“Want to get out of retirement..?”
Cooking at Esse for the Blackout Dinner
It has been a good 5 years since I cooked the type of dishes that this guest-chef invitation required of me, and I was admittedly both excited and nervous to step back into a kitchen of the highest caliber.
Esse restaurant is Matt Orlando’s new restaurant. If you remember what Amass was all about, you know very well what Esse has to offer. An uncompromising dedication to sustainability and excellence brought together by inventive uses of waste products, offcuts, and the like.
When Matt asked me if I wanted to return from my retirement and do an event together, my answer could only be: “For you, anything.” That was obviously a stretch, but you get the point. Matt Orlando is one of the most dedicated human beings I have ever crossed paths with, and his enthusiasm and excitement for our craft deserve all the respect he enjoys from his peers. Including mine. But besides wanting to show my respect, he is also a guaranteed good hang, and when the lineup included Jonathan Tam, Claus Henriksen, and Milton Abel, there was no doubt.
Besides the good times, I also had my purely selfish reasons to chip in; I had started to feel the itch. Since closing Relæ in 2020, which I did for several reasons, but very much because I had grown tired of the pressure the kind of inventive cooking implies, my “creative” cooking had been limited to the kitchens of Bæst and Mirabelle. Not exactly restaurants where you are looking to get challenged on the mind and palate, rather places where comfort-cooking would be added a little twist.
This was my first opportunity in years to get a little more twisting going and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I made a boiled leek dish dressed with fermented leek juice and pistachio, and another starter based on scallops, maitake, and confit roe emulsion, both of which I was quite satisfied with. The leek dish was trying to enhance the juiciness of leeks and was bathed in the cooking liquid made tangy by the Esse team’s fermented leek juice and some additional Japanese Quince juice. The scallop was about mid-menu and was more of a deeper, creamier round of chopped-up scallop-and-mushroom salad, really. I go deeper into the dishes on YouTube. Scratching the itch was quite a relief, but while I mentally needed the culinary stimuli, my feet were hurting for days, and my body made it clear that it preferred my new life with plenty of opportunities to take a seat throughout the day.
I have 25 years of experience in cooking, and while I have described selling the restaurants as me “leaving” the industry, that does not feel like being the case. After a bit of a hiatus and a firm focus on family, I am starting to shift my perspective, now enriched from a healthy slab of time off. I truly love this industry, and I hope to contribute in some other way. I hope that writing, thinking, and sharing my experience on social media is a plausible way forward. Getting plunged straight back into the reality of the cooking life simply reminded me of how great it is to do great cooking shoulder to shoulder with great people, and how it is deeply embedded in me. While there is no chance in hell I would want to start a new restaurant project, on a night like this I feel like I am back home where I belong. I go on at length about my brief return from retirement on the YouTube channel that you should check out!