Winter Greens with Yuzu Koshu Coconut Vinaigrette

Pop-Up Post Mortem + Discount at Farm to People

I would like to use this platform to air my darkest secret — I have never worked in a restaurant.

I have catered galas, museum dinners, and brand events, but I have never worked the line of the restaurant kitchen (I paid my karmic dues art handling and studio assisting). You might assume that making food en masse would be the same for a party as it would be for a restaurant, but the cadence, the language, and the potholes for the latter are completely unique. I am learning all of this through a series of pop-ups, testing through my recipes for my forthcoming restaurant, opening this Fall at New York City’s New Museum.

Food service, like ballet, is an art of feigned effortlessness. The audience, enchanted by the weightless ballerina on stage, knows full-well that her toes are bleeding inside her pointe shoes. In a restaurant, we want each dish to taste like it was delivered on a lightning bolt of effortless inspiration, but one peek backstage belies the litany of efficiencies and detailed choreography that are required for the show to go on.

A couple of weeks ago in Brooklyn, I host the first in a series of restaurant preview pop-ups. We did 100 covers (if you couldn’t get a reservation, I will post the date for the next one on my Instagram). The hearth was burning, charring Jimmy Nardello Peppers dusted with homemade togarashi and a squeeze of lime. We blackened hamachi collars and bathed them in a warm oil of tingly peppercorns (wild about this relative of the Sichuan peppercorn from Burlap + Barrel), lemongrass, and fried shallot. Salads spanned citrus and feta with a seedy, spiced-up oil, and crunchy greens and winter radish in a yuzu koshu vinaigrette, dusted with crushed macadamia nuts (recipe down below for paid subscribers). The star of the show was the Caraflex cabbage, fermented for three days prior, slathered in salted butter, roasted whole until the outer layers were crispy like parchment and the center melted. And that’s just a snapshot of what I’m working on for the full restaurant menu.

Left: the finished dish of whole roasted cone cabbage with green aji sauce. Right: 3 day lacto-fermented cabbage, getting ready for a slow roast

Today I am sharing one of the recipes from the pop-up, a beach vacation of a salad: Winter Lettuces with Radish and a Yuzu Vinaigrette. It conjured my favorite sort of feedback from diners — quizzical, chin-scratching, the sense that the flavors were eerily familiar but impossible to pin down. It’s bright and fresh, and makes a simple green salad into a memorable moment.

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My food relies on exceptional produce. I’d be nothing without it. I found my soulmate in Farm to People, a home delivery grocery service in NYC doing impeccable sourcing of fish, veg, CA citrus, and Hudson Valley dairy. Miraculously, they agreed to sponsor my pop-ups, insuring that I would never have to cry over my Instacart order again. There’s minimal packaging in each delivery (they only use compostable plastic bags), and it’s easy-peasy to edit your cart and change your delivery date. I can’t endorse them enough. They have single handedly made it bearable for me to live on the East Coast.

Use the code JULIAS82 for $25 off your first Farm to People order.

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Yuzu koshu, the Japanese citrusy chili paste available at every Asian market, is no pantry secret. An essential condiment to ramen, it has been widely adopted by home cooks for a myriad of uses. Yuzu koshu is the lynchpin to this salad dressing, whisked with lime-spiked melted coconut oil. Together, they form a wispy magic shell on contact with the cold lettuce, encasing each leaf with an umami rich, gentle heat, and complex floral notes. I usually make this salad with a mix of sturdy Asian salad greens like tatsoi and mizuna, but it works beautifully with little gems and Napa cabbage too. Keeps in the fridge for up to two weeks, but you will have to reheat it gently to loosen up the coconut oil once its been in the fridge.

Note: When I buy radishes, I immediately scrub them and slice them thin on the mandolin, and store them in a deli container covered in cold water. They will stay extra crunchy and firm this way, and they will be ready for use after a quick pat dry. Change the water out every 5 days.