This Is Camino by Russell Moore & Allison Hopelain & Chris Colin

Author:Russell Moore & Allison Hopelain & Chris Colin [Moore, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781607747284
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2015-10-12T21:00:00+00:00

FIRE

In the Piedmont region of the Italian province of Cuneo, there’s a small village called Verduno, and at the top sits a magnificent eighteenth-century castle. One night during my Chez Panisse era, we were there for a Slow Food dinner—it was a pretty grand affair. Alice was there. Carlo Petrini was there. The guy who invented the Hubble Space Telescope was there. Mikhail Baryshnikov was there, for god’s sake. I was there to prepare a dinner for forty-five, which then became fifty, which then became sixty. It was an important meal, an occasion for Alice to put forth the Chez Panisse ideals in a memorable way. I cooked it in the driveway.

Alice and I wanted to grill pigeon, but there was no grill. So instead of working inside this marvelous building, I found a gravelly spot out front. They probably call it the courtyard—it was a driveway. I just started gathering whatever I could find: old grapewood burls to burn, some bricks by the side of the building, a couple oven grates I crisscrossed on top of each other. Then I lit the fire.

It was always sort of like this with me—cooking in some subpar, precarious way. Whether at big Chez Panisse events or at home, where our kitchen is horrible and small, I’d just end up outside, building a weird fire and cooking over that. Partly it suits my brain. Following recipes and remembering temperatures—I’m not so good at that. Which is why I’m particularly suited to cook with fire—it’s entirely intuitive.

The fire also forces you to engage at a deeper level. You’re tending to these mini environments, which in turn causes you to pay attention in a way you don’t with a tidy stovetop and a timer. Always in the back of my head is what’s happening with the heat, what’s happening with the food, what temperature the food was before it went on, how many people are in the room, what the night’s various dishes need, and so on. There’s a string of microdecisions that, if you make them right, result in really good food—or else something burnt and terrible.

For that meal in Verduno, I’d set out to grill that pigeon—but then it occurred to me that we might as well make the stock for the fish stew on the fire, to give it this woody tinge. Then I decided to grill focaccia to accompany the stew. Then I grilled the potatoes. At some point, the sun set. Allison came by with a glass of wine and a penlight. I was cooking in the dark. I ended up cooking the whole meal outside, on this weird, thrown-together fire. I remember Baryshnikov out there, in these white jeans—how did he pull off white jeans?—smoking cigarettes and watching me cook. He gave me whiskey. I never saw the inside of the castle.

When it came time to start building Camino, I knew the restaurant had to embody that spontaneity, or what would be the point of leaving Chez Panisse? We

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