Has New York reached the peak of pork?

Chef Silvia Garcia-Nevado had just launched into a description of Iberian ham in Wine Bara new Spanish wine bar in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood the other night when a cook came up and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, eyeing anxiously a nearby wooden stand cradling a leg of partially sliced ​​Cinco Jotas ham. “There are more orders for the Cinco. Want … me to cut it? Garcia-Nevado considered this for only a moment. (Retailing in restaurants for just over $1,000 per leg, and cured in Atlantic sea salt in southwestern Spain, Cinco Jotas requires a specific knapping technique to obtain its uniquely nutty flavor and juicy). He then he shook his head. , and he hastened to resume her position at the ham, where he spent much of the rest of the night wielding a long, slender carving knife as if it were a bow, and she a first-chair fiddle.

Suddenly, specialty cured pork seems to be on every other menu in New York. The chefs collect the hindquarters. The servers talk about it with an almost religious reverence: “Let it melt on your tongue before you swallow.” The dishes are assembled with skillful precision and few embellishments. “All the pieces should be swimming like a school of fish, the fat facing one direction,” says Joshua Pinsky, co-owner and chef of claudio, a French-inspired eatery in the East Village where homegrown country ham comes with a stack of sunchokes and red-eye mayonnaise for $23. In I gave it, an Italian cafe in Rockefeller Center, the prosciutto di Parma ($21 a plate), aged for 30 months and imported from the family-owned Fratelli Galloni company, arrives on a stainless-steel plinth, each strip arranged like a wavy petal along its length. along the surface so that its barely translucent fat catches the light. In by raf, a new French and Italian restaurant in NoHo, a mountain of sweet and spicy Bayonne ham floats on the table, along with fine Sardinian carta di musica crackers. And the whole layout scheme of pork bara newly opened pork and beer purveyor from the team behind the neighboring Lower East Side wine bar Plot, focuses on a tangerine-colored Berkel slicer, being used to hand-slice rarefied cured pork cuts to order. A district away, another antique slicer, in Ham & Sons Bara restaurant in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, it dates back to 1910 and produces country ham dishes with as subtle and smoky undertones as any fine wine collection.

The presence of fancy ham in New York is not new. Local institutions like Estela, King, Ernesto’s, Carbone, and those in the Momofuku group (where Pinsky used to cook) have long promoted cured pork to diners looking to pretend they’re on vacation in Europe. But it is recently ubiquitous. In part, that’s because, since pandemic-era restrictions were lifted, wealthy New Yorkers have never been more willing to be pampered by their culinary choices, to revel in the drama of dining out, no matter what. that they are eating The Upper East Siders are spending $29 in a deli sandwich to go. And there’s a $29 hot dog on the menu at Mischa, chef Alex Stupak’s new restaurant in Midtown. At the same time, says Ignacio Mattos, chef and founder of the Mattos Hospitality group, which includes Estela, Altro Paradiso, Corner Bar and Lodi, “the pandemic has sharpened people’s palates. People had more time, they became more curious. Sausages, there is nothing more sophisticated.”

“Consumers have gotten super smart,” says Grant Reynolds, co-founder of Pig Bar and Parcelle. He credits a chef-led market education. “It became ‘Portlandia.’ The olive oil bottles are dated by vintage. Harry’s Berries has become a family brand.” (The ever-ripe California strawberry jam, which retails for over $15 per pound, have become a status symbol among home cooks of late.) “In haute cuisine, you talk about perceived value,” Pinsky says. “Ingredients that you don’t have to do much to—things like uni, caviar, truffles—you buy the highest quality and put them on the plate and let them shine. I think country ham is one of those”.

It doesn’t break the sweat of chefs either. “Restaurants are leaning towards the deli,” says Brian Goldblatt, managing director of Natoora, a wholesale supplier of high-quality ingredients. “It is profitable. They can charge a lot and require very little manpower.” The ham itself is, of course, expensive, whether imported from Europe or ordered from one of the few small-batch domestic producers. But the reduced demand on the kitchen—essentially just the need to slice to order, coupled with flexible storage requirements since, as Goldblatt says, “cured meat is indestructible”—pays off its pressure on operations, especially in a work environment where turnover is high and wages rise. Sommelier André Hueston Mack, who opened & Sons Ham Bar in 2020, says part of the concept for him stemmed from a desire to reduce the chef’s drudgery. “I was looking for something sustainable,” he says: a dish that could be sliced ​​and served by just about anyone after a short workout, in a pinch.

And New Yorkers aren’t just willing to put up with a price per plate that keeps the cost of luxury ham around the coveted 30 percent markup (a high water mark often cited by restaurateurs); they are driving it. Mary Gibson, executive chef of the Italian restaurant Jupiter, which opened at Rockefeller Center late last year, told me she’s surprised by how popular the salumi misti dish has been; “It’s such a common request, every other ticket or so,” she reports. At Raf’s, executive chef and co-owner Mary Attea says diners often order the Bayonne jambon platter and carta di musica late after spotting it on their way to another table.

Since it opened a few weeks ago, Bar Vinazo has already gone through four legs of Cinco Jotas, at $30 a plate. It’s just one of a handful of pork dishes on the menu. I proceeded as per Garcia-Nevado’s instructions and allowed a cut to fall on my tongue. It was delicate and earthy at first, and as he chewed it, it became fruity, almost fragrant. It wasn’t entirely transformative; It didn’t change my life. But it was delicious.