Dinner with Jeremy and Jessica Nolen

A few hours before dinnertime, my phone vibrates with a Twitter notification: “@CarolineRussock is cooking dinner for @NolenJessica and I tonight. I hope she doesn’t make bratwurst and sauerkraut!” 

When planning dinner at my home for Brauhaus Schmitz chef Jeremy Nolen and his wife, Jess, a pastry chef, I knew better than to go Teutonic. After all, there’s no one in the city with a tighter sausage game. Instead, I opted to take advantage of the last tomatoes and peaches of the season with a simple goodbye-to-summer menu of grilled flank steak, tomato and radish salad, lacinato kale sautéed with shiitakes and a potato salad. Sure, the potato salad might be a little close to home, but mine swapped an herby mayo for the apple-cider vinegar, onions and parsley that go into Jeremy’s kartoffelsalat at Brauhaus. 

With a new restaurant, Whetstone, in the works and New German Cooking, their first cookbook, coming out in November, the Nolens have plenty going on. But, over cocktails, the conversation began in a place far away from the kitchen, in Berks County with Jeremy’s ’80s cover band, Super Bang. 

“Our first song was Poison’s ‘Talk Dirty to Me,’” Jeremy says. At the time, he was working at a contract-management kitchen for the local electric company, a large-scale operation where he was cooking for 2,000 people a day. But he had nights free to practice Skid Row and Mötley Crüe covers with his band. 

What began as a side project with a couple of gigs booked at a local bar quickly morphed into something much more serious. Media Five Entertainment, a management company representing some major Pennsylvania talent, signed Super Bang, and before long they were playing up and down the Jersey Shore four nights a week. 

The demise of Super Bang reads like an episode of Behind the Music, with management-company decisions to replace the lead singer because of his less-than-hunky-rock-star looks and subpar replacement singers hastening the end.

Even though he clocked more time playing ’80s covers at beach bars, Jeremy was more at home in the kitchen. “I wanted to go to culinary school and my dad said, no,” he explains. Nolen’s father was also a chef and a musician and knowing the scope of his son’s previous kitchen experience, didn’t see the point. 

“I cooked with my dad since I was 14. I was 19, showing culinary-school graduates how to actually make béchamel. I learned how to make liverwurst when I was in high school. I went to school with liverwurst sandwiches, but in Berks County, everyone went to school with liverwurst sandwiches.” [Bordering Lancaster and Lebanon counties, Berks has a sizable German population, making a liverwurst lunch way less weird.]

Serendipitously, at age 28, Jeremy landed at Coquette , the Fifth and Bainbridge bistro where he would meet his future wife. Since Coquette, the space has been home to Adsum and Tapestry, two well-received spots that lacked staying power. It will be home to Whetstone this winter. 

“Don’t say it’s cursed!” Jess chirps in. 

Shuttered restaurants notwithstanding, 700 S. Fifth St. is the opposite of cursed for the Nolens. It was in the kitchen of their upcoming restaurant that the couple first set eyes upon each other.

It was 2007, and a 20-year-old Jess was fresh out of The Restaurant School, working as a pastry cook at Continental Midtown. After a particularly trying Saturday night, a former co-worker told her about a pastry-chef position that had just opened at Coquette. Classic French desserts were firmly in her wheelhouse and Jess landed the job and was immediately smitten with Jeremy. 

“I remember when I first met Jeremy … that beard!” she says.

“She hit on me every day,” Jeremy says smiling, with a mixture of humor and modesty. “I couldn’t believe it!” 

A short-and-sweet courtship involving snagging bites of cheese at Jess’s dessert station (“That’s my M.O., I love cheese. Cheese is fucking awesome,” says Jeremy) and a whirlwind trip to New York followed. The couple have a daughter, Kiera, 6.

Jeremy came upon the former Coquette spot though Brauhaus’ insurance agent, who is part owner of the property. “It was kind of one of those things that really just worked out,” Jeremy says.

 Nolen is still going to be keeping tabs on Brauhaus and their sausage-centric satellite in Reading Terminal, but he and Jess are moving away from German cooking for Whetstone. “It’ll be cool, kind of a neighborhood place, but not in a cheesy way,” Jeremy explains. He’s thinking a New American menu, set up straightforward with appeti-zers, soup and salads, entrees and plenty of charcuterie. On the dessert end, Jess is planning on playing with Amer-ican flavors like root beer, butterscotch and birch beer. 

Whetsone is much smaller than the beer-hall-like Brauhaus, but cooking for a smaller audience isn’t a big deal for Nolen. “When you first start out, there’s like four people there,” he says, thinking back to his cover-band days. “You have to go up there with the energy as if there were 1,000 people in the room.’’ And it’s that kind of  thinking that works in the kitchen as well.