A great piece by Jane Black over at Chow focuses on the challenges chefs have serving offal at restaurants. Focusing on Boston’s Eastern Standard, a New American restaurant located just down the street from Fenway Park, there are plenty of challenges in serving pig’s ear to a crowd of Sox fans:
hef Jamie Bissonnette loves offal. He goes through three pigs’ heads a week at his Boston restaurant, Eastern Standard, to make his head cheese terrine. He slips braised sweetbreads into a salad, and serves a crispy pig’s ear with a pork chop.But because the restaurant’s near Fenway Park, on baseball days Red Sox fans “come here because they couldn’t get into [pizza chain] Bertucci’s,” Bissonnette says with a shrug. So the pig’s ear, for example, isn’t exactly mentioned on the menu. “If they say, ‘What’s this?’ and we tell them, 90 percent of the time they just say, ‘Wow. That was good,’” says Bissonnette. “The other 10 percent freak out.”
Here in town, we have a great many offal-obsessed restaurants. We’re big fans of Ansill (pick: sweetbreads) and Gayle (pick: scallops and pork cheeks).
Waiter, There’s a Pig’s Ear in My Soup [Chow]
Ansill [MenuPages]
Ansill [Official Site]
Gayle [MenuPages]
Gayle [Official Site]
