Double Cut Pork Chop doing it over pasta or polenta we do it over four cheese grits with chicken sausage and roasted mushrooms. The marsala sauce is really concentrated from straight marsala wine with lots of herbs, onions, chicken stock, pickled shallots, parsley leaves and radish. We love taking something that’s familiar and putting our own style to it. Also, a lot of the menu is shareable appetizers and pizzas. We also have seafood entrées meat entrées. Every week we have new specials. Your Brussels sprouts dish at the St. Pete Wine & Food Festival was a huge success. Can you describe the dish? Everyone does Brussels sprouts with bacon and for good reason. I wanted to think outside the box a little bit but keep it vegetarian. We halve the Brussels sprouts and fry them crispy, but the trick to it is to agitate them in a raw state so that the leaves come off. Then when you fry them you have super crispy leaves for texture. After they’re fried, we season them generously with salt; use Agrodolce which is like Italian sweet and sour sauce so you get the sweet notes, sour, salty; goat cheese fonduta to add a little more richness and a �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� for the heat; and spiced crispies for the texture which is just rice crispies that are toasted and smoked paprika and butter; lots of torn mint, grapefruit and orange segments so there's more freshness and acidity. Do you have a few favorite ingredients that you like to work with? We start a lot of the dishes with what we call the usual suspects: olive oil, onion, garlic, rosemary, thyme, and ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ chili that’s been salted and slightly fermented. It’s not too �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� that in to almost anything I can. What does a typical meal at home look like? ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� when I cook at home we keep it pretty simple. Every week my son and I go to Mazzaro’s to shop. We typically go to the cheese area and pick out three nice cheeses, get a loaf of bread and a preserve. We also pick up something nice like a dry aged ribeye from the butcher counter and cook it in a cast iron skillet with lots of butter, roasted potatoes, spinach and greens. Very simple. How do you test new recipes for the restaurant? We typically test recipes out among the management, the owners, the cooks and myself. Sometimes menu items are accidental. For example, the buttermilk pie we are ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ make buttermilk pie. It’s been on the menu ever since. I’m constantly thinking of what a new dish could be. Some things I’ll spend months working on and some things I can just hit in one day. It all depends on the dish. "We are working hard on the next project now called Fat Beet Farms, which will be in Oldsmar. It’s going to be many things." 16 localsDISH JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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