Executive chef Robert Curtis has a theory about cabbage that set the course for the totally reconstructed menu he debuted at Hazel last month.
Curtis — who arrived at the homey Shaw restaurant shortly after founding chef Rob Rubba amicably resigned in June — is willing to bet most people hate the vegetable. Where others see only a drab, sulfurous meal from their past, Curtis sees a challenge.
“We all have a memory of a piece of cabbage that was absolutely terrible, right? It was boiled, smelled like farts. It was just God awful,” he says. “So how do we get people to actually want that?”
The answer to that question fuels a restaurant that has shifted from selling Rubba’s Southeast Asian-tinged mashups to embodying Curtis’s ideal of a Turkish tavern.
When Curtis took over and began testing dishes this summer, he knew he’d eventually fill out a vegetable-centric menu. “As a chef, it just becomes more interesting after a while,” he says.
The quartered cabbage at Hazel shows the lengths Curtis will got to make produce alluring. He takes a section of arrowhead cabbage and steams it, brines it, crisps it on a flat top, finishes it in an oven, dresses it with an orange-caraway vinaigrette, and blankets it in a crunchy crumble of toasted garlic and ginger.
Despite the multi-pronged approach, the leaves of the cabbage retain their integrity. There’s no mush to be found.
Curtis, 29, credits James Tracey, the culinary director of Neighborhood Restaurant Group, with giving him the freedom to take the menu in a more Mediterranean direction. Although Rubba’s food had garnered Hazel positive reviews and a Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington award for 2017 New Restaurant of the Year, Tracey told Curtis during an early tasting to trust his own vision.
“He talked about what this restaurant has been, what they’ve traditionally done, and then he said, ‘It doesn’t have to be.’” Curtis says. “He kept saying those words. ‘It doesn’t have to be.’”
So Curtis started tinkering, drawing from his recent globe-trotting experiences. After growing up in Bethesda and working in D.C., Curtis moved to San Francisco to work under Michael Rafidi at RN74.
In that city he fell in love with a Turkish woman, and he spent a month living with her in Istanbul before returning to the District to save money and help Rafidi open the ill-fated Requin on the Southwest Waterfront. Curtis then set out for Copenhagen to work as an apprentice at the world-famous Noma well before Rafidi left Requin near the start of the sexual harassment scandal that ultimately took down owner Mike Isabella’s whole restaurant portfolio.
While the potent team-first culture at Noma left a mark on Curtis, the headier influence on his life came from that month in Istanbul, where he was bombarded with new flavors. He said his only experience with similar cuisine before that “was probably the Greek diners up on Rockville Pike.”
Curtis became enamored with the whole idea of sharable meze meals, and he became fixated on recreating the experience of transporting customers to a Turkish meyhane, a neighborhood tavern where people are always laughing and eating and the glasses of distilled raki flow freely.
While Curtis knows Hazel will never be set up with a glass case holding hundreds of varieties of meze, he thinks the vegetable plates, grains, dips, and large-format dishes new to Hazel can help mimic the experience.
Here’s a look inside the dishes at Hazel:
Carrot Haydari
The most memorable meal Curtis had in Istanbul was at a restaurant and market called Namli Gurme in the waterfront Karaköy neighborhood. Although it was breakfast time, he wanted to try all the dinner dishes, including a carrot haydari dip he likens to a raita but with shaved, cooked carrots instead of cucumber. Curtis could never find a haydari as delicious as Namli’s, but he created his own with garlic, lemon, dill, and parsley. It’s served with a ballooning laffa-like bread that’s fired to order on pizza stones in a 500-degree oven, then topped with salt and whole coriander seeds.
Roasted Carrots
Originally these root vegetables were meant to be an accompaniment on one of the family-style plates, but Curtis said people responded so well to them that he gave them their own place on the menu. Hazel dresses them with whipped tahini — the restaurant uses the Soom brand from Philadelphia — and a spicy harissa oil to dress the carrots along with alliums and herbs. The garlic-ginger crumble was brought over from the cabbage dish to add more texture.
Roasted Cauliflower
Prep cooks were hacking away at heads of cauliflower florets one day when Curtis walked in the kitchen and saw all the cores and stems ending up in the trash. So he came up with a two-part dish in which the scraps are roasted until tender with the same urfa pepper and sesame seeds that the florets get, but with the addition of fennel. They get “blitzed” with lemon juice, Curtis says, resulting in a pickle-like product that hides underneath the photogenic parts of the plant.
Dirty Rice
Taken from a section of the menu titled “Grains of Various Names,” the duck confit dirty rice is a nod to the Southern food Curtis used to cook before being drawn to Mediterranean flavors. This version throws in duck livers and whipped lardo with pickled rings of Jimmy Nardello peppers and a fennel salad on top to lighten it up a bit.
Gnocchi
One of the signature dishes from Curtis’s predecessor at Hazel was a pork and kimchi gnocchi. Curtis gave the pasta his own treatment with poblano pork ragout he likens to a mole made “with lots of toasted seeds and toasted nuts.” It comes from an “Animal Kingdom” portion of the menu that includes two other familiar dishes from Hazel’s past, a foie gras mousse — with an English muffin instead of Rubba’s zucchini bread — and steak tartare. “We didn’t view it as a replacement,” Curtis says of the gnocchi. “We just thought it was something that made sense.”
Branzino
One of Hazel’s three large-format dishes, the whole-roasted branzino is another reminder of Curtis’s time in Turkey. He said he tried to keep the treatment restrained but still interesting, adding a yogurt mixed with harissa powder, lemon, garlic, and ginger to help keep the fish tender during a two-part cooking process. The branzino is seared on the flat top to create a base of crispy skin, then broiled to add char to the top. It’s served with citrus gremolata, winter radish slices, and sumac onions. “For me it’s like give me lemon, give me herbs, salt, and olive oil, and we’re good to go,” Curtis says.