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EASTERN NOT - SO - STANDARD
An offal experience with Chef Marco Suarez
By CHRISTINE LIU
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At the bar at Eastern Standard, I partake in a platter of three meaty slabs—head cheese and sheep tongue terrine, rabbit liver paté, country rabbit terrine wrapped in bacon and stuffed with rabbit tenderloin—followed by a rabbit confit with beet gnocchi, roasted garlic, tomatoes and brown butter vinaigrette. These seasonal (and deliciously daring) plates illustrate the creativity of Executive Chef Marco Suarez, whose cheffing experience includes Tremont 647 and Bouchée. And very soon tonight I am to join him in the kitchen, learning exactly how the magic all happens.
By 10pm, the restaurant has thinned into a grazing murmur; I head towards the back, ready to work. With plenty of stimulation in the kitchen—enormous pots of boiling stock, the tantalizing smell of fried potatoes, Suarez's catchy iPod mix—I pull on an extra white apron and nervously tug on the evening's first of many pairs of latex gloves. From the terrines I tasted earlier on, I knew I'd likely be getting friendly with a bit of variety meats. Very, very friendly, as I was soon about to learn.
"Why don't you dig into the rabbits now?" says a cook among the bustle, and Suarez produces a plastic bin filled with skinless, pinkish whole bunnies. I'm not terribly daunted by the mountain of raw meat, but I couldn't help notice the little mammalian form of each, a crouched mid-run silhouette. "I was cooking them with this Russian chef, and he was convinced they were actually dogs or something," laughs Suarez. "We called them 'bow-wows.'" He hands me a knife—sharp enough to cut through flesh of all kinds, I reason warily—and illustrates in detail the steps of cutting the meat into the parts we want. He flips the limp body over: "First, you want to check inside and remove all the organs—kidneys and liver." Those get plopped into a metal pan for an offal terrine. Then the legs are next: "Nature tells you exactly where to cut," Suarez demonstrates, the knife riding neatly along the rabbit's hip. After most of it is separated by blade, the bone is snapped by hand. The meaty legs are saved for confit, and put in another pile. Then comes the tenderloin: lean cuts on each side of the spine, removed efficiently with blade against bone, preserving each usable bit on these Australian rabbits—about twice the price per pound of prized Blue Foot chicken. Finally the front legs ("kinda like rabbit wings," Suarez concedes), taut with muscle fibers, are scraped of their meat to be thrown in a terrine. Whatever's left—bones and delicious cartilage—goes off to make rabbit stock. I work steadily on my bunny, making piles of parts, while chef Suarez takes his blade to a few.
Next thing I know, my cutting board is flipped, and a surprise plunks down: a sheep's head complete with eyeballs, sharp teeth and lolling tongue. My pulse picks up a bit, but I want to keep a cool front—one that promptly ends when Suarez takes me along an eyeball-removing lesson, and I let escape a series of squirmy squeals. "Sheep's heads are weird," Suarez declares, sawing through the locked jaw. "Once I found a bone I never knew before." It's my turn to try, and I do my best to cut out the tongue (exposing tiny sweetbreads hanging in the throat) and take five agonizing minutes gouging out eyeballs with a knife and optic-nerve-cutting scissors. Though everyone's working, the banter is loose and silly, bottles of beer enjoyed in the late hour. "Eyeball, eyeball," we crow at the successful pluck, and the gelatinous orbs are plunked unceremoniously in a plastic bucket. They dare me to swallow one ("it's a rite of passage, really"), and I stall for time; meanwhile, a crew member plays puppeteer with another sheep's head, I'm given a mint-flourished whiskey smash, and in the name of anatomical exploration sous chef Jason Heard takes a cleaver to expose the brains. "Stand back; shit's gonna fly," he warns. After a good few whacks, the neural tissue comes out for inspection. It's pink, wet and kind of cute.
"Wanna pull a pig's head apart?" the chefs ask. I pull on another pair of gloves, scribbling in my blood-speckled notebook: hell yes, I'm ready. Boiled for a while, the pig head—complete with snout and ears—produces chunks of tender flesh and random delicious fodder for head cheese. "Stick your finger in the eye-socket, the meat will come out another part of the skull," Heard suggests. With instruction, I work my hands through the pile, discarding excess fat, skin and bone. I'm secretly thrilled that I've peeled off a face.
"It's an interesting art, a dying art," says Suarez of his kitchen's painstaking process of house-made sausages, terrines, and the like. "Charcuterie is great no matter what's in it. Think about the time going into it; each item takes from four hours to three days to make. It's truly detail oriented." Continuing, he adds, "Offal is always fun, as well as steak tartare. Everyone wants to order these three dishes, which cover the level of talent that goes on in the kitchen."
But this dedicated chef, who's taken only four days off in his last three months working at Eastern Standard, can appreciate all sides of comfort food: "When I go home, I'm a ramen noodle kind of person... just something in my stomach before I go to sleep."
EASTERN STANDARD
528 COMM. AVE., KENMORE SQ., BOSTON
617.532.9100
OPEN DAILY 7AM-10:30AM, MON-SAT 11:30AM-2:30PM, SUN 10:30AM-3PM, SUN-THURS 5PM-11PM, FRI-SAT 5PM-12AM
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