when you want, where you want.
Chef Nick Curtola Loves to Visit His Old Cooks’ New Restaurants
Illustration: Ryan Inzana
Would New York City’s restaurant scene look the way that it does today if the Four Horsemen hadn’t opened in 2015? It’s hard not to see its influence in the approximately one million wine bars that have opened across the city in the last decade: the devotion to natural wine, yes; the always changing menu of unfussed-with Greenmarket finds, of course; but also the attitude — a joyful, everyone-is-welcome sense of genuine care. “We started the restaurant with a no-assholes policy,” says chef Nick Curtola, “and that includes ourselves — treating people with a lot of respect.” The thing is, the Four Horsemen is a relatively small space, so the number of people who can eat there is physically limited. That’s changing, since the group is expanding with an Italian restaurant next year (“We have a working name, which is I Cavallini,” Curtola says), and a years-in-the-making Four Horsemen cookbook that’s out later this month. “The restaurant is only 40 seats, and we can only reach so many people,” the chef explains. “With the book and social media, we can stretch out a little more.”
Wednesday, October 2
There’s a great little coffee shop around the corner from the restaurant called PPL. It’s a Japanese coffee shop and really beautiful. We’re lucky in New York — this is just a corner coffee shop, and it happens to be amazing. It’s one of those places. I grabbed a latte and got to work.
It’s the time of year that can be a little bit stressful and challenging for a chef that cooks seasonally, but also, that’s part of the fun. I’m working on a roasted-squash dish, so I cooked up a couple of versions, and a new dessert, which is sesame panna cotta. I toasted sesame seeds and steeped them in cream. We have a really nice golden sesame paste that we’re using in a salad dressing right now, so I added some of that and some vanilla bean. The flavor was amazing — it tasted like Reese’s Pieces — but the texture was a little loose, and I’m very particular about it. I hate when panna cotta is too thin, and I hate when it’s too thick and you can feel the gelatin in there. I’m going to work on it for the rest of the week and get it dialed in.
Family meal was from one of our longtime sous-chefs, Dylan. He made pulled pork and chicken-fat fried rice, along with a pickled-onion herb salad. We use the same ingredients at family meal as we do in the restaurant — we aren’t trying to serve beautiful food to guests and shitty food to ourselves — and it’s a really important part of our day. We instill in the cooks early that it’s a time for us to sit down, talk about reservations for the night, talk about any changes or guest notes, and come together.
After family meal and before service, we do tasters. We added roasted chicken as a fall dish with broccoli spigarello, garlic-chile oil, chicken jus, and figs. It’s a really nice, transitional fall dish. Then more coffee, and we go into service. I’m tasting throughout the day and don’t usually need something late at night.
Thursday, October 3
It was an exciting day because we were getting ready for some guest dinners with friends visiting from Rolf and Daughters in Nashville. Our guest chefs were all prepping with us.
Amanda, our general manager, went to Ten Ichi Mart and got us a bunch of onigiri and sushi. And Billy, who was part of our wine program and now works at Rolf and Daughters, ran out to Birds of a Feather, which is right down the street. We get that, I’d say, once a month, as either a late-night snack or impromptu family meal. The highlights here were the pea shoots, spicy fried fish, and kung pao chicken.
Dinner that night was really nice because I got to go to Bridges. The chef, Sam Lawrence, had been at Estela, and two of my old line cooks are working there — I wanted to visit them. It’s great to go to these places where you feel like they’re part of the family. They had a really beautiful king crab, which was a grilled leg and part of the body. Dessert was vin-jaune ice cream with dried peaches. It’s a very cool spot. I’m excited to see how it evolves.
Friday, October 4
I always have a drip coffee at home, black, and another during the drive in — we moved to New Jersey a couple years ago. Some days are better than others for the drive.
The guys from L’Industrie sent us a bunch of hoagies that were like deli-meat combos with balsamic vinegar. The shop is dangerously close to us. We did hoagie nights at Horsemen during the pandemic, and we’ll always order their pizza at Nightmoves for parties we do there. I remember when they first opened their tiny storefront, and it’s not like they’re a secret anymore, but I will praise them forever because they’re awesome. Definitely a good neighbor to have.
I grazed around the restaurant the rest of the day and went to Penny for dinner. My old prep cook is the chef de cuisine there, and I’ve known the owners, Chase and Josh, for a really long time. My wife worked with Josh when they were at Momofuku together. It was my first time at Penny, and honestly, I had such a good dinner. The highlight for me was the lobster that they’re just basting in butter with an herb brush, and the bread with the buttered anchovies.
It’s kind of crazy to think that Horsemen has been open for almost ten years, and so many people have come in and out of the kitchen — we’ve made so many connections. I think, too, one aftereffect of the pandemic is that everyone in the industry wants to see everyone else succeed. We’ve all seen the bottom and nobody wants to go back. We’re pulling for each other a little more vocally than we might have before.
Saturday, October 5
We used to do set lunches at Horsemen, and our pop-up with Rolf and Daughters was a way to revisit that. Morning started with a lot of prep. They brought so much pork from a farm in Tennessee they’ve been working with. They had coppa and chops that they’d aged for a bit, so we cooked those on the grill and served them with end-of-the-season habanada peppers that we roasted until they were nice and charred. They made a toasted-bread ice cream that I thought was really interesting and served with golden raspberries we’d picked up at the market on Friday.
It was nice to cook with them. They dictated most of the menu, we went to the market and prepped with them, and they told us what to do with everything. We had two really solid, busy, nice services.
I haven’t been to their other restaurant in Nashville, Folk, yet, but I’m going to be there in November as part of the cookbook tour. They’re hosting us. It will be fun, but I’m nervous about going out. The tour is small — we’re doing a couple things in New York, San Francisco, and London — but there’s a reason I’m a chef and I like to be stuck in the kitchen: I don’t like being the center of attention. I’m excited to share the book, so that will push me through, but I get some social anxiety. I have to, like, mentally prepare.
That night, we took the visiting chefs to Rolo’s, which is one of my favorite restaurants in New York. It’s another it’s-a-small-world spot where we know a lot of the team, and I love the food. I worked at Franny’s, and it reminds me of that restaurant in some ways.
We started with all of their breads and cured meats and stracciatella. I always think it’s a fun way to snack and start. We got almost the whole menu. The sleeper hit for me was the pickled carrots they do with coriander. We had steak, too, that they put the perfect amount of age on — not crazy funky, and it had a really nice texture that was … I don’t know, supple?
Sunday, October 6
On my drive in, I stopped by Peter Pan and got a couple dozen doughnuts. I’m originally from the Bay Area, and there are so many mom-and-pop doughnut shops. My brother and I would skateboard or bike to them in the mornings. Here, it isn’t such a thing because everyone on the East Coast is so hardcore about Dunkin’. Peter Pan is the shop that reminds me most of the places in California. They aren’t fussy, they don’t use bacon or, like, hibiscus. It’s just classic. I picked that up for the team.
We did the same menu from the day before, and after service we went out with the chefs again. Dylan, our sous-chef, picked Taiwanese Gourmet in Flushing. We had 11 or 12 people in a basement banquet room and got a ton of food: marinated tripe in chile oil that they served chilled with smashed garlic all over it, pork-blood cakes with rice that were pan-fried with sweet chile sauce on top, duck tongues, kidneys. The staff made sure we knew what we were ordering: “Are you sure? Two orders of tripe, is that right?” We were a bunch of cooks and chefs — we wanted all of it. They have really awesome fried chicken, too.
Monday, October 7
I had the day off, so I was at home, where I can nurse my tangerine–La Croix addiction. I used to fully shit on these waters whenever I would see them around, and now I drink two or three cases per week of the stuff. It’s bad. I probably had six of those on Monday, snacked on chips, and made a cheese quesadilla for lunch.
The quesadilla is really nothing special. I take a large flour tortilla and start it open in a nonstick pan with butter. I add a shit ton of shredded cheese and fold it over and then just keep flipping it in foamy butter until it gets crispy. When it’s done, I fold it back and add some sliced avocado.
When I’m home, I make very simple food for myself, partly because my wife is a really good cook. She’s Irish, her dad owned a restaurant in Dublin for a long time, and she worked at St. John in London for a while. I look forward to her dinners all week, home-cooked meals that she does so well. One of the things she does that I like most is her shepherd’s pie, minced meat with peas covered in mashed potatoes and put into the broiler. We put a ton of HP sauce on it, which is something she turned me on to when we were dating. Instead of ketchup, we’re using HP.
I went out a lot this week, but my day-to-day is usually much simpler. We’re out in the burbs. I work a lot, or I’m spending time with my family. Our daughter is almost 8, and she’s picky, but I think she likes it when I take her to the restaurant. She tells her friends I’m a chef, that kind of stuff. It’s a lot of pizza and pasta with her right now, but hopefully it clicks one day. I mean, I was picky about a few things when I was a kid. Now, I pretty much eat everything.
This post has been updated to correct the spelling of I Cavallini.
More Grub Street Diets