Press | Russet

Center City BYOB Russet is cooking its way through summer, Metro, 2012-07-05

Summer in the Russet kitchen is an embarrassment of veggie riches. Plump tomatoes are ripe for the picking in chef Andrew Wood’s backyard. Cilantro arrives from a friend’s garden in Northern Liberties, complete with white blooms that add their own snappy flavor. As for Lancaster’s first eggplants, they’re already roasting on the grill, preparing for a date with some wild striped bass in the dining room of the converted 1800s townhome.

Craig LaBan restaurant review: Russet, Philadelphia Inquirer, 2012-06-17

Why is it so many restaurants do starter courses better than entrees?

I have theories, of course. Smaller plates are freighted with less-expensive risk, so chefs feel freer to take chances. Smaller plates provide the innate challenge of brevity, forcing cooks to focus their sharpest ideas. Inside the constraints of an appetizer or primi pasta, a masterful technique or seasonal whim can be the star, instead of supporting cast to a $28 hunk of prime meat or fish.

Russet is one of those fast-from-the-gate players. And the opening dishes are so fine, I can taste in the exquisite pastas, charcuterie, and vivid foraged flavors both the restaurant’s considerable potential, and the distinguished lineage of the chef’s training.

Zipper-edged stradette pasta flecked with the earthy sweetness of cornmeal twirl beneath a ragu of duck and the surprising sweet-tart pop of tiny fraises de bois strawberries. Housemade lonza, chile-cured from the loin of Tamworth pigs Russet buys whole from Lancaster County, comes sliced into a translucent amber rosette draped with pickled ramps, blanched celery leaves, and a rustic green oil with mortar-crushed herbs. Stinging nettles, plucked for the restaurant by urban forager David Siller, are spun into silky strands of forest green tagliolini, glazed with the capery anchovy piquance of bagna cauda, and then set beneath a lightly broiled yolk that bursts into sauce at first touch.

Chef Andrew Wood, 36, and pastry chef Kristin Wood, 38, are the co-owners of Russet. And they’ve returned to Andrew’s home region to open this simple but elegant BYOB in the former Ernesto’s after working a tour of the country’s best restaurants. They’d journeyed from Radius (in Boston), where the couple met, to Trio and Tru (in Chicago), to Quince in San Francisco, and then back to Philadelphia, where they helped open James. Andrew then worked as butcher at the short-lived Maia before landing as sous chef at Fork.

The Italian influences of Andrew’s time with Michael Tusk at Quince are obvious here. So is the Northern California reflex for seasonal ingredients and sustainability, from the recycled fabrics they used to upholster the chairs and banquettes (all 52 seats) to the antique sconces that warm the sparely painted cream and burgundy room, to the relationships they’ve fast secured with local farmers.

Of course, the farm-to-table movement has become common. But few restaurants live the notion quite as thoroughly as Russet, where Wood has the know-how and resourcefulness to buy animals whole, whether it’s one of the 10-pound drakes he stews for a day into duck ragu; the steer from Green Meadow Farm that gave him 1,000 pounds of meat to brine, braise, age, grind, or roll into involtinis; or the five heritage pigs he has contracted this year to turn into prosciutto (currently hanging downstairs) or mince into a chile-flared ragu (shoulder, ears, snout) over pici noodles extruded through a bronze die like spaetzle.

Even the big halibuts Wood orders directly over the phone from a captain in Alaska are put to multiple use. The fillets are steamed to perfection in parchment over a bed of spinach, tarragon, and asparagus. The bones, meanwhile, are steeped into the foundation of a bouillabaisse turned black with cuttlefish ink, then tossed with orecchiette for one of the more stunning pastas, whose earthy, almost truffle-y sea-flavored gravy is offset by pristine ivory scallops and the sweet tang of slow-cooked Jersey tomato fondue.

The freedom of such a free-flowing menu, though, has its drawbacks. With only a handful of selections based on market availability, the room for error is slim. And our dinners hit some unexpected bumps in entree mode.

The actual ingredients were less of an issue than redundancy. At one meal, all four dishes came anchored with greens. They made an aromatic cushion for the halibut, and a pleasantly bitter contrast to the exceptional roast chicken, with turnip greens and baby turnips. But by the time I munched through the kohlrabi greens and salty ham shards beneath my severely undercooked salmon (basically, a brick of raw fish), the stemmy pile of foraged garlic mustard greens with the pork Milanese was so spicy, it overshadowed the other issue of the pork’s lack of tenderness. At my next meal, after another impressive round of starters highlighted by several pastas and a creamy sformato flan infused with toasted garlic, the focus of our entrees was good — a meaty chunk of golden tilefish, tender duck breast with rhubarb mostarda, and a gorgeous Lancaster leg of lamb. The lamb was a solid success. But detail flaws took away from other dishes. Bitter chunks of pom-pom mushrooms that for some reason tasted like clay should never have been sent with the duck. A sheer wrapper of lardo enveloped my tilefish in a see-through parcel of pig fat that, visually and texturally, was a disconcerting distraction from the pristine fish and pretty cilantro flowers laid on top.

In a restaurant whose appeal is all about earnest flavors and great ingredients, something like an off garnish can matter — and show Russet still has lots of room to grow.

If that does happen, Kristin’s pastries will be keeping pace, and her desserts are as seasonally driven as the menu. Lemon verbena-infused buttermilk panna cotta come with orange-apricot marmalade; classic brown butter tart is topped with a pinwheel of rhubarb and honeyed meringue; ice cream is vivid with the depth of sweet-sour of wild plums.

There was also an exceptional ice cream with Ommegang’s Art of Darkness, a malty ale that tasted like boozy dulce de leche. Topped with a crunchy sesame tuile, it was good enough to make me think the end of my meal was as good as the beginning. Once Russet tidies up all those stray greens and odd garnishes cluttering the middle, we’ll have a complete restaurant to compete with our best.

Philadelphia Restaurant Review: Old World Sensibilities at Russet, Philadelphia Magazine, 2012-05-29

Recently, Andrew and Kristin Wood took delivery of a 387-pound pig at Russet, their new BYO in an old Spruce Street townhouse. It was a Tamworth-Old Spot blend raised in Peach Bottom, Pennsylvania. The head alone weighed about 50 pounds, and Andrew (who won a 2010 Best of Philly nod for his charcuterie at Fork) brined it for use in a terrine. He turned the front shoulders into coppa and salami. The loin became lomo—pale pink petals of which would later be folded into the semblance of a splayed rose blossom, like pig origami, dressed with blood orange supremes and chili oil. The belly became pancetta tesa; the feet, zampone. The hind legs yielded 38-pound prosciuttos.

But you can’t use every last bit of a pig. Wood reckons that he ended up with about six ounces of waste. “Stink glands,” he explains. “From the armpits and the crotch. If you go to cure them, they sometimes liquefy and burst, and ruin everything.”

That’s one way to describe Wood’s head-to-tail bona fides. Here’s another: The ivory ribbons of lardo crowning a russet-potato-and-Pink-Lady tarte tatin on my first visit were so exquisite that my wife all but ordered me to get some into our kitchen, lifting a ban as old as our union.

The Woods’ seasonable-and-sustainable credo is familiar, but their Old World sensibility gives Russet a traditionalist rather than trendy vibe. He makes pastas from Lancaster wheat, rolling out some shapes on a chitarra crafted by an old artisan in Chester County. She makes a butterscotched, Calvados-creamed apple mille-feuille that’s to die for.

I wish their titular tarte tatin could be a permanent appetizer. But the Woods burn through menus fast. The next time, lardo was a translucent cocoon for a hunk of tilefish slathered with a savory mince of green herbs—ingenious and delicious, yes, but it seemed to have hogged that night’s allotment of inspiration. A blanket of beef leg alla Milanese was big enough to smother a grease fire even after four people had tried sawing through its boredom. The thin-rolled spinach ravioli of a previous evening—exquisite expressions of gorgonzola dolce dabbled with hazelnut sauce—had given way to heftier goat-milk ricotta ones in a rustic sauce of molten tomato chunks: still good, but, like a pedestrian filet of striped bass, sadly forgettable.

A suggestion: Go with anything that’s been gift-wrapped in cured pork. Wood’s best knack is for creations like braised celery stuffed with herbed brioche and wrapped with bacon. And while yes, Russet does need to even out a little and spread the inspiration more widely over that ever-changing menu, it’s still a restaurant worth watching—one with some minor flaws, but amply larded with potential.

Farm-to-Table Fans Will Find Much to Fawn Over at Russet, Philadelphia Weekly, 2012-04-24

Like cupcakes, food trucks and, um, cupcake food trucks before them, local and sustainable farm-to-table restaurants are currently riding the crest of a food-trend wave that threatens to wash over us all. Whether the myriad Philly restaurants proudly boasting the names of their farmers and suppliers right on the menu are driven by PR or passion is a matter up for debate. But considering some of the truly God-awful factory-farmed food stories in the news of late—from pink slime in beef to feces and arsenic in chicken—it’s hard not to welcome these forward-thinking joints with arms (and mouths) wide open, no matter the intent.

Enter Russet, a BYOB owned by husband-and-wife team Andrew and Kristen Wood. Housed in a converted rowhome in Rittenhouse, it crafts a daily menu around a few choice local ingredients. The simple, rustic atmosphere inside exhibits a sleek, European flair that mirrors the restaurant’s purposely limited Italian and French-inspired menu, which is broken down into “1st,” “2nd” and “desserts.” It’s printed double-sided on a half sheet of un-laminated recycled paper, with, naturally, a list of suppliers (Green Meadow Farms, Lancaster Farm Fresh Coop) to put your weary mind at ease. Before you’ve even taken a bite, Russet has sung you a Siren Song of Sustainability.

About that first bite: a single plump scallop poached in butter with raw pea-tops and blood orange slices set atop portobello duxelle. The scallop is light, and the portobello duxelle is savory and earthy. Alternating bites of grassy pea-tops and bright, acidic blood orange freshen the plate. It’s a helluva start.

Hand-rolled garganelli pasta comes with spinach, a sunny-side-up egg and crispy, thick-cut guanciale— unsmoked Italian bacon made from pig jowl or cheek. After breaking the egg yolk to coat the pasta, the resulting taste is that of a deconstructed carbonara, but the spinach gets lost in all the gooey, creamy flavor.

The vicious-sounding stinging nettles are an ingredient that pops up on several dishes throughout the menu. The stinging nettle chitarra pasta is a lovely, vibrant green, brightened with lemon, spring garlic, and salty with anchovy and Parmigiano-Reggiano. At once tart, sweet and salty, it’s one flavor-packed pasta.

Stinging nettles also make an appearance on the American red snapper entree, alongside Jerusalem artichokes and tomato fondue. The tomato fondue adds a powerful sweet-acidity to each bite. The nettles are sauteed, but retain ample crunch. The Jerusalem artichokes are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem (discuss!), but actually the tubers of a kind of sunflower. In this dish, they’re roasted, and taste like a hybrid potato/parsnip.

Also from the “2nd” menu items, the beef daube provencale: no steak knife required here; your fork will easily pull the tender beef apart. Charred ramps add to the heartiness of the stew, although the crispy polenta that sat underneath it all became a bit soggy soaking it up. Beef fat wins again. It always does.

Kristin serves as Russet’s pastry chef, offering up several country-style desserts (like rhubarb-brown butter tart with honey ice cream and candied ginger) as well as ice creams and an artisanal cheese plate.

The heirloom apple mille-feuille with butterscotch custard, almond nougatine, calvados cream and cider syrup tastes like the best of a state fair, but the calvados cream, thick but not tooth-ache sweet, elevates the dessert to a more elegant standard. Another favorite, the bittersweet chocolate budino with poached sun dried cherries and black pepper creme fraiche—complex, it starts mild, gets sweet, turns tangy and finishes peppery—is a standard dense chocolate cake that pops with tart dried cherries.

“Farm-to-table,” “garden,” “local,” “sustainable,” “organic”: these have become buzzwords in the restaurant industry, one that seems to look more and more like a living, breathing Portlandia skit each time a new spot flicks on its Edison bulbs and plants an herb garden on its roof. But why be cynical? It may be a trend, but the food’s great—and that’s no fad.

Late Harvest, Philadelphia City Paper, 2012-04-12

Winter is coming. That’s what Andrew and Kristin Wood fretted about in the fall, when lease negotiations for the stately space they’d fallen in love with the previous July — the planned home for their debut restaurant, Russet — dragged on. And people were getting tired of waiting.

Charcuterie nerds river to river were salivating for Andrew to strike out on his own, after he’d spent two-and-a-half years as Terence Feury’s sous chef and cured-meat vizier at Fork. Meanwhile, pastry chef Kristin had cultivated her own following, doing the bijoux desserts for James until it closed. The time’s been ripe for this quiet culinary power couple for quite a while, and yet, all around town, much younger chefs have beaten them to it, abdicating the warm, salaried lifestyle of their mentors’ kitchens and taking the long road to the unforgiving island of chef/owner.

The Woods waited. They traveled. They cultivated personal relationships with farmers. They had a son, Gus, who’s 4 now. (“Four and three quarters, as he likes to remind us,” says Kristin.) They toured more than 100 spaces, many of which became new restaurants (Nomad Pizza, Llama Tooth) while Andrew and Kristin continued their quest. But when the former Ernesto’s 1521 Café turned up in the Woods’ space?-hunt, “We knew as soon as we stepped inside.”

Fluted columns, moulded archways, high ceilings. The architectural pluses abounded, but the place needed work: a new floor, new paint. They also added recessed lighting and a crystal-beaded chandelier that glitters above the salvaged-wood tables built by the guys at Green Meadow Farm, one of the Woods’ purveyors.

Nobody wants to open a restaurant in February, a dining dead zone even in premiere-frenzied Philadelphia, but that’s exactly what the Woods did. Quietly, Russet hosted its first service on Valentine’s Day, a chef-reviled holiday in a chef-reviled month, and they packed the 52-seat dining room.

Nearly two months later, the rabid enthusiasm has waned a bit, and I found Russet settling into an easy, agreeable pace late one Saturday brunch. Sun poured through the front windows like honey, steam rose from mugs of Counter Culture in lazy curls, and my server, the most genuinely enthusiastic one I’ve met, wore a smile as comfy as sweatpants. The vibe was as warm as breakfast at grandma’s — if grandma happened to own a Rittenhouse mansion and bake heavenly muffins bejeweled with dried cherries.

I plucked the tart cherries from Kristin’s wares while awaiting butter and jam — I had to ask for both — and a crunchy-cornered buckwheat crêpe folded around caramelized onions, bacon, apple, cheddar and egg into an inelegant trapezoid. Cleaner plating also would have benefited the ciccioli, spreadable pork rilletes here plopped on a tuft of oiled arugula like food-court tuna fish. Scratch that: At least food-court tuna fish arrives in a neat scoop.

Once smeared on a brioche baton, however, all was forgiven. The herb-flecked ciccioli began melting on contact with the warm bread, each stroke of the butter knife revealing succulent, preserved pork scraps like precious fossils. One bite, and you get the hubbub about Wood’s charcuterie skills — which are also on display in his biscuits with housemade cotechino gravy. Laced with allspice, cinnamon, clove and cayenne, this beautifully spiced sausage is such a natural for breakfast, it’s hard to believe someone hadn’t thought of it before.

Ciccioli, cotechino … you wouldn’t be off for wondering if Russet was more Italian than American. I think Wood is at his finest when cooking within this school; he’s no stranger to it, having done time at Quince in San Fran and Terra in the Napa Valley. At Russet, his gutsy pastas knocked me out. Greened with wild nettle folded right into the dough, the toothy chitarra was the season incarnate, balling with punchy spring-garlic bagna cauda and a pop of lemon zest. Rolled like secret little messages, tender garganelli mingled with Francescina, a rustic meat stew whose tomato-lashed scraps of pork belly clung to the pasta’s corduroy ridges. Wood’s are the best noodles I’ve had since Kristin’s old boss Jim Burke shut his doors.

Anointed with syrupy 25-year-old balsamic, the sunny-side-up farm-egg starter was less successful. The overcooked yolk cried a few golden droplets, not nearly enough to sauce the accompanying arugula salad and bits of pitina, a killer smoked-meat “meatball” cured like sausage. The bacon-wrapped heritage turkey “involtino” was essentially turkey meatloaf, albeit probably the juiciest, best-seasoned turkey meatloaf on earth, but over rainbow chard and sunchokes it still became one-note after I’d put away two of three huge slices. Halibut en cartoccio was the exact opposite. In its parchment package with maitakes and spring garlic, the normally rich, meaty fish turned demure and delicate, a haze of tarragon-scented steam wrapped around it like a shawl. It was simple and beautiful and quite the cut of fish, worth every bit of its $30 price tag.

You’d think it might be hard to say the same of an $8 ice cream, but Kristin scoops her silky salted-caramel sundae big and tops it with rare greenhouse-grown Lancaster County bananas suspended in rum syrup. I liked the apple mille-feuille less, the roasted Pink Ladies lost in the tumult of butterscotch custard and Calvados cream, but Kristin’s take on diner coconut-custard pie was a tropical reverie flavored with lime and pineapple. Worth the wait? I’d say so.

Russet | 1521 Spruce St., 215-546-1521, russetphilly.com. Dinner served Tue.-Sun., 5:30-10:30 p.m.; brunch served Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Appetizers, $7-$14; entrées, $18-$30; desserts, $8-$9. BYOB.

Homegrown Menu, The Inquirer, 2012-03-01

The four-course feast featured black-soybean soup with a ceviche of marinated raw beets, turnips, and rutabaga. Next, a salad of hydroponically grown butterhead lettuce with cornmeal croutons tossed in apple cider vinaigrette.

The braised lamb, organically grown and grass fed, came with caramelized onions, sweet potato gratin, wilted greens, and cranberry creme.

Warm apple cake with cheddar cheese ice cream rounded out the meal.

Everything on that farm-to-plate menu was grown within about 100 miles, no easy feat in winter. Everything, that is, except the coffee.

Coffee, tea, sugar, olive oil, lemons, vanilla – some of the ingredients you most expect to see in restaurants – cannot be grown within 100 or 150 miles of here, which is often the accepted definition of “local.”

When buying locally isn’t an option, what’s a chef to do?

“We know we have to serve coffee, customers expect it,” says chef Sheri Waide of Southwark restaurant, at Fourth and Bainbridge Streets, which hosted that winter-harvest meal Feb. 22.

Waide co-owns Southwark with her husband/bartender, Kip, and they serve Corsica blend coffee from La Colombe, a locally based importer and roaster with well-established principles of ethical trade.

When she cannot get a product that is grown locally, Waide says, her decisions are still dictated by the values of ethical eating.

That includes concern for the Earth, air, and water; for fair working conditions and wages; and for supporting small farms instead of the large, corporate type – even and especially in Third World countries.

It means dealing with locally based importers, so dollars earned here stay here. It means reducing waste; eating nose to tail by serving less commonly used cuts of meat; supporting antihunger efforts.

And it means making “farm to table” more than a slogan or a mode of decor.

Knowing your grower is as essential as educating customers.

To that end, Southwark schedules special dinners every third Wednesday with menus built around the products of a particular supplier: a grower or brewer, maybe a cheese maker.

For February, the focus was on the guy who drove the truck from the farm to the restaurant.

Mikey Azzara provides fresh produce, eggs, grain, and more, from farms in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania to restaurants and groceries in the region.

He began the business, called Zone 7, five years ago in northern New Jersey and expanded one year ago into Pennsylvania.

On this night, he offers behind-the-scenes stories of winter harvests, demonstrating that purveyors, like chefs and farmers, are values-driven, too.

For Azzara, that means seeking a diversity of crops as well as growers. It means supporting family farms, and eating nose to tail.

“Each year we’ve had a greater variety of winter produce because more farmers have started using greenhouses and hoop houses to meet the demand.”

A Korean farmer whose land is near the New Jersey Turnpike in Hamilton, N.J., grew the black soybeans for the soup on the menu, Azzara says. The fact that these beans were not genetically modified makes them hard to find and especially desirable.

The cranberries were from a Pine Barrens bog worked by generations of one family since the Civil War, Azzara says. And the grass-fed, organic lamb was from Neptune Farm in Salem County, where 60-year-old Torrey Reade only sells her animals whole.

Southwark also buys less commonly requested cuts of beef, which enables farmers to use the whole animal. That means filet mignon is not a menu staple.

“We have calves liver on the menu now,” Waide said. “And in the past we’ve done braised beef tongue.”

Across town in the Rittenhouse Square area, Andrew Wood and his pastry-chef wife, Kristin, just opened Russet, another restaurant with a seasonally driven menu primarily sourced from farms and purveyors within roughly 100 miles.