Pork cures menu blues, adds variety to entree items

Nation's Restaurant News, August 18, 1997 by Kathy Blake

Customers at The American Restaurant in Kansas City, Mo., perceive pork as more elegant and desirable than chicken, especially when they plan party menus, according to executive chef Debbie Gold.

With a clean, lean image, pork is taking an important place on menus in restaurants today. Chef Gold says pork tenderloin, $24, is a very popular menu item at both lunch and dinner. "We marinate it in brown sugar, balsamic vinegar and cumin, then grill it," she says. "At dinner we serve it with cilantro mashed potatoes, green fava beans and ancho barbecue sauce."

For dinner parties in the 80-seat private room at The American Restaurant, Gold often recommends pork crown roast as the center of a menu that also includes Lyonnaise potatoes, fresh asparagus and onion, bacon, and mushroom sauce.

"We're a fine-dining restaurant," she says, "and we need buffet and special-event menus that are not too pricey but are nice, and pork has been very well received. A whole pork loin is ideal for buffets. We roast it whole in a traditional style with olive oil, thyme and onion."

The Midwest, according to chef Carl Huckaby, is pork country. "I always have pork in at least one appetizer and two or three pork entrees. Some weeks I go through a whole case of pork tenderloins."

At Huckaby's 110-seat restaurant in Indianapolis, Chez Jean, one appetizer always on the menu is bacon-wrapped shrimp served with black-bean cake, salsa and corn tortilla straws, $17.95. The four large shrimp are usually shared by two or four guests, Huckaby explains.

Huckaby's recipe for Southwestern blackened pork served with saffron rice won him a place as a Celebrated Chef for this year with the National Pork Producers Council. The dish is made with boneless pork butt cut into small pieces and marinated in copious amounts of spicy sauce and Paul Prudhomme's Steak Blackening Magic.

Pork tenderloin, $18.95, marinated in equal parts hickory-maple syrup and bourbon and then seared is a favorite entree at Chez Jean. Another best-seller is a more elaborate preparation which, he says, was inspired by chef Tracy Cisneros, sous chef at Kinkead's Restaurant in Washington. Huckaby extracts beet juice with a juicer and makes a demi-galce with pork stock and the beet juice to serve with medallions of pork tenderloin seared and served with a saute of shiitake mushrooms and leeks.

Christopher Ray, chef of C.J. Calloway's in Sioux Falls, S.D., marinates pork tenderloins for about one hour in apple cider before smoking them over hickory wood. He serves the sliced smoked pork with a salad of greens, wheat berries, shiitake mushrooms and warm cranberry-cider vinaigrette.

At Kinkead's, a 250-seat restaurant that specializes in seafood, sous chef Cisneros has found that pork is an ideal flavor enhancer for many seafood dishes. In fact, her Asian pork and shrimp consomme was featured at the dinner honoring the 1997 winners of Celebrated Chefs in Chicago last June.

"We use both salt pork and bacon in our New England seafood chowder, $5, and a Portuguese stew, $7.50, has chorizo in it," Cisneros says.

This summer bacon-wrapped monkfish with lobster sauce, $19.50, is a big seller at Kinkead's. "The flavor of the bacon and the texture of the monkfish are perfect together," she says.

Pork dishes without seafood also prove successful at Kinkead's. Rack of pork, $20, is served with red beans, herb rice and buttermilk-dipped onion rings.

"Not long ago [chef-owner Bob Kinkead] announced that we have to find a purveyor for pork cheeks. He wants to create a pork cheeks-sweet-breads-rabbit trio in the fall, which is inspired by French country cooking," Cisneros says. "As an experiment, we prepared some pork cheeks by searing and then braising then in the oven with red wine for a couple of hours, and they were delicious!"

Mesa City in New York features American Southwestern cuisine and co-owner/executive chef Bobby Flay menus grilled pork chops with mango-red chili barbecue sauce, $17, which is boldly spiced and colorfully presented. An option for an hors d'oeuvre on Mesa City's catering menu is spicy maple-glazed pork tenderloin on blue corn tortillas with red onion marmalade.

Jimmy Sneed says his restaurant, The Frog and the Redneck in Richmond, Va., purchases country ham, sausage, bacon and other pork products from Surry County, where Surry ham and sausage are specialties.

The menu at the 140-seat restaurant changes every day, and Sneed says, "We specialize in a very large way in local products." In early July the appetizer menu included handmade raviolis filled with fresh lobster, wild mushrooms and bacon on "awesome" seaweed salad, $12.75, and "Redneck risotto" with sauteed local shiitakes, Surry sausage and aged Parmesan cheese, $8.50.

Mustard pasta with duck confit, Surry sausage and oven-dried tomatoes was available as an appetizer, $14.50, or a main course, $18.50. And, among the meat entrees was whole fresh quail stuffed with fresh crab, local shiitake mushrooms and Surry ham, $24.25.

Sneed says that a couple of years ago, he won second place in a recipe contest for his recipe for a whole pork loin stuffed with crab and shiitakes which, when roasted and sliced, revealed a pinwheel of crab and mushrooms. Today a rotisserie near the dining room at The Frog and the Redneck sizzles as pork roasts roll, and servings are carved off to order. The roasted pork loin is sometimes served with grilled Vidalia onions and mustard sauce.