2. Cold Fried Chicken
“Everybody loves eating cold fried chicken,” Vincent says. “This is the perfect distillation of all the different sensory things that make that good.”
That means it’s technically served closer to room temp rather than cold — to optimize the dark meat’s rich flavor of the chicken and maintain the outer crunch. The carefully engineered process starts a few days in advance, when the chefs rub Amish chicken drumsticks in mushroom powder and other flavorings, then let them sit for a day. They bread the chicken in flour, buttermilk, and cracker meal and fry it, then let it sit out until service, when each flavorful, still-crunchy drumstick is arranged alongside seasonal veg (bok choy, for now) atop peach-plum jam flecked with Thai chiles and peanuts. In other words, your favorite picnic food, fancified.
3. Grilled Pork
Just because the ribs came off the menu doesn’t mean Team Giant doesn’t love pork more than most proteins. Playing around with different cuts led the kitchen team to the meaty neck, which lends itself beautifully to grilling.
The pork is sliced and skewered with onions soaked in orange vinegar syrup then grilled until the edges are richly charred. “Honestly, we’re skirting the edge of burnt food, but nobody’s sent it back. It’s summer. It’s that nostalgic thing of grilling food until the edges are almost burnt.” The pork is served with feta, tomatoes, and fermented tofu chimichurri — a finishing sauce stolen from a previous bay scallop dish — and a crisp-chewy slab of scallion pancake.
“(Chef de cuisine) Mike Gaia and (chef) Melven Botacabe and I all came together on this, and little by little it became a Giant dish,” Vincent says. “It happens that way a lot.”
4. Cannolini with Goat Cheese
Because everyone likes lots of pasta options, the goat cheese cannolini was born to fulfill the “stuffed” pasta prerequisite. The chefs add a touch of vinegar to the housemade dough to make it tender, then smash a basil leaf into it as they roll it out, “so it distributes itself and perfumes the dough with basil, which is neat,” Vincent says. The ruffly-edged pasta is stuffed with Prairie Farms goat cheese, then nestled into a luscious sauce of almond pesto and sun-dried tomato butter. The seasonless nature of the dish betrays the ongoing unpredictability of running a small restaurant in a pandemic.
“When I wrote the menu, I didn’t know if we’d be closed for another two months,” Vincent says, “and the sun-dried tomato butter and almond pesto were good in case we had to delay the season. Plus, almost everything we’re talking about today can be frozen, which is very telling of our mindset.”
5. Crêpe Cake
Inspired by pastry chef Heather Haviland’s (owner of Lucky’s Cafe in Cleveland) layered crêpe cake with cashew buttercream, Giant’s version starts the same but takes a different flavor direction. Huge stacks of crêpes are cooked and cooled, then stacked with alternating layers of yellow cake puree and ricotta with candied orange and chocolate. The resulting cake is sliced into wedges and served in a bright-red pool of sweetened tart-cherry sauce spiked with cinnamon, cloves, and lemon. “It’s delicious, and we just needed something we can produce a lot of,” Vincent says.
Maggie Hennessy is a Chicago-based freelance food and drink journalist, and the former restaurant critic for Time Out Chicago. Her work has appeared in such publications as Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Taste, Eater and Food52. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter. Follow Resy, too.
