eat this lens

cover story: olivia and edible austin

When I was assigned to shoot Olivia as the first restaurant for my new Back of the House feature in Edible Austin, the first order of business was to have dinner there and get a feeling for what kind of restaurant it was. We arrived early for drinks and to make introductions with Executive Chef/Owner James Holmes and his staff since my assignment was to begin the next day.

Olivia is newish to the Austin restaurant scene being only a year or so old, and was recently named as a Top Ten New Restaurant by Bon Appetit.

Chef Holmes and crew approach their menu with total focus on seasonality, sourcing the best local ingredients from area farms – Richardson Farms, Loncito’s Lamb, Boggy Creek Farm, Tecolote Farm, Rain Lily Farm and Green Gate Farms among them – creating simply elegant dishes on a menu that changes almost daily.

On the night that we dined one of those dishes included lamb fries, causing a simultaneous reaction from both my wife and I that we must have an order of them before anything else!

“Do they taste like chicken?”

Lamb fries are not really fries. In reality, they are the testicles of a lamb. And done well they are delicious!
Having never seen them on another menu, my only experience with eating lamb fries has been at Pete’s Place – the venerable Italian-American restaurant in Krebs, Oklahoma – where I’d been eating them since I was a boy.
Sliced thin and lightly fried with a dusting of Parmesan cheese and a squeeze of lemon juice, the lamb fries on Pete’s menu have a very mild lamb flavor, with a delicate and juicy meat. To say they tasted like chicken would be completely inaccurate but the flavor is mild enough that if you are trying to convince a ten year-old boy (or other lamb fry virgin) into eating them for the first time, saying that wouldn’t be out of place!

When Olivia’s little nuggets arrived at our table we were all set for a flavor explosion, each of us greedily grabbing one for a quick dip in the house-made mustard vinaigrette served along side on their way to our mouth. Instead we got hit with a blast of salt that overpowered the light, airy and delicately fried lamb. Not to be deterred, we tried another. Then another. Then we stopped. It was clear that this batch of lamb fries was over-salted and we sent them back.

Quite a inauspicious start to working together for the next week – sending back food to the chef and his kitchen you’ve been assigned to photograph!

However, the rest of our meal was spectacular – green gazpacho soup with cucumber melon and hint of jalapeno; smokey grilled corn on the cob from Richardson Farms; PEI mussels cooked in Lone Star beer with housemade sausage, garden peppers and grilled foccacia to soak up all the broth; a duck and mushroom risotto with chunks of smoked duck ham, cremini, oyster and portabella mushrooms; and perfectly cooked filet with foie gras. The service was impeccable and the evening was amazing. Stuffed and sated I was well nourished and educated on what was to come.

A lamb fried degree of separation.

James and I had arranged to meet at the restaurant the following morning. When I arrived he was already there loading large coolers in the back of his well-traveled pickup getting ready for our trip to Sunset Valley Farmers Market where we’d be picking up pork from Richardson Farms and possibly some lamb from Loncito Cartwright.
As we made our way into traffic, he said, “Man, I’m really sorry about those lamb fries last night. You were right, they were too salty.”

With that I launched into my story of lamb fries and how I was so excited because this place near where I went to high school in Oklahoma had the best lamb fries and we’d never seen ‘em on another menu, when he interrupted me with, “wait, you’re not talking about Pete’s Place are you?!”

Turns out his roommate in college graduated a year before me in high school and was a guy I knew well back in those days as our girlfriends had been close friends. Amazed by our connection, we also discovered that a close business partner of his father was also a close family friend of mine, and had spent a lot of time in McAlester. He had also eaten at Pete’s many times. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “Pete’s is why I have lamb fries on my menu.”

A simple and complex thing.

The idea for the story came to me while I was flipping through a food magazine and watching Top Chef simultaneously. As I thumbed the pages of the magazine it occurred to me that chefs (or cooks) are never really featured in their element. Usually a chef is shown in portrait or shots of their finished dishes, and aside from maybe Saveur, they are never shown in the back of the house performing their craft.

With massively popular “reality” shows like Top Chef, Iron Chef or Hell’s Kitchen I thought that fans of both food tv and magazines would love seeing a photo essay of chefs at work in the kitchen. The idea of focusing on chefs or restaurants that were sourcing a majority of their menu as locally as possibly was also appealing as a way to possibly enlighten readers about the benefits of eating as locally as they can.

I spent a week with the Olivia staff, following them to the markets, hanging out in the restaurant when Morgan made fresh pasta or Jacob worked on the housemade charcuterie. And I was there for service on a busy Friday night, behind the line alongside them as they worked the stoves, creating dish after dish of simple, gorgeous food.
The kitchen at Olivia is not big – stoves and burners and a grill line the back wall with a prep counter and fridges running the frontside just under the pass. What struck me as interesting was there were no warming lights in the pass. This makes for an interesting view from the kitchen out into the open dining room. Above the pass on the kitchen side are bookshelves lined with cookbooks.

During one of the shoots James pulled down several of the cookbooks, talking about inspirations gleaned from the recipes, and about his philosophy on food. Reaching for his well-thumbed copy of Simple French Food by Richard Olney, he instinctively turned to a section scribbled with notes and underlined text, pointing to this passage:
“Simplicity – no doubt – is a complex thing. And the complexity of conceiving the larger symphony, a simple menu, must receive a bow of respect…”

On the wall in the server area just on the other side of the kitchen hangs a portrait of the venerable Texas country outlaws, Waylon & Willie, passed down from Holmes’ grandfather, and the irony of their sly grins isn’t lost on Holmes. Their music, like the quote from Olney, is simple but with a sophistication and complexity not readily acknowledge. So is the food that Olivia puts out. The fresh local ingredients bely their sophisticated preparations to appear as a simple plate of food, masking the skill and craft used in their creation.

The thrill that’ll get you when you get your picture…

Working in a commercial restaurant kitchen is a delicate ballet of chaos and precision. Usually crammed in too small spaces, chefs and line cooks typically work in a fevered focus, producing dish after dish. Toss a photographer into that mix and it could be recipe for disaster.
In my case, I have spent enough time working in restaurant kitchens that I know the movements and the language to blend in. That helps when your camera hovers next to their ear, shooting over their shoulder, perched atop a milk crate in the middle of the line to get a bird’s eye view, or crouching on the floor peeking in blazing hot ovens. I discovered that photographing cooks during a dinner rush can be just as exhilarating as being one of them. At the end of the shift I too was covered in sweat and grease and smelled like a kitchen but flush with the satisfaction that comes after making it through the other side of a busy dinner rush.

The pleasure of eating some of the best of what Austin’s food scene has to offer, of making new friends, of having my work featured on the cover of Edible Austin, all made this assignment an amazing experience. James and his crew were gracious and welcoming from the beginning and made it so easy for me to capture them in their element performing their brilliant craft. On my last night there I ordered the lamb fries again along with a host of other dishes. The lamb fries came out perfect – light and airy with a crisp texture giving way to the juicy meat inside and balanced perfectly with the right amount of seasoning. Simplicity, no doubt, is a complex thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under back of house, local food and tagged with back of house, boggy creek farm, bon appetit, eddy award, edible austin, green gate farms, lamb fries, loncito cartwright, lone star beer, olivia, pete's place, rain lily farm, richardson farms, tecolote farm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.