries in DC and Philly, at Yellow and Machine Shop. It and a few recent Inquirer pieces are linked here:
Why I save the menus from my favorite meals, February 2025
These menus span meals on five continents and remind me to have a global perspective on food. As much as I love the food scene in Philadelphia, looking at this wall, I won’t lose sight of where we fit in, and how we are influenced by worldwide trends. Mexico City’s paper menu game is particularly strong, and the menu wall features wax-stamped menus from both the Pujol’s current location, and its original one, as well as its taco omakase menu which my bridesmaids took me to. Despite recent culinary-focused travels around France, I have only one menu to show for dining out in France, Joel Robuchon’s Atelier (France, as a nation, you have too many permanent menus not conducive to keeping). Some of these menus are trophies, the heads and hides of extinct beasts, like the final menu from wd~50; one of Amass in Copenhagen’s final menus; and the menu from when iluka of Copenhagen collaborated with Reverie in D.C., before an electrical fire gutted Reverie. There’s also the menu from Neighborhood in Hong Kong, when we were finally released from Hong Kong’s restrictive COVID-era quarantine, on a trip when Ari first met my extended Chinese family in December 2022. I’m debating on whether to add menus from Cadence and Aldine to the wall.
Two food stores beloved by Philly chefs are closing this month, March 2025 (this was a rough one…both of these stores were relatively long-time retailers of Poi Dog sauces)
A video! I took a really, really, really long detour to deliver Reading Terminal Market’s 76 Award
And this I wrote a while ago, but it just published…a highly subjective roundup of some of my favorite, a little off the radar and also a lot off the radar places in NYC. (At long last, I slipped Fascati’s Pizza, where I first ate pizza in my life, when I was 5 and scared of pizza, into an article.)
See you at Agricola!