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Treading lightly around customer memories of home-cooked Thanksgiving dinners, some restaurant operators will walk a fine line between the familiar and the innovative when they cook turkey this year.
They realize that many patrons have a mental archetype of the traditional family feast, centered on a simply roasted bird and predictable accompaniments like giblet gravy, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes. That tends to be at odds with a chef’s creative urges.
“As a chef, you really want to go to an extreme place just for your own entertainment,” said Bret Macris, executive chef of Rose Water, a seasonal American restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y. “But you have to realize that if people don’t understand your menu, they won’t enjoy it. “
His way of making turkey distinctive yet approachable is to cook the white and dark meat separately with different methods. For Rose Water’s three-course, $70 per-person Thanksgiving menu this year, he will remove the breast from the thighs and legs and smoke it over applewood. He will cook the thighs and legs slowly in duck fat like French confit. Cooking it that way takes a fraction of the time of roasting the whole bird and ensures evenly done meat, Macris said.
Last Thanksgiving, Macris roasted the breast separately with fresh rosemary and made deep-fried roulades of the legs. The latter he deboned, filled with a mixture of kale and savory bread pudding and wrapped in the skin. “They came out nice and crispy,” he said.
At the Atwood Café, a Kimpton restaurant in Chicago, executive chef Derek Simcik will offer deep-fried turkey, a dish he grew up with in a family with Texas and Louisiana roots. The restaurant is closed for Thanksgiving, but turkey will appear in menu specials over the holidays.
“During the holidays, you get some people who think outside the box and are more experimental, but most of the time they want roasted turkey breast and side dishes the way mom used to make them,” said Simcik.
Before deep-frying the turkey, he plans to inject it with a mixture of Cajun spices, beer and herbs, rub the outside with a cayenne salt mixture and cure it in the cooler for a day or two.
“The salt draws the brine through the meat making it more flavorful,” Simcik said, resulting in turkey that is crisp outside and moist inside.
At Eve, also a restaurant in Chicago, a menu of regional American turkey variations like grilled breast of turkey with Maine lobster croquettes and Southern-style turkey gumbo with crawfish, andouille and pickled okra was a hit with patrons on the previous two Thanksgivings, said executive chef Troy Graves. This year, for variety, he is preparing classic herb-roasted turkey with toasted chestnut stuffing, but he said he probably will revisit the regional turkey theme in the future.
There is a different approach to Thanksgiving at Andina in Portland, Ore., a restaurant that celebrates the cuisine and culture of Peru. Its guests anticipate a Turkey Day experience quite unlike the American norm.
Take the asado de pavo novoandino, roast turkey Peruvian style, traditionally enjoyed in Peru on Christmas Eve. Before roasting, the turkey is rubbed with a mixture of garlic, cumin, pepper, salt and vinegar and a paste of Peruvian red peppers. The latter is flavorful rather than spicy and lends a rich red color, said owner Doris Rodriguez de Platt, a Peruvian.
“Our guests come to the restaurant because of the flavors we have,” said Rodriguez de Platt. “They are unique because of the combination of different peppers and herbs we use in Peruvian cooking.”
