Dish of the Week: Cabbage + Carrots at Eat Me Speak Me
Jarrett Stieber is funny.
I don’t often have the opportunity to write about a chef’s sense of humor, because it usually stays in the kitchen. In the back of most any kitchen, there are plenty of jokes: the nicknames for coworkers, the mocking of special requests, the riffing and punning that kills time during slow service hours. Once a dish goes out from the pass and onto the table, the humor is no longer apparent. Especially in the culinary traditions that Stieber is cooking from – thoughtfully sourced ingredients, New American techniques – dishes are too often delivered with an exaggerated sense of solemnity and seriousness.
Stieber does away with all of that Eat Me Speak Me, his pop-up restaurant in the Candler Park breakfast diner Gato . Of course, it doesn't take much insight to realize that a guy who partially named his restaurant "Eat Me" has a sense of humor. There's no division between the kitchen humor and the dinner service here, in part because there's nowhere for the kitchen to hide. There's just Stieber and a few guys working for him on a tiny, little breakfast line. They're only open three nights a week. The stereo plays ironic, upbeat popular music. Drinks are BYOB. This is a shoestring operation.
Let me explain how a joke by Stieber, a 2016 James Beard Foundation semifinalist for Rising Star Chef , works. Just the other night, I ordered a dish called "Cabbage + Carrot" at Eat Me Speak Me. In fine print, on the side of the menu, the dish is subtitled "Tarragon with the Wind." That's the first part of the joke, the goofy kitchen pun. The other part of the joke is a bait and switch. Carrots and cabbages are ugly, rooty, lumpy vegetables. The dish that shows up when you order it looks like a bouquet arranged for a wedding, some unbelievably precise arrangement of tiny carrots and chopped cabbage and a bed of tarragon-laced yogurt with a dollop of olive puree that focuses the arrangement like a bullseye. But that's not even the best part. A generous shaving of cured egg yolk spiked with berbere coats the whole thing, making the dish a rich, spicy pleasure.
For garnish, there are a few purple buds that Stieber calls "pretentious flowers" on the menu. He's letting you in on the joke – this is a very elaborate dressing of simple vegetables, the kind of arrangement that many restaurants would deliver with pedantic seriousness. Stieber tosses it off like nothing, a little, goofy joke: Tarragon with the Wind, get it?
Which is maybe another part of Stieber’s joke. He barely has a shoestring of a restaurant and he’s turning out plates like this. What’s everybody else’s excuse?
Eat Me Speak Me, 1660 McLendon Ave., Atlanta. 404-371-0889, eatmespeakme.com.
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