“How many people pay attention to the vegetable on the
cutting board?” he asks me at one point. “What’s the texture?
What’s the flavor?”
Demonstrating this, he tastes each vegetable before adding it to
the salad. First the fennel: “It’s pretty good.” Then a black radish:
“Normally I’d cook this, but it’s nice and sweet.” A breakfast
radish: “I don’t like this. It’s old; it’s not nice.”
The greens that Patterson adds to the salad—field sorrel,
miner’s lettuce, borage, chickweed—were foraged for the
restaurant. When I express concern about my ability to do the
same at home, he answers, “This grows all over the country. This
grows in Central Park.”
Most home cooks dump cans of tomatoes and cartons of cream
into a pot, turn up the heat, and, thirty minutes later, call it soup.
Patterson’s approach is more like that of the painter Georges
Seurat, who painted his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the
Island of La Grande Jatte, dot by dot. Patterson cooks the same
way.
And each dot matters. Take the cheese that Patterson shaves on
top of that same salad. As we cook, the woman who makes the
cheese—Soyoung Scanlan from Andante Dairy—comes to visit
the Coi kitchen. She talks about a newer cheese she’s trying out,
and Patterson samples it. Their rapport makes it clear that
Patterson values this relationship with the person whose cheese
he’ll soon be shaving over his salad.
That cheese has a story. So does the radish. So does the wood