Where I've been

This morning, someone pointed out to me that it has been a month, exactly a month, a whole month, since I last posted here. I nearly choked.

The truth is, I’ve been having a hard time. Nothing around here looks the same as it did, pre-restaurant, and to be perfectly honest, though I like this new life, I also miss the old one. There’s no point in trying to hide it. I’ve been dealing with a lot of exhaustion, and it’s been difficult to feel creative, eager to cook and write here - or do pretty much anything except watch Battlestar Galactica on Netflix. It’s a dire situation when you go to the dentist, as I did this morning, and it actually feels relaxing, like some sort of reprieve, to get to sit there for an hour with a faceful of metal instruments and suction devices. Listen, you people out there who have babies and operate on a constant sleep deficit and STILL manage to blog: you’re a miracle. I don’t know how you do it. Maybe it’s the fact that babies are cute? If Delancey could nuzzle my neck and coo, maybe everything would feel easier.

Either way, what I really wanted to say is this: that I haven’t forgotten about you, or about our conversations here, and that I am trying to find my way back. The first step is for me to cut back my hours at the restaurant, which I have just begun to do. Then, of course, I have to figure out where the hell my energy went. And I have to acknowledge, too, that things are just different around here. It’s a new balancing act, and I have yet to master it. But I want to. Soon.

What I do now

So, I wasn’t kidding about the black hole. But I’m sorry to have been gone from here for so long. I’ve missed you.

Delancey is getting easier. As of two weeks ago, we now have a prep cook to work in the mornings, which means that instead of going in at 9 am to receive the first deliveries, Brandon can now go in around 11 am, and I go in sometime between noon and 2 pm, depending on the day’s prep list. We still get home around midnight, but it feels a lot easier than it did a couple of weeks ago. We’re getting more sleep, for one thing, but even more importantly, we know what to expect now. That’s the key, I think. In the beginning, I would be mopping the floor at the end of the night, thinking I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE TO MOP THIS STUPID STUPID STUPID FLOOR AT ONE IN THE MORNING WHY DOES PIZZA HAVE TO BE SO MESSY AND STUPID THIS RESTAURANT IS SO MESSY AND STUPID WHERE IS THE NEAREST SHARP OBJECT SO I CAN STAB MYSELF AND GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM AND MAYBE THERE I CAN ACTUALLY GET SOME SLEEP, but now I just think, Ah yes, here I am again, mopping the floor late at night. This is what I do now.


Over the past couple of months, a number of people have told me that opening a restaurant seems a lot like having a baby, and while I can’t say for sure, since we are not at all in the baby-having business, I think I know what they mean. You can prepare for a baby, or a restaurant, in many ways, but when it actually comes, it changes everything. The shape of your life is completely different. You are exhausted. This baby, or this restaurant, or whatever it is, is wholly dependent on you. It does not stop. And while you eventually adjust, and it adjusts to you, nothing ever quite goes back to the way it used to be. I am just figuring this out.

But it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing. I love this restaurant. I love our staff. I love our customers. I’m learning so much. Brandon is learning so much. We’re learning so much. And it really does get easier. I’ve done payroll three times now, and only the first time did I come close to screaming. I actually kind of enjoy it now. I do it twice a month, in the mornings, and I use my TI-85 calculator, the one I got for trigonometry class in high school. We’ve been together for almost 15 years. We’re tight.


And we’re starting to be able to play with the menu a bit, which feels good. We’re now making our own pork sausage, and we’re doing a lot of pickling: peppers, shallots, cucumbers, Walla Walla onions, you name it. This morning, as I type this, Brandon is working on an eggplant sauce for pizza, based on a killer pasta sauce that my friend Francis made up. If it works out, it’ll be on the menu tonight. And last week, we started serving burrata. You probably can’t tell, but that last sentence was a very, very exciting sentence to write. I am nuts for burrata. We buy ours from Gioia, a cheesemaker in LA, and it gets overnighted to us twice a week. We serve it as a first course, with a dousing of olive oil, some sea salt, and a few toasts. I am deeply in love with it. But every time I plate one, I die a little, because at the end of the week, it means one less leftover burrata for me.


We’re also changing up the dessert menu, now that fall is coming on. The chocolate chip cookies are still there, and possibly will be forever, but the chilled peaches in wine are gone, as are the popsicles. Instead, there’s plum crumble. That’s what all of these pictures are of, in case you were wondering. I know it took me a while to get around to explaining that.


I learned about this crumble recipe about two years ago, from Luisa. I made it a couple of times that summer, and it went instantly into my keeper file. It’s pretty straightforward, as most specimens of the crumble genre are, but unlike some, it’s not gloppy, gluey, or the least bit too sweet. It calls for my favorite kind of plum - Italian prune plums, the deep purple, oblong ones that come out in late summer - and it doesn’t mess with them much. Before going into the pan, they get a very small amount of brown sugar, even smaller amounts of ground ginger and cinnamon, just enough flour to give their juices some body, and a gentle kick in the seat from some crystallized ginger. The topping comes together a little like streusel, as Luisa so rightly described it, in hand-formed clumps and particles, which you pile on top of the plums. Then you spoon melted butter - what seems like a lot of melted butter, but be strong, be strong - over the whole thing. Once in the oven, the topping goes pale brown and pleasingly lumpy, crisp in some parts, chewy in others, soft where it meets the jammy fruit underneath: a perfect compromise, I would say, between crumble, spice cake, and cookie. I serve it with housemade crème fraîche, but it hardly needs the help.

Most nights, I make two 9”-by-13” pans of this stuff, and most nights, I want to hoard about half of it for myself. If it weren’t for the servers, who stop by every few minutes with new orders and expect to find me working, I would probably get a spoon and hide in the corner by the chest freezer. Then I’d start in on the burrata.



Plum Crumble
Adapted from Marion Burros and Luisa Weiss

The original version of this recipe is hard to improve upon, but I have made a couple of small changes. When I measure the sugar for the topping, I keep it on the scant side, because I like my plums solidly sweet-tart. I also reduced the butter a bit, because it seemed to want to pool in a kind of scary way at the bottom of the pan. Cutting it back even a little seems to help a lot.

At Delancey, I make this crumble in bigger batches, and it scales up beautifully. If you need to feed a crowd, try tripling the recipe as I’ve written it below, and bake it in a 9”-by-13” dish, as pictured above. Works like a charm.

For the plums:
2 Tbsp. lightly packed brown sugar
1 ½ Tbsp. all-purpose flour
¼ tsp. ground cinnamon
¼ tsp. ground ginger
2 Tbsp. finely chopped crystallized ginger
12 to 14 Italian prune plums, halved and pitted

For the topping:
Scant ¾ cup granulated sugar (about 4 to 4 ½ ounces)
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. kosher salt
1 egg, beaten well
7 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted

Position a rack in the center of your oven, and preheat the oven to 375°F.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the seasoning for the plums: the brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, ginger, and crystallized ginger. Add the plums, and gently stir to coat. Arrange the plums skin side up in an ungreased deep 9-inch pie plate.

In another medium bowl, combine the dry ingredients for the topping: the granulated sugar, flour, cinnamon, baking powder, and salt. Whisk to blend well. Add the egg. Using your hands, mix thoroughly, squeezing and tossing and pinching handfuls of the mixture, to produce moist little particles. Sprinkle evenly over the plums.

Spoon the butter evenly over the topping, and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is browned and the plums yield easily when pricked with toothpick. Cool.

Serve crumble warm or at room temperature, with crème fraîche, thick yogurt, or unsweetened whipped cream.

Yield: about 6 servings

Note: To reheat leftovers, it’s best to do it slowly, in an oven set to 300 degrees.

Wonder of wonders

Well, the bad news is that I seem to have fallen into a black hole called Delancey.

But the good news is that we’re open. And that Brandon and I are still alive! And that somehow, people are coming to our little restaurant! And, get this: I actually managed to take a picture of one of the pizzas. Wonder of wonders! I can die happy now. No, really, right now. I’m tired.



This particular pizza looks sort of cockeyed and misshapen, but please bear with me. (Secretly, I like them that way.) It also looks small, because it’s sitting on a huge metal plate. In person, it’s our normal size, I swear, which is to say about 12 inches in diameter. This pie was a test run one afternoon, when Brandon bought a case of padron chiles and was trying to decide how to use them. He tossed them with olive oil and gray salt, roasted them in a skillet in the wood-fired oven, and then stemmed them and tore them into strips. They’re medium-hot - enough to make your lips burn, but not incendiary - and the best part is, they have a huge amount of flavor on top of that heat. Maybe this is a useless comparison, but they remind me of some green chiles that I once had on a cheeseburger in Albuquerque. (I have a soft spot for New Mexico.) Anyway, Brandon put his roasted padrons on top of a pizza with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, aged mozzarella, and Grana Padano. It’s on the menu now, and we call it the “Padron.” That’s about as creative as our naming scheme gets around here.



It’s hard to say how these first weeks have gone, because we’re still so much in the thick of it. We’ve been running on adrenaline, for the most part. But it’s gone as smoothly as I could have hoped, I think. There have been glitches to work out in the kitchen, and a certain amount of slowness, and a few requisite catastrophes: refrigerators breaking, exhaust fans not working, beer taps not working, my head almost exploding, and so on. But people are coming in to eat, and we get to cook for them, and that’s what this is about. When everything goes right, and when people leave happy, it feels better than almost anything. Last night was our tenth night open, and for the first time, just for a second, I was able to look around and smile at the people at the bar and think, Here we are. We’re actually doing this.



Before we started this process, I understood on a cerebral level that people in the restaurant industry work hard, but I didn’t really know what that meant. I somehow didn’t realize that Brandon and I would be at Delancey from 9 am to 1 am the next day, every day, or that we would be on our feet for 95% of that time. Granted, we are very, very inefficient right now, and we have a lot to fix and learn and decide and improve, but there are certain parts of this work that won’t change. Like the fact that many of our vendors deliver at nine in the morning, and that someone has to be there to meet them. And the fact that the dough has to be made after service each night, around 11 pm. And after the dough is made, the floor has to be swept and mopped. You would not believe how much flour winds up on the floor of a pizzeria. It will not be controlled. I think it actually breeds at night, while we sleep. It’s devising a plot to take over the world. I’m sure of it.



I know that I have a tendency to make opening a restaurant sound about as fun as being eaten alive by a bear - and it does sometimes feel that way - but to be fair, I should tell you that there’s a lot of magic in it too. Like, for example, around four in the afternoon, when the servers start to set up the dining room. I wish you could be there. They set the tables, light the votives, and fill the water glasses, and on the surface, it seems like pretty routine stuff. But the room has this quiet hum to it, this sort of potential energy, that I find so peaceful. I look forward to it every day.



And there’s this table. Someday, when I get to eat in my own restaurant, I want to sit at this table in the window. I like to fantasize about it sometimes. It’s better, at least, than thinking about flour particles breeding.



Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a quote that I used to have written on a piece of paper on the wall near my desk. It was by the German poet Goethe, and I don’t know where I first heard it or where that piece of paper is now, but what it said was, “Do not hurry. Do not rest.”



I think about it almost every day. It’s only six words, but it sums up right now so well.

Tonight at five

It’s very peaceful at Delancey right now. I’m going to try to remember what this feels like.


Wait. Is the art in this photo crooked, or is it just me? Maybe my eyes are crooked. Anything is possible. Delancey opens tonight at five.

There’s no signage outside the building yet, but that’ll be fixed soon. It’s at the top of our to-do list. In the meantime, for those of you in the Seattle area, maybe this map will help you find us? Our address is 1415 NW 70th Street. (It might be helpful, too, to know that we’re one block north of Ballard High School, directly across the street from a bar called Tarasco, and right next to Honore Bakery.) Like our signage, our web site is also still a work in progress, but our phone is up and running, and I consider that a small victory. The number is 206.838.1960. If you would like to reserve a table, please note that we take reservations for parties of six or more only. We’re open from Wednesday to Sunday, dinner only, from five to ten-ish.

A number of you have asked about our menu, so I should probably tell you about that, too. It will change often, depending on the season and what we can buy from local farmers, but this is the one we’re opening with. The scan is wonky, I know, but bear with me. If you click on it, it will enlarge to a much more readable size.



Eventually, we’ll get a stamp with our logo and bang it down at the top of each menu with some nice, orange-red ink, but until then, I’m writing the restaurant name by hand. It’s kind of a pain, and sometimes my mind wanders midway through the stack and I lose my ability to spell, but it makes me happy. So, I should mention, do chilled peaches in white wine.


I made these on a whim last week, tossed them up onto the menu, and they might now be my favorite dessert. (For this week, at least.) You just take some peaches, slice them, toss them with sugar, and then dump a bottle of dry white wine on top. Then you put them in the fridge for a while. You can serve them after only a half-day or so, and they’ll taste fantastic, like a very classy, grown-up version of peaches in light syrup. But after a whole day or two, they start to go translucent, and then they’re even better: thoroughly soused, barely sweet, cool and refreshing, almost dangerously easy to eat. (I did not mean to make that rhyme. Or half-rhyme. Whatever. Swear.) Before summer ends, you really should make some. I insist. Especially if you live too far away to come to Delancey and let me make them for you.



Chilled Peaches in White Wine
Adapted from A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes, by David Tanis

I’ve tried this method with a couple of different wines, but my favorite is Domaine de Pellehaut “Harmonie de Gascogne.” It’s on our wine list, and it’s hard not to love: crisp and light, a little grapefruity, not too expensive - and perfect, perfect for peaches. And about the peaches themselves: be sure to choose specimens that are firm and meaty, not watery or mealy.

8 ripe peaches (white or yellow, or a mixture), washed well and rubbed dry
4 Tbsp. sugar, or more to taste
1 bottle (750 ml) dry white wine

Slice the peaches thinly. (I get about 16 slices per peach.) Combine the peaches and sugar, and toss gently to mix. Add the wine, and toss gently again. Taste, and adjust sugar as needed. (Brandon likes them a little sweeter than I do.) Cover, and refrigerate for several hours - or up to a few days, if you want.

Serve the peaches cold, in a glass or shallow bowl, with a small ladleful of their liquid. Eat the peaches with a fork and then drink the liquid left in the glass.

Yield: about 8 servings

Figuring it out

I meant to post this last Friday. You can see how well I did with that.


I also meant to take a picture of some pizza, since that’s what this whole business is about, but that didn’t work out either. The cook we hired to help Brandon with the pizzas didn’t show up for his first official day of work - the day before our first pre-opening dinner - which has left only Brandon and me in the kitchen. That means that I do my work at my station, run over to his station to help top and finish pizzas, and then run back to my station again. This has not left much time for photography - or breathing, or thinking, or sleeping. If I ever see our no-show again, I am going to break his face. Mark my words. In the meantime, Brandon has burned his business card in the pizza oven. Do not cross us, people.

But as of this evening, we’ve found two people to work part-time until we find a full-time cook. We’re going to sleep better tonight.



And not only will we sleep better, but I will dream of tomato salads. I have three boxes, three whole boxes, of these beauty queens sitting at my station. These particular specimens, called Big Beef, were grown by Billy Allstot, a farmer in Tonasket, Washington. Billy grows the best tomatoes at the farmers’ market, and they cost a small fortune, and we’re so proud to serve them. For our first pre-opening dinner, I used them in a composed salad, along with fingerling potatoes, green beans, hard-boiled egg, anchovy, and shallot vinaigrette. The second night, I cut them into thick slices and topped them with fresh corn cut from the cob, cherry tomatoes (again from Billy), basil, and more shallot vinaigrette.


My mother was here for our first dinner, and as it turns out, she is an absolute champ of a sous chef. She also bought sunflowers for the bar, and on our night off, she treated us to beers and bourbon sours. She was in town for five days, and I don’t know how we could have made it without her. I cried when she left. I have never been as tired as I am right now. I never even knew that I could be so tired.



But I never seem to get tired of making raspberry yogurt popsicles, which is good, because I’ve already made almost two hundred of them. I’m in love. They’re one of two items on our soft opening dessert menu, along with bittersweet chocolate chip cookies with gray salt. The popsicles up there, the ones in the photo, were from one of my test batches, made in small glass juice jars. At the restaurant, I make them in vodka shooter glasses. I’ve only broken two glasses so far, and our dishwasher has broken three. It’s not a terrible record, I don’t think. We’re figuring it out. Not just popsicles, but everything.


I can’t say much more tonight. It’s almost midnight, and I’m still at the restaurant, and I’ve got tomatoes to go home and dream about. But if you want to read a bit about one of our first dinners - and get a look at the pizza! - go read this. And for a peek into the dining room this past Sunday night, click over here. (Thank you, Lorna and Viv!)

I’ll see you in a little bit.

Some idea

So, Delancey is opening its doors on Wednesday, August 12, at 5:00 pm. I’m a little short on words to describe how I feel about that, but maybe this picture will give you some idea.







Brandon feels pretty much the same, I think. Maybe with a touch of queasy on top. Or maybe I’m just projecting. Hard to say.










Nah, actually, we’re very, very excited. This is the part that we’ve been waiting for. It’s been a long time coming, and though I don’t know that we’ll ever feel completely ready, we’re close. Or close enough. I just hope we get some sleep sometime soon, because apparently, I’m already having a hard time keeping my eyes open.






And we’re in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. The restaurant has no air conditioning. I’m going to sit here and massage my temples for a while. That’ll help.









But hey, you know, today is the fifth anniversary of this blog. Five years. Five years! It’s pretty amazing. You’re pretty amazing, people! Thank you. You make me so happy.

And it’s also our second wedding anniversary. That’s not so bad either.






Between now and the 12th, we’re holding soft opening dinners. My mother arrives today to lend a hand, and then my in-laws come next week. I might not be able to write a coherent sentence for a while, but I’ll have photographs for you. For sure.

See you in a couple of days.





P.S. To those who have asked questions about various aspects (lights, desserts, etc.) of the restaurant: I promise, promise, to answer them soon. I could talk about that stuff all day.

P.P.S. For local readers: I’m so, so sorry to say that the soft opening dinners are sold out. We opened them first to family and friends, and then to a mailing list that Brandon has been compiling, and they went fast. We can hardly believe it. But if you would like to get information about future special events at Delancey, please send an e-mail to delanceyseattle (at) gmail (dot) com with “mailing list” written in the subject line.

The whole point

I am pleased to report that we are finally approaching the part of this restaurant thing when we actually get to cook. It’s kind of amazing.


The construction is essentially done. There are some details left to complete, like installing acoustic paneling (to cut down on noise), hanging art and mirrors, and setting up the computer system, but we’re very close. Two of our construction workers - I’m not going to say who (rhymes with “Holly” and “Mandon”) - accidentally glued an eight-foot-tall chalkboard to the floor on Sunday, but it’s okay. It came up easily enough. We’re really very close. And we still seem to remember how to cook, which is promising, since that’s the whole point.


About ten days ago, we held a private dinner at Delancey. The evening was a collaboration with our friends Olaiya and John, part of a series of charity dinners that they organize and host under the name Little Spark, with proceeds going to Women for Women International. It was our first time cooking for paying guests, and needless to say, there was a certain amount of terror involved. And a lot of excitement. And adrenaline. If you were there, I was the crazy lady in yellow rubber gloves, standing at the dishwasher until 1 am, grinning like an idiot at the empty plates.

Dinner was served family-style, and the focus of the evening was pizza, but we served a full three-course menu, starting with wood oven-roasted vegetables and ending with chocolate chip cookies with sea salt and housemade ice cream. Everything but the pizza was mine to do. I went to the farmers’ market the day before - though once we open, we’ll be buying from a couple of local farms who deliver, as well as a produce distributor who works with other local farms - and bought what looked good: bundles of small carrots, the freshest broccoli I’d ever seen, bags of small yellow potatoes, and a fat bunch of parsley. I wanted to keep it simple. So I cut the broccoli into florets and tossed them with olive oil, salt, ground cumin, and ground coriander. (A lot like this, actually, minus the shrimp.) When they came out of the oven, the florets were charred in spots, frizzled at their edges, so that they crunched softly - like water chestnuts, I decided; I love water chestnuts - between your teeth. We squeezed some lemon over them, and that was it. The carrots were left whole, tossed with olive oil and salt and roasted quickly, so that they caramelized without turning to mush, and then they too got some lemon, along with a splash more olive oil and some aleppo pepper. But what everyone asked about, and what I wanted to tell you about today, was the potatoes.


That’s them in the photograph up there: steamed potatoes tossed with salsa verde. But ignore the steamed part. Steamed potatoes are totally fine, but for the dinner, we served them halved lengthwise and roasted, so that they were crispy and browned, delicious even before the salsa verde came along. Either way, however you do it, I am here to tell you to make this sauce. It’s similar to sauce gribiche, in a sense - both have parsley, capers, olive oil, and lemon - but it’s simpler, quicker, easier to bang up if you don’t have an herb garden at your disposal. (Ours was an early casualty of the restaurant. It’s now so far gone that our landlord actually mowed it the last time he came over.) If you, like me, tend to buy a bunch of parsley for a recipe and wind up with half of it moping around, festering in your crisper drawer, this is for you.

Basically, you take roughly equal parts capers and Italian parsley, and you moisten them with olive oil and lemon, and then you season it all with some garlic, lemon zest, red pepper flakes, and a couple pinches of salt. I imagine that it might be good on chicken, or some cold leftover steak, but it’s insane on roasted potatoes. If you really mean business, toss it into the potatoes when they’re still hot, and then lean over the bowl while the whole thing opens up and blooms: the tangy capers, the brightness of the lemon, the fragrance of the olive oil, the grassy green parsley. I can smell it just sitting here.


Salsa Verde for Potatoes

For this recipe, we use capers in brine, and we don’t rinse them after draining. And just so you know, you can multiply this recipe to make a lot at a time, but you’ll want to watch out for the garlic. Its flavor tends to grow exponentially, and it can quickly become overpowering. For large quantities, add garlic to taste.

Oh, and just in case of confusion: the term salsa verde is a sort of catch-all used to describe a variety of green herb-based sauces, so if you’ve seen other salsa verde recipes that looked different from this one, that’s why. (For example, there’s a salsa verde in my book that uses cilantro, chiles, and lime juice. Nothing like this one, but pretty killer on roasted cauliflower.)

6 Tbsp. olive oil
3 Tbsp. capers, drained and coarsely chopped
2 Tbsp. finely chopped Italian parsley
2 medium garlic cloves, pressed or minced
1 ½ tsp. lemon juice
½ tsp. finely grated lemon zest
1/8 tsp. kosher salt
Pinch of red pepper flakes

Combine the ingredients in a small bowl, and whisk to mix well. Set aside for 15 to 30 minutes, to allow the flavors to meld. Toss with hot roasted, steamed, or boiled potatoes. (But preferably roasted.) Salt to taste, if needed.

Yield: enough for about 1 ½ lb. potatoes