The Beauty Shop Lunch

A few weeks ago I took Julia to The Beauty Shop, an interesting little restaurant in the Cooper-Young district of Memphis. It's a converted hair salon that still has the hairwashing sinks behind the bar and you can sit under the old hairdryers in the back. I like it because of the great cocktails and eclectic, constantly changing menu. Plus, it's really fun to take someone there for the first time, and we had a great little lunch. The following weekend I decided to recreate it at home. Anything you see here is the creativity of the Beauty Shop staff, and any flaws in the execution are my own fault. I take no credit here beyond the fact that a particular joy of cooking is the ability to have a great meal and then pull it off with your own kitchen.

First up: the appetizers with assorted cheeses, olives, marinated mushrooms, and some other neat things. They had a nut-brown sugar-butter spread that was delicious, and a dish of canned cherries that had been reduced down with balsamic vinegar. I did a decent job with the spread using walnuts, and found that sea salt was crucial to bringing out the flavor. My cherries were not pretty to begin with, but flavorwise I got pretty close with a slow reduction using both balsamic and red wine vinegar. The cheeses here are Manchego, Gouda, something Basque, and something else from the Netherlands.

I had a roast beef sandwich of some sort at the restaurant, but Julia picked their ham and cheese which included thin slices of apple and spicy brown mustard. When I made it, I used mandoline slices of Asian pear, Black Forest ham, smoked cheddar, and a combination of oak leaf lettuce and frisée. Like the restaurant, I did not grill the whole sandwich but merely used lightly toasted bread to make the sandwich. Minus the lettuce, I've made similar sandwiches in a skillet.

It's a great flavor combination and I had a few more of these over the next few days with the ample spare ingredients. Wrapped tightly they also last long enough to make in the evening and enjoy at lunch the next day.

The Beauty Shop serves sandwiches and other lunch items with freshly fried potato chips and a garlic-chili aïoli. For my aïoli, I used Sriracha sauce to spice it up with excellent results. Aïoli is not the kind of thing you want to eat every day, but man, it's delicious. I left half of the batch plain and found it tasty, but so much better with that squirt of Sriracha. Here's the recipe I used, not really taken from anywhere but just a result of trial and error.

Benito's Aïoli
5 Cloves of Garlic
Dash of Dijon Mustard
1 Egg Yolk
½ Lemon, Juiced
Dash of Sea Salt
A few turns of freshly ground Black/White Pepper
1 Cup of Pure Olive Oil (no extra virgin necessary)

Combine everything except the oil in a blender or in a cup with a stick blender. Then slowly drizzle in the cup of olive oil while blending. That's it. You can modify this in hundreds of different ways, either by adding chopped herbs or by using different vinegars instead of lemon juice. Throw in some hot sauce like Sriracha or toss in diced cornichons, go crazy.

Dulcius ex asperis

After doing a lot of cooking at home, at parties, and on icy mountaintops for the past 20 years, I don't have any fear of failure in the kitchen. It doesn't mean that I don't screw up--my New Year's Eve fondue was a dud and I burned a frozen waffle the other day. But I tend to celebrate said disasters rather than get anxious or annoyed. Frankly at this point I enjoy learning something from a cooking failure, and then there are the occasions when the end result is sweeter out of difficulties.

I was planning on doing simple tacos for Saturday, with roasted chicken thighs and braised pork shoulder. With the latter I'll usually throw a few cans of tomatoes and chiles in the enameled Dutch oven along with the pork and let it slow cook until everything is nice and tender, just enough to be pulled easily with a fork. I got distracted with a few other projects and that shoulder ended up simmering for almost ten hours. Because I'd started on Friday, there was plenty of time to make something new for Saturday, but I decided to let it all cool and see what I had to work with in the morning.

Saturday I woke up and discovered that the pork was almost mushy. Flavorful, just barely still in muscular strings but soft and buried under a half inch layer of pork fat and gelatin. I poked around and thought that, it weren't for the tomatoes and chiles and assorted spices, I'd accidentally made rillettes de porc. For the tacos, I took a few spoonfuls and mixed in a bit of chipotles in adobo sauce. I had to be gentle, and just barely warmed it, but the rillettes worked wonderfully in a warm flour tortilla at lunch.

For dinner, I took the opportunity to try another application with my favorite sandwich, the medianoche from Cuba. Ham, Swiss cheese, mustard, pickles, roast pork, all pressed in a loaf of bread split longways and brushed with butter before grilling. Most of the elements of this sandwich are pretty basic and don't change a lot, but the type and preparation of the pork does make a big difference. Sliced pork loin doesn't work that great. Smoked or roasted shoulder that's been pulled is the standard, but can often come out in chunks as you're eating.

But a rillettes-style preparation? Perfect. The flavor is great, but you also get something like a porky version of the tuna melt. Some of the fat renders back out into the bread and helps with crisping, while it slices neatly and makes for easy eating. If I were having to make a lot of these on a regular basis I'd be making Caribbean-spiced rillettes all the time.

I've packed away most of my rillettes de porc mexicaine in the freezer, knowing that in a month or so I'll want to mix some with chopped dates and almonds to serve on toast points.