For a very short period of time I was Chef de cuisine of the High-Hat Club, a small nightclub in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago.
Back in 2014, my best friend Mike Polino had the idea of taking over a friend’s jazz club and rebuilding it into a kind of New Orleans-style dive. He wanted to know if I wanted to be the chef of this joint. I had just spent eleven frustrating years at the same bookstore chain, and I was itching for a dare-to-be-great situation. Instead of saying “Oh hell no—I love you, but there’s no way in hell I’m going into business with you”, I asked him what kind of food he wanted to serve. Polino said, “I dunno, Cajun and Italian.” I replied, “Why don’t we call it Creole Italian like Liuzza’s or Mosca’s? That way we can serve any of the foods of New Orleans or Louisiana at large and still maintain focus.”
Focus in restaurants is an obsession with me. IMHO what makes a great restaurant is focus. You specialize and you do a small menu that you execute well. You don’t try to be all things to all people. That is the path to the dark side. That is the path to mediocrity. Greek diners here in Chicago have menus as thick as the 1979 JCPenney Christmas Catalog with food that is about as appetizing.
These diners have seemingly thousands of menu items and few of them are memorable in any way and the price points are always eccentric and confusing. Something like a breakfast with two eggs, two bacon or sausage, hash browns, toast, pancakes, coffee, and juice for $8.99, an unadorned “Belgium” waffle for $14.99, cup of soup $2.99, bowl of soup $3.00 and so on. A typical diner here in Chicago will serve twelve breakfast burritos, eighty-two omelettes, five kinds of soup every day (four of them are cream of something unnerving like turnip or okra), forty-eight sandwiches on a bewildering assortment of breads, entrees from every continent save Australia and Antarctica, and a myriad of store-bought desserts. I’m going to cut this rant short by saying that there is excellent food to be found on Greek diner menus. To misquote the odious Michael Pollan, “Would my grandparents recognize this as food?” “Salmon croquettes served with your choice of potato, iceberg lettuce salad or split pea with ham soup, and pickled beets”—unfortunately my ancestors would recognize that as food. Stick to the breakfast classics like pancakes, French toast, “Belgium” waffles, eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, hash browns, etc. or omelettes—especially the Greek omelettes with feta and spinach (and sometimes tomatoes). For lunch try the patty melt or a classic cheeseburger. For dinner have the meatloaf or the sturdy open-faced hot turkey or beef sandwich with mashed potatoes from a box. Or anything that is an old family Grecian recipe—think a roasted or grilled half-a-chicken marinated in oregano and garlic and served with lemony Greek potatoes, rice, salad, and salad or soup du jour. Jennifer swears that if you wish to know if a Greek diner is legit, order a turkey club with fries—if those are good they are a legit diner and the diner gods have bestowed their blessings upon them. You may proceed to trying something new the next time you are there. Heed our advice and you won’t go wrong if you find yourself over-served and famished at 3:47 a.m. in a 24 hour diner that starts with Golden in the name.
Back to the High-Hat. One day I will tell the whole story of our adventure in the hospitality and restaurant industry in all its gonzo detail, but today I will share a short story about the invention of the most popular dish at the High Hat Club: Dirtbag Bolognese.
Restaurants with an organized chef tend to have family meals before they open. Something filling and usually cheap. Lots of variations on roasted chicken quarters, a starch, and a vegetable that is about to go bad. Very rarely I would have something like that to serve the staff, but usually my cooks or I would just make something off of the menu that we had a lot of extra ingredients for. Some days it would be a bowl of jambalaya or beans and greens with grilled Italian sausage, or a quick burger on French bread.
I had fought and lost the battle to not have a burger on the menu. I hate burgers from places that don’t specialize in burgers. They are almost always trash. New Orleans is not a burger town either. They have burger joints like everywhere else in America, sure, but the po’ boy is king and the muffuletta is the crown prince. Burgers are an afterthought—for out-of-towners and little kids. Also, we had no flat-top grill on which to cook burgers, only the charbroiler left over from the Greek-owned jazz club. Other than the once-a-year Whopper that I immediately regret, I fucking hate charbroiled burgers. They taste like overcooked and burnt shit. And by shit, I mean literal shit.
From butts.
I hate them.
Now, I don’t hate grilled burgers. Burgers grilled over charcoal in a backyard or at the Weber Grill restaurant are delicious, but something about the flame broiler makes everything cooked on it sad and dry.
End of second rant.
In hindsight I should have just made the frozen patty charbroiled garbage burger that the Chicago hot dog/gyro/pizza puff stands seem to specialize in, but my pride said, “No—I’ll at least hand form the patties before they get ruined on the charbroiler.” Hamburger meat does not keep particularly well and I found myself with excess ground beef. L, Polino’s girlfriend at the time came in starving from her day job about an hour before dinner service began. On her birthday, October 2nd (same as my baby sister Jessica, my cousin Chase, and my friend and fellow former High-Hat chef, Diane S.). L had a variety of of official and unofficial jobs at the High-Hat—almost no one did more to get the High-Hat up and running than L (but that’s part of a larger story for a much longer piece). I asked her what she wanted, and she said anything—something that was about to go bad. I did not have the heart to make her a sadness burger, so I improvised. I had some cooked and cooled spaghetti on a speed rack in the kitchen and some New Orleans-style red gravy, the ground beef, diced red, yellow, and green bell peppers, and diced onions in the reach-in fridge. I made a sauce with the meat, the red gravy, peppers, and onions. I incorporated the sauce with the spaghetti and to then let it cook in olive oil in the ripping hot pan without turning until it began to stick and almost burn. I then plated it up with grilled garlic bread and served it to L. She loved it. The serving was big, so she gave some to Polino and he loved it. Everyone else on the staff asked to have it for family meal that day, and I said, “Fuck it, let’s put it on the menu.” I needed a pasta dish besides spaghetti with red gravy and grilled Italian sausage (which turned out to be rarely ordered). A new dish was born on October 2, 2014. Polino asked me what I would call it, and I said “Dirtbag Bolognese”.
This sobriquet was to honor its humble origins. Of me using the lowliest utility grade ground beef that Restaurant Depot had to offer in our burgers and thus the pasta sauce. It was also given that name because Polino and I used to live together as dirtbag roommates in the mid 2000s and he taught me how to reheat leftover pasta by frying it in olive oil. It makes an amazing texture and concentrated flavor that cannot be duplicated—or so I thought until I made this dish. This dish that I threw together in a matter of minutes became the most popular dish at the bar and long outlived my short tenure at the High-Hat. Last week Polino sent me this great text that really made my day:
Here’s the recipe:
Dirtbag Bolognese
Ingredients:
1 pound of spaghetti
1 pound of ground chuck
1/2 a red bell pepper, diced fine
1/2 of a yellow or orange bell pepper, diced fine
1 yellow onion, diced fine
2 cups of New Orleans red gravy (recipe below)
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
more olive oil for drizzling
Boil and drain the spaghetti and spread it out on a sheet pan making sure to have no clumps. Keep the boiling pot handy.
Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil. You are trying to coat each piece with just a little oil.
Let the pasta come to room temperature for at least an hour—or if you have room place the sheet pan into the fridge to chill for 1/2 hour or longer.
Put ground beef into the largest frying pan or skillet that you have (even a wok would work) and cook over medium-high heat.
Add the bell pepper and onions to the pan and sauté until the onion begins to soften and slightly brown at the edges.
Drain excess fat.
Add the red gravy to the meat mixture and combine well.
Cook this sauce until it is at a bubbling simmer, but not quite boiling.
Take the cooled spaghetti and mix together with the meat sauce in the pot you boiled the pasta in.
Quickly wipe out your frying pan and put back on stove at the highest temperature you feel comfortable cooking at.
Add the olive oil to the pan.
When it begins to shimmer add the combined pasta and sauce.
Stir well and then let it sit on the heat for about one minute. Wear an apron because it will spit at you.
Stir again and let sit on the heat for another minute or so until it begins to stick to the pan and the sauce really adheres to the pasta.
Serve immediately.
Serves six as a pasta course or four as a main meal.
New Orleans Red Gravy
This is the recipe I borrowed stole with minor tweaks (so minor that I forgot what they were) from Chuck Taggart’s excellent and venerable Gumbo Pages. This is the recipe that I use when I make red gravy. It’s delicious on anything that red sauce is good for. Here is a link to his recipe: Chuck Taggart's New Orleans Red Gravy
Ingredients:
1/2 cup good quality extra-virgin olive oil
10-15 cloves garlic, sliced in half lengthwise (if you're from New Orleans, you'll say "toes" of garlic)
3 bay leaves
1 cup finely chopped onion
3 cups chicken stock or vegetable stock
3 cups canned tomato sauce
6 ounces tomato paste (one small can)
1-2 tablespoons minced fresh garlic
2 teaspoons salt
1-2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon minced fresh sweet basil (or 1 teaspoon dried)
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme (or 1 teaspoon dried)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper (freshly ground, if possible)
Place the olive oil, sliced garlic cloves, and 2 of the bay leaves in a 2-quart saucepan. Brown garlic on both sides over medium heat, about 2 to 3 minutes, stirring often. Remove garlic from pan. Add the onions to the pan and sauté over medium-low heat until onion edges start to brown (DON'T burn it!), about 6 to 8 minutes, stirring frequently. You're caramelizing here, not burning.
Add the tomato paste and stir to coat the onions. Cook the tomato paste with the onions until the color deepens slightly to a red mahogany color. Add the remaining bay leaf and all other ingredients. Bring to a simmer; reduce heat if necessary to maintain a very low simmer and cook for about one hour, stirring occasionally. Remove the bay leaves before serving.
YIELD: About 6 cups
I meant to have this post finished before Christmas, but better late than never, right?
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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