MODERN COMFORT

JENNA TELESCA

It's familiar, but new. Restaurants are taking well-loved comfort food — mac and cheese, grits, fried chicken, meatloaf — and reworking them with fresh ingredients and contemporary flair. The trend could influence the preparations and ingredients in supermarket prepared food departments.

The Meatball Shop in New York sources most of its vegetables from a local farmer, and lists the farm source of all its proteins.

For instance, even something as simple as a meatball has been reinvented and expanded. The Meatball Shop in New York's Lower East Side neighborhood offers a customizable menu of meatball-based dishes such as the Smash, in which customers receive two meatballs — made of beef, pork, chicken, vegetable or a special — smashed into a brioche bun with a choice of tomato, spicy meat, mushroom, parmesan cream, pesto, or a special sauce and mozzarella cheese, or provolone cheese with a side salad. Another dish, Everything But the Kitchen Sink, lives up to its name with three meatballs over the restaurant's greenmarket veggies and a salad.

The Meatball Shop not only offers variety in its meatball offerings, but ingredients that its customers can feel good about. When asked about the importance of local and sustainable sourcing to the restaurant, Michael Chernow, co-owner and general manager said, “It's essentially where we start and end. We made sure to do the right thing as far as sourcing.” In season, the restaurant gets the majority of its market vegetables from a local farmer, and lists the farm source of each of its protein items on its website.

“It's a humongous part of our concept. Everybody thinks that when you source locally and sustainably you have to charge an arm and a leg for a meal … one of our main focal points is that that is absolutely not true,” Chernow said. “You can do the right thing as far as sourcing ingredients, put them on a plate and charge a fraction of what a typical farm-to-table restaurant charges.”

When the restaurant opened in an unfriendly economy last winter, the owners made sure to keep all of their menu items under $10, Chernow told SN. The concept has been so popular that this summer, Chernow and co-owner and Executive Chef Daniel Holzman are opening two new locations — one in Brooklyn and another in Manhattan's West Village.

Melissa Abbott, director of culinary insights at The Hartman Group in Bellevue, Wash., said that in addition to meatballs and meatloaves made with different kinds of meats and sauces, a new kind of fried chicken is appearing on menus.

“Now there's Korean fried chicken that David Chang [chef and owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar], and the Kogi Korean Taco truck is promoting that's a little bit lacier and crispier and has a lighter flavor to it,” Abbott said, adding that high-end restaurants are doing fried chicken dinner nights that are selling out.

Reworking traditional regional comfort foods can make them enticing to a wider audience. Abbott said Chang has also been working with grits, combining them with shrimp and a high-quality bonito fish stock.

And, although it's easier to convince customers to try food that isn't a big jump from household foods, the reimagined comfort food trend's popularity comes down to the quality ingredients.

“It really is mostly about quality,” said Abbott. “And even though there's the familiarity with things like beans, which are coming back in fashion — you know whether they're heirloom and heritage — it's cool to eat things that were once considered really stodgy and kind of like peasant food.”

To participate with this trend, Abbott said supermarket prepared food departments could focus on presentation and server enthusiasm. For example, at the gourmet market Fox & Obel in Chicago, mac and cheese made with premium cheeses is presented in stacked wedges on wax pieces of paper, she said. The presentation indicates to her that the food preparer had cared about the dish and was proud to serve it.

“You want to be served food by people who love food and have a passion for food, not get the sense that this person has very little interest in serving you,” Abbott said.

In fact, each comfort food restaurant SN spoke to exuded enthusiasm for its product. The MeatLoaf Bakery in Chicago creates its meatloaves in a savory cupcake style, topped with mashed potatoes, cheeses and garnishes as “icing.” Owner and Chief Meatloaf Maker Cynthia Kallile talked about the careful treatment of the products that go into her meatloaves. She uses all fresh produce — and local produce when it's available.

“We triple wash our parsley, and we pick it by hand, and we chop all the vegetables. It's very important to me to have it look good and taste good,” Kallile said. “It's just very, very important to me to do that, and [for the food] to be very special.”

The Meatloaf Bakery offers specialty meatloaves, fashioned to look like bakery items that come in a small “loafie” size, cupcake size and full loaf size. The most popular item is The Mother Loaf, the retailer's most traditional take on the comfort food classic, made with beef, pork, veal and onions, herbs, and ketchup. Yukon gold potatoes provide a kind of frosting on top of the meatloaf.

Another item, the No Buns About It Burger Loaf, which follows The Mother Loaf in popularity, is more creative with bacon, cheddar, onions, mustard, pickles and beef. This meatloaf is topped with “Cheesy Taters.”

Presentation is key at The Meatloaf Bakery, where each meatloaf is a work of art. “When I came up with the idea I thought now when you think of meatloaf, it's really not particularly attractive,” Kallile told SN. “But yet, it can be very delicious, and then it's so creative, there's so many things you can do to create a meatloaf, if you will. But I thought, you've got to make it pretty.”

In addition to focusing on presentation and working with quality ingredients, supermarket prepared food departments could highlight premium or specialty comfort food by clearly conveying each dish's specific ingredients. Abbott brought up black beans, noting there's a difference between mentioning an heirloom variety, like Midnight Black beans, and standard commodity black beans.

“It really cues to the consumer that it's higher quality,” she sad.

Although reimagined comfort seems like it would most appeal to adults, restaurants stressed that their food is kid friendly.

On the weekend at The Meatball Shop, Chernow said it's common to have children and adults alike in the restaurant.

“You walk in and you see a 3-year-old kid eating a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and then you look across the room and you see a 75-year-old woman eating a bowl of meatballs, and they're both equally as ecstatic to be doing it, so it's fun,” he said.

Macaroni and Cheese is a classic kid-favorite, and in addition to children, Brooklyn Mac, a mac and cheese restaurant that opened last fall in Brooklyn, has expanded its potential clientele by offering gluten-free and vegan options, as well as specialized salads.

Brooklyn Mac's menu is rooted in the borough, with dishes named after local neighborhoods and salads named after local parks.

The Coney Island mac and cheese is made with hot dog, sauerkraut, mustard and American cheese, while the Park Slope has cheddar, hamburger and caramelized red onions. Or, there are vegetarian options such as the Williamsburg, with sauteed mushrooms, scallions, tomato and mozzarella.

The restaurant also allows customers to make their own mac or salad, using ingredients like marinated skirt steak and ricotta cheese. The owners of Brooklyn Mac, who also own “Cup,” a coffee shop next door, find their comfort food niche by being responsive to the community around them.

Jason Anello, Brooklyn Mac's marketing/public relations representative, told SN that the owners are “very concerned with the neighborhood and what the neighborhood feels. And, they want to adapt the restaurants, both Cup and Brooklyn Mac, to whatever the neighborhood clientele wants and that even means changing what the restaurant is like.”

In fact, after popular demand, the restaurant is working to develop a dish named after the Greenpoint neighborhood where it resides. The owners have enlisted the neighborhood for taste testing.

Of Brooklyn Mac's owners, Bianca LeRoux prefers vegetarian dishes, while Jeremy LeRoux likes meat. Those different preferences helped shape the menu.

“They wanted to hone the concept so that it was appealing to both [of] them and therefore to both sort of market sets of people who can't eat gluten or need to be gluten free or who are vegan,” Anello said. Putting the salads on the menu also offers another healthy alternative to the mac and cheese dishes, he added.

The Meatball Shop and The Meatloaf Bakery also both offer vegetarian options, such as veggie meatballs, market vegetables and a Yentl Lentl Loaf — a gluten-free lentil and brown rice “meatloaf.” The Yentl Lentl Loaf can have wide appeal because it's a creative take on meatloaf that happens to be vegetarian, not exactly an item acting as a meat substitute.

Abbott doesn't recommend that supermarket foodservice offer faux meat options, but generally suggests prepared food departments stick to basic vegetarian-friendly foods like hummus, baba ghanoush and tabouleh that will expose customers to new flavors and tastes.

To get on board with reimagined, gourmet comfort food trend, supermarket foodservice departments can do more of what they're already doing, while making adjustments in sourcing and presentation.

Comfort foods are still the basis point of supermarket foodservice, Jenny Anderson, program director the RMS monitor program at the Technomic consulting firm in Chicago, told SN, noting that the food is familiar and appealing to customers.

“But they've upped the ante by enhancing those offerings with different ingredients or flavors to make them elevated comfort food, and that's where some of the restaurant influences come into play,” said Anderson. “You're seeing popular and even trendy ingredients and flavor profiles migrate from foodservice to retail more quickly than in the past.”

Anderson said prepared food departments are offering items like rotisserie chicken available in multiple flavors and soup with gourmet influences.

“Meatloaf is also becoming fairly common in the hot grab-and-go proteins area where rotisserie chicken has now been joined by ribs and other meats. But you might find it glazed with a distinctive sauce or stuffed with cheese,” she said.

Anderson cited examples where retailers are experimenting with mashed and baked potatoes, like Giant Eagles' Market District Rösti Bars, which feature the traditional Swiss dish of shredded, fried potato pancakes, combined with ingredients like uncured bacon, eggs and black wax cheddar cheese.

Some supermarket prepared food departments' experimental offerings were deemphasized during the recession, when retailers focused on classic best sellers, Anderson said.

“I actually think this premiumization of the classics will be the main direction for innovation in supermarket foodservice for some time to come. It's a great niche to develop differentiated signature dishes that already have some level of consumer acceptance,” said Anderson.

“Many consumers are still watching their spending and are likely tightening budgets again in the face of higher food prices. In those instances offerings that are more familiar ‘sure things,’ but still special in some way are a safer bet and likely will get a boost in appeal.”