meticulous,” Danko recalls. “She’d look at a plate and ask, ‘Why
is this component there? What role is it playing?’”
Danko himself is also meticulous, a fact that becomes very clear
when we start cooking.
We begin with a blueberry crostada, and Danko has a unique
method for making the crust. After using the food processor to
combine the butter and flour and adding only the smallest amount
of water, he dumps the pebbly mixture onto a sheet of parchment
paper and then begins squeezing clumps, stacking them on top of
each other. He uses the parchment to shape those clumps into a
log that he slices in half, making two pristine disks.
After refrigerating the dough for one hour, and after rolling it
out (he uses a bench scraper to fix any cracks in the perimeter),
filling it with blueberries, and popping it in the oven, Danko begins
making one of his signature dishes: buckwheat blinis with crème
fraîche, smoked salmon, and caviar.
He coats a nonstick pan with clarified butter—“You need
enough fat to float the blinis or they won’t curl”—then uses a
pancake dispenser to drop wet blini batter into the hot pan. The
dispenser ensures circles as precise as the disks of crostada dough.
Pretty soon, the hot blinis are transferred to a plate and Danko
uses a bag to pipe on crème fraîche. He lays on salmon and then
pipes osetra caviar on top. “Eat it hot!” he instructs. I do and it is
good.
Danko’s precision and meticulousness is evident in everything
he does, including the way he warms a bowl before adding the