We already know that Anoosh Shariat retired in April, with David Danielson buying Anoosh Bistro and taking over operations with nary a beat skipped.
We’ve also known that once the busy April and May event calendar passed, Danielson would begin putting a personal stamp on his restaurant, located at 4864 Brownsboro Rd.
Now the revamping is under way, with the first change being a new name: Äta, probably destined to be mispronounced from the Swedish, which sounds more like EH-ta, although we’ll all be saying AH-ta (with just a hint of Southern drawl, like in Malmö).
Then, on Tuesday 11 June a new menu is being launched. Chef Danielson graciously stepped away from the kitchen yesterday and answered a few of my questions about what’s happening. The transcript has been lightly edited.
Roger Baylor: What’s about to happen at the soon-to-be former Anoosh Bistro?
David Danielson: We are getting ready to have a major transformation. Basically I purchased Anoosh Bistro about six weeks ago, a couple of weeks before Derby, and we have essentially kept everything running the way it was for the last month. There was Derby, and then Mother’s Day, then the PGA, and the Memorial Day weekend. So we’ve been moving through that, trying out new dishes, rewriting the menu and getting a feel for where we’re at.
And so now we’re ready to do it. The new sign came down yesterday, and a new temporary sign went up, so we are fully rebranding and then relaunching a new menu starting next week. The name is “ata,” a-t-a, but it’s got the little two dots over the “ä.” It means “eat” in Swedish.
RB: I was about to ask if there were any umlauts in your background. Isn’t Swedish your heritage?
DD: Yes, it is. The reason I named the restaurant Äta is that it speaks to my heritage and my upbringing. I grew up in Chicago in a Scandinavian family. Holidays really were my first and most important food memories, going to the Swedish bakeries and marketplaces. There’s a neighborhood in Chicago called Andersonville, where we always shopped.
It also goes to the balance of a Scandinavian lifestyle and their philosophy on food, where just the right amount is best. There’s a saying, “enough is as good as a feast,” and so it kind of speaks to that. It’s just the feeling of breaking bread with family and friends, and the tradition of that.
And it also showcases just where food in this country has gone, and how it’s morphing, and people are putting their twists and their heritage on these things. That what we’re doing. Äta is going to be based on seasonality and influenced by global flavors from different places I’ve worked and things I’ve seen all over the world. I’ve worked in Russia and China, South America and the Caribbean, and I spent time in New York, working at the United Nations. Whether it’s techniques or flavor profiles or ingredients, we’re putting them into it, and I’m cooking what I think is fun, great food.
RB: What does all this mean for the forthcoming new menu?
DD: What has happened here is that Anoosh really built a reputation for a style of service, very classical, very traditional, and as people’s eating habits and dining habits have changed, so must we. We’re moving away from the traditional menu, adding small plates and shareables, expanding the bar menu with different items, so people don’t necessarily have to have a three, four or multi-course dinner. They can come in and sit at the bar, or sit at a table with their group and share.
We’re also trying to take the price point down. This has become a special occasion restaurant, and the cost of fine dining is high, so I don’t want to do a restaurant where I see people only twice a year on birthdays and anniversaries. We want people to come in all the time, and it’s my belief that while fine dining tends to be expensive because of the ingredients and the labor and a thousand details, great food doesn’t have to be expensive. It can be accessible.
We’re adding lots of variety on that front, like grilled prawns with garlic and lemon and chilies and butter. We’re doing caramelized onion and fig jam on grilled toast with Point Reyes blue cheese bites. We’re doing filet mignon skewers for people who want to have meat but don’t want to sit down and have a full steak.
We’re doing beautiful charcuterie. I’ve got a guy who I work with from Smoking Goose who makes most amazing charcuterie. So we’re running charcuterie board. We’re doing a charred broccoli with blood orange, Calabrian chilis and burrata. I have this amazing burrata that I get from Italy. We actually call in, and it takes ten days for me to get it, because when I call they actually call the dairy farm to order the milk, and then the cheese is made for me and sent here.
It’s about really cool products, and we’re using them in the right way. We’ve added a great pasta dish on the menu, pappardelle pasta with braised pork shoulder, and we braise that pork shoulder with pancetta, fennel and onion, a little bit of stock and heavy cream for about three and a half hours, and then we shred it, and to finish it we add a little bit of the pasta water, lemon zest, lemon and parmesan cheese, and it’s just a beautiful, refreshing, but very rich, gorgeous pasta. The recipe dates back over 500 years to before they had tomatoes in Italy.
So, stuff like that. We’re doing red wine soy and lemongrass short ribs, putting a little Asian flair into it, served over a black rice with stir-fried-style vegetables, asparagus and shiitake mushrooms. We’re doing a New York strip that’s coffee crusted with lingonberry thyme demi-glace, and a completely deboned half-chicken that we’re sautéing, and we serve a little copper pan of barley risotto with morel mushroom and spring peas on the side. So just very seasonal, flavorful, interesting, great food for people.
It’s not crazy, it’s not sophisticated, it’s just really great, beautiful food prepared, you know, nice. It’s still an upscale dining experience. We have impeccable service. We’re just focusing on the ingredients, putting out good food and shedding some of the baggage that goes along with classical fine dining restaurants.
I mean, I came out of this, right?
I worked at Chez Paul, I worked at Bouley, I worked at Charlie Trotter’s. I worked at all these great restaurants that were very buttoned down and fine dining, and that’s great. It was amazing experience. But the thing is, and this is me, if you’re in New York, Chicago, LA, there’s a huge demographic, people doing business, and these restaurants are Michelin-starred restaurants. People are traveling from around the world to come and support these restaurants and keep them going. You know, we’re in Louisville, Kentucky, right? And so I want a restaurant with fabulous food, but is accessible, and people can come here and eat every day.
RB: When’s the menu going live?
DD: The menu will start live on Tuesday.
RB: What’s the biggest challenge of this transformation?
Here’s the challenge. You have an iconic restaurant, you have an iconic chef who’s known for quality, high standards, amazing staff. I will be very honest that I wasn’t really in the market to buy a new restaurant, but I sat with Anoosh, we were talking, and the reason that I bought the restaurant was because for the 10 years that he owned it, he created an amazing culture with his staff.
Restaurants are not four walls, they’re the people who are in it.
We have this beautiful culture here, and that’s what forced me to really think about doing it. We are continuing in the vein of serving amazing food with great service, and we are carrying on the legacy of what Henry’s did first and then Anoosh after it. We’re modernizing the restaurant and making it a little more approachable for modern-day diners.
The other thing is that we’re totally revamping our drinks menu, cocktail menu, and also our wine list, which has been very heavy on French and Californian. We’re expanding to Argentinians, Austrians, Italians and Washington State, adding more wines by the glass, and starting to really show people some interesting wines they may not know, and are very approachable.
The challenge is paying homage to a great restaurant that has a long, storied history – but I will tell you, I’ve done this before, right?
I was the executive chef at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, oldest operating hotel in North America, and at Rockefeller Center, the United Nations and Churchill Downs. So over the years, I have a record of going into these iconic places that have an unbelievable history, putting my flair and my spin into it, and taking them forward.
From our archives, a bit more about David Danielson.
Afternoon Archive: Q & A with Chef David Danielson of Churchill Downs
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