AUGUST 2015 | BOROMAG.COM | 47 30th Avenue might have become the unofficial culinary South in Queens. Within a 10-block span, you can find three restaurants that focus on good, old-fashioned Southern recipes, from the brunch phenomenon of Queens Comfort to the taste of N’Awlins at Sugar Freak, and now the wood-fired and deep-fried renderings of Burnside Biscuits. Few things scream Americana as boldly as fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits, mac ‘n’ cheese and moon pies. While all of those classics are rendered to a degree that could simply be called perfection, the team at Burnside Biscuits is targeting higher aspirations than tasty stick-to-the-ribs comfort food. Created by the brains that brought us Bareburger, the restaurant takes its name from General Burnside, a Northern man who found himself in the South during the Civil War. When the dust settled, he took what he had learned about Southern traditions and brought it back to his loved ones. And so Burnside Biscuits offers Southerninspired recipes prepared in a New York City tradition. In the space formerly occupied by the old Athens Café, wood-fired ovens slowly roast nuanced flavors—not from hand-tossed pizzas, but from twine-tied carrots glazed in bourbon, dry-rubbed curried broccoli with sharp cheddar, cast iron skillets of cavatappi and pimento crack and cheese, or corn bread as crispy and sweet as a cake donut slathered with maple-cultured butter and emerald chives. In fact, it was that very cornbread that sealed the deal between Executive Chef Sam Crocker and the Bareburger Group's culinary director, Andrew Sarda. The two met at the Christmas gathering of a mutual friend. “Crocker brought this fantastic cornbread,” Sarda recalls, “and we started talking.” Burnside certainly isn’t Crocker’s first time in the kitchen. Originally from Florida, he found himself in college at Georgetown with no idea what he wanted to do. “So I went to Hong Kong,” he explains, “where I found myself in their markets more than anywhere else. My mom told me to follow my biggest hobby and so that’s what I did.” He came back to the United States and enrolled in culinary school. After some time at Cookshop and a year and a half at Jean Georges, Crocker found himself traveling in a train across the country. “An old college friend of mind had started sort of a moving incubator for young entrepreneurs, and so I cooked for them as we traveled across the country in antique train cars.” When he came back to New York, he joined the team at Il Buco Alimentari as a sous chef. After a break of a few months, he met Sarda at the holiday party, and the rest is history. “I really think this was sort of a passion product for the guys,” explains Crocker of Sarda and Bareburger’s CEO, Euripides Pelekanos. “They built this huge group of restaurants with their own personalities, but sharing a common bottom line of properly sourced, natural, organic products. Combining their work ethic and principles, we wanted to do a Northern take on a Southern specialty.” “I do not pretend at all to be the arbiter of what Southern food is,” Crocker continues, “and I am not going to pretend to be. I just wanted to try to embody the Southern ideal of food and how it is handled and respected and used. Large roasts, vegetables, rice and grains combined with the fact we are in New York City. So I went back to my history degree and read the Carolina Housewife, and Virginia Housewife, and went down to Virginia for a few weeks. Frank Lee took me to a fried chicken lunch, and he said to me, ‘What we do here is we source locally and try to work with the things that are around us, and we try to make an honest living out of what we have here.’ And that really struck a chord with me.” (continued on page 48) Bourbon Black Jack Carrots Countrystyle Sausage Gravy Executive Chef Sam Crocker
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