- Michael Gebert
- Posting the day’s seafood at Nico Osteria.
In the first part of my interview with Erling Wu-Bower, posted yesterday, the Nico Osteria chef and I talked about his Italian approach to food in general and seafood in particular.
Ha. Italian seafood breakfast is tough. We do some crab, a crab sabayon with poached eggs. We do a seafood brunch, for sure, we do seafood towers, we do fish collars. But the breakfast is a little more land based—it’s based on cold cuts, eggs, cotechino sausage. Because everyone should have the option of having tripe for breakfast, we do tripa romana with a fried egg on it.
It’s not as kitschy as it was at Balena. Which is something that I really dislike, kitsch in food. It’s not that I’m overserious about food, I just don’t need to get cute. And pastry is by definition a cuter atmosphere than savory food.
And then we do Roman-style tripe, and we do a pink squid terrine, and we do carbonara with bottarga. It’s awesome. Come check out brunch sometime.
This is the key to my job. I’m sourcing fish, one because it’s the key to the menu, and two because it’s incredibly expensive and you can’t waste it. What we do is we get a report that comes via LA of what will be available this week. And we do a ton of research. I mean, the Internet is an incredible tool. This type of restaurant would not have been possible ten years ago.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and those are great moments because they force you to work as a chef. But also on those days, we may just have six or seven crudos instead of 11. One day I think we were down to five. But that’s who we are. We’re not going to force it.
