Updated: Includes Charles Gabriel’s restaurant information, below
When a man talks to me about his banana pudding, I assume we will talk about many things. I was mid-meal at Charles Gabriel’s restaurant, marveling at the juice from his chicken, when I leaned back from my table to ask Mr. Charles if the bowl he was cutting bananas into was otherwise filled with Nilla Wafers and custard. When he got to talking about how the texture of the pudding changes as it sits, I knew I was going to make him my teacher in the ways of the Southern kitchen.
Charles Gabriel is renowned as a fried-chicken master, deserving of his floppy white hat, the kind that usually sits on the heads of cartoon chefs. But masters are sometimes protective of their specialties, so I intended to start by asking him about collard greens and hoppin’ john and whatever else he might make for a traditional African-American New Year’s before seeing if he’d mind getting into it with fried chicken. Besides, I don’t want to pigeonhole the man.
But when I came to his kitchen, the smoky oil vapor stinging my eyes, his round face bore a smile. “I don’t cook much for New Year’s,” he said. “I’d rather go to Vegas.” He knew what I wanted: He had chicken parts marinating in a tub and a bird on a cutting board to show me how he likes to take it apart. “I get nine pieces out of a chicken,” he said, and he was barely finished with his sentence when off flew the wings. His movements weren’t the precise, graceful ones of fine dining chefs, threading thin blades through joints and slipping meat off bone. They were strong and practiced. Whack! Crack! And the pieces came apart for him with ease.
He walked me through coating the birds, curling his thick hands into generous bowls, giving them a delicate toss in a tub of flour big enough to bathe a child in, and then he took me to his manhole-size pans, the ones for which he named his restaurant: Charles’ Country Pan Fried Chicken. It’s been 20 years since Mr. Charles has been in business for himself, 20 years and 5 million pieces of fried chicken, give or take a couple hundred thousand. Not one of them found its way into a deep fryer.
“See, in a deep fry, the chicken cooks under the oil,” he said. “They sit on top of each other, pressing each other down in the oil. Here, it’s half in and half out. I’m turning it, so the grease doesn’t have time to penetrate. It takes time. It might take 15 minutes, I’m turning and turning. In a pan, I stay with the chicken. I work with it.”
He had 40 pieces in the two pans. It’s not entirely easy to see the color develop on the crusts, sitting as they are in roiling oil, so Mr. Charles flipped them by some combination of sight and sixth sense. As he worked the fry, I could see the where the pan makes a difference; the browning is more intense where the pieces rest on the hot metal, giving a richer flavor than deep-fried chicken, where you might be afraid of overcooking the meat before getting that kind of color. The pans also give his fried chicken imperfections — a patch of less-crisp skin here or there, the kind of imperfections that give contrast and charm. They give evidence of his hands.
But as I pressed him to talk about why he insists on using these pans, a commitment that means most of his waking life is spent turning chicken, he spoke mainly of family and past. “A pan is all I ever cooked in,” he said. “When I was coming up, that’s how my momma taught me how to fry chicken. I grew up in the country part of Charlotte, North Carolina. Back down South, we did sharecropping, picking cotton, 6 a.m. in the field till we left at 6 p.m. to go home. That’s when we all cooked; we was 12 boys and eight girls, and my momma taught us all how to cook.”
“I came up to New York 45 years ago. I’m 63 now. It wasn’t my plan to open a restaurant. But up here, I saw that no one was frying chicken the way I knew how. So I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna get my frying pan, and I’m gonna fry chicken.’ No one uses a frying pan in New York. I know, because people come in all the time and say, ‘Where’d you find that pan?’ No one can find pans this big!”
I marveled at them, their handles jutting three feet into the air, making us look doll-size. Thick and heavy, the pans have the gravity of heirlooms, but Mr. Charles actually manages to wear them out. “I just can’t throw them out. I keep them in my basement. They’re my souvenirs,” he says. The ones on the burners are babies, only a year old, but they already have that black on them, the black that comes with age and grease.
He started pulling chicken out of the oil, setting them on a draining rack, and I could hear their crusts make sandpaper sounds as they rubbed against one another.
Someone knocked, impatiently, on the door to the kitchen. Mr. Charles looked, for a half moment, less than happy as the man hollered something with impatience. Finally we heard what he was saying: “When are you going to have ribs again, Charlie?” Another customer came in from New Jersey, wished Mr. Charles a merry Christmas, and left clutching his bag of chicken to his breast.
By now, he may be used to having fans. Twenty years ago, back when food trucks were still a long, greasy way from being sexy, Mr. Charles started rocking the cast iron on his home stove, cooking at dawn to drive around Harlem with warming drawers full of food. “This ain’t gonna work,” he thought, but his heart lightened when he realized people appreciated him. “People started to say, ‘Where’s the Chicken Man at?’” he said, smiling. “This guy from the New York Times, he would come up in a cab, eat it, and go back downtown. He did that every day for a while, and that’s the first time I got written about.” From that review on, Mr. Charles’ name has taken its place in the pantheon of New York food cult figures, up there with the pizza master Dom DeMarco, Cake Man Raven, and the ever-regal Lemon Ice King of Corona.
I asked if the fame or all the time on his feet has caused him to develop a personal style in his food. “I just cook everything like I was taught,” he said reflexively. He paused, then added, “Well, I put the flavor to my vegetables myself. I make my seasoning. But my favorite thing is cooking my momma’s chicken. When I get in there…” He gestured toward his pans. “There’s just something natural about it for me.”
“Has your family ever eaten your food?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. My parents passed, but I used to go back home for family reunions, and I’d do all the cooking. Their stove was too small for me to get it together like I wanted to, so I’d cook here, pack it up in my car, and drive down. As soon as I get there, they’d all be waitin’.”
“And what did your mother think about your chicken?”
Mr. Charles broke into a huge smile. “She said, ‘It tastes just like I taught you.’”
Click here for Mr. Charles’s recipe for fried chicken.
Photo by Francis Lam
Visit Mr. Charles, and taste his cooking, at:
Charles Country Pan Fried Chicken
2839 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
New York, NY 10039-2158
(212) 281-1800
We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their holiday memories with us, and we’re sharing them with you all this week. Today, two chefs spend the holidays pretty much alone, and that’s alright by them.
From Michael Laiskonis, executive pastry chef, Le Bernardin:
It was a turning point in some way, 15 years ago, when I separated the holidays of youth with the ones I experience now. It was my first Christmas season as a young cook, deep, as we call it, in the shit.
There are busy days in the hospitality industry that are like hard sprints, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, but the weeks that fall between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve comprise one long, grueling marathon. As waiters and cooks we subconsciously plan for the “season” all year long, but it’s always still a little shocking when it hits.
I was a baker at a small outfit in the outlying suburbs of Detroit. We were producing around the clock for over two weeks. By Christmas Eve, it was all flying out of the shop as fast as we could fill the cases. I was feeling that deep, to-the-bone kind of tired, surviving only on what little adrenaline I could summon until we finally locked the doors at 4 p.m.
I managed to grab one of the last unsold baguettes and left, exhausted and hungry. On the long drive back to my rented flat in the city, I began to realize that most of the markets had closed as well. I got home, finding just enough to scrape together a simple pasta. Along with the bread I had made with my own hands, it was a solitary dinner, a quiet reward for a lot of hard work. It was an early lesson, though, on just how good food could taste in context; it satisfied a deeper hunger. And then I slept, well into the next day.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Amanda Cohen, chef-owner, Dirt Candy:
I never do Chanukah dinner, and the fact is that I’ve been a working chef for the past 11 years. Usually, on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I’m working. The restaurants where I used to cook were always dead on those days because they never did special menus for the holidays. Trust me, nothing is more demoralizing than working Christmas Eve and doing five covers.
But when I do get to leave after Christmas Eve, I see my family and they cook for me since I’m not about to lift a finger, and I’m always back in town to work on New Year’s.
So basically my holiday story consists of sitting in airports for three or four days, eating food other people make, eating airport food, and then going back to work. Sorry it’s not more exciting, but at least I get to sleep.
We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their holiday memories with us, and we’re sharing them with you all this week. Today we’re celebrating with fabulous foods, be they wholesomely found or more ill-gotten.
From Clark Wolf, food and restaurant consultant:
It was the indulgent start to an excessive decade: 1980, and who knew that wild arugula and padded shoulders were just round the corner? So nice that only one of those endured.
We were working to open a new outpost of the legendary Oakville Grocery, and a small group of us gathered in a Napa Valley farmhouse to rob the very larder we were stocking.
I’d arranged for geese to be raised for us nearby, secured major quantities of Italian white truffles, and gathered quail eggs and a slab of illegally imported foie gras large enough to clog international arteries.
We rendered the duck, gathering and straining the fat so we could pan fry sourdough crostini, scramble the quail eggs (kept overnight in a jar with the truffles to absorb their aroma) to go on top, then gilded that lily with a slash of foie gras and generous scrapings of more white truffle.
We were well into our third or fourth or fifth bottle of Champagne when Rick slipped and dropped the pan, sending the goose flying across Joe’s pristine show kitchen, only to be returned to the oven, forgotten in the haze and profoundly overcooked. We abandoned it. It was all of course far too much, but it felt just right.
I do remember a salad and a delicious, pedestrian poached egg the next noon, but that’s another story.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Greg Higgins, Chef-owner, Higgins Restaurant and Bar:
No offense to the founder of Festivus or any other feast days, but the winter solstice is primordial, predating all organized religion. It’s also the normal peak of truffle season along the 45th parallel.
There are many food memories brought on by the abbreviated days around the winter solstice, but I’m most moved by the scent of dank earth, the kind coming from a freshly dug Oregon black truffle. These things are precious, and the hunt for them is shrouded in a mystery that feels appropriate for the misty, dreary days of the Northwest winter.
There are secrets and pacts, and my band of rogue foragers never talks about the whereabouts of our forays. We take our experience and intuition and a bit of luck with us into these eternal forests, and we dig under thick moss and broad ferns. Occasionally, we get a waft of their unmistakable perfume, hovering elusively in the wet air. We gently rake back the duff of conifers and leaves, finding black nuggets encrusted in forest clay. The hunt continues until we’re content to return, chilled to the bone but charged by the aroma in our gunny sacks — spices, rich earth and exotic fruits.
Back in the kitchen, we spray away the tenacious clay to reveal the velvety black trophies. Preparing a simple risotto, it’s easy to forget the numbing cold and our sore knees and backs from the day’s adventure. Some fresh chevre, a leek or two pulled from the kitchen garden, a bit of patient stirring and all that remains is the celebration at the table with fellow foragers and an ample supply of dark and pungent pinot noir nurtured in that same red clay.
We, like many other mycophages, celebrate this auspicious day rather than some of the more religious or spiritual holidays, celebrating the return of the light.
Class is starting, and Dave Arnold has a cocktail in one hand and a stirrer in the other. Only, since Dave is the French Culinary Institute’s director of culinary technology, that stirrer is a metal rod so hot it’s red to the core. “Folks at home might not want to do this,” he says, plunging the poker into his glass, barely moving to avoid the flames shooting back at him. “There’s a perception that it’s unsafe,” he cracks as I watch fire singe his hair.
He’s calm, swirling the poker in the liquor inferno like he was stirring sugar into midsummer iced tea. “The intense heat allows you to actually caramelize the sugars in the drink,” he tells me, which is something you could never do by heating it on a stove without boiling off all the water, which, you know, wouldn’t make for a very liquid drink.
I take a sip. It was right tasty before, a bright mix of ale, cognac and lemon, but now it’s incredible, totally transformed, tasting of toast and butter, darkly complex with a subdued sweetness. Still, mixing a drink with a flaming sword is not among the most technologically advanced of Dave’s tricks.
He and Nils Noren, the institute’s vice-president of culinary and pastry arts, are superstars of the cooking-geek firmament. Their latest blog post tells you how to make ketchup that melts and hardens like chocolate, and one of their greatest hits is turning fish into a wood-print. (Huh? Right … watch the video.) But it’s not just navel-gazing showoff stuff. Their goal is to push the boundaries of what we think is possible in food and make what they find useful for chefs and, in some cases, ambitious home cooks.
I, frankly, am not ambitious enough to build a low-temperature rotary evaporator distiller for my sauces, but I appreciate their work for how inspired they are. I confess that I also tasted in my glass of Red Hot Ale the giddy flavor of novelty, but it turns out that the idea is older than any suspenders-clad hipster bartender would dare to go, back to colonial taverns that kept loggerheads hot in the fire for their drinks. (Maybe because no one’s remade a fashionable tri-corner hat yet?) It’s the obscurity of this inspiration — in a sense, this respect for tradition — that convinces me that Dave and Nils aren’t enfants terribles, out to destroy the old in the name of their egos, but rather genuinely excited and profoundly creative cooks, just ones with lots of toys.
Recently, a few days after their holiday cocktail class, I sat down with them to talk about that creative process, what they think we’ll all gain from their work, and how much garlic you can eat in one sitting.
Let’s start with how you got into this. Nils, you moved on from being an accomplished chef to being an administrator at this culinary school, and Dave, your background isn’t even in food. Why does this lab even exist?
Nils: Well, it doesn’t hurt that it’s fun; I don’t actually get to work on this stuff enough. Research and development is such an important part of what universities do, and we think that’s what this school should be doing. We want to support the culinary industry, and these experiments are hard for chefs to do in restaurants, because of time, space and the demands of running a kitchen, when you have service to prep for and orders coming in. At Aquavit, where I was the chef, we were doing some of these things, but didn’t really talk about it.
Dave: Right. We publicize the technology because we want people to use it, not because the customer needs to know. That’s when you really win: when it just tastes amazing and for the customer, it’s not about the technology. Here, we get to go overboard to get the very best possible result. But for every 10 things we do that won’t go very far outside of these walls, there’s one that can have real lasting impact in the way people cook.
Take cooking a burger. You can: 1) overcook it, 2) leave it underdone in the middle, where it’s all squashy or 3) use a low, even temperature to get the whole burger the right texture. That’s why people sous-vide. You don’t want to sous-vide a burger, because the first thing about burgers is you want to be gentle with the patty to keep it tender, and the vacuum packing in sous-vide will crush the patty. So we learned to flash-fry the patty to set the shape, then put it in a ziplock with butter or beef fat, so it’s floating in there, all happy, and you can cook the pouch in a slow water bath to the right temperature and flash-fry it again to finish browning it.
Sous-vide is actually a great example of how industrial and fine-dining techniques can become useful at home. The technology for maintaining water at very steady temperatures was originally for medicine, and then made its way into fine dining. But you know, it’s great at home for parties. It switches the work from service time to prep time; all your food can sit, hot and ready to go any time. I had a bunch of people over for steaks, and the whole party was in a water bath.
It sounds like we’re talking about a different kind of party now. Hot tubs aside, how does your partnership work?
Dave: Ha. My background was in philosophy and sculpture. Anyone who says they “do art for themselves” is lying. Art is all about eliciting reaction, and cooking gives a lot of the same sort of immediate feedback.
Nils: I started cooking because I couldn’t make a living playing reggae in Sweden.
Dave: In art, most pressure is internally driven, except when you have shows. So I wait until just after it’s impossible to get things done, and then I get to work. But Nils is very organized. He has to be, with his experience running kitchens. And we’ve been doing this for three years. We respect and trust each other’s approach and palate.
Nils: We often don’t even need to talk. We can work and taste something and know exactly how we want it.
Dave: It’s interesting when we disagree, though, because while there’s room for opinion, most of the time it’s just right and wrong. I probably shouldn’t say that, but you know, there’s delicious, and there’s not so much.
So how do get you inspired to do your projects?
Dave: Sometimes it just starts with “I wonder …” David Chang came up to us once to talk about ike jime [a Japanese fish slaughtering technique, supposed to produce better flavor and texture]. He was like, “Harold McGee says it’s bullshit.” So we say, “Well, is it bullshit?” and it started from there. We’ve done a bunch of experiments on this, to the point of anesthetizing the fish before killing it, and we’re getting amazing results.
Nils: We often return to our experiments. We might stop working on something, but we’re never done with it.
Dave: You never stop learning about something. You might think you’re pretty close, but then something can throw you for a loop and you start over, excited to try it again.
What is a project you’ve done that will have long-range influence?
Nils: I think our pressure cooker work is really exciting. Most people use pressure cookers to just cook things faster. But you can make amazing stock in it. And we’ve found that you can use it to create new flavors — the high heat and pressure can kill sulfur, for instance. So onions become so sweet you can make them into ice cream. You can make horseradish that has all its flavor without the pungent heat, and you’ll find that it’s sweet, because it’s a root vegetable after all. You can make garlic that you can eat whole — two whole heads and still be able to talk to people. You can’t even do that with roasted garlic.
Dave: Yeah, that’s a problem. I once roasted a bunch of garlic, and then didn’t have anyone to talk to at the party. I sat there and just kept eating garlic. So then, the next day, I didn’t have anyone to talk to either.
Nils: Yeah, that’s just kind of how he is.
You can follow the adventures of Dave and Nils on their blog, cookingissues.wordpress.com, where they also post information about upcoming classes.
Charles Gabriel at work 
Lamb and yellowtail mokume gane 
