hello world! remember me? do i even remember me?

a lot has gone on since i last wrote for the site. i opened a restaurant—yeah, i opened a flippin’ restaurant! sorry, that just felt good to say. so yeah, the restaurant has been cranking at full blast ever since our first day of service, which has made the last several weeks seem like nothing less than a whirlwind. i’d like to say i wish i’d written about the opening, how i felt after my first day cooking in the kitchen, what it was like as i came to know the staff (and continue still), and everything else that goes with opening a new spot—but i’d be lying if i said i just didn’t have the time. since that first day we pulled out the cutting boards and turned on the burners, i haven’t spent a day away from the kitchen. no joke. so, though it feels funny to be writing a blog today and just jumping right into what i’m about to write about, i just don’t think there’d have been anything exciting to write about anyway! i wake up early and come to work, stop working late and go to bed at home. every day. sounds exciting and blog worthy, yeah?

yeah. it’s really not. but that’s not to say i haven’t been trying.

a few weeks ago my friend johnny (he helps with my social media) tagged along at green city market early one wednesday morning with the intent of starting something for the blog. the idea was simple. shop at the market, conceive a dish using that morning’s bounty in the afternoon, write about it on the blog, and then offer it that night for service. pretty cool idea, right? well, obviously it’s yet to come to fruition—though, if you munched on our crave brothers mozzarella salad with sungolds, yellow plums, watercress, and purple beans, you ate the dish i came up with! here’s a few pics from that day…

and it’s this salad that brings me to the whole point of writing today. that salad, though we carried it for a few days, disappeared after those few days were up and never returned. that’s the way it’s gonna be at girl & the goat for most dishes—we’ll cook with and serve what’s in peak season—which is exactly the reason an asparagus salad i so badly wanted on the opening menu didn’t make the cut. local asparagus season was short, and we missed its small window.

but that won’t always be the case—and isn’t the case with one dish specifically.

from what’ve read and have heard staff who scour the twitterverse and blogs and facebook, the crispy pig face we had early on generated a good amount of buzz. in case you didn’t have it, that dish literally read on the menu as crispy pig face, chimichurri, daikon, and baby arugula. now, when i say pig face, it speaks to a european meat dish called head cheese. head cheese—it’s not a cheese at all—is a gelatinous dish that’s composed of cleaned pig head, minus the organs, and is served room temperature or sometimes fried. hence, our crispy pig face.

well, i wanted something different. so, as fluid and ever-evolving the menu is, i went to work and last friday night finally found something we’re all really happy about. here’s how it read on the menu over the weekend…

like the menu says, the pig face is roasted. it’s no longer crispy, or fried.

we’re very fortunate to have my friend enoch working for us, as he’s our butcher. a full time butcher. rather than order parts of animals that have been butchered elsewhere and passed through god knows how many hands, we receive whole animals from the farms at girl & the goat—which makes enoch an incredibly important part of the restaurant. and when it comes to the pig face, it’s enoch’s magic that makes the dish possible.

enoch takes the whole pig head while its still raw and removes its face, then rolls the face with the tongue still attached inside. we then braise this overnight and then slice it the next day so that the ticker for your order finds its way to my hands when i’m working the expo line during service, the cooks are able to finish the sliced, braised pig face in our monster of a wood burning oven. like i said, we’re really excited about the dishes new evolution.

here’s what it looks like after it’s been braised and sliced, before it’s finished in the oven:

you might’ve seen a picture of the dish this past friday when i posted it to twitter. here’s that:

so that’s the finished dish after it’s been pulled from the wood oven. on the plate is a tamarind dressing as well as a red wine and maple sauce, crispy cilantro potato stix, and a fried farm egg. so while pig face might imply head cheese on the surface, this dish is a far cry from that traditional meat jelly that is head cheese that i personally adore, but might haunt many others in their sleep for weeks.

here’s the pig head before enoch works his magic:

and here’s what the heads look like after:

and this dish definitely reflects a philosophy of ours at the restaurant—and is why enoch is so important to us. since we receive the whole animal from the farm, we aim to use the whole animal. i hate that i feel it’s a bit cliche to label our philosophy as head to tail, but that’s what it is. cliche or not.

which is exactly what we’re doing tonight with something i’m really excited about. all day today our oven has been going to work on three veal belly rib roasts—each weighing in at nearly five pounds. as of right now, these whole bellies will be $75 and are obviously meant to be shared by the entire table—and they’re coming with appropriate accoutrements that we’re in the process of finishing as well as—and i’m really excited about this—our own homemade mu shu to wrap the meat around! with just four people, you’ll be getting more than a pound of roast each!

i had to be fast when taking this picture so i didn’t let too much heat out of the oven, so it’s dark and a little blurry, but here are the roasts doing there tenderizing thang:

so there you have it. pig face. whole belly rib roasts (we’ll be doing goat rib roasts, too). it’s like a candy shop for meat lovers!

and i’ll leave you with just the right thing to soak all the juices up with…

peter piper bread made fresh this morning by our baker greg—yup, it’s a pickled pepper bread!

that does it. my first blog post in ages—and damn did it feel good! keep checking back as more and more content is being geared up for the blog and more… but until then, it’s back to work.