Welcome to Lunch Rush, a new series from The Standard challenging the city’s top chefs to make an extraordinary lunch in our very ordinary office kitchen in 20 minutes or less. The available equipment: a microwave, espresso maker, a tea kettle and a toaster oven. Also provided: plain old iodized salt, sad pre-ground pepper and olive oil. The chef provides the rest of the ingredients — and a recipe.
Stuart Brioza, the nationally lauded chef of State Bird Provisions, The Progress and The Anchovy Bar, is a ham. When he steps out of the elevator to head into The Standard’s office on a Wednesday afternoon — hair disheveled, beard scruffy, tattoos of a fork and knife on his forearms — he smiles big for the camera and announces, “1-800-DIAL-A-CHEF!”
Though David Chang has made microwave cooking hip again (and The Standard does indeed offer this piece of equipment), Brioza chooses to make a salad. A man who loves to utilize ingredients from around the world, he ups the ante with goods from The Japanese Pantry, an online shop co-founded by Greg Dunmore, the chef-owner of the former Hayes Valley-based Nojo.
Both Brioza and his wife, pastry chef and partner Nicole Krasinski, who has tagged along, like to eat healthy. “I want to make a salad that will give me energy for the day,” says Brioza, unpacking a block of Hodo soy yuba, peeling off the slippery ribbons made from tofu skin. Brioza uses it at his restaurants in all sorts of ways, including in the style of pasta all’Amatriciana. “It’s one of my favorite ingredients — it has 21 grams of protein,” he says excitedly.
Next, he pulls out shiso from the Japantown market Nijiya, all but shoving the serrated green leaves into our noses for a licorice-y whiff. For a bit of sweetness, he slices up apriums, an apricot-plum hybrid, from Kashiwase Farms. And for bitterness, he roughly chops chrysanthemum leaves, or shungiku, from Hikari Farms, which grows “all the really unique Japanese ingredients: Tokyo turnips, daikon. And they’re perfect.”
After whipping out an inexpensive but lethal Japanese mandoline to swiftly shave the cabbage and cucumber into perfect slices, he gets to work in our little kitchen. To a wooden bowl, he adds pickled Japanese turnips he picked up at Nijiya (“Pickles make a salad!”), endearingly accompanied by a boooof! — like a little boy’s pretend explosion.
Who needs tongs when you have hands? Chefs use them a lot. Brioza boldly digs his fingers deep into the mix of cabbage, cucumbers and “super sustainable” wild albacore tuna from Island Trollers, all with a white-miso, rice-wine-vinegar dressing made with Zero Acre’s neutral, better-for-the-planet sugarcane oil. Somewhere in the whirlwind is a dash of one of his favorite seasonings, yuzu shichimi togarashi, which adds a floral note of chili and citrus.
Finally, as if he’s some kind of salad CIA agent, he leans in, dropping his voice conspiratorially, and holds up a little packet: “I like to take these little things of dashi and actually sprinkle the ground seaweed and bonito like a seasoning. It’s a game-changing move for umamification.”
Lunch is served to Standard employees at our conference table — ergonomic office chairs and all. We use chopsticks instead of forks and inhale the pile of delicious salad, which indeed feels so restorative it’s bordering on righteous.
Sadly, my little fantasy that Brioza has become The Standard’s private chef comes to an end after we clear our plates. He packs up his knives and exits down the elevator, as chipper as when he came — leaving us to return the next day to our all-too-frequently-consumed insta-salads from Trader Joe’s.
