Bone Appetite
Posted on July 1, 2010 – 7:51 AM | by OldManFoster
By Becky Grunewald photos by Scott Duncan
It started with the bone marrow: a dramatic dish that snapped me to attention. Two caveman-sized beef shanks split in half, resting on a bed of rock salt, topped with rough-chopped parsley and capers, piled with toast points for slathering. This dish – rustic yet refined – was served in the luxurious belly of Ella restaurant. It was followed by a crisp skate wing bathed in butter, whimsically sprinkled with celery leaves and brought to the table in a copper tray whose color echoed the soft metallics of the recessed lighting. This entrée was paired by the sommelier with a fresh and peppery Austrian gruner veltiner. This was the most surprising and elegant meal I’d had in some time.
Apparently, I was not the only one to take notice. In recent weeks writers for the Sacramento Bee, Sactown Magazine, and the Sacramento News and Review have all raved about this dish. Kelly McCown, Ella’s new executive chef, has unwittingly kicked off a trend. It may not be as dramatic as giant roasted bones, but Sommelier Joe Vaccaro, has created a wine list for Ella that is no less buzz-worthy.
The two men represent a combined 40 years’ experience in the food industry. Vaccaro worked in restaurants in San Diego to put himself through school and earned a business degree with a focus in information systems. He said, “I went to work for two years in technology and came running back. I hated living in a cube. It drove me nuts. Not being able to talk food and wine with anyone drove me nuts. This is what I love. I came running back.”
Vaccaro eventually moved to San Francisco to work at the (recently) Michelin-starred Fifth Floor restaurant. He had to start from square one:
“I thought I knew a lot about wine. I started to work at The Fifth Floor and realized I knew nothing about wine so it was a humbling first step… I went from 15 years experience to being a food runner when I moved to San Francisco, so to get on the floor I needed to know a lot about wine. I started to study. That was really it…it’s all I really liked to read about. It’s a passion that’s turned into a job so that’s really great.”
Chef Kelly McCown is equally passionate about his vocation. He grew up in San Francisco and had this to say about his path to a culinary career,
“I started as a dishwasher when I was 14. It wasn’t anything I saw myself doing at a young age but after flunking out of some of California’s better higher education institutions, my dad in a very-I don’t want to say threatening-I’ll say suggestive way…grabbed me by the collar and asked me what I was going to do with my life and I pulled out culinary school-don’t ask me where it came from. It ended up being a lucky guess.”
After graduating, Chef Kelly worked in San Francisco, on the Oregon coast, for ten years in Seattle, and most recently, in Napa Valley as executive chef at Francis Ford Coppola’s Rubicon Winery. He was a victim of the recession there but not before he had some good times foraging for mushrooms with Ford Coppola’s wife, Eleanor. He hasn’t foraged in Sacramento yet (somebody needs to introduce this guy to Hank Shaw!) but he says that his new proximity to farmland compensates for the lack of wild ingredients.
McCown left the Rubicon with a “nice severance package” but decided to start looking for work right away. He interviewed with the Selland family which was “an interesting process” and said, “they gave me pretty much carte blanche in a beautiful room and a great space and so I thought we could do nice things. So that’s kind of what brought me here.”
Vaccaro moved to Sacramento because his wife is a native and they wanted to be closer to family. He reminisced, “I actually talked to Josh (Selland) the first week I moved here and he told me about the restaurant but it was a few months off and I couldn’t wait that long. I said when you’re closer to opening if the position’s still open give me a call and let’s talk again and he did. So I jumped on it.”
He echoed Chef Kelly’s assertion that the Selland family had given him carte blanche, saying, “They’ve been very hands-off. This is a really unique opportunity to be able to build the wine program from scratch. I know people who have done this job for a long time who have never gotten to write a wine list…the only direction they gave me was do something that’s not being done here. After looking around I kind of interpreted that as being a little more Old World focused-but being so close to the Capitol you have to have a strong California presence. So that’s where we are, we’re about 60/40. I mean my heart is in Old World wines. That’s what I love. There are great California wines but that’s what I really love.”
More specifically, his favorite wines include, “German riesling…Alsatian riesling as well. Bubbles-any sparkling wine, and I’m a burgundy freak. I can’t afford to drink red burgundy all the time but that’s always a special occasion when I have a bottle at home that we’re ready to crack.” I commended him on his well-curated beer list and he said simply, “I just love beer. Especially after tasting wine and talking wine all night at the end of the night I want a beer.”
Chef Kelly’s personal taste in food was shaped by the abundance of Japanese restaurants in the Seattle area. He called himself a “sushi hound” and said that on any Monday night you can find him sitting at the sushi bar at Kru. He expressed admiration for what Chef Billy Ngo is trying to accomplish, saying “Some of it isn’t for everybody. Not everybody is going to run in there and eat ankimo (monkfish liver). But on the other hand, he’s doing it. There are some solid people in this town, they just need a shot at it.” Chef Ngo is also riding the bone marrow wave-he introduced a marrow dish at his newest venture, Red Lotus.
I asked Chef Kelly about the now-famous bone marrow dish and he seemed a bit bemused by all the fuss. He feels that the diners in Sacramento have been “vastly underestimated” and in addition to the bone marrow, he has introduced other challenging ingredients such as shad roe, calves’ liver, veal kidneys, and even a lamb’s tongue salad. He said that when he first interviewed that Sacramento reminded him “a little bit of Seattle when I first moved up there. The culinary scene was still a little fledgling and now you look at it and it’s a nationally regarded food town. I thought there was a lot of opportunity here…”
Vaccaro has found Sacramentan’s tastes to be similarly malleable, saying, “The folks in this town have really taken to what we’re trying to do here and they’ll take directions and suggestions a lot more than I had anticipated when I first moved here. That’s been a really pleasant surprise.”
We can all look forward to having our palates challenged and educated by these two visionaries in the years to come.
Tags: Becky Grunewald, Ella, Joe vaccaro, Kelly McCown, Scott Duncan