Hugue Dufour

Chef-owner, M. Wells
Queens, New York

In Spain, on a farm where he was helping slaughter pigs, chef

Hugue Dufour encountered a woman who had peculiar ideas about

feeding her children breakfast. “You know how when you have

liver problem is good to have liver?” he asks me in his thick French

accent while drinking a glass of red wine at his runaway success of

a gourmet diner, M. Wells. “Well, this lady say, ‘If you eat brain,

you’ll be more intelligent!’”

So every morning this woman would make a tortilla Española

for her children using blood sausage (good for the blood, I

suppose?) with brains hidden inside to make her kids smart.

Which explains why on the counter before us, there’s a cooked calf

brain sitting on a spiral of blood sausage ready for us to use in

Dufour’s take on that same dish.

“I’ve never had brain,” I say timidly.

Dufour cuts me off a piece. “Try it,” he says and, unsure of

how to react, I do.

It’s creamy. It tastes vaguely of, well, chicken. Dufour laughs

and tells me about a dish he once served called “rabbit oysters.”

“We took rabbit heads and we poached them for an hour; there’s a

natural seam that shows up on the skull. We’d cut them open with