Here’s what some of the city’s best chefs are grilling for Memorial Day
In restaurants, open kitchens offer a view of the cooks at work. But if you really want to get to know a chef, look no farther than his or her backyard barbecue. Restaurant cooking is about pleasing the customer; at home, over a grill or a smoker, it’s personal. Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial opening of outdoor cooking season. For professionals, the holiday can offer a rare respite from the kitchen, time to spend eating and talking with family and friends. So what are chefs cooking up in their own backyards these days? We asked a few of Boston’s best.
IRENE LI
chef and co-owner, Mei Mei
Irene Li, a three-time James Beard award semifinalist for “Rising Star Chef of the Year” who is building a reputation as an advocate for food justice, at first says she is “not really a barbecue person.” Then she shares the following anecdote: “I turned 20 the same year my mom turned 60 and my dad turned 70, so we threw a 150th birthday party together and roasted a pig and a giant sea bass over the sandbox I played in as a kid.”
This year for Memorial Day, Li is going smaller-scale, making a dish that reflects the aesthetic of restaurant Mei Mei. She brings together seasonal ingredients and flavors from Asia by grilling soft-shell crabs and wrapping them in lettuce with fresh herbs, pickled vegetables, dollops of mayonnaise flavored with fish sauce, and a squeeze of lime (see recipe, Page G5). “The little differences in the crunch of lettuce, the crunch of shell, and the crunch of pickled veg kind of tickle my brain in just the right way,” she says.
Favorite barbecue memory: “My mom loves to grill. She’s taken barbecue classes and reads up on it all the time. Her specialty is chicken wings marinated in a concoction made of all the little takeout sauces she’s collected from Chinese, Indian, Thai, and other restaurants. And because she’s a doctor, she stores the marinade in a urine sample cup in the fridge.”
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