How to Name a Restaurant
At How to Cook a Wolf, Ethan Stowell delivers simple plates, simply.
Except for maybe a stone cottage with dirt floors and fluttering curtains on the shore of Lake Geneva, it would be hard to come up with a more fitting shrine to M. F. K. Fisher’s Old World earthiness than this. Perhaps, as Stowell affirms, he didn’t intend it. Perhaps his menu didn’t intend it either—but there is no escaping the fact that dinner at Wolf embodies the very pleasure Fisher spent her career extolling: Food too fresh and fine to require adornment.
No chef in town is as enamored of a dish of Castelvetrano olives; a soft-boiled egg with silky anchovy mayonnaise; a plate of ahi presented simply and stunningly in the chilies and lime that cured it. In that first meal, after a round of Negronis woke up our 5:30 appetites, we reveled in bowls of trofie pasta, intensely brightened with parsley-walnut pesto and Pecorino Toscano; orecchiette pasta with cauliflower, screaming with garlic and anchovies; squid salad, pocked with Controne beans and shallots, brisk with breezes of chlorophyll and brine.
Wolf’s chef, Union and Tavolàta alum Ryan Weed, sears scallops just to caramel, places them atop a schmear of artichoke puree, then dots them with Taggiasca olives; he fans thick slices of blush-perfect duck across a plate with beets, onions, and mandarin oranges and calls it a salad. (It’s a sensational one.) This is about as wacky as Wolf gets. These guys are fond of big European flavors and the minimalist treatments to showcase them: the tuna and capers in the garganelli, the garlicky clams in a winey linguine. “But anyone can make clam linguine!” cried one of my tablemates, mistakenly conflating innovation with prowess. Wolf is not an innovator; it simply does simple plates beautifully. In that way it’s like an Italian version of Madrona’s Crémant, where the French classics are interpreted in such exemplary ways that their novelty is their very lack of novelty.
If the wolf isn’t exactly at the door, he may lately have been spotted about the neighborhood.
Besides—not everyone can make clam linguine. One of the glories of Wolf is that everything we tasted was executed to a turn. (Almost everything: Stuffed quail—$16, the most expensive item on the menu that evening—was tasty but overcooked.) There’s an easy fluidity between the front and the back of the house here, as there is in all of Stowell’s restaurants, which means the servers stay in close contact with the chefs and are thus infected with the love of the food. To a person, the staff hit that sweet spot of low-key graciousness and invisible efficiency. Indeed, professional evenhandedness compels me to admit that midway through my second dinner I realized with a thwack of chagrin that this focused, foodcentric service may trace directly to Wolf’s maddening refusal to accept reservations. Nobody’s stressing out a seating chart. Nobody’s turning a table.
Things feel, I’ve got to admit it, relaxed. In Union, Stowell gave us the serious downtown foodie destination; in Tavolàta, the festive drop-in dinner party. In How to Cook a Wolf, the latest in his ongoing survey of the ways we eat out, he’s given us a casual, affordable, simple home away from home. It was a fitting match to the zeitgeist of 1942; it’s a perfect one in 2008.
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Published: April 2008
