62 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM You can’t be creative.” The title “line cook” is another phrase Sal can do without. “We’re molding them as chefs,” he insists. And when this dream becomes reality? “I want to eat one day with them.” For someone as sensory as Sal, it tracks that his dishes are as aesthetic as they are appetizing. Order a salad and be presented with an entire head of butter lettuce expanding outwards like a flower, its leafy “petals” adorned with blossoms, lardon and a drizzling of Dijon vinaigrette, a chili-sprinkled poached egg at its center. Meanwhile, the king salmon topped with microgreens features a fan of asparagus with pansies perched atop each potato. “We call it a craft, but you can consider it an art form,” Sal says of cooking. For holidays or private events, the tavern’s chef is known to invent entire menus around the lyrics of a song or the lines of a poem. For Valentine’s Day, Sal prepared five courses to represent the different stages of love. The First Date course featured duck atop puff pastry (signifying the many layers of that first conversation) and flourishes of truffle foam (symbolizing the nervous bubbles in your stomach). The Proposal, a surf-and-turf dish of wagyu beef and lobster, portrayed two separate entities coming together as one. And the dessert finale, Together Forever, formed a solar system with bonbon planets orbiting a red velvet cheesecake sun. Sal’s imagination extends to the use of unexpected ingredients. Right now, he’s developing an homage to fried chicken made of duck confit. “‘American’ is a lot of things, right?” he points out. Sal also got inventive with the Menlo Tavern meatball. Though initially inspired by his Italian grandmother, he completely revamped the dish. {food coloring}
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==