What A Mess
Chef Brooks Headley on running a lacto-veggie restaurant in carnivorous NYC
Cake friends,
First off, an update: After a long journey via boat and a brief delay at customs, Steak Zine has finally arrived at our fulfillment center! We hope to get pre-orders out very soon; keep an eye on your inbox for a shipment notification. Thank you for your patience and support.
We’re excited to celebrate the new issue tonight at Superiority Burger in the East Village. There will be twice baked-potatoes, the Platonic ideal of a hot fudge sundae, and lots of steakhouse-inspired food (just no meat). Plus, magazines! If you don’t have a reservation: you can try your luck for a limited walk-in table, or come straight to the back bar to grab a drink and a copy of Steak Zine. We’d love to see you.
Superiority Burger’s Brooks Headley isn’t just a cult-followed chef—he’s also a phenomenal writer. Today, we’re sharing his first new essay in years, “What A Mess,” originally published in Steak Zine. In it, Brooks traces how a meaty act of culinary autonomy set him on a path through Baltimore punk houses, white-tablecloth pastry kitchens, and ultimately into his own 100-seat beefless restaurant serving “whomped up vegetables.” It’s a truly singular piece, just like Brooks himself.
What a Mess
by Brooks Headley
I run a lacto-ovo veggie burger restaurant in a red meat ravenous town. That town is New York City and I am not very smart. Steak is everywhere in the five boroughs. People seem to crave it clinically. From the fetishistic pan-roasted and butter-basted ribeye at Minetta Tavern to the tacos de bistec at Zaragoza on Avenue A to Palestinian beef and lamb shawarma at Ayat in Bay Ridge, well-cooked cow is readily available at all prices and preparations. And wow is it popular. So for me, offering a menu of whomped up vegetables in a 100-seat beefless space is basically financial suicide. That’s fine. I have zero regrets, especially considering that if it wasn’t for beef, my restaurant career may not exist.
I grew up in the 1980s in the northern suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. I lived just far enough away that I could drive my mother’s car into the city and go see The Criminally Insane or Reptile House at The Loft or The Cornhole or any number of open-minded churches with rentable rec rooms, and escape back to the burbs when the gigs got violent and dangerous (which was every time). Baltimore has its own regional steak variation known locally as pit beef. It’s a charcoal-grilled wad of roast beef, sliced thin and piled on a kaiser roll, often sold at a roadside stand like corn or summer peaches. Pit beef was only moderately of interest to me as a teenager. I was much more infatuated by the short-lived illegal and unsanctioned vegan restaurant in an apartment in an alley off of Charles Street called Red Light Green Light. Outside on the wall, an illuminated red light meant they were closed, while green signified barbecued tempeh and vinegared carrots were at the ready. Maybe it didn’t even have a name. This joint was run by the local cadre of crusty punks, all a few years older than me. A crusty at that time (and let’s face it, now as well, the lifestyle doesn’t seem to change) was typically a Crass, Antisect, and/or Discharge shirted individual who was at least vegetarian but almost always a full throttle vegan. Their politics were extreme left almost to the point of anarchism. And oh, the crusty moniker? Showers and bathing was not subculturally stressed, resulting in a familiar filthy black scum under the fingernails and a gentle crust around the ears. One guy never took his boots off, not even to sleep. I also knew some clean crusties, but they probably lived with their folks like me.
Growing up, I cooked a lot with my mother and grandmother. Fried chicken shaken up with seasoned flour in a zip top bag, fat hamburgers on toasted white bread with rivers of ketchup, divinity (a red or green food dyed marshmallow-y drop nougat), and the oiliest, most stomach-ache-inducing zeppole that I looked forward to during the December holidays. My Italian grandmother only fessed up to larding her beloved polenta sneakily with Velveeta when she was in hospice. So that’s why it was so creamy?
I had a fairly evil stepmother who wore frilly hats and long gloves and spoke with a ’90s Madonna accent in the ’80s. She never let me help her in the kitchen, which imperiled our relationship from the outset. She would make mashed potatoes that also involved parsnips, celeriac, and carrots. I was aghast. Why on earth would you intentionally ruin mashed potatoes? The nerve. She also made the absolute best pancakes in the history of the world. They were light as hell, yeasted with a delicate airy crumb structure, and served with drawn butter and warm, Grade A maple syrup from antique pewter pitchers. She shooed me from the kitchen when she made them; I assumed because she thought I would steal the recipe ideas and shuttle them back to my mom’s house for the two of us to reverse engineer. She was right.
Needless to say, cooking and food was a tremendous part of my upbringing, even if I was far far far from a Flynn McGarry eleven-year-old prodigy staging at Alinea. You ever seen that screwy dessert they do at Alinea? The one where a slice of polycarbonate is fitted on a dining table and then two Bragard suited dudes proceed to smear and plop and tornado cookies and creams and liquid nitrogen-ed mousses all over? They “plate” the table. What a mess.
I think I was ten, but maybe eleven, perhaps twelve. I was alone at home. My mother was out at a work thing. And I was hungry. I had never cooked anything independently before. Oh sure, I’d microwaved a Lean Cuisine chicken a l’Orange, or spread some yellow mustard on wheat bread and added cold supermarket salami. But as of yet, no solo culinary adventures.
I scanned the refrigerator. I scanned the freezer. There was a lot to eat but none of it was ready to go or close. There wasn’t even macaroni and cheese. There was, however, 16 oz of magenta-colored ground beef on a Styrofoam plate, wrapped so tightly with cling film that it appeared effervescent and jewel-like. In the past I had inquired about the pale chunks of gristle and fat and tendon in ground beef—what is it? I was told flatly: “white meat.” I could probably fry up a hamburger but I couldn’t find any bread and it was three and a half decades before Via Carota would bring their bunless Italian patty, the svizzerina, to the West Village: a naked burger cooked so much like a steak it’s borderline satire.
Back to the freezer. I eyeballed an orange-and-white package closed with a rectangular plastic chip that prevents freezer burn. The same kind of tie off for a loaf of bread. But this wasn’t bread. It was pre-bread. Frozen bread dough. A common sight in ’80s mom freezers. There was also butter in the fridge. It probably tasted like onions in the way that almost all unwrapped butter sticks in domestic refrigerator crispers suck up all the flavors of that particular fridge. I mean, that’s what fat does. I have very specific memories of the indigenous butter odors of all of my friends and families’ iceboxes. My reactions to these bouquets ranged from mildly grossed out to utter superfund site.
Was I going to let this frozen bread dough proof properly? No, because I had no idea what that meant or what I was doing. I just needed it to go from rock-hard to squishy in whatever means was most rapid, so I put the frozen thing unwrapped on a plate in the dormant oven where the pilot light flickered forever. It felt slightly warm.
I melted two sticks of butter, then slid the entire pound of ground beef off the styrofoam platter and into the cast iron pan, careful not to splash myself. I used a slotted metal spoon to break up the meat to start the frying (accidental confit-ing?) process. When the ground beef was cooked, and later carbonized and rendered off its er, white meat, sluicing one animal fat into the other animal fat, I turned the heat down a little. Are you paying attention? The smell was alternatively nauseating and intoxicating, which really sums up cooking-in-process. I returned my attention to the frozen bread dough.
The blob in the not-turned-on oven had grown venerably while simultaneously drying out. There was a kind of alligator skin forming on top that was equal parts very dry and quite wet, and looked like an elderly person’s lower legs. Having never made bread before, I went with my gut, or perhaps something I had seen peripherally on a Saturday afternoon PBS cooking show, most likely and unfortunately The Frugal Gourmet. Kneeling down in front of the oven I punched the gob down, which gave easily to my fist, and released a yeasty aroma into the kitchen.
I formed six rounds by pinching off pieces of dough and flattening them with my palm. Was there a plan? No, but this was coming together nicely. I returned to the now cooled cast iron pan. The two fats and highly overcooked blackened beef had congealed into a tacky paste. I tasted: acrid and needed salt. It probably required pepper, too, but I couldn’t find any. I reached into the fridge and pulled out two bottles: A1 and Lea & Perrins steak sauce. I unscrewed the plastic tops and sniffed. The astringency of the A1 reminded me of a pediatrician’s waiting room. The L&P smelled both sweet and savory: the winner. I poured half of the bottle of steak sauce into the meat mix and swirled everything together, watching solids and liquids and chunks merge into a very unemulsified mass. I stared at the bottle in my hand, and as my pulse quickened I emptied it entirely into the beef goo, feeling both naughty and confident.
All of a sudden, the plan presented itself. This is the greatest part of cooking. The most fun. The most exciting. At one point I may have believed I would bake the discs of bread and use them like naan or pita to swipe up the beef mix. No way man, I had it now. Fuck, I thought. This rules.
Using an unslotted spoon, I portioned out the beef mixture into the center of the parched bread dough circles. Using an A-OK hand gesture I brought the excess dough up and crimped off the top like shrimp shumai. They were beautiful. Knock outs.
I grabbed a new pan from the tall pot cupboard and placed the pot on the range, cranking up the flame, and adding almost a whole bottle of Wesson vegetable oil. I was a cautious kid so I kept the heat low. When the oil seemed warm enough, I dropped in a dough ball. It floated so I kept turning it. I flicked the oil on top using a spoon to try to brown the area poking out of the hot fat, not unlike that line cook spooning and basting browned butter on that Minetta ribeye. It didn’t rip open, didn’t explode. I spooned the fried orb out of the oil and rested it on a plate covered in a triple layer of paper towels like I’d seen adults do. It was far too hot to touch but I bit into it anyway. The scorching hot filling squirted all over the roof of my mouth, later in the day turning into a series of blisters I lanced with the pressure of my tongue into hanging flags of tissue.
I couldn’t tell if I liked it, or if it tasted good or even had any discernible beef flavor. My stomach hurt, engorged with butter and beef fat and carbonized meat and under-proofed dough. I felt like shit, but I chalked this up as a wild success. This exact feeling (including the queasiness) I would grow to love in the future every time I got to R&D at work.
Exactly sixteen years after this incident, I secured my first professional restaurant job making $5.15 per hour as a pastry cook at the most expensive Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C.
This job started me on a meandering, loopy, and at times dawdling quest in the culinary world that spanned multiple states and lasted for another sixteen years. One that dunked me fully into professional fancy restaurant dessert making. An interloper in a scene based in tradition and rigidity. My approach to this craft was equal parts deep veneration and holy Jesus all this shit is fucking stupid. At a certain point I grew depressed and weary that I was a tool of the man, toiling endlessly so the richest people on the planet could swipe a fork through two bites of cake and then smile wanly at each other across a table.
I needed to escape, so I started making veggie burgers for the post-midnight unsanctioned kitchen staff meal. There was no burger on the menu so I had to schlep the Martin’s Potato Rolls back from Western Beef a block away. It was the most perverse thing we could have eaten at 12:30 a.m. in a fancy restaurant. This filled me with joy.
When the meat roast cooks started to request them, I knew I was on to something. These were the tough guys in the kitchen, regardless of gender and personal beefiness. A 900-degree broiler with a sliding hefty grill was their instrument. I would sneak patties unnecessarily into their blast furnace, spattering the vegetarian orbs with residual animal fat. Once I secured a 300-square-foot, nearly useless but already vented storefront in the East Village, I quit my job and opened up Superiority Burger. A meatless takeaway spot in the reddest of red meat towns. An art project more than a restaurant. One forged in rendered tallow, yet serving no cow parts.
Brooks Headley owns and operates Superiority Burger, a vegetarian restaurant in the East Village. He is obsessed with meat even though it makes him queasy.
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Read: Caity Weaver went on a quest to locate the best free bread in America…it’s a rollicking ride.
Listen: Our friend Trinity Mouzon Wofford just released a wonderful debut cookbook, Eating at Home: The Nourishing Practice of Everyday Cooking. Hear her talk about it with Aliza on the TASTE podcast and check out a copy.
Read: Jaya Saxena wrote a wonderful essay on finding pleasure in the process of cooking and baking and why that’s more urgent then ever.
I love Superiority Burger and I might love this essay even more.
brooks headley one of the best living writers