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A bemedaled chef joins two Oscar winners to stage a sustainable SRP New England restaurant.
Chris Styler reports.
Wheeling through downtown Westport, Connecticut, on a warm day in fall, the flaming orange sugar maples set against a crystalline blue sky looked more like a movie set than real life. Or, given my destination, perhaps I should say stage set. I was on my way to pay Michel Nischan a visit at the newly opened restaurant, Dressing Room. I have known Nischan since I had written about him for these pages during his stint at Heartbeat, the Myriad Restaurant Group's healthy but haute restaurant in the W hotel on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue. Since then, Nischan has been around, to say the least, penning cookbooks (the Oprah-ignited, James Beard-awarded Taste: Pure and Simple and Homegrown: Pure and Simple), and, as ongoing development consultant to Taj Luxury Hotels, Resorts and Palaces in the spring of 2006, opening a restaurant named Pure in Mumbai, India, about as far from Westport as a person can get.
Dressing Room, which then had been open for all of three weeks, is housed in a separate building adjacent to the historically rich Westport Country Playhouse, where generations of top-billed actors and performers have numbered everyone from Paul Robeson and Ethel Barrymore to Liza Minnelli and Christopher Plummer. When in 2000 Joanne Woodward was named artistic director of the Playhouse, she and husband Paul Newman (hence the double entendre lurking in "Dressing" Room) spearheaded a massive fund-raising effort to restore the sporadically neglected playhouse. The $30 million raised was used to pay off the mortgage, refurbish the theater, add new lighting, electrical and sound capabilities, and construct a flying stage and orchestra pit to boot. The restaurant, which, since its inception in the 1950s, has endured more bad stretches than good, would later undergo a thorough overhaul, which included a fresh coat of exterior paint in a rather offbeat, but not unpleasing, shade of green (think gigantic squared-off Martini garnish).
The coming together of the Illinois-born chef with the French sounding name and a pair of bona fide Oscar-winning celebrities is not as random as it may at first appear. Nischan and the Newmans' daughter Nell, who runs Newman's Own line of organic food products, had long crossed paths in pursuit of their mutual interest in—more accurately passion for—sustainable and organic agriculture. It was Nell who first suggested to Nischan that he talk to her father about the Playhouse restaurant project. The first meeting went swimmingly, according to Nischan. "We hit it off immediately. We were talking about the same thing, great burgers and meat loaf in a white tablecloth setting." What started as advice volunteered by Nischan turned into a job offered by Newman. After a little hesitation, Nischan consented. (As he now recalls, "My wife, Lori, said, 'Why don't you take it? This will be the first time you will work with someone who shares your goals, someone you don't have to convince.'")
Nischan's short-term goals at Dressing Room have been to create lunch and dinner menus ("The return of the Great American Breakfast is soon to come"), using as many locally raised, organic products as possible, and to seek out more regional practitioners of sustainable farming methods. Longer-term goals are to integrate that kind of thinking and products into local community life to which end the restaurant/theater's parking lot plays host to a farmers' market, a runaway hit from the day it opened last spring.
Katherine Dyer's dual duties as both manager of the farmers' market and assistant general manager of the restaurant mirror nicely the synergy Nischan and his team are striving to create. The fledgling market's success astounds her. "I look around here on a good day and see hundreds of people shopping, actually having conversations with the people who produce their food." Among the first year's participants in the market were Ox Hollow Farm (eggs and pasture-raised beef and pork, all antibiotic and hormone free), Sankows Beaver Brook Farm (sheep's and cow's milk cheeses), and Star Light Gardens (micro greens). This year the market will stay open from late May through November and is expected to draw more participants. Many of these farmers and other food producers supply the restaurant with everything from hydroponic lettuce and herbs to organic cheeses, honeys, and maple syrup. John Barricelli, whose SoNo Baking Company and Café in nearby South Norwalk, treasures the one-on-one contact with customers and the exposure it has brought him. "We do phenomenally well at these markets," he relates. "We get customers from the market for the bakery, our catering business, even some restaurant business." That includes Dressing Room, one of SoNo's newest clients.
Nischan has also struck up a relationship with the local school system to introduce a program akin to Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard project in Berkeley, California. The focal point will be Westport's Staples High School, which recently introduced a new culinary program of restaurant trade-school level cooking classes that quickly incited an oversubscription of more than 200 students. Nischan sees the school's horticulture club and brand-new greenhouse as one future food source for the culinary program, as he does Westport's two acre community garden, tended by dedicated townspeople. He would like some of the high school's students to be a source of inspiration as well: Nischan will explain family farms, sustainable agriculture, and the importance of responsibly grown food in everyday life to high school students. Those students would then work with younger children on the same issues, both in and out of the garden. "High school students are a good place to start," Nischan says, explaining his trickle-down theory. "They're beginning to be socially and politically aware. I can reach them and they, in turn, can reach younger kids. To a fourth grader, I'm not cool. But to a fourth grader, a ninth grader is a rock star."
Nischan is the first to acknowledge the difficulties inherent in running a restaurant like his in a region with a five month growing season. "You know, I'm committed to trying as hard as I can to get the most organic and local ingredients, but there are limits," he admits. "I'm not part of the 'all-or-nothing' wing of the organic movement. I think that hard approach puts people off. We plan to bring people along gently, because when you offer people all or nothing in a situation like this, they will most likely choose nothing." Ever the optimist, Nischan was looking forward to the lean Connecticut winter months, expressing his enthusiasm for root vegetables like burdock and salsify and other staples of the New England winter table. "But we'll give them their soft greens from local hothouses, too," he smiles.
While I sat talking with Nischan in the front room of the restaurant, Dyer brought in Perry Hack of Two Guys from Woodbridge Farms, brandishing an array of pea shoots and mixed lettuces. While Hack hadn't participated in the market last season, this year he'll offer a range of certified organic greenhouse hydroponics. As Nischan and Hack continued to figure out how to get goods from greenhouse to table, Dyer echoed Nischan's pragmatic outlook. "Right now, we're featuring mostly organic along with some conventional farmers in the market. We're trying to make it as appealing to people as possible. I'm from California, so I know what happens when farmers and chefs have the chance to work together. I think it will naturally trend toward more and more organic produce in the market, and more of that will end up on the menu. Let's put it this way: I'd like to see a lot more farmers' names on the menu."
In line with the overall theme of sustainability, Dressing Room has made use of virtually all of the old kitchen equipment (painstakingly refurbished by Nischan and crew). Solid workhorses, like a DCS six-burner range and a Montague 10-burner range with ovens, which form the backbone of the hot line, and a simple Blodgett tabletop convection oven in the pastry station reflect a certain Yankee sensibility, befitting the restaurant's locale. The J&R rotisserie/char-broiler combines infrared heat for the rotisserie section with a wood-burning grill that is stoked and coddled all day long to radiate the perfect heat throughout service.
An aura of spare, quasi-Nordic modernity suffuses the dining room, where recycled materials add rustic charm. Walls were redone with what's referred to as "Bucky boards," named for Newman's race-circuit buddy, Bucky Watkins, whose South Carolina business amasses boards from barn walls and floors and sells them to businesses interested in a one-of-a-kind look. The smooth, pale gold floors—which contrast beautifully with the coarse-textured, darker Bucky boards—were reclaimed from New England shipyards. Old fruit and vegetable crates, mounted on the wood-covered walls, make attractive and practical shelves. Hand-hewn stone, culled from a local quarry and artisanally laid, make the fireplace in the corner of the front dining room/bar room a thing of beauty.
"We'd like to think that our cooking reflects what would have become of classic dishes had they stayed in the hands of artisans," Nischan says, summing up the kitchen philosophy. Dyer mentioned that the printed menu already reflects a one-on-one connection with the places and people who provide the food for Dressing Room. Dishes with names like "Hook and Line Caught Chatham Cod," "Berkshire Pig," and "Newman Says, 'Use a Spoon' Salad" let diners know that, even if the issues at hand and the cooking are serious, this is not a place for lofty attitude. If the idea of "Creamy Ancient Farro—Kinda Like Risotto" hadn't swayed me, I would have ordered it anyway just because of the description. How many times will I ever see the words "creamy," "ancient," and "kinda" all on one line, let alone on a menu? And not a lot of arm-twisting would be needed for me to order the baked beans with quince and pork belly or the roasted beet salad with local cheeses, raspberry vinegar, and argan oil vinaigrette.
Nischan's hydrogen-powered crew could be doing their collective or individual thing in just about any venue they chose. But they aren't. They're at Dressing Room because they, like Nischan and the Newmans, believe in the vision. In a world where culinary buzzwords are tossed around like hydroponic greens in an eco-friendly salad bowl, Nischan and some high-profile partners are putting their sustainably grown, organic burdock right where their mouths are.
