Read an Excerpt
Introduction
When we first started talking about a Camino book, the obvious question was how to show people the way we cook at Camino when we know that people do not have giant fireplaces in their homes. Our first solution was to not make a cookbook—to not have any recipes! To make a flip book! Or an art book! Or a zine!
After a little more thought, it seemed clear that the essence of our cooking isn’t ultimately the fire. The fire’s simply a (huge, roaring) means to an end. At its heart, Camino is about an approach to food, one that can happen anywhere. Neither Russ nor I are grandmothers, but fundamentally ours is grandmotherly cooking. Specifically, a frugal grandmother who grew up in the Depression, had plenty of style, kept a sweet vegetable garden, and could shake a good cocktail.
Grandmotherly cooking requires no special equipment. At our own home, we don’t have a fireplace. We don’t even have much of a functional kitchen. It’s tiny, and our stove has a huge crack on the top that makes the burners too slanty to cook anything evenly. Our oven door doesn’t even close all the way. Which is all to say this: Whatever you’ve got at home? Fine.
There was a time when what Russ and I had at home was all I wanted.
Back when Russ worked at Chez Panisse, he had a pretty great situation. Wonderfully talented coworkers. Six weeks vacation. And blissfully humane hours; he surfed four days a week. So when, after twenty-one years, he started to imagine something new,
I wasn’t sure so sure.
It wasn’t the perks I feared we’d miss. It’s that I don’t like compromise and restaurants are full of small compromises. What if our restaurant said no to compromise? No non-organic produce, sure—but also no traditional waiter-busser hierarchies.
No tablecloths. No martini glasses. No machismo. No pizza or burgers or pasta. No pigs from Iowa, even though they’re great, and cheaper. There’d be no flowers on the table, no art on the walls. No bar stools, no Beefeater gin, no kids’ menu. No alcohol with food coloring. (So long, Campari.) No alcohol from the “big two” distributors, for that matter. No encroachment on serendipity.
So what would it be? It’d be us: me, a landscaper whose restaurant experience consisted of eating at restaurants, and Russ, the guy who cooked our dinner over a backyard fire, atop that old rebar we lifted from a vacant lot. All those fancy Chez Panisse meals, but then at home he’d be out in the dirt, cinderblocks blocking the wind and neighbors wondering about the guy roasting goat over a fire.
Camino would be an extension of Russ bent over that fire—and, in a sense, of the Russ from way back, this half-Korean punk rock kid working the Texaco in Southern California. At sixteen he was hitching rides in the old Minutemen van, this barely-a-teen coughing up gas money for passage to whatever punk show was playing that night. What was playing, I suspect, was an escape from the stifling suburban jocks-and-cheerleaders tar pit of high school.
Why am I telling you about my husband’s adolescence? Because you can draw a line from those years straight to the menu at Camino, three-and-a-half decades later. In his sweet and reserved way, he’s the most defiant and strident person I know. (I stopped letting him read Yelp after someone referred to him as Stalin. He’s wanted to top that ever since—Idi Amin maybe.) Restaurants are full of compromises and artifices, and Russ can’t stand those things any more than his teenage self could’ve.
When Russ wasn’t pumping gas and skipping prom, he was learning to cook at a nearby Italian restaurant. So when he decided to move to the Bay Area at twenty-two, a family friend suggested he reach out to some local eateries, including one with a name he couldn’t spell—Chez something. He cold-called, got an interview with David Tanis and talked his way into a 6 a.m. tryout the next morning. He put his head down and cooked a staff breakfast for twenty people in ten minutes. This earned him seven hours of peeling garlic the next day.
It went on like this—two days a week, then a little more. Six bucks an hour. Each night he went home and researched all he’d encountered that day (what in the world did “corked” mean?). He was around grownups—film talk, art talk, wine talk, plus the cracking open of goat heads. He was hooked.
Me? This was not my path. I had not worked in a restaurant. So really my only exposure to restaurants was as the girlfriend of the chef at Chez Panisse. Not the strongest resume, maybe, but it was exposure to a restaurant as a beautiful lifestyle, one where you decide how you want to live and then make the restaurant around that.
Where Russ and I overlapped was simplicity. As talk of this theoretical Camino gathered steam, we envisioned a place that was real and comprehensible and beautiful and honest and good. We’d be that little Italian house in the countryside, with one light on and a little old lady cooking over one pot. She invites you to dinner, you take a seat—and you don’t ask for grilled cheese and a Coke.
So, okay, we’d be a little Stalin-like, too, if Stalin offered a limited, strictly organic menu, cooked over a massive fire.
Most of all, though, we’d be a restaurant more theoretical than fixed. I mean, the food isn’t theoretical—I promise it’s real. But it changes every night. The essence of Camino isn’t some signature dish, or stone tablet of perfected recipes. Camino is the thinking that led to those recipes, which will probably change again tomorrow night.
That last aspect—sort of funny when you’re putting together a cookbook. Until now we’ve had nothing written down, even dishes we make repeatedly. Every year, rather than simply whip out the nocino recipe, we start from scratch, feel what the right amount of walnuts is. For Russ, everything lives in the strange, swirling cloud that is his head, and improbably that’s a highly effective system.
The nocino thing? Sure, there are moments when I see it from the outside and it looks totally nutty. But there’s a philosophy behind the nuttiness. At some level, every meal here needs to feel like it’s being made for the first time. For Russ and for all our cooks, that wards off a certain rigidity that can creep into a kitchen. It ensures full engagement with ingredients and technique, and prevents autopilot. It keeps you loose and honest, if that makes sense.
For you, the reader, all this adds up to a cookbook that might feel unconventional at times. The recipes might not look like recipes you’re accustomed to. You’ll find Very Specific Feelings About How to Cook interspersed with instructions to go off and improvise. There are recipes that are suggested and then more suggestions on how to rearrange all the components into something else entirely. And in the middle of the book, you’ll encounter something decidedly unorthodox—an intimate and highly candid look at how all this comes together at Camino over the course of a week.
Most of all, you will encounter hints for how to think about food like we do at Camino—to be dogmatically flexible in your cooking, to think ahead to your next meal, to take that little extra step to make your food the tiniest bit better, to enjoy yourself, and to not compromise.
—Allison Hopelain
