The Union Square Cafe Cookbook: 160 Favorite Recipes Fron New York's Acclaimed Restaurant

445 Pages·1994·1.16 MB·English

by  Danny Meyer

THE
Union Square Cafe COOKBOOK
160 Favorite Recipes from New York’s Acclaimed Restaurant
DANNY MEYER
and
MICHAEL ROMANO
Photography by
RICHARD BOWDITCH
Paintings by
RICHARD POLSKY
To our parents, with love
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
APPETIZERS
SALADS
SOUPS
SANDWICHES, EGGS & LUNCH SALADS
MAIN COURSES
VEGETABLES, SIDE DISHES & CONDIMENTS
DESSERTS
PANTRY STAPLES
MAIL-ORDER SOURCES FOR SPECIAL PRODUCTS
METRIC CONVERSION CHARTS
SEARCHABLE TERMS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PREFACE
Twenty-five minutes before the mahogany door to Union Square Cafe swung
open for the very first dinner on October 21, 1985, I broke into sobbing tears,
brimming with bittersweet emotion. On one hand, the restaurant’s debut marked
the realization of a lifelong dream—ever since it was clear I didn’t have what it
took to be a major league baseball player or play-by-play announcer. I had
worked toward and focused on this very moment for the previous three years,
and perhaps for my first twenty-seven years as well. Nothing should have made
me happier and prouder than this day. But something was troubling me. I had
absolutely no business opening a 125-seat restaurant in the middle of New York
City, and for the first time, at just that moment, I knew it.
I had grown up loving to cook, remembering practically every meal I had ever
eaten, adoring festive family get-togethers, longing to try new restaurants and to
return to old favorites, savoring the anticipation of every next meal, equating
each one with great adventure. Friends and family found it odd when I would
mix and match every ingredient and flavor on my dinner plate, trying to come up
with something new, something better. A bite of lima beans always tasted better
with a forkful of buttered egg noodles than it did on its own. And the noodles
improved when I chewed them together with my mother’s broiled chicken thighs
with herbs. It was a gastronomic epiphany for me when, as a six-year-old, I
discovered the taste combination of buttered spinach noodles sprinkled with
Kraft Parmesan.
By the time I was seven, my palate began to find exciting stimulation. My
father—who always included me in his cooking exploits—was in the business of
custom-designing driving tours through the French countryside, and our Saint
Louis home was like an ongoing foreign-exchange program, hosting daughters
and sons of the Relais & Chateau patrons with whom he did business. Many
meals at home had a French touch, and no dinner began without a bottle of
Beaujolais-Villages. In 1965 I took my first family voyage to France, and I was
forced by my parents to keep a diary. One day’s entry highlighted my fascination
with the “wonderful quiche Lorraine” I had tasted in a private home in Nancy. In
another, I remarked about loving “fraises des bois and crem fresh [sic]” in Saint
Paul-de-Vence. This is not my first book on food!
Back at home, it had become my household responsibility to feed my family’s
pet dog, a neurotic and epileptic French poodle named Ratatouille. Third-grade
friends looked at me with disbelief when I tried to explain the meaning of his
name. I enjoyed slipping “Rata” my leftover tastes of things like steak tartare,
spicy tacos, Usinger’s Milwaukee braunschweiger and Wilno kosher salami,
because it was important to me that he could enjoy my favorite foods in addition
to his foul-smelling Alpo. Once I even tried feeding him peanut butter. He ate it,
but it took him at least ten minutes to quit smacking his tongue and get it down
the hatch. In retrospect, Ratatouille was my first regular customer. It made me
happy to please him with good food. I may not have known it then, but that’s
about all it takes to be a successful restaurateur.
Success was a long way off, however, for Union Square Cafe. On the first
night of business we served just twenty-eight diners. Never mind that sixteen
were well-wishing guinea pigs who had been invited with our compliments,
another two had come primarily to teach us how to use our computerized cash
registers, and of the ten intrepid diners who actually qualified as true restaurant
pioneers, two ended up walking out of the restaurant hungry and angry because
the food they ordered never arrived.
It was on that night that I realized what an orchestrational miracle it would
one day be if we could ever figure out how to deliver the right food at the right
temperature to the right person at the right table at the right time. I reasoned with
myself that others before me had solved this mystery, but I knew that we were a
long way off.
Union Square Cafe opened with an abundance of good intentions, yet with a
sad dearth of hard restaurant experience—from the top down. My idea of a
successful restaurant had been one where I took the orders, cooked the food, and
then did the dishes. That quickly changed. I was a complete novice, having had
only eight months’ training as an assistant manager at a downtown Manhattan
restaurant, which is where I met Michael Romano. I had spent another handful
of months chopping shallots, opening oysters, and observing as a kitchen
stagière in Italy and Bordeaux.
Our first chef, a twenty-six-year-old named Ali Barker, had certainly cooked
in some good restaurants in his short career, but had no previous chef’s
experience, and in fact had never even attained the rank of sous-chef. The
general manager, Gordon Dudash, had once been a decent bartender, but had
never managed people; the head bartender, Paul Bolles-Beaven, came from a
distinguished family of clerics yet had never mixed a cocktail; and the
bookkeeper, who was undeniably honest, had never so much as balanced his
own checkbook. And yes, the first waiter I hired thought it proper to use a
corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne. For other reasons of ineptitude, he was
also the first person I ever had to fire.
Union Square Cafe has come a long way since those early days. The
restaurant has always attracted an ambitious and caring family of staff members
bent on making good things even better. We’ve been fortunate to have a loyal
following of friends who always let us know when we need to improve and are
equally quick to praise us when we do.
When Union Square Cafe needed to find a chef in 1988, I immediately
thought of Michael Romano. We had worked together for a short while in 1984
at the now-defunct Pesca. Michael had just returned from several years of
cooking in Michelin-starred restaurants in France and Switzerland and I
remember being terribly impressed with his knowledge, patience, crisp presence,
and talent. While Union Square Cafe’s cooking was rustic and straightforward
from day one, in Michael’s hands comfort food has become excellent food.
My collaboration with Michael has included several trips abroad, dining in too
many restaurants, tasting in more than our share of dark, dank wine cellars,
innumerable seasonal menu changes, and thousands of lunches and dinners
served. But this cookbook—an anthology of Union Square Cafe’s cooking—is
the highlight of our years together and makes me especially proud.