Eli Kulp's tasting menu at Fork embraces local flavors that are both familiar and far reaching
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
There are plenty of words that exist in other languages that aren’t easy to translate into English. There’s the Scottish colloquialism tartle, that awkard moment of hesitation during an introduction when you’ve forgotten the other person’s name. Another is saudade, Portuguese for a profound longing for someone or something that you love, but have lost. And then there is the French idea of terroir. Often referred to in relation to wine production, terroir is most easily explained as the characteristic taste and flavor imparted to a wine through the environment in which it is produced. But the concept of terroir goes much further than that. Terroir is the taste of a place.
With the newly introduced Our Terroir tasting menu at Fork, Eli Kulp’s embraced this sense of place and taste. There are nods to the sandy soils of South Jersey’s Pine Barrens, Lancaster County classics like brown butter noodles, mushrooms trucked in every morning from Chester County and crisp-skinned pork with broccoli rabe and provolone, rooted deep in South Philly.
The concept of Our Terroir has been in the works since November when Kulp and his talented sous began kicking around ideas for a tasting with unique dishes — not those that won Fork a glowing three-bell review from Craig LaBan back in January 2013 — but new plates that would give the kitchen room to grow. Plates with a sense of place.
“That’s what made Torrisi Torrisi,” Kulp says of the New York restaurant that was his home before Fork. “They were the first ones to take the idea of a city [New York], and turn it into a 20-course tasting menu.”
Torrisi Italian Specialties sits on a Nolita street on the cusp of Little Italy and Chinatown, and its initial tastings embraced elements from both neighborhoods. A Canal-Street-inspired cucumber salad dressed with dried scallop vinaigrette sat aside pork chops with roasted peppers reimagined from Mulberry Street.
Regionality and tradition are two concepts that Kulp had in mind when researching the new Our Terroir. He sought out Lancaster-bred food historian William Woys Weaver and his newest volume, As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine for the backstory on the molasses pie that ends the meal with rye streusel and buttermilk ice cream. And Rick Nichols, a guy who is a living encyclopedia of Philadelphia foodways, steered him to Justin Hulshizer, a Bucks County grower whose grandmother left him a small saffron plot where 3,000 crocuses now bloom.
The stigmas of Hulshizer’s precious crop found their way into Saffron’s Revenge, a dish that sprung from the image of wild rabbits that graze on the Bucks County saffron crocuses. And Woys Weaver’s grandmother’s brown butter noodles are translated into a take on pasta carbonara that starts with a brown butter pasta dough extruded in-house, tossed with locally cured pork jowl and black pepper and situated atop a perfectly sunny single egg yolk.
And then there’s the Pine Barrens, which reads like either a reference to a particularly dark episode of The Sopranos or a little bit of scenery between Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore. But to Kulp, it’s 1.1 million acres of inspiration. “It’s a unique microclimate and it has a lure, a mysterious element to it. Plus, I like working with pine and it’s a great excuse to use those flavors. There’s the connection there.”
Kulp translates the wild lushness of the Pine Barrens into an arresting combination of venison carpaccio from Dallastown’s Highbourne Deer Farm with brittle chips of charred cabbage brought together with a steeped pine tea.
But the beauty of Our Terroir comes in its accessibility, including the shaved apple salad with rosy Goldrushes from Bucks County’s Solebury Farms paired with wild hickory nuts (that taste something like what pecans aspire to) and a prickly/puckery ginger shrub, and roast pork with fermented broccoli rabe and provolone that is missing nothing but a seeded Italian roll.
And the close-to-home comfort of Kulp’s Kennett Square a la Pascal Barbot (a nod to the pristine plates of the innovative Parisian chef) is apparent with its hundreds of feather-thin slices of Kennett Square mushrooms shaved raw and layered with smoked sweet potato, lemon zest and cashew puree.
“There’s something so pedestrian about white button mushrooms in American culture,” Kulp says of the salad-bar stalwarts. But when they’re brought in fresh every morning, hand-plucked from the R.L. Irwin Mushroom Company in Kennett Square, “You’re tasting it like you’ve never tasted it before.”
To complement the menu, Fork beverage director Paul Rodriguez has created esoteric pairings to work with it. It’s apples to apples with Isastegi, a tart Basque cider matched with the apple salad; and a gutsy natural California Cab with the roast pork. But the most intriguing pairings come by way of local varietals from the Penns Woods Winery out of Chadds Ford, a delicate, floral traminette that works wonders with venison, and an inky red Chambourcin that seems as though it was made for mushrooms and sweet potatoes, both of which tap into a definition of terroir that is entirely on point.
Our Terroir tasting at Fork | 306 Market St., (215) 625-9425, forkrestaurant.com. Tasting avaialble Tue.-Sat., for the whole table. $95 plus optional $50 beverage pairing.
