It's not every morning that a Rhodes Scholar asks you if you'd prefer to sit indoors or out and freshens your water glass. But that's what happens when Zeke Emanuel decides to cook breakfast at a pop-up restaurant for four days over two weekends and he enlists a daughter to lend a hand. By the time the fourth and last breakfast is over, next Sunday, each of Emanuel's three daughters, and at least one nephew and niece, will have helped find and bring ingredients, greet guests, and clear tables.
Nearly all of Emanuel's pop-up adventure, in fact, was true to its origins at one of the dinners he likes to invite people over for, from the ingredients obtained from his favorite purveyors at the Dupont Circle farmer's market, to the simple and direct flavors in the dishes he made, which were what you wish you could wake up to any weekend or for that matter weekday—French toast, pancakes and waffles, omelets, fruit salad with granola and yogurt, hash browns, and breakfast sausage, with slightly fancified additions like quail eggs with quinoa and grated tomato.
Like most people's, Emanuel's palate was cultivated by family, curiosity, and cultural background. Breakfast is a meal he believes in as part of family duties and pleasures: His grandfather, a “food-delivery guy,” served him and his brothers breakfast from scratch every day, and that’s what he served his three daughters. He invites friends to breakfast as often as he does to dinner and stands at the waffle iron conversing till guests have finished every quarter. His food, like his conversation, is forthright, thorough, unfussy.
But standing at a kitchen counter and keeping four guests fed isn’t the same as directing a staff of nine cooks and serving 111 on the first morning, and more than that on the second. That took a few months of planning, and enlisting assistants and friends.
“What is this, some kind of George Plimpton thing?” someone at my table asked as we watched Emanuel, his mike clipped to a blue “Breakfast is on the table with Zeke” T-shirt that was part of the gift bag (of course, there was a video crew filming him), take long tweezers to thin slices of compressed honeydew before sprinkling spearmint leaves in fine chiffonade over the top. “A midlife crisis,” his brother Rahm commented to the Chicago Tribune with familial bluntness, though he did lend his brother two children to help serve and clear dishes. (“This is Rahm's standard thing for everything that is unusual,” Zeke explained). Many food people and writers are in fact regularly suspected of wanting to cook in restaurants, though as a longtime restaurant critic I know just how exhausting the work is, and have harbored no such wish. Emanuel is not a normal food person (and he is one: see his articles for the late Atlantic Food Channel here), and he's an Emanuel. So he doesn't shy from challenges—he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, as he remarked in an aside in his article for us about not wanting to live past 75. (And found the whole thing meh, which he didn't add).
When our mutual friend Sara Weiner, originator of the Good Food Awards for artisanal food products, came to his house for dinner and launched into a frequent rant about the lack of any decent breakfast restaurants in Washington, another guest—Jodie McLean, CEO of Edens, the developer of the large collection of artisanal food vendors at Union Market in northeast Washington—challenged him to fix it, however briefly. A restaurant in a space Edens manages called Masseria (named for the stucco farmhouses of the southern Italian region of Puglia) was about to open; Edens and the restaurant's chef-owner, Nicholas Stefanelli, offered to donate the kitchen and dining room, ingredients, cooks, and servers to the three charities the proceeds from the very modest "diner prices" they set for the menu: Martha's Table, the Good Food Awards, and DC Central Kitchen.
Though the breakfast was billed as healthful, they were no haranguing admonitions on the menu and no haranguing table side lectures from the chef, though diners might have expected both. Instead there were enthusiastic recommendations of the ingredients Emanuel “sourced,” both when he would swoop into a table and on printed sheets with the menu, and a blanket prohibition of potatoes (the hash browns were made from grated malanga, a nutty-flavored tuber commonly used in Puerto Rico and Cuba and a complex rather than simple carbohydrate). His kitchen is kosher and though he eats everything on his adventurous trips to cutting-edge restaurant, he has no taste for pork, so bacon is duck and sausage is lamb, from Red Apron Butchery.
The restaurant, which had its first family-and-friends dinner the night before Emanuel’s first pop-up breakfast, is airy and attractive, with a large patio and outdoor lounge. It’s of a piece with the almost terrifyingly upscale collection of food boutiques in the new Union Market, which is incongruously beside the old wholesale market, where neighborhood families patiently line up to have wholesale meat and fish, mostly from huge unlabeled freezer chests, cut to order at a friendly, thronged butcher whose only name we could find was “Union Market.”
The Masseria cooks and servers plunged into the Emanuel experiment with good cheer and efficiency. The first-day results, as you might expect, were slightly bumpy, but with the satisfactions you get when a father cooks you breakfast (and with few complaints, as most of the diners were family and friends too). A father, that is, who shops with care. Berries with a pitcher of just-pourable honey yogurt from Clear Spring Creamery demonstrated the importance of sourcing: I scraped the bottom of the yogurt pitcher with a spoon. Blueberry pancakes were so light yet rich-tasting that I suspected sour cream in the batter, but the recipe for “Zeke's super fast blueberry pancakes” provided in the goodie bag (there is one, PC burlap on PC-brown paper) specifies just flour, egg, milk, and a modest amount of canola oil—though the last step does say “smother in butter and maple syrup.” And there were better-than-proficient omelets, with lacy exteriors folded over sauteed oyster and hen of the wood mushrooms, a large deep orange-yolked soft-boiled egg the kitchen managed to time so the yolk was almost cooked but still liquid, and superior French toast.
Dreamy French toast, in fact. As soon as we sat down, Emanuel arrived at the table, announced “You have to try everything on the menu” (by the time I left, three hours later, I had, much of it cadged from unsuspecting diners' plates with coerced permission), and plunked down a plate of three thick, mottled-brown slices of raisin challah with a half white peach sauteed in saba, grape juice cooked down to a syrup, in the middle. “Wait for the syrup!” he barked (his standard form of address). “It's special.” It had indeed been fetched on a New Hampshire farm by his daughter Gabrielle, who loaded a car with plastic gallons of it.
But the French toast, which in an informal survey was everyone's favorite, was special too. As is almost never the case and certainly not with restaurant French toast, the egg-milk mixture had thoroughly soaked through the challah, from Lyon Bakery, which has a stall at Union Market, but not left too long to get soggy. So the sauteed slices had the milky freshness and souffle-like texture inside you hope for in fresh-out-of-the-oven bread pudding but seldom get, and crisped crust. I’ll be hoping for that French toast for a long time. There were no desserts, but the gift bag contained a tiny square of the chocolate Emanuel recommends as part of a daily healthful diet, from Askinosie Chocolate, a chocolate-maker in Springfield, Missouri that teaches underserved high-school students how to make chocolate and brings them on trips to African cacao farms, and which won its second Good Food Awards in 2014, when Emanuel was master of ceremonies.
It’s not too late to book for the farewell engagement, next Saturday and Sunday mornings (you can call Masseria at 202 608 1330 for reservations). And next week the challah for the French toast will be handmade and shipped from Boston by Marc Garnick, who taught Emanuel oncology at Harvard and is, he says, the best baker he knows. The Zeke show, at close range or far, is always entertaining. And for two more days it comes with the best breakfast in Washington.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/breakfast-with-zeke/399638/
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