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Looking for the perfect nine-course tasting menu to prepare at your next dinner party? Nick Elmi has got you. The chef, who worked at Philly icon Le Bec-Fin before opening his own restaurant and winning Bravo’s hit culinary competition Top Chef, just dropped his first cookbook. Laurel: Modern American Flavors in Philadelphia ($35) is based off recipes from his excellent East Passyunk Avenue eatery and available starting Tuesday, September 17.
The chef wrote the cookbook with Philly-based food and travel writer Adam Erace (Erace also wrote a Palizzi Social Club cookbook with chef Joey Baldino; that one is out next month). Photographer Neal Santos, who co-owns Filipino stand Lalo in the Bourse food hall, took the photos.
Elmi opened Laurel in late 2013, right after his New Orleans-set Top Chef season premiered. The elegant 22-seat restaurant serves what he describes as modern, French-influenced American cuisine, available only via tasting menu. It’s a splurge for a weeknight meal, at $85 for six courses or $125 for nine, but the oft-changing menus are so inventive you’ll be talking about the dishes for days afterward.
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Like the menus at the restaurant, the recipes in the cookbook are seasonal, with bourbon-glazed grilled lobster with crunchy grains and apple blossom for winter, black sea bass with peas and rhubarb for spring, and a summery marigold-compressed kohlrabi. Each chapter makes up a nine-course tasting menu, complete with cocktail pairings.
The dishes may be too intricate for most to execute at home, but it’s a pretty book.
Next door to Laurel, Elmi has cocktail bar ITV. In November 2017 he added Royal Boucherie, a lively French brasserie in Old City.
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