milk and serial. serial and milk.

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charles dickens did it.  so did arthur conan doyle…and he was knighted.  so why can’t i count myself in the ranks of those who publish serially?  so here goes.  you may have read parts of the beginning or the end among the posts of this venerable little site, but now you’ll have the whole megillah at your fingertips.

we’ll start at the very beginning.  it’s a very good place to start.

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Bill Buford was a staff writer and former fiction editor at the New Yorker Magazine before he quit his job to work as a prep cook at Mario Batali’s Manhattan restaurant.  Julia Child was a government employee and an admittedly awful cook when she enrolled in Paris’ Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.  Steve Cook was a Wharton graduate working in finance when he left New York to open a restaurant in West Philadelphia.  And today I am a senior at Penn, an amateur foodie with medical school in my future, when I walk into Cook’s kitchen at Marigold and pick up a chef’s knife.
It’s a rainy Friday afternoon in early October.  I quickly change out of my street clothes and into the black and white dress code of the kitchen: black shoes, black pants, white chef’s coat, white apron, two white kitchen towels tucked into my waistband.  Erin and Eric are there when I arrive at noon and work is well underway.  There’s a pile of onions on the counter—my task is clear.  Erin hands me a paring knife, but first I am upfront with my inexperience.  In my chef’s whites I may look the part, but in these days of the Food Network and Iron Chef marathons, foodies like me are a dime a dozen.  Erin grabs an onion, cores the top, peels off the skin in one shot, and passes the knife to me to start on my task.  She is silent.  Intent on mimicking her flawless knife skills on the fifteen pounds of Vidalia onions in front of me I’m oblivious as Luke walks in a few minutes later.  He sneaks downstairs to dry off from the rain and grab his equipment before I have a chance to introduce myself.

…

Steve Cook moved back to Philadelphia with no prior restaurant experience in 2004 and opened Marigold Kitchen, a contemporary B.Y.O.B. in West Philadelphia with a Middle Eastern twist.  Philadelphia was the natural choice for this Penn grad.  Smaller than New York, the risks are somewhat lower here.  None of Marigold’s chefs are native to Philadelphia, though they all love the food scene here.  It’s user friendly, I overhear once in the kitchen.  “But people in Philadelphia also aren’t as daring as those in New York,” counters another.  The chefs here hope to change that.

Cook was working in finance in New York and admits that things were going really well.  But notwithstanding the implicit risks of opening a restaurant he knew he’d be happier in the kitchen.  Cook is a Wharton man.  He knows the stats.  Sixty-one percent of independently owned restaurants close in the first three years.  But, for those who succeed, the restaurant industry brings in 1.4 billion dollars in sales.  Daily.  So Cook’s not taking any risks with the current Marigold line-up.

His formula is simple: young chefs, new flavors, good food.  Cook served as Marigold’s executive chef himself for almost two years before hiring Mike Solomonov to take his place in the kitchen last spring.  First at Striped Bass and then Vetri, Mike learned from Philadelphia’s best before earning a stage of his own.  Mike’s two previous posts were both named as Gourmet Magazine’s top fifty restaurants in America in September.  And just a few weeks later, after being named the city’s best new chef by Philadelphia Magazine, Mike won Marigold a spot in Bon Appétit’s directory of the region’s best restaurants.

Luke joined the Marigold team in July.  He and Mike had worked together at Striped Bass, Luke’s first restaurant job in Philadelphia.  He is now the sous-chef at Marigold, filling in when Mike’s not around, setting the tone in the kitchen.  Luke confesses that he and Mike have different techniques, as all chefs do.  Under Mike’s supervision the mantra at Marigold is ‘the braise’—slowly cooking meat or vegetables in liquid.  In Mike’s case he’s braising the pork loin and beef short ribs entrées, the artichoke side dish, and duck breasts.  Luke is still learning and he’ll have plenty of time to develop a theme of his own.

Erin and Eric round off the current roster of chefs.  Eric is a master of cold prep—salads, cold appetizers, cheese—and desserts.  At thirty-five, Erin is the oldest in the kitchen and is the only woman.  She’s a line cook now, but Luke is quick to add that she’s expanding her repertoire as the resident butcher at Marigold.  Erin handles all the protein: fish, poultry, and meat.  She checks the orders as they arrive, sends them back when they don’t meet her standards.  “It’s a tough job,” Luke admits.  “She has to learn how to judge quality by smell, appearance.  And she has to weigh her options.”  You don’t send an order back on a Friday afternoon when there’s no chance of getting another shipment before the weekend.  It takes skill to work with what you’ve got.

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