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“Do you belief me?” the chef requested.
It was late, happening 10 p.m. The kitchen of Shaw-naé’s House, a six-table restaurant on Staten Island, had been slammed all evening and was working low on a couple of issues. Actually, a number of issues, together with nearly all the things I’d simply tried to order.
But then Shaw-naé Dixon, the proprietor and chef, entered the eating room with a proposal. She provided to place collectively “a smorgasbord” of odds and ends, full parts the place she had them, little tastes the place she didn’t. She promised it might be sufficient to feed my two buddies and me. She’d give you a good worth later, if I promised to belief her.
Trust her? This was Shaw-naé’s House. I used to be talking to Shaw-naé herself. We had been hungry. She had all of the meals. Who else was I going to belief?
As I’d quickly study, I’d been in Ms. Dixon’s arms the minute I’d walked via the door. In many eating places nowadays, it may be onerous to inform who owns the place. At Shaw-naé’s House, it’s not onerous. She’s the one within the apron who wears black braids swept up above her head and wrapped round and round like a turban. The one within the cooking movies enjoying on large screens that hold excessive on the partitions. The one who, on her breaks from cooking, walks from desk to desk, saying hi there to everyone, inspecting their plates to see how their appetites are holding up, asking about their well being.
When she’s within the room, the phrase “love” will get batted backwards and forwards usually. Regulars get a kiss in the event that they’re seated, a hug and a kiss in the event that they’re standing up. In Ms. Dixon’s e-book, an everyday is anyone who’s been in additional than as soon as.
It was my first time, however she took management of my meal anyway. She went away to the kitchen and returned a couple of minutes later with an quantity of meals that was staggering for a spot the place half the menu had been eighty-sixed. She’d fastened us a tray of catfish, massive nuggets fried in herbed bread crumbs, with a home tartar sauce on the facet. The catfish had a sweetness and tenderness I’ve not often tasted outdoors the South.
Lined up on one other tray had been rows of rooster wings. They stayed crunchy though they had been moist with a darkish glaze that tasted of cinnamon French toast in maple syrup.
Ms. Dixon introduced out a small soup bowl. Inside, mounded over white rice, had been what will need to have been the final of the oxtails. There was sufficient for me to inform that they had been greater than somewhat Jamaican, stewed in a candy, inky sauce. I might style contemporary thyme and ginger, and allspice berries and one thing else, near licorice — star anise.
She introduced macaroni and cheese, too, the great variety, the place the macaroni spirals round and holds on to the cheese, which is orange and melty and dotted with herbs and pepper.
And the smorgasbord stored coming. There had been smothered turkey wings in gravy that tasted like Thanksgiving dinner and a pink snapper that had been cooked within the deep-fryer — the entire thing, tail and all. The fish was inside a golden shell just like the crust on fried rooster, golden and so crisp that the crunch rings in your ears. Later, Ms. Dixon mentioned she acquired it that method by frying it twice. It had cooked in a curved stance, so it stood up on the plate, rising above a colourful pile of crisply sautéed greens.
This was a type of soul-food cooking I’d by no means encountered in New York earlier than. Parts of Ms. Dixon’s menu, just like the smothered turkey wings and the cornbread she tops with berries or mashed candy potato earlier than baking, should not too completely different from the normal Southern dishes you’ve had should you’re fortunate sufficient to know an excellent soul meals kitchen the place all the things is produced from scratch that day.
Other instances, although, she performs freely with the previous recipes — lightening right here, tightening there, including contemporary herbs and greens cooked rapidly so that they maintain their coloration and crunch. That facet of her cooking is somewhat harking back to the way in which Tanya Holland used to convey fashionable flavors and a little bit of California daylight into her menu when she owned Brown Sugar Kitchen in Oakland, Calif.
The Jamaican oxtails at Shaw-naé’s House are from a distinct delicacies fully, however Ms. Dixon cooks them with the identical freedom and authority she brings to collards and fried whiting. Some prospects, tasting these oxtails, have requested Ms. Dixon whether or not she has any Caribbean heritage. “This is the one island I’m from,” she tells them.
Ms. Dixon belongs to one among Staten Island’s oldest households. One of her ancestors was a ferry operator named John Jackson, who in 1828 purchased the primary lot of land in what turned Sandy Ground, believed to be the oldest constantly inhabited free Black settlement within the United States. By the Civil War, Jackson had been joined by an exodus of free Black shellfishermen from Maryland. They made Sandy Ground a affluent oystering village, till air pollution compelled the Raritan Bay oyster beds to shut.
Ms. Dixon, who has no formal coaching, discovered conventional Southern dishes from her grandmother, who was born in Sandy Ground. She taught herself to make a couple of Caribbean recipes after she started work as a caterer. Laying out buffets for film and tv shoots across the metropolis, she watched what the solid and crew ate, and expanded her repertory.
Ms. Dixon opened Shaw-naé’s House in 2021 in Stapleton, a various neighborhood that holds, inside a couple of blocks, a mixed-use waterfront growth with a brand new trattoria and enoteca; the old-guard Sri Lankan restaurant Lakruwana; and an epic mural with black-and-white portraits of the artists within the Wu-Tang Clan. (RZA and Ghostface Killah used to reside in a housing venture about half a mile away.)
As Kwame Onwuachi, one other former caterer, does at Tatiana, Ms. Dixon utilized the instincts she honed in that commerce when she opened her restaurant. She doesn’t simply deal with particular person dishes, as cooks educated in culinary college usually do. She sees the entire unfold, and has a really feel for the way in which communal plates and a way of abundance can get a party off the bottom. (Toward that finish, it additionally helps that Shaw-naé’s tropical rum punch may be very drinkable, extremely efficient and served by the pitcher.)
Every on occasion, site visitors in Shaw-naé’s eating room will halt whereas servers perform a ShawCuterie Board, an extended plank piled with rooster wings, cornbread, cheese cubes and grape clusters. This is a transfer straight out of the caterer’s handbook.
The similar spirit will need to have been in Ms. Dixon’s thoughts when she got here up with Soul Fries. Soul Fries are like nachos, however with French fries as a substitute of chips, and the same old toppings changed by cut-up bits of fried rooster, spoonfuls of collard greens, and hunks of macaroni and cheese which were warmed so their orange cheese begins to run into the cheese sauce with which Ms. Dixon has coated the fries.
There was by no means sufficient area on my desk for a ShawCuterie Board. I made area for the Soul Fries, although. By that point I used to be on my second go to, and I’d discovered to belief.
