The Dish

 

"The Dish

By Andrew Friedman

Mariner, 288 pages, $29.99

Midway through Andrew Friedman's "The Dish," the author visits the packing facility of Nichols Farm in Marengo, Ill., at 3:30 a.m. "The sky above may be dark as squid ink," he tells us, "but here the business day is well underway." On the loading dock, he watches as restaurant delivery specialist Marc Hoffmeister loads the refrigerated 16-foot cargo box of a Chevy Express 4500 -- peaches, corn, delicate greens, cherry tomatoes. This is an odd place for a stranger, with or without a notebook, and an employee asks him what he's doing there. He tells her who he's there to write about. "She nods, smiles kindly, gestures around at the co-workers buzzing about: 'All the people nobody sees.' "

Even those of us who work behind desks have, of late, become intimately familiar with the words "supply chain" -- shortages during Covid sparked a much greater awareness of the strange linkages that put paper towels on shelves, tires on cars, and cheese on sandwiches. All around us, myriad figures coordinate to bring together the elements needed for commerce. Nowhere is this process more fascinating than in a restaurant.

Every day, thousands upon thousands of plates are dropped in front of restaurant patrons, each of them a point of intersection on a web that radiates outward through the waitstaff, the cooks, the butchers, the truckers, the farmworkers. Every leaf of lettuce, every drift of parsley, every crab came from somewhere. Mr. Friedman chose to write about one plate, which was served to him on Saturday, July 24, 2021, in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago, at a restaurant called Wherewithall. The restaurant, which had been closed to protect people from Covid-19, had been open again for four weeks. The savory course of that night's tasting menu was "dry-aged strip loin, tomato, sorrel." That's Mr. Friedman's "Dish."

What follows is a thorough, lively work of on-the-ground reportage. The paths to the dish are long. "The tomato that co-stars in Wherewithall's strip loin dish requires a minimum maturation time of approximately seventy days," Mr. Friedman writes, "three months from seed to plate." The author takes the reader on an adventure to places we don't normally visit -- gardens, farms, the abattoir. None of the processes are romanticized here. One farmer seems almost apologetic about the utilitarian nature of his cattle business with its concrete feeder, pile of manure and unadorned sheds. These aren't Instagram-ready sets; they're jobsites.

Mr. Friedman met a bunch of very different individuals, and presents them with a generous, kind eye. In these pages, the ink is even, democratic -- the heroes are guys like Mr. Hoffmeister and Edilberto Cassaruvias Avila, who came to the United States from Guerrero, Mexico in the mid-1980s. He works at Wyncroft winery in western Michigan, which makes Wyncroft Shou, a "classic Bordeaux blend of three red wine varietals (Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot) that is the foundation of our dish's sauce."

The cooks at Wherewithall design their menu each week around what is available from the purveyors on whom they rely, buying as geographically close to the restaurant as they can. Chefs can muse about what they want, but their imaginations will consistently brush up against the realities of what's available: Mr. Friedman shares a remarkable story about a Chicago chef who asked a farmer what he needed to get rid of -- the "whaddaya got?" strategy of menu design -- and ended up with a dish that became the hallmark of her restaurant: Wood Oven Roasted Pig Face. Discussions must be had and decisions made, and then, no matter how close the farm is to the kitchen, trucks must be driven. It's complicated work to get the right stuff to the right place, and Wherewithall is but one of many stops.

In the restaurant, Mr. Friedman observes scrupulously. He provides enough robust detail that a person with a fair bit of kitchen knowledge could, I suspect, get very close to cooking that week's tasting menu from Wherewithall. We follow members of the staff as they work, and we learn the paths that led them to this moment. Thomas Hollensed, the sous chef, grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., and learned to cook with his grandmother. He spent some unhappy times in military boarding schools, got himself sent back home by claiming a "sudden and debilitating fear of climbing up and down stairs on crutches" after an accident, and found the work he loves in the kitchen of an events venue.

Mr. Friedman has an interesting idea about careers. He proposes that people end up where they are because of a "portal," a key moment in life, from which they emerge dedicated to what they're going to do. For anyone who wonders how people got where they are (or who wonder, like I do, what it is that many people even do), this will scratch an itch. In general, "The Dish" crackles with positivity. Johnny Clark, the owner of Wherewithall with his wife, Beverly Kim, once worked in South Korea under chef Im Ji-ho -- a masterful eccentric known as "the wandering chef" for his focus on foraging -- where he learned that "there doesn't need to be some full on anger/ego situation; you can cook for happiness."

But this is, after all, the restaurant business. Andrew Friedman had, no doubt, turned in his manuscript well before the sewer line underneath Wherewithall broke, which proved to be the final straw for the ambitious startup. Readers who want to taste Johnny Clark and Beverly Kim's cuisine will have to find it at their other restaurant, Parachute. Knowing that Wherewithall was not long for this world, like knowing that the ship is going to hit an iceberg, or that Romeo is going to drink the poison, only heightens the satisfactions of Mr. Friedman's book. We can, after all, still visit its pages.

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Mr. Watman is the author of "Harvest: Field Notes From a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food."" [1]

1. I'll Have What He's Having. Watman, Max.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 Nov 2023: A.13.