NONGLUTEN #004: A few NYC restaurants | A few products | Monica Glass

My meal of the year (so far) at Kabawa. Raincoast crisps get an almond flour makeover. Plus: an interview with the chef behind Cambridge, MA's exceptional Verveine Cafe & Bakery

A FEW NYC RESTAURANTS

Kabawa

Caribbean | East Village

Sometimes when I take a bite of food I really love, I start involuntarily laughing. It only happens once or twice a year; last week, it happened at Kabawa.

The culprit: bammy, the Jamaican fried cassava cake, dipped into butter and scotch bonnet pepper jelly. Funnily enough, most diners here won’t get to try it, because bammy is the gf substitute for Kabawa’s usual roti-based bread service. “We wouldn’t want you to miss out,” our cheery server told us, and we definitely didn’t—the roti-eaters did.

Kabawa—the recently opened prix-fixe sibling to Bar Kabawa next door—is a showcase for the tremendous talent of Bajan chef Paul Carmichael and his team. And for those with an interest in Caribbean foodways (me) or family roots in the region (Lauren), the menu is riddled with engaging easter eggs you really never see at kitchens of this caliber in New York.

It is also—unlike patty specialist Bar Kabawa—largely gluten-free, and both the front-of-house staff and the kitchen handled celiac precautions better than any other restaurant we’ve eaten at in the City. At $145/person before tax and tip, this is what you’d hope for, but it is rarely executed so effortlessly tableside, and with such rigor behind the scenes.

The menu changes often, but we loved the precious orb-cassava dumplings suspended in tomatoey creole sauce, the earthen embrace of green banana-mushroom pastel, and the rich, offal-infused “jerk” duck sausage. Somebody ought to write a Master’s thesis about the dizzyingly delicious confit goat, smothered in a complex scallop-spiked sauce that smolders with addictive heat. And what can I say about matrimony? The poetically named Jamaican dessert combines citrus and condensed milk—here spun into ice cream—to wonderful effect, further enhanced by the occasion: our anniversary.

Website | Instagram

Thai Diner

Thai | Nolita

Everybody loves Thai Diner—including the gluten-free community, who already knows that this restaurant goes above and beyond in its gf accommodations. But I have some info that may be news, especially for those who haven’t been in a little while: Thai Diner’s fried chicken and fried tofu are, as of recently, gluten-free and fried separately.

There’s so much else to explore on the menu, but this innovation does open up many more options: stick either protein on top of the delightfully chewy and wok-charred pad see ew (made with gf soy sauce), or try the playful fried chicken larb, cut with plenty of bright herbs, onions, and cucumbers. Note that for whatever reason, the fried red snapper is not gluten-free—a shame, but the situation seems dynamic and may soon change.

For what it’s worth, my favorite thing here has no fried component at all—turkey-stuffed cabbage rolls in a pool of coconut-makrut lime sauce. They call this dish “stuffed cabbage tom khaa,” and it’s an incredibly—and improbably—successful mashup of those two things. I’m also partial to the chilled roast chicken-banana blossom salad, bound in an assertive dressing that’s sneakily one of the spicier things on the menu.

The kitchen is less consistent when they’re slammed, so I recommend going for an early weeknight dinner or weekday lunch. The latter means you can get Thai iced tea or—even better—iced coffee with coconut cream. I can’t get that with dinner. I’d be up all night thinking about the cabbage rolls.

Website | Instagram

Bodrum

Turkish | Upper West Side

The Upper West Side is not one of the City’s top food neighborhoods, but we spend a lot of time up there—it’s where my in-laws are. And of course my mother-in-law’s kitchen is better than any local restaurant, but there’s really only one place we go when she takes the night off: Bodrum.

We have been eating at this nondescript Turkish restaurant together for the past decade, and Lauren’s relationship with Bodrum goes back even further. This means she’s spent countless nights with their hot, crusty (and free!) pide bread; it also means she’s reached a hard-won peace with the fact that it’s now off-limits. It’s a testament to Bodrum’s many other strengths that we continue to go in spite of this temptation.

Any eggplant mezze is a solid bet—we rotate between imam bayildi, patlican salatasi, and baba ghanoush—but our mandatory pick is the bright and lemony braised leeks, served in a pool of fragrant olive oil. Simple chicken shish kebab is smoky and satisfying, served with buttery Turkish rice, which is not pilaf and does not contain orzo. Equally good are the chicken or lamb adana kebabs, spiced and ground meat served with garlicky yogurt and tomato sauces. These are normally served on bread, but they’ll be happy to sub rice.

Those are our go-tos, but the menu goes deeper and there are a lot of gf options. Everything is accurately marked, and servers generally know the deal (though this is a place where we say “gluten allergy” rather than celiac, just to be extra clear). Bodrum is quite popular in the neighborhood, so you do have to reserve for dinner on their lovely sidewalk terrace in nice weather. But for lunch you can walk right in—or on summer nights, get it to go for dinner on the Great Lawn, where the pide can’t find you.

Website | Instagram

A FEW PRODUCTS

1. Lesley Stowe Raincoast Crisps - Almond Flour

I’ll never forget where I was when I learned they make gluten-free raincoast crisps: in the Lesley Stowe free-sample tent at a tennis tournament in Montreal. But gf raincoasts are not as abundant in the real world as they seemed at the Rogers Cup last summer—and this only adds to their mystique. I scour the cracker aisle at every shop, and walk out with a box of these maybe one in ten times.

They come in three flavors—rosemary-raisin (pictured), salty date, and cranberry. And ironically they’re a little bit dry, but really blossom when topped with cheese (bloomy rinded soft cheeses in particular) or dipped into just about anything. Your local Whole Foods is the best bet for securing a box, but their elusiveness is part of the fun. (For me).

Usually about $6-8 for a 5.3oz box

2. Pasta Natura Teff Ditalini

You may know teff, a grain native to Ethiopia and Eritrea, as the star ingredient of injera. It’s cool to see it lend complexity to this gluten-free pasta, whose faintly smoky flavor reminds me of Pugliese grano arso (burnt wheat). It goes really well with tomato-based sauces, and I’m often inspired to incorporate other Southern Italian ingredients like broccoli rabe and ricotta salata.

Pasta Natura makes a whole line of gluten-free pasta using alternative grains and flours, and I’m looking forward to trying more. I get mine at Eataly, which is New York’s second-best source for gf pasta (and may hold the top spot in the other American cities that have one).

Usually $6-8 for a 8.81oz bag at Eataly

3. Lakritsfabriken Salty Liquorice

Liquorice can be a minefield for hidden gluten, though I suspect at least half the world’s celiac population doesn’t care—liquorice is also pretty divisive. In our household, we welcome liquorice, and particularly welcome this high-quality gluten-free black liquorice from Swedish company Lakritsfabriken.

I wouldn’t call this an entry-level black liquorice, though it’s not as in-your-face as the most intense salmiakki. I like to temper its more savory qualities by enjoying it alongside some chocolate chips—it’s one of my favorite flavor combinations. If you do like liquorice but salty liquorice is a bridge too far, Lakritsfabriken has several other gluten-free products. Collect them all.

Usually $15-20 for a 1.4oz box. We got ours at Boston’s Formaggio Kitchen

Right around the time Lauren was diagnosed with celiac disease, one of the country’s best new gluten-free cafe/bakeries opened in Cambridge, MA, about 15 minutes from where I grew up. Of course I’m talking about Verveine—the project of longtime Boston chef Ken Oringer, whose daughter has celiac, and pastry chef Monica Glass, who has celiac herself.

There is really no adjective effusive enough to fully describe the magnitude of what Verveine has accomplished—Monica’s breads and pastries are creative marvels that fill me with optimism, dopamine, and, admittedly, more than a bit of Boston pride. I have been lucky enough to eat there several times over the past year, and I’m convinced it represents the future of gluten-free cooking and baking in America.

There are pastries, sandwiches, and composed dishes bursting with ingredients like ube, preserved lemon, and shiso. There are baguettes, loaves of ciabatta and milk bread, and pizza on Fridays. There are triple-chocolate muffins, cardamom-mango morning buns, miso brittle-peanut cookies, and apple cider donuts. It would be enough for all this to be half as good as it sounds, but it’s not. It’s better.

Some of this has to do with Monica’s signature gluten-free flour blend, WLDFLR, which is available for purchase both at the cafe and online. But even with a bag of this in the pantry…I’m not sure just anyone could do what she does.

After graduating from Penn State, Monica moved to New York for a career in public relations before pivoting to pastry. She spent time working under Deborah Racicot at Gotham Bar & Grill and Michael Laiskonis at Le Bernardin before opening 10 Arts by Eric Ripert at the Ritz-Carlton in Philly. A move to Boston brought Monica and Ken together in the kitchen of fine-dining stalwart Clio, where she became a Food & Wine Best New Pastry Chef mere months into the job in 2013. National food media shunned Boston even worse then than they do now, so this was a big deal!

Much of the increasing press around Monica’s pastry work did mention her celiac disease, but mostly just in passing—she was working with gluten and making regular desserts, after all. But all the while, she was plotting the bakery/cafe of her dreams—equal parts inclusive and innovative—and as the appreciative crowds now prove, it couldn’t have come soon enough.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

LP: The fact that you opened right on time for us was really just incredible, but I can imagine you’ve been dreaming of this business for a really long time…

MG: A very long time, yeah…

How long has the seed for Verveine been germinating in your mind?

Basically all 17 years since I was diagnosed. At the time, I was working at 10 Arts by Eric Ripert in the Ritz-Carlton [in Philadelphia], and I started trying to secretly do gluten-free things.

But at first I really didn’t want to go be a fully gluten-free chef; I wanted to hone my technique. I mean, I’m not young now—I’m in my forties—but in my twenties I really wanted to learn from the best. So I wanted to fully learn how to do things the normal way first.

You’ve been very patient! For 17 years you’ve been holding on to this!

You said you were sneaking in gluten-free desserts; did you feel like you couldn’t fully explore all the possibilities of doing gluten-free baking at those jobs?

If I had gone completely gluten-free, I don’t think people would have really reacted well to it. There’s still this huge stigma around it, but also—if people didn’t want to eat gluten-free, I didn’t want to force it upon them.

Well I’m sure that has had an influence on the way your gluten-free pastry work has come out, because I don’t know that every gluten-free baker does have that grounding in traditional —and particularly traditional French—pastry technique.

I didn’t realize you also worked at Le Bernardin—how was it working there? As an aside, your gluten-free baguettes are better than theirs. You should be supplying them!

[Laughing] I should be! Someday…

I reached out to [then-pastry chef] Michael Laiskonis because I liked his blog at the time—this was in between 2006 and 2007. I staged, and then he told me he was looking to fill a pastry position, and asked if I wanted the job. I loved it!

After being there for about a year, they asked me to open 10 Arts, so I was still under the Le Bernardin umbrella for another 5 years, but I moved to Philly. And that’s where I really started coming into my own as a pastry chef.

I’d had digestive issues my entire life—severely anemic, underweight— but my mom got sick when I was in college, and that’s when I really noticed my body giving up; they say that stress can be a trigger. She was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, and she passed away the week I was supposed to move down to Philly. Shortly after moving, I was diagnosed with celiac, gastroparesis, gastritis, and esophagitis all at the same time.

Oh my goodness—what was the second thing? That’s the one I don’t recognize.

Gastroparesis. Basically paralysis of the stomach—slow motility.

So the other three things were knock-on effects from the celiac that I would hope you’ve been able to overcome since then? Or do they occasionally flare up?

The gastroparesis sometimes does, but no. There is evidence of chronic gastritis, but it’s inactive right now.

So this was 2008—what was it like in the restaurant world that you occupied, and particularly in the pastry world that you occupied?

It was challenging, cause every day I was using the exact ingredient that was causing me harm. So I didn’t know what to do—I was baking breads, I was making cake, cookies, bread pudding, and I just had to stop tasting my own food.

Thankfully at that point I had made a bunch of things already, so I called it my “mental mouth;” I knew what things tasted like. But coming up with new ideas was challenging since I couldn’t taste anything.

I’m curious if you can recall an early gluten-free baking triumph that made it onto one of your dessert menus. Something where you really started to feel like, “Okay, I’m really getting the hang of this.”

I think one of my favorite things I did was a chestnut cake—it was while I was very briefly at [now-closed] Fish in Philly. It was a warm chestnut…not a soufflé, but soft in the same way. I used an iteration of my flour, plus chestnut flour and creme fraiche. The egg whites and yolks were separated, so it was kind of like a chiffon. That was probably one of my first successful things.

That sounds great. I want to hear about how your flour came together. That’s kind of the foundation or prerequisite for even considering the first idea of Verveine, right? How much trial and error was there?

There was a lot of trial and error, and just tinkering and changing percentages and stuff. You know, really looking at the starch, the fat, the protein content in different flours, and piecing it all together to mimic an all-purpose flour.

I don’t call my flour all-purpose though, because there are some things that it just isn’t for—it’s not bad, but I prefer a different blend. But I do call it my “pastry flour.”

1-to-1 blends have really improved so much even in the past few years, and I suspect that the commercially available 1-to-1 flours back then were not great. I mean, you had things you could refer to, but they weren’t that good, right?

Yeah, I was just very unhappy with all the blends on the market. And I tried…a lot of them.

I was really excited when Thomas Keller came out with Cup4Cup, but I didn’t like it that much. I think it’s fine for pie doughs, or things that you want to be light and flaky, but it’s not a 1-to-1 for cookies or cakes. It tends to make those drier because it’s starchier.

Are you OK with me putting that in? Cause that’s interesting context. I really like Cup4Cup, but it’s interesting to hear from a pastry chef what its weaknesses are.

[Laughing] That’s fine—I think it’s good for certain things.

I do think it’s the best of the commercially available 1-to-1 blends, but do you have another one that you prefer?

Oh I agree, it is the best that is available commercially.

So yours contains rice flour…

Rice flour, brown rice flour, arrowroot, tapioca, potato starch, dried milk powder, and a pinch of xanthan gum.

I feel like the arrowroot is the wild card that I haven’t seen in any other flour blends. I know it as a stabilizer for home ice cream making…

That too, yeah!

Is that where your idea to use it here came from? Where else do you use it?

In baking and in sauces—it does create the elasticity, but it doesn’t have the aftertaste of, say, corn starch. But it is used as a thickener, so that gives it some structure.

Once you landed on this a-ha combination, did you then have to find a way to get it produced at scale before you felt like you could embark on opening a business that relied on it?

Yes, cause mixing all those starches is very messy! I hoped that we would be operating successfully, so I would need a lot of flour.

I reached out to my friend Rebecca Foxman who owns Fox & Son in Philly, cause she had started selling some of her [gluten-free] funnel cake mixes, so I asked who produced them. She connected me with the Raymond Hadley Corporation in Spencer, NY, and we did some trial runs—and now they produce my flour.

So, going back chronologically— at what point do you end up in Boston?

2012 was when I first ended up in Boston. I had left 10 Arts, and a mutual friend connected me with [Ken Oringer’s then-partner, chef] Jamie Bissonnette, who said that Ken was looking for a pastry chef for Clio. And I was like, “Oh my god, Ken Oringer—yes!” So I went up there, did a tasting, got hired, and moved to Boston.

And then you were at Clio for quite a long time?

Well, I left in 2015—I knew that Ken was closing Clio at its 20^th anniversary [at the end of 2015], and I was very open and honest with him about wanting to go back home to Philly. But we decided that we wanted to work together in the future.

This is just coming into my mind—the idea of staff meal or family meal. Was that tricky for you to navigate?

That was tricky, especially because a lot of the time it came from [Clio’s Japanese sister restaurant] Uni—so they were using regular soy sauce. But Tony Messina, who was the chef of Uni while I was there, and then Douglas Rodriguez who was the Clio chef, were both very good about introducing more gluten-free things, and it became better as they learned more about it. But yeah, the beginning was hard.

Did your fellow cooks know about celiac disease?

Not really. I mean, they had an understanding, but they definitely took it seriously and they always made me special things.

At this point, did you start slowly introducing more and more gluten-free things to the Clio dessert menu or was your experimentation mostly going on off the clock?

It was both. I definitely started introducing more gluten-free desserts at Clio, where I could experiment with a lot of different things. Fortunately, that’s one of Ken’s strengths—he wants you to use weird ingredients and experiment, so I was very lucky that I got to do that.

But I was always experimenting on my own time, too. I kept developing my own flour blend and changing it as I learned more.

So, okay—there’s a big gap here that I don’t know about between 2015 and…last year’s opening. What was going on then?

After Clio, I was at Constellation Culinary Group—I was the Corporate Executive Pastry Chef, so I oversaw all operations from the Berkshires down to Miami, and I got to experiment there, too. When you’re feeding hundreds or even thousands of people at different venues and events, they’re gonna have lots of different dietary needs.

Meanwhile, Ken and I kept lines of communication open. He originally just wanted to open a bakery/cafe, but I didn’t want to do that, because I wanted to do it gluten-free. And then his daughter was diagnosed with celiac disease about 6 years ago, and that’s when the serious conversation started, like, “Hey, I guess we can do gluten-free!”

Well, you had your flour ready to go, and then it was like—it’s time. Are these discussions going on during lockdown? Just thinking about the timeline of when you opened…

We had been talking about it for years. We signed the lease in 2023, and it took a year-plus from signing the lease to opening.

So walk me through opening— I think people still think of this as, like, a niche trend sometimes, but it’s clearly not a niche trend cause look at the lines! The response has been just insane, right? The response has been completely crazy.

Really insane, and I did not expect that at all. And it still—even now—brings me to tears just to see how many people are being affected or changed by it. I have stories from so many guests saying I changed their lives!

It’s my mission for people to be able to dine together—for everybody to eat together at the table, and for no one to feel excluded, and that is what is happening there. I have celiac people and non-celiac people dining together, and everybody is enjoying everything!

Well for a couple like us where one person has celiac and the other doesn’t, it really couldn’t be better. Especially given how much we both care about food.

And this level of sophistication is not present in a lot of dedicated places. I think you may be the only gluten-free bakery/cafe that uses black sesame, or ramps, or yuzu, or muhammara—all these fun things that this community normally doesn’t have access to. There’s obviously a real desire for it.

I mean, I like to introduce people to new ingredients. I like to introduce myself to new ingredients! I want to take risks and try things. I get bored easily, and I like to explore new things—so I wanted to introduce that spirit here as well. And that goes along with the whole idea of not just being a gluten-free café/bakery—I wanted it to just be food.

Right. You don’t put the term gluten-free anywhere, you don’t see “gf” anywhere, and that’s obviously on purpose. I’m curious to hear more from you about why you made that choice.

We didn’t want the stigma of “gluten-free” to detract people from wanting to come in. My whole thing is making gluten-free food that people would never know is gluten-free, so it’s not that I wanted to trick people—and we’ve definitely had some people get mad when they found out that it’s gluten free—but I just wanted people to experience it first and then make a judgement.

Do you have a sense of the breakdown of your customer base? Like, how many people are celiac vs. gluten intolerant vs. someone just coming in off the street who has no idea…

I don’t. I really would like to know that as well, so, I don’t know, maybe we could try and do a survey at some point.

Just looking around the cafe, it’s a very diverse clientele, and that’s cool to see. It’s also just a commentary on the gluten-free community in general—anybody could be affected.

Any age, any demographic—and when I was writing the business plan, I had multiple people be like, “Well, you have to find your—who is your customer gonna be?” And I’m like, “I don’t know!” Cause celiac disease does not discriminate. So it could be anyone from any age, it could be anyone from any cultural background.

There’s also an astounding diversity in what you offer food-wise—the flavors that you explore, and the cultures that are represented. You get diagnosed with celiac and you think, “Okay, well, I’m never gonna have arayes again,” for example, and then we show up at Verveine and you’re making arayes! (Levantine ground lamb-stuffed pita pockets) Which is crazy. I never thought my wife and I would eat those together again. And they’re delicious.

It’s so funny too, because I didn’t expect them to be that popular! But when we put them on, they sell out in minutes.

There are a few things on your menu that have a Middle Eastern influence. Initially I was wondering if it has to do with Ana Sortun…

That’s a good theory, but it’s actually moreso my friend Michael Solomonov’s cooking, and I just love that kind of cuisine. It’s a style of food that I like to eat.

Your pita, by the way, is totally crazy. Of all of your breads, the pita may be the one that most defies science. What was that process like?

Everything is rooted in traditional technique for me, so what I usually try to do is start with my normal glutenous recipe, and adjust that—because I don’t want to just create a weird gluten-free pita; I want it to be an authentic pita.

And then I play around with different ingredients, and different flours. This one has had a couple iterations—different hydrations—and I probably created this one during Covid. And then, actually, Mike Solomonov loved it so much that he and I tried to find a pita factory to produce it—

Oh please God.

But we couldn’t find a dedicated factory, or one that would be open to cleaning their lines. But it is still a plan of mine.

The pita has the elasticity and chewiness that is so—I mean, the only other time I’ve had it is eating pizza made with the deglutinized Caputo flour in Naples.

That’s actually what I started with, but I don’t use any of the deglutinized wheat starch in the cafe, just because so many celiacs also have issues with wheat.

No, of course, but that’s so interesting—so you saw how it behaved using that flour, and then you tried to reverse-engineer it using a blend that didn’t include wheat starch?

Correct, yeah.

The other thing that totally floored both of us was your guava and cheese pastelito, or handpie. That’s another thing that—there was a cafe near us in Brooklyn where we used to get those all the time. And again, you just think, well that’s kind of a niche thing, is anyone ever gonna make that gluten-free? And yours was just so good.

Yeah, people still ask about it. I change the flavors, and sometimes I do a savory one as well, but I think I am gonna have to bring that back because people want it!

Do you have a template of various doughs or types of pastry that you know you want to offer, and then you kind of slot in different flavor combinations and different ingredients seasonally?

Yeah, it’s an Excel sheet, but I have, like—savory pie, savory galette, tart, danish dough, and then underneath all sorts of flavor combinations. But last week, for example, I was able to get wild garlic in, so I just made something off the cuff.

Would you say there’s one product that has been the best-seller, at least from the pastry case?

It’s kind of a tie. I guess the #1 seller is the cinnamon roll, and for the children, ube brownies. Everybody loves the purple brownies.

Those are delicious.

And then—everybody also loves the danish dough. It’s just a complicated process, and I am still trying to teach my team how to do it. But right now, I’m the only one to make it, so it doesn’t get on every day.

We tried the spinach and artichoke danish a couple months ago, and it was fabulous. The lamination on that is so impressive. I’m curious—you clearly have the skills to make what I bet would be a really bangin’ croissant, but you don’t have croissants.

And I saw the Lune cookbook—this is the other thing, you’re the only gluten-free bakery I’ve been to that has cookbooks displayed, and I always think it’s cool to show your customers what inspires you. So I see the croissant book up there—is that in the works?

So yeah, I took a little time off from working on it, but I have been working on a gluten-free croissant for a while. It’s not 100% there yet, which is why I haven’t introduced it, and then I also need my team to really learn lamination. But it’s hard—most of them are new to pastry, so they’re just learning, and then it’s specifically gluten-free pastry…

Well, I was gonna ask that—how do you hire for a project like this?

It’s hard! I just hire in the traditional way, interview them, have them come in and cook with me for a paid stage, see if they like it. In the beginning, because we didn’t announce that it was gluten-free, I got a lot of people in and then they would be like, “Nah, I don’t wanna do it if it’s gluten-free.”

Some of the people who have stuck with me are gluten-free, but most of them aren’t. They just wanted to learn how to do pastry better.

Are there any pastries or breads that are a white whale for you? Or something you really want to nail, but you can’t nail for whatever reason?

It’s more that there are things that I want to put on the menu, but it’s about having the time and the space to do it. Cause I can make bagels, I can make the sourdough English muffins…

Oh my god.

I would love to put pretzels.

A nod to Philadelphia.

I don’t want to ask you about expansion after just a year, but it must have crossed your mind. I mean, I want a Verveine on every street corner. I want a Verveine at Logan!

The reason why I do want to expand is because I want to feed as many people as possible. But obviously, what we do and where we go depends on a lot of different factors.

If we do expand, I only want to go as far or as close as quality permits. Because quality is of the utmost importance to me and I want to be able to oversee it all.

Are you in the kitchen every day?

Mmhmm. Mondays I’m off.

You used to only be open Wednesday through Sunday. And then you added Tuesdays, I assume because of demand? Are you having any trouble keeping up with demand?

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are slower days, but they’re still great days. We still sometimes have a little bit of a line, but it’s not like out the door like weekends. Online ordering has gotten big on Tuesdays through Thursdays.

And online ordering for pizza day—and we should talk about pizza for a second—is what my wife and I learned is the hack to be able to make sure you get pizza.

Yeah [laughing]

So you were just saying—you can make pretzels, you can make bagels—you made pizza, and the pizza is awesome. I’m sure people are so stoked to have pizza, and we certainly are. I feel like I want a Verveine pizzeria. All of your customers must feel that way…

That’s a possibility, too [laughing]

Your pizza has the perfect sauce-to-cheese ratio and it really evokes a style of pizza that I feel isn’t as well represented in the gluten-free space. It’s also a nice size—just the right size for two people to split.

Thanks! Yeah, sizing—I put a lot of thought into the sizes of breads and everything else in the beginning. I mean I still do, but I wanted it to be real food. Gluten-free bread is always super tiny!

Your milk bread slices are, you know, capacious.

[Laughing]

How are you able to achieve that? Is it because of what you bake it in?

I bake it in a normal Pullman pan. A loaf pan.

So you just get a rise from it that other gluten-free bread struggles to get?

So, for that I also separate the eggs, and I whip the egg whites for extra rise.

Oh that’s so smart. Just thinking about when you were diagnosed, and when milk bread really exploded in this country—have you tried regular gluten-containing versions of shokupan?

Many, many, many years ago, yeah. And I mean, mine doesn’t have the glutenous strands that you can pull apart, but it’s more the flavor and the actual technique that I was looking for.

The flavor’s bang-on. The flavor is exactly right, and the texture is lovely.

What’s so interesting about your stuff is that it does mimic gluten-containing bread and pastry to a certain degree, but it also creates its own third genre. It’s its own thing that is amazing on its own terms. If you’re constantly comparing things like, “Oh, this doesn’t taste exactly like this; the texture isn’t exactly the way I remember it,” you can really go down a dark path.

Thank you, yeah, and that’s exactly why I’m not gonna put the croissant on until it’s, like, a croissant.

Well, and croissants have a way of going viral. It might get ugly in line if you start offering croissants [laughing]

[Laughing] Yeah.

Is there anything else you’ve been working on that you’re excited about?

Phyllo dough.

Oh my god, really?

For spanakopita or baklava, because that’s something I really miss.

Yeah! And that’s something that’s really just about impossible—

Yeah, spreading it super, super thin without breaking…

So you’re just about there?

Yup!

That’s so exciting. Spanakopita is something that we used to make all the time, and we really miss it. There’s the gluten-free puff pastry in the freezer and that’s close, but it is different.

But that’s also something that I want to do with my flour brand—frozen doughs like the frozen puff pastry, frozen pie crusts, frozen biscuits, cookie dough…

That would be amazing.

Before we close, I just wanted to ask about any positive international travel experiences since your diagnosis. Do you get to travel much?

Not right now! But before moving up here, I took some time off from working, and I just traveled. I went to Italy—Sicily, specifically, that was awesome—and London. In Italy they had so many gluten-free options, and so did London. Amsterdam was great. Copenhagen was pretty great and easy.

You mentioned you were partially a French major, have you traveled much in France?

I’ve been back to Paris for a little trip, but I haven’t tried the gluten-free bakeries there yet. Actually one of my favorite photos is from when I was 20, holding a baguette on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur, and I’m just—I look sick. I look incredibly skinny and sick, and it’s just a reminder: ironic that I’m holding a baguette and now I can’t eat it!

No, but, here’s the thing—your gluten-free baguettes would be perfectly at home even on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur. I think that’s a nice full-circle place to end. I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to chat with me.

Of course!

NEXT TIME ON NONGLUTEN…

A few more NYC restaurants

A few more products

and NONGLUTEN welcomes…FRED MORIN, chef/co-owner of Montreal’s legendary Joe Beef Group.

Thank you for reading!

All illustrations by Lauren Martin. Photo courtesy of Monica Glass.