Sepia's interior. Photo from official website. Sepia restaurant in Chicago's West Loop is a testament to the success that can come from having a vision and sticking to it. While the idea of having one foot in the past and one foot in the future sounds like a bad tag line for a time-travel company, this is precisely the thing that makes Sepia, now more than a year old, still one of Chicago's hottest restaurants. Owner Emmanuel Nony has stuck to his guns and successfully melded mod and old, whether it's in the interior design featuring crystal chandeliers shaded by spacey screens or the website theme music, which features a trip-hop remix of Billie Holiday crooning "God Bless the Child."...
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“That’s a fat ass,” observes sous chef Nick Stefanelli. “That’s what you want," says executive chef Stefano Frigerio, "since the fat melts inside the meat as it’s curing.” So, basically you want a fat ass—for charcuterie. Learn this and other standards on salting, fermenting, aging, grinding, and curing piggy meat in the current issue of Washington City Paper....
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SF Bay Area artisanal charcuterie The Fatted Calf sends out a great email newsletter, worth subscribing to even if you don't live in the area. This week's missive included this nice bit on corned beef: Corned beef isn't exactly from Ireland but neither was St. Patrick. It turns out that this briny beef specialty, called "corned" because the grains of salt used for preservation resembled little kernels, gained popularity in the ghettos of New York's lower East Side where recent Irish immigrants were searching for a substitute for their beloved bacon (which they make from Pork Loin and not belly). As luck would have it, their Jewish neighbors across the hall were digging into a tasty brisket that fit...
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Veronica of the eponymous Veronica's Test Kitchen recently made the pork belly confit from Michael Rulhman and Brian Polycn's Charcuterie, and boy does it sounds like something I want in my belly RIGHT NOW: " The confit was crispy on the outside, the meat falling apart but it was the fat that held the concentration of flavors derived from all the spices -- a perfect alchemy of complex tastes that explodes with flavor with each bite."...
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