Chef Andrea Reusing in the serene Asian-ispired dining room of the Lantern
Restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Photo credit: Natalie Ross
Chicken as revelation—that’s a hard notion to swallow.
But five years ago, the Lantern Restaurant’s Tea and Spice-Smoked Chicken offered tantalizing possibilities. The bird was full of genuine flavor, the slightly gamey taste that comes from a life in the outdoors spent pecking and scratching. The first bite was succulent, oozing with luscious juices. With the next came a delicate smokiness and the mild astringency of black tea. Then the spices hit my palate: sweet cinnamon, licorice-scented star anise, aromatic cloves, peppery red chilies. The chicken had been brined and smoked, then roasted to order, and the miracle was that, after all that manhandling, it was tender and utterly delicious.
Last fall, Gourmet gave the Lantern the No. 47 spot on its list of America’s Top 50 Restaurants. The editors got it right: Chef Andrea Reusing “cooks to her own tune.” Like a lot of American chefs, she starts with local fare--in this case pristine North Carolina ingredients like briny shrimp, flounder and soft shell crab; heritage pork; free range duck and chicken; locally made cheeses; sourwood honey; and truckloads of wondrous vegetables grown on nearby farms. But then Reusing performs a sort of culinary legerdemain, using these raw materials to conjure dishes from five Asian culinary traditions (Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, Japanese) that remain true to their roots yet have a distinctly modern sensibility.
Here’s what I ate at the Lantern a few weeks ago: North Carolina crab cakes spiked with vibrant Thai flavors such as lemon grass and mint, with a sweet-hot house-made chili sauce that titillated every one of my 10,000 taste receptors. Sumptuous coconut-braised pork shanks, falling off the bone tender, cooked with fresh gingery galangal, topped with crispy shallots and a side of addictive Vietnamese style green papaya salad. Dessert was a deceptively simple crème fraiche panna cotta served with local organic strawberries.
In spite of its sophisticated airs, Chapel Hill is still a small, laid back southern university town where you might reasonably expect to find black-eyed peas and fried green tomatoes on the menu. But Reusing is the ultimate insider’s outsider, and she brings a global spin to the kitchen. She grew up in Washington DC and New Jersey, fell in love with homegrown tomatoes in her parents’ garden, studied cinema at NYU, ate out a lot in Chinatown, edged into line cooking in the East Village. After marrying Durham rock musician Mac McCaughn, she ran a catering business out of their house, then helped open Enoteca Vin in Raleigh where the focus on food and wine pairings won national raves. She left in 2001, gutted the old Darbar and Leo’s space in Chapel Hill, and with her brother Brendan, opened the Lantern in 2002.
Those are the basic facts. But they don’t capture Reusing’s boundless energy, or her passion for the Slow Food movement and the dedicated farmers whose bounty is the focus of the Lantern’s menu. When she addressed the American delegation at the Slow Food summit in Italy last year, she summed it up in one sentence: “…food grown by people with strong connections to their land and community is the only way a girl from New Jersey could open an Asian restaurant in North Carolina and even approach some idea of authenticity.” Check out the menus for the Lantern Table, a dinner series celebrating local fare, and you’ll see what she means.
One of the things I like best about the Lantern is the way it transports you to another place. The dining room that opens onto Franklin Street is cool and serene, with walls the color of green tea and clusters of George Nelson bubble lamps casting a diffuse glow over the scene. It has a calm, almost meditative vibe—until it fills up with 58 hungry people, of course. But go down the back alley, open the iron gate, push aside a heavy velvet drape and you’ve walked into an oriental dream right out of a Charlie Chan movie. It’s the coolest bar in town, dark and moody as an opium den, with dangling red lanterns, a laughing Buddha, and exotic drinks like the Red Geisha (muddled fresh strawberries with lime, ginger and vodka) and my own favorite, the Hibiscus Petal (pink flower-infused vodka with Thai basil.) You can eat here too, so you have a choice of escapist fantasies in which to enjoy this very global local fare.
I first visited with Andrea at the restaurant a couple of months ago. Here’s what we talked about.
What was your first cooking job?
I was writing for a political consultant in New York and also working as a cocktail waitress. Then I started as a line cook at the Telephone Bar which was an English pub in the East Village. It was easier than waitressing because I didn’t have to wear heels. I was getting up at 6 AM to make Sunday brunch—kippers and scotch eggs for 100 people. I had no experience, but the chef, Ellen Smith liked hiring women and she trained me.
Where did your interest in food come from?
My grandparents were good cooks. They lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In the summer, we’d walk across the road to pick corn. My grandmother would take us to Amish farms to buy cheese and eggs and milk. We’d also go to Central Market which is the oldest farmers’ market in the country. It has homemade pickles, amazing chickens, good dairy products. There’s a man who grinds fresh horseradish on an old grater with wheels. The flavor is completely different from what you get in the bottle. Everything was local and delicious.
My parents loved food too. They always had a garden. We’d eat tomatoes only in summer. They’d get Asian or Chinese recipes from Craig Claiborne and make Chinese American food. We always had a wok.
Going from catering to being chef at Enoteca Vin must have been a big jump. How did that happen?
The people who were opening Vin took a big chance on me. I was cooking mostly Asian food at the time and some of that was on the menu. The focus, then as now, was on wine and food pairings, so we’d serve different spicy dim sum with great champagne. There were tons of cool artisan cheeses. But the real emphasis was on local, very seasonal ingredients. I was there for two years. Ashley Christensen is the chef now.
Did you have a signature dish at Vin? What was most popular?
We did a salt cod hash with fried local egg. Roasted whole cauliflower with fontina and white truffles. A homemade seafood choucroute with monkfish and periwinkles. I made picnic hams out of local pork shanks. Our most popular dish was steak frites—we served it with duck fat-fried potatoes with olive butter and arugula.
What was your concept for the Lantern?
There weren’t many Asian restaurants in Chapel Hill, so that was a good niche for us. And I wanted to have a friendly neighborhood spot where people could drop in for great food whenever they felt like it. The space had a really good vibe. Before Darbar [an Indian restaurant], Leo’s had been there. It was a beloved Greek restaurant run by an Italian family. I know of two couples who got engaged there.
What’s the idea behind the Lantern’s menu?
It’s pan-Asian, with respect for regional Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese and Japanese tradition, using local ingredients as much as possible. We have wonderful North Carolina eggs, greens, pork, mushrooms, seafood.
We rotate the vegetables so that they are strictly local and served only in season. In the fall we do braised Asian greens and yellow wax beans. In the winter, dark green crinkly savoy cabbage, which has a really interesting flavor. In spring, lots of asparagus and sugar snaps. Whatever’s wonderful and growing right now.
There’s been a big move towards heritage pork around here…
Our small farmers are raising amazing pigs. Ossabaw fat is delicious. It’s high in omega-3’s and low in transfats. Another great one is Berkshire Red Wattle. We use local pork for all our dumplings and roast pork dishes. The pork shanks are pasture-raised from Niman Ranch. An animal only has two hind shanks and we use 100 a week. That would be 50 pigs and there’s not enough volume to support that.
What items are always on the menu?
Tea and spice smoked chicken. We brine it, smoke and roast it to order. We sell 130 of those a week. Also the dumplings: pork and chive, and cabbage and shitake mushroom.
Braised pork shanks are another big favorite. In the fall we cooked them with soy, sugar, orange peel, cassia and star anise, and paired them with mushroom sticky rice and braised watercress. Right now we’re doing shanks braised in coconut milk with galangal root. The spicy papaya salad on the side is a sort of crossover Thai-Vietnamese dish
Is there a spice that you’re really excited about?
Vietnamese black pepper from Adriana’s Caravan. It’s pungent and spicy and has an almost floral taste. We use it to finish “shaking beef”: the meat is stir fried with lalat leaves and seasoned with salt, sugar, fish sauce, rice vinegar and lime. The pepper goes on at the end.
Do you make your own spice mixes?
Oh, yes. We grind the garam masala for an Indian soup made of local white sweet potatoes. It’s based on Julie Sahni’s recipe and has cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves and mace. We sauté it in ghee and add it to the soup at the end.
What’s your favorite dish?
The local pickle plate. Right now we’re doing one with ramps, turnips, green tomatoes, radishes and kimchi.
After five years, how do you stay excited?
The farmers and the ingredients keep me excited. I appreciate people who work really hard but who have a great time doing it. It makes them fun to hang out with.
Tell me about your car.
It’s a 1985 Mercedes diesel that runs on cooking oil from the restaurant. We use a German converter. If you smell fried fish driving around town, it’s me.
To see Andrea's recipe for Indian Stew with Tomato-Saffron Broth and Chickpea Dumplings, go here.
