Eat The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Anita Lo
The Annisa chef reflects on the influences that made her one of NYC's most distinct culinary voices.
Regan Hofmann
Anita Lo spent years cooking ahead of the curve, often heartbreakingly so. Her first experience opening a restaurant was a Korean behemoth in the mid-’90s, that tidy time when ring-molded food skyscrapers were the rage and fermentation was a health inspector’s nightmare, not the hipster holy grail. It lasted two years. She ventured into Asian-tinged BBQ two years before Zak Pelaccio hit with Fatty ‘Cue—her Bar Q closed after ten months, pushed over the brink by the 2009 recession. And as the child of a Malaysian-Chinese-Southern-New England household in suburban Michigan, she lived fusion before the word existed outside the world of nuclear physics. “We traveled a lot, ever since I was tiny,” she says. “Even then I saw the parallels between Indonesian and Malaysian [food], Chinese and Malaysian, even some of the ingredients in Southern cuisine and Asian cuisines.”
Today, her motto is more “No New Friends” than Manifest Destiny. She’s slashed her commitments down to one: Annisa, the restaurant she has owned for 13 years, that she pulled from the ashes of a devastating electrical fire, that she held on to through a breakup with her business partner and nursed through the period when fine dining was the first line slashed from everyone’s budget. There she has built herself the space to relax, to write (her first cookbook, Cooking Without Borders, was published in 2011), to spend time at a summer house on Long Island and work on potential new dishes. “I’m not that prolific. I sit and think, I sit and work things out and then try it,” she says.
Set that claim against her successes on pretty much all of the quick-fire cooking shows (she was the first challenger to win on Iron Chef America and came in fourth on the first season of Top Chef Masters) and something doesn’t add up. Turns out that what she lacks in off-the-cuff inventiveness, she makes up for with a steel-trap memory and a mastery of dissecting dishes to their component parts, as well as repurposing ideas over and over in endless combinations. One single plate can contain a dozen different narratives, from a vestige of her classic French training to a friend’s go-to party recipe from 30 years ago.
That’s why Annisa’s menu reads like a schizophrenic flight itinerary, somehow making sense of dishes like squid with Thai basil and peanuts, and eggplant with Turkish chilies. And it’s why Lo has settled for the term “Contemporary American” to describe her cuisine, which can mean nothing and anything all at once. Then again, most new restaurants are trying to find their own way to define the intersection of cuisines these days—the curve may have finally caught up with her.
Here, Lo reveals some of the dishes that have stuck with her over the years and reflects on how they fuel her today, from her mother’s home cooking to a tribute to her “restaurant parents” at New York City icon Chanterelle.
My mother's Steamed Fish with Scallions and Ginger
My mom was a very good cook, and she made a lot of different styles of cuisine. [There was] Chinese—my father was from Shanghai, but he died when I was there—and then my stepfather came into the scene and he had really strong New England roots, so we had a lot of that sort of simple New England food. My mother was from Malaysia and also spent some time in Tennessee, so we had that as well. She would come home from a very long day at work—she was a doctor—and she would cook for us. [She] would put, like, six different dishes out. She would make this steamed fish on occasion, and it was one of the first things I learned how to make – it’s one of the things that I go to all the time. If I’m ever alone and I want to make something simple for myself, I go directly to that. It's so easy. I did a special of it—probably at Maxim’s—and we served it for Mother’s Day.
My Nanny's Chicken Paprikash
We had all different kinds of nannies, but the nanny that stayed with us the longest grew up in Hungary, so she would make us chicken paprikash. It was one of my favorite dishes growing up, and I loved to watch her make it. Sometimes she would make it with rice, which I didn’t like—I mean, I liked it, but I didn’t love it. The best were her dumplings; she would make homemade dumplings and float them in the broth, which was awesome. I never got that recipe; I’m kind of upset about that. I've tried to recreate it and it just wasn’t the same. [The rest] is so easy to make. I made it throughout college, I used to make it for staff meal here [at Annisa], I used to make it in France when I was in cooking school—instead of using sour cream I’d use crème fraîche.
Can Restaurant was my first chef job, in the early '90s. It was a French-Vietnamese restaurant, and it was based on a restaurant in Paris that was very, very trendy, where half the menu was French and half was Vietnamese. That didn’t make sense to anybody in New York at the time, so I was trying to do French and Vietnamese in one. For the tuna, I made a scallion oil, a green one, and I served it with seared tuna that had been marinated in lemon and soy—and I probably put lemongrass in there. I made it like a tataki, just seared the outside, and served it over this oil with a cucumber salad. I later used that recipe somewhere else—I want to say at Mirezi—and I believe Gael Greene [the New York Magazine critic] really, really liked it. It was one of the first dishes I created and one of the first successful dishes—it just worked the first time. That's not at all my process. I mean, I think at this point in my career I know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, but I still have failures, certainly. And sometimes you have failures that you can tweak and make into a good dish, and sometimes you have failures that are just failures and you just have to throw away the whole thing and start again.
This was back when cod wasn’t a no-no. It was just a sautéed piece of cod, and then we took all the cod parts and salted them, and made a potato gratin with the salt cod in it—kind of like a brandade that wasn’t puréed. And then I served it on just an anchovy tomato sauce; really simple. I had a friend in cooking school who had worked at Union Square Café and he was very interested in Italian cuisine. He would have these parties at his loft-like apartment in Paris, where a whole bunch of people would come over—all ex-pats—and he would make these big pasta dinners. So this sauce was based on something that he had made. And then I made a little tapenade sauce, with black olives. One chef used to come to the restaurant; he was French, and he was like, "I love this dish; this is a perfect dish!" You know, nobody really came to Maxim’s. I was there for a long time—I taught myself how to cook there. I’d worked at some great places and I’d been to cooking school, but I had something like two years of cooking experience before I became a chef, which is crazy. It was awesome, but I had to learn by trial and error, which was very difficult. Maxim’s had locations all over the place, so I felt like I was given reign to bring in whatever influences I wanted. The fact that it was French-based was easier for me because I’d lived in France—that was where I went to cooking school, that was where I did my internships, my experience in cooking was all French. And we were cooking for maybe 30 people a day…it was great.
Grilled Hanger Steak, Seoul Style, with Spicy Potato Pancakes at Mirezi
Before I opened Mirezi, [the owners] sent me to Korea and I went through a week of cooking school there, and they took me to eat at, like, seven restaurants a day—it was really kind of vile. It was owned by a Korean company and they wanted to have a strong Korean influence, but they also wanted it to be Pan-Asian—this was the mid-'90s. The problem was that they didn’t really know exactly what they wanted. I think it was a vanity project, on some level. Korean food was a hard sell, and it was a big restaurant—it had two floors, which was really a problem. But also we were really before our time; we had the first sake lounge, really, before sake became big. That was just awesome. The signature dish was this hanger steak marinated bulgogi-style in garlic, soy, sugar, and black pepper, then grilled, and it had these spicy potato pancakes on the side. This was the one dish that people seemed to like.
Seared Foie Gras with Soup Dumplings and Jicama at Annisa
We opened with this dish, and it’s stayed on. You know, a lot of people hate the things that they can’t ever take off [the menu], but…my cooks get really good at it, because they have to do it over and over and over again. It’s something I don’t have to worry about, which is nice. The idea came about because my father was from Shanghai, and we grew up eating soup dumplings. It was kind of obvious to put foie gras in it instead of crab and/or pork. And the broth was basically something that my mother taught me how to make, a red-cooked broth we used to make with chicken, duck, pork. We would eat it over rice. A soup dumpling is gelled, so I made it with pigs’ feet so it gels on its own. I put all sorts of kinds of meat broths in there just to give it extra punch. Inside is some foie gras mousse and some jicama, which is just crunchy, it kind of tastes like a water chestnut a little bit. And then it’s served with seared foie on top and a black vinegar reduction—you know, normally Shanghai soup dumplings are served with a black vinegar dipping sauce with ginger in it, so I just did a plate reduction. It’s kind of nice because both of my parents have passed away, and this is my mother’s broth recipe, and it’s a soup dumpling, which is from where my father was from.
I worked at Chanterelle for two, two and a half years. David [Waltuck] and Karen were like my restaurant parents: my partner who helped me open this restaurant, Jennifer, worked there to learn how to run the front of the house; they helped me when I was writing my business plan; etcetera. In many ways, I’ve tried to run this restaurant in similar ways [to Chanterelle]. We’d have a family meal, like a staff meal, where we'd all sit down and eat, and I thought that was great, really team-building. It was a really special thing that made you and everybody appreciate food more, instead of just having this staff meal where cooks shoved whatever they could in their faces while they were standing, and it was all stuff that was going bad. I think if you want to have a caring staff you need to care for them. At Chanterelle, David once made this one thing that I loved: it was braised pigs' feet that had been chopped up and formed into a cake—I think it had leeks in it—and we pan-fried it so it was crispy on the outside. It was just really delicious. I thought something similar to that could be really good in a chicken, because I always think chicken is really boring; I like to have a chicken on the menu that I would order. This is one-half of the breast but the entire skin; it’s wrapped around and stuffed inside with pigs’ feet and chanterelles because, you know, it’s from Chanterelle—and it made sense on the palate, too.
Miso-Marinated Sable with Crispy Silken Tofu in a Bonito Broth at Annisa
This is something that we’ve also had on the menu forever, and people come in just for that. People come in for the soup dumplings, people come in for the chicken, and people come in for the sable. It’s just a classic Japanese miso marinade for rich fish. You know, Nobu certainly made it popular, but it really is classic canon for Japanese food…people have been doing it for ages, this exact way. The dish was sort of based on an agedashi tofu I used to love—there was a place up by Columbia, this little Japanese restaurant on Broadway, and I would get it there. It was exciting when we came up with that, because it was like, Oh god, I want to eat that fish. This is one of the few things that, back in the day, my cooks were involved in the development of. It was my sauté cook’s recipe—he was so passionate, he was a great cook. He went on to become, I think, the chef of Haru.
Poppyseed Bread and Butter Pudding with Meyer Lemon Curd at Annisa
I used to make staff meal once or twice a week; I love making staff meal, but I don’t have time for it anymore. I had a lot of bread left over—we used to save all the bread and it would build up. I made a bread pudding, and I just winged it. It turned out really, really well, so I was like, Okay, maybe this can be a nice dessert. We just made it a little fancier and now it has poppyseed and Meyer lemon curd on it. We still use the leftover bread; it doesn’t work with fresh bread. It needs to be a little bit dry to soak up the custard and the butter, otherwise it just tastes like mush. That was another thing that David Waltuck taught me: how to repurpose things. He would make staff meal as well, once a week, and he would talk about, you know, "Oh yeah, this used to be a soup." And growing up in a Chinese household, you just didn’t waste food. At Bouley, the sous chef used to go through our garbage, and in France it was the same thing: “You can use this, you can use this, you can use this.”
Pecan Beignets with Salted Butterscotch and Bourbon Ice Milk
One of my interns came in and made doughnuts one day—just plain doughnuts—and I thought, The base is like a pate à choux, I could probably fill these. There’s pecans in there, salted butterscotch, and a bourbon ice milk. I was reading—I think it was in the Times—about tailgating; there’s a bourbon milk that’s a popular Southern tailgating drink. They freeze it, so that by the time halftime comes around it’s cold, but it’s melted. I was like, Why don’t you just eat it as an ice milk? I always liked that icy, milky thing.