There’s a debate heating up over tuna melts in Larchmont.
It’s not all-out food war, but chef Nancy Silverton was a bit taken aback when she heard about a customer’s complaint at Max & Helen’s, the new diner she opened last week with television creator and host Phil Rosenthal and his daughter Lily Rosenthal and son-in-law Mason Royal.
“This gentleman was livid because he said we didn’t know how to make a tuna melt,” Silverton says. “Lily asked him what was wrong. He said, ‘Well, first of all, your tuna was warm!’ She asked him how he likes his tuna melts. He said, ‘I’m looking for cold tuna. I want my cheese on the side.’”
While Silverton may not agree with the customer’s unorthodox version of the classic – heated! –sandwich, she can appreciate that people’s ideas of comfort foods are usually rooted in their memories of the dishes.
“It’s like, ‘Sorry, sir, but that’s not a tuna melt,’” she says. “But you can’t fight someone’s memory.”
The diner is Silverton’s latest addition to the Los Angeles foodscape. Late last month, she debuted the menu she designed for Soho House’s Garden restaurant in West Hollywood to help mark the members-only club’s 15th anniversary in Los Angeles. Silverton’s 25 items are evenly split between new recipes and classics from some of her restaurants like Mozza and Campanile.
In the works is an Italian-American steakhouse, Spacca Tutto, opening in August in Rick Caruso’s high-end shopping plaza Palisades Village in Pacific Palisades as well as a Mozza outpost in Bozeman, Mont.
I caught up with Silverton earlier this week as she was preparing to host Thanksgiving dinner at her home.
You’re busy these days.
I am busy. You know, I think I might be busier than ever, which is amazing. I like to be busy.
You redesigned the menu at Soho House and just opened Max & Helen’s.
I love a project. I love projects that are kind of immediate, not when somebody’s saying it’s a five-year plan. Soho House was something that happened so quickly. I’ve done a couple collaborative dinners with them that have always gone well, and I really like them. It started out as a simple let’s add a few dishes to the menu and then it became a little bit more ambitious and let’s redo the menu for the Garden upstairs. I think we have the foresight to work with people and within their constraints and limitations and set them up for success rather than the opposite. The opposite would be a very ambitious menu that took a lot of not only skill, but someone really hands on, and someone really overseeing it. So why not give them something that are crowd pleasing dishes and geared towards their level?
Does Soho House give you data and spreadsheets about what their members like to eat, how they like to eat? Or were they like, “Go forth and do what you want?”
Both. Like they said no nuts across the board and there was maybe something else, but coming from Los Angeles, having restaurants in Los Angeles, I feel like I know who their members are. I’m not a member, but you can imagine the clientele wants food that they can identify with. You don’t want to get too out there. At the same time, you want to spark their interest. There’s also the the healthy eating component for some of them. We didn’t source or make anything that was too complicated. Given the amount of recipes that I’ve done, not only in my few restaurants, but also in my cookbooks, I realized that I have a huge portfolio of what to draw from without having to always reinvent the wheel. That really helps.
In most cases, there’s really no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Don’t need it. Don’t need to. For instance, one of the items I was able to kind of, let’s say, recycle onto their menu was one of our most popular dishes from Campanile, which is a simple grilled rib eye. But the key to it was that after it came off the grill, we gave it a nice smear of a black olive tapenade that gave it this burst of flavor that you don’t know where that’s coming from. I haven’t used that dish for years. And look at the diner. It’s only been open for a week, but there’s like a five-hour wait. Why is there a five-hour wait? Because in the end, people just want to eat a patty melt. Why kid ourselves?
You can put a spin on a pastrami sandwich but not so much that it’s no longer about the pastrami.
There’s a dish on our menu here at Mozza, which is the Nancy’s Caesar Salad. I named it the Nancy’s Caesar Salad not just because I like to see my name on the menu, but because I wanted to sort of hint at the fact that it’s not just a normal Caesar salad. When you order something classic like a Caesar salad, you have to deliver a Caesar salad experience so that by the end, whoever’s eating it says, “I feel satisfied that I had a Caesar salad.” There’s a little wiggle room in there, and that’s what I did with my salad. I deconstructed it in a way where everything is there, the anchovies are there, the romaine lettuce is there, the parmesan is there, the acid is there, the bread is there. I just mixed it up a little bit, but didn’t let it fall so far away from the tree that when you’re done eating it, you say, “Well, that was good, but I really just want a Caesar salad.”
Do you already have a signature dish at Max & Helen’s?
You never say, “I’m doing this and it’s going to be a signature.” But right now, there’s a lot of buzz around the waffle. It’s the customer that decides what the signature is. Hopefully, you create or make comeback items where people have to come in and have it again, and that’s what brings them in.
The wait is pretty long to get a table at the diner. Will you ever take reservations?
Who has reservations at a diner, right? But the other thing is, once you have reservations, you cut out the neighborhood because then anybody can make them and nobody can walk in. I like reservations and I also like places I can walk into. But I would never want to wait.
If you walked up to Max & Helen’s and you were told the wait is three hours, you wouldn’t wait?
I would not, unless it was a situation where you say, “OK, we’re going to go to the movies and we’ll be back in three hours.” Then it’s not really a wait. You just have your name in there. But if it was standing in line, absolutely not.
Have you gone to the Tesla diner?
I haven’t. I wasn’t in the country when it opened up and I don’t have a Tesla.
Did Elon Musk ask you to design the menu?
Nope, he didn’t.
Would you?
Why would I? Now I have my own diner.
Do you watch “The Bear”?
I saw the first season. I like all the people involved, but I’m just not a television watcher. I hate getting hooked on things on television. I did enjoy it. What I liked about it the most is that it felt real. They did their homework. I know that the writers and the creators are involved in the business and the actors look like cooks.
This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.