SpiceLines

The next day I finally got my goat: dark, unctuous, with the flavor of caramel. It was less goat, in fact, than Ur-meat: so tender it was falling into velvety shreds, oozing syrupy juices, perfumed just faintly with cinnamon, cardamom, and a dozen other spices in Hich’s secret ras-el-hanout blend.

Hich is Hich Elbetri, chef and co-owner, with his former wife Janet, of Sandwhich, a Chapel Hill eatery which prides itself “on doing everything wrong.” This is not the place to go for your basic grilled cheese sandwich. Instead, fork over $8.99 and you get the BAM, melting chunks of white Vermont cheddar studded with nuggets of applewood-smoked Nueske bacon, layered with sautéed Cremini mushrooms and sweet apple, all on grilled local sourdough. Unless you are trotting around with a five-year-old, there’s no point in ordering grilled cheese anywhere else.

Janet, who writes occasional email letters for the restaurant, admits that this isn’t standard operating procedure for a sandwich shop. Recently she said: “It makes no sense at all for the chef at a sandwich shop to go to Chatham County and buy an entire goat to serve at the restaurant. It makes no sense at all to go obsessing over obscure spice mixtures. Slop some mayonnaise on some bread, put a piece of ham in there, stab it with a toothpick and sell it, right? Right? Yes, right! And so the moral of the story is that sometimes it makes a certain kind of sense to do things the wrong way...”

You might say that Hich has been doing things "the right wrong way" for years. Born in Rabat, Morocco, he is a self-taught chef who edged into the food industry waiting tables in New York. Before that he was a pharmacy student in Moscow. Janet, who studied Italian and history at UNC, spent a year living in Bologna and worked for Lex Alexander at Wellspring. She’s been in the specialty food business for over 20 years.

The pair met in New York at a restaurant opening. Janet was working for El Rey Chocolate, Hich was busing tables. “We literally bumped into each other,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Oh excuse me,’ and we started talking. I pride myself on my ability to tell where a person is from. He told me he spoke Russian, French, Arabic and English, in that order. I said, ‘Well, you’re not from Morocco.’ And of course he was.” She laughs, adding “I could tell he had a great flair for food.”

It took a diploma from the French Culinary Institute to get Hich into restaurant kitchens, however. After completing an intensive nine-month curriculum, he began cooking at Jean Georges Vongerichten’s Mercer Kitchen; later he went to work at Danny Meyer’s flagship Union Square Café. In 2004 Lex Alexander invited the pair to take part of the space he rented for 3 Cups, his acclaimed Chapel Hill coffee shop. As soon as it opened its doors, Sandwhich—the quirky spelling incorporates Hich’s name—practically reinvented the downtown lunch.

The upscale menu, which includes items like Mr. Crunch, a “cool” sandwich of thinly sliced proscuitto di Parma with Chapel Hill Creamery smoked mozzarella, fresh mint leaves, oregano vinaigrette, and frisee on a baguette, relies heavily on local farmers and food artisans for most of the restaurant’s ingredients. It may be the only place in town to get a house-roasted local turkey sandwich with chipotle mayonnaise, or roasted eggplant and goat cheese with oven dried tomatoes and roasted pepper confit on olive-oil rich focaccia. It's all homemade, including the tangy Moroccan carrot salad that comes with every order.

Sandwhich is casual and small, with exposed air ducts, big picture windows and local art. A lazy nude by Ippy Patterson sprawls along one wall. An earthenware tagine on the front counter, and mint tea and preserved lemons in the cooler, hint at the chef’s former life in Morocco. In good weather, the hip, youngish crowd, drawn mostly from the university and the arts, spills out into the tables in a central brick courtyard shared with a few other restaurants. (After a long-running dispute with the landlord, 3 Cups is moving to another location; workmen are renovating its former space for Bliss, a new cupcake and cookie bakery.)

Although currently separated, the couple are still good friends and a team when it comes to the restaurant and the parenting of their 5-year-old son. Janet is the self-described “everything miscellaneous person”—a catchall that covers a broad range of activities from keeping the books to writing enticing food stories that she sends to the shop’s customers.

Hich, tall, lean and intense, rules the kitchen. On Friday, in black pants and shirt, he was browning chunks of goat on the stove for a weekend wedding; eventually it would go into the oven where it would braise for hours in white wine and chicken stock until the meat was so tender it simply fell off the bones. Nearby, I spied a pan of richly spiced morsels of said goat. It was all I could do not to snitch a bite.

Spice rubbed goat browning in the pan at Sandwhich.

Hich and I talked several times over as many weeks. Here’s part of our conversation.

Q. You studied to be a pharmacist in Russia, but in New York, you turned into a chef. Were you always interested in food?

I’ve been a foodie ever since I can remember. My Mom was a super cook. She would get up early in the morning and spend a whole shift, maybe five hours, in the kitchen. Feeding her family good food was her job and she loved it, even if she was tired at the end of the day.

Q. What did she cook?

Everything was amazing. I grew up on a schedule. Friday was couscous with butternut squash, zucchini, parsnips, cabbage, chickpeas, raisins and chicken. Sunday was fish or lamb with white beans. We ate fresh sardines a lot, never more than a day old. My mother cleaned them herself, then butterflied and marinated them with parsley, paprika, cayenne, lemon juice, and garlic, and pressed them together so they looked like little hearts.

Q. What was your favorite dish?

My favorite meal was white beans, lamb sausage and seared sole, served all together on the same plate with roasted green peppers and raw tomatoes, diced very small, like mirepoix, with extra virgin olive oil, salt and distilled white vinegar. The white beans were mixed with cumin, turmeric and salt, and cooked with little pieces of garlic that were the same size and color as the beans—you didn’t know when you were biting into them whether you would get beans or garlic.

Q. How did she prepare the fish?

It was marinated with ginger, parsley, lemon juice, salt and turmeric, then dusted in flour and sautéed in sunflower oil. Sometimes she’d serve beet salad with diced tomatoes, salt, oil and vinegar.

My other favorite was mrouzia—beef shanks with her own blend of ras el hanout, braised four or five hours, from eight in the morning till about noon. She topped it with fried whole almonds and sesame seeds. She never skimmed the fat and I always got mad about that.

Q. So why did you become a pharmacy student in Moscow?

I just wanted to travel and I had two choices: France or Russia. It wasn’t about studying to be pharmacist. I just wanted to do something totally different and Russia was cheaper. Eventually I became somewhat fluent in Russian. I had a Russian girlfriend and we cooked all the time.

Q. That must have been challenging. What was the food like?

Everything was potatoes and meat. Horrible canned tomatoes, horrible canned olives, some European packaged food. All they had was pork fat, dried stinking fish, vodka, beer and old hard yeast bread. The food stores looked like hospitals. It took me six months to get used to it. Going from my Mom’s cooking to a Russian supermarket was like going from a really good restaurant to a really bad dumpster.

But there was amazing history in Moscow. The walls would talk to you, going back 60 or 70 years. I was there for three years.

Q. So how did you wind up in New York?

It was a beautiful day and I was just walking by the U.S. embassy in Moscow. I decided to go in and ask what I would need for a tourist visa. A man interviewed me. He asked me one or two questions, then threw my passport over his shoulder into a basket. I didn’t know what that meant and I just sat there. He said, “What are you looking at? You’re approved. Come back at 4 PM.” They gave me a one-year visa with multiple entries. I arrived in New York on July 26, 1996.

Q. What did you think of the city once you got there?

I hated it. It was so dirty and not at all what I had in mind. Moscow was like a clean museum compared to New York. I had a ticket back to Moscow, but I didn’t want to be a pharmacist. I thought it was dumb. Some friends convinced me “…..it’s not as bad as you think…you’ll see.”

Back then it was easy to get jobs in restaurants, especially as a busboy. It didn’t require much English. I waited tables at Blue Water Grill, Ruby Foo’s and a place called Sophia’s [now Serafina's] Fabulous Grill.

Q. What made you decide to become a chef?

I almost never ate out until I met Janet. I always loved cooking at home, making things like stews with beef, or green beans and okra, stuff that took a really long time to cook. I don’t like to do things fast. It has to take hours for it to be good.

But I couldn’t cook in a restaurant unless I had a diploma, so I decided to enroll in the French Culinary Institute. It’s a great reputable school, had a short 9-month course, and it was in the city so I didn’t need to travel. It was a lot of fun. There were four people at every station, nothing like the real world.

Q. What was your first job after you got out?

I was the grill guy at Mercer Kitchen. I went from making $1,000 a week waiting tables to $250 a week cooking. Later I went to Union Square Café.

Q. What was Union Square Café like?

I started at the pasta station. It was hard. I had to prep 16 dishes from scratch every morning. I cooked four different pastas, risotto, potatoes, blanched broccoli rabe. There were eight solid pastas, four side dishes, both appetizers and entrees. I was really working two stations in one. I trained a couple of people who ran away crying in the middle of the shift. You have to be a superman, like an octopus with eight arms.

It was hell on earth but I loved every second of it. I got to the point that I was able to work every single station in that restaurant. It’s called being a “floater.” Michael Romano [the chef] was a great guy. Danny Meyer [the owner] used to stop by my station and say, “That pasta looks great. Thank you for doing such a good job." It made me think, “It takes a different kind of human to do this kind of work.”

Q. How did USC influence your approach to cooking?

I have total respect for what they do with ingredients. They do things the way they do because it’s the right thing to do. There were no short cuts. No one made a big deal out of the ingredients they were using: halal lamb, farm-raised baby pigs, organic chickens. It’s just how it’s done.

General rule of thumb: if it’s easy to make, it’s not slow food. Slow food equals good food. In Morocco lunch took four hours to cook, not including the prep that was done the day before.

Q. So why did you open a sandwich shop?

I love sandwiches and I really enjoy going to sandwich shops. I remember after getting off work at Ruby Foo’s I would stop by a Korean deli and get a sandwich, maybe tuna or cheese. I called it “hand-held food.” It was very comforting.

I took the concept of a sandwich shop and made it fancier. We use fresh, local ingredients, as if we were a fancy restaurant. Our tuna salad sandwich is really made from a whole poached tuna loin. We mix it with garlic mayo and serve it on grilled sourdough with smoked bacon and local, organic greens.

Q. Isn’t it harder to do it that way?

It’s satisfying to me and to our customers. I can’t cut corners and do it the easy way. I may be swimming against the current but I don’t know how to do it any other way. A lot of people don’t pay attention to the details. For example, I toast my own spices. Nobody’s watching me do it—I do it because I just love smelling the spices.

Q. What’s your best-selling sandwich?

There are three: the meatloaf, the O.B.L.T. and the poached tuna salad.

The meatloaf is made from Niman ranch beef and it’s served on sourdough toast with Cabot cheddar cheese, applewood-smoked bacon and a balsamic glaze. The Outrageous B.L.T. also has the smoked bacon, plus fire-roasted jalapenos, juicy local tomatoes, avocado and local organic greens on sourdough. Our bread comes from Weaver Street and most of the produce from local farmers.

Q. Do you have a personal favorite?

My own version of the GMC [Grilled Marinated Chicken]. It’s grilled chicken with roasted jalapeno peppers on a French roll instead of ciabatta. I’ll have that with split pea soup that reminds me of Morocco. It’s made with cumin and salt with a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil in the bottom. Stir it up and drink it. Yum!

Q. What possessed you to go out and find a goat to cook at the restaurant?

I wanted to buy a whole goat and cook it at home. I was throwing a party with a friend, so I ordered a whole 90-pound goat from Flemming Pfann at Celebrity Dairy. He took the goat to a halal butcher in Siler City: Halal is a way of slaughtering animals without causing them to panic. He dropped it off in the morning and I picked it up at 4:30 that afternoon. I had to go in the walk-in to get it—very scary stuff. Lots of carcasses hanging in there.

Q. How did you cook it?

My intention was to cook it for the party, but it was so big that I decided to do half of it for the restaurant. For the party I rubbed the meat with spices and hung it in the walk-in for a couple of days, then put it in a huge roasting pan on a monster grill. I browned the goat on all sides, dropped in some mirepoix, more spices, and white wine, and reduced it until it was almost dry. Then I added chicken stock to cover the goat half-way and wrapped it up in aluminum foil.

I cooked it for six hours. It took 3 wheelbarrows of oak wood and three people with two spatulas each to lift it out of the pan and put it on a platter. I t was so tender it kept falling apart. Usually I throw out the mirepoix, but this time I dumped it all in a bowl. It was mixed up with meat juices and people just went crazy over it. Even vegetarians were eating it. People were talking about it for days. I walked in the hotel down the street and the first thing the bartender said was ”Why didn’t you invite me to the party?”

Q. Did you cook the other half differently for the restaurant?

I did it almost the same way, except I pulled all the meat off the bones and reduced what was left over—the vegetables evaporated into the meat. I served it with a homemade chutney of figs, turmeric and juniper berries.

Q. Is this a Moroccan dish?

It is, but we don’t cook it with goat, at least not in my region--although goat is widely used in the south of Morocco in the Berber region. I chose goat because in my opinion it is better-tasting than lamb or beef. The secret is knowing how to cook it so it’s not gamy.

Q. What about the spices?

It’s a Moroccan blend called ras el hanout. I researched a bunch of recipes, but every one of them had something missing. So I had to come up with a new version to make it my own. All together it had 14 to 16 ingredients, some were toasted, and all ground up together. The smell was absolutely amazing.

Q. What’s in your ras el hanout?

I’ll tell you the spices but not the proportions because that’s my secret. It has cardamom, cloves, cinnamon sticks, coriander seeds, cumin seeds black peppercorns, juniper berries, allspice kernels, fennel seeds, paprika, cayenne, turmeric, ground ginger and grated nutmeg.

Ras el hanout gives the dish this sweet nutty caramel-like smell and flavor, especially if you let your meat sit with the spices for a day or two.

Q. How do you grind your spices?

I use a Krups . I’ve had it for years and it works great.

Q. What’s next on the horizon? More goat? Moroccan dinners?

Right now I’m cooking four goats for a wedding on Sunday with 170 guests. Dressed out they weigh about 35-45 pounds each. I’m serving braised goat with roasted vegetables, and a friend is making the wedding cake with cupcakes.

I’d like to open a couple more Sandwhiches, maybe have three in total. And one day it might be fun to have a burger and dog truck using really special ingredients. But that’s just an idea. My real plan is to keep making the best sandwiches.

Sandwhich, in the Courtyard of Chapel Hill, West Franklin at Roberson, Chapel Hill, NC. Telephone: 919/929-2114. Web: www.sandwhich.biz