The Cheat: A Bunny Hop

I watched him assemble a dish of steak & potatoes with a side of green beans & a few sautéed mushrooms. It took about 10 minutes. But the method that led to those 10 minutes started a full 48 hours before they stepped up to the stove. Nine people worked on different aspects of the dish. For the final run, Moore & his cooks used 10 different pans.

It isn’t easy to cook restaurant food at home. Chefs don’t have kitchens like ours for the same reason that Jeff Koons doesn’t have a studio like your Aunt Hildie’s up in the attic. Chefs have enterprises to run, not children to feed. They have bustling shops filled with skilled staff members charged with particular duties. Chefs have systems. They have a stove, a refrigerator & a sink, not counter space & a dog lying somewhere inconvenient. (Hey, a dishwasher!)
The food you get in restaurants reflects the differences. A lot of hands go in to each dish, even when the eating is seemingly plain. Two times I was in the kitchen at Montrachet, a TriBeCa institution until it closed in 2006, to watch what went in to making dinner for a paying crowd. Harold Moore, who now runs the show at Commerce in Greenwich Village, was then the executive chef. They was 29, affable & cooking lovely, simple Italian food.

It would be bananas to do that at home. (Though it would be chilled to have 10 pans. & the steak was fantastic.) Still, if you plan correctly, with a few choice cheats, even home cooks can experience a quantity of the giant flavors & deep sophistication that chefs use to such great effect.
This is a appetizing dish, a perfect Sunday dinner: rabbit legs browned in a pan, then cooked in a mirepoix braise for a long time, served on top of collard greens studded with, in Animal’s case, Sea Island peas from South Carolina & diced country ham from Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Madisonville, Tenn. A grainy mustard sauce, thickened with braising liquid & completed with butter, is drizzled all over it. It tastes of a South that exists only in the mind: sunny; not hot; not humid; all flavors in balance; everything fresh.