Hot-and-sour soup at Umami
Good To-Go is a series featuring well-made takeout meals that highlights how restaurants and other food VERMONT establishments are adapting during the COVID-19 era. Check out GOODTOGOVERMONT.COM to see what your favorite eateries are serving up via takeout, delivery and curbside pickup.
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Feasting with a pro of Chinese cuisine
O
n a Friday afternoon in late October, I emailed Steve Bogart: “Are you willing to risk a little rain on our food to meet at 5 Saturday for an Umami picnic in Stowe?” Bogart, now retired, was the founding chef-owner of A Single Pebble, a Chinese restaurant in Burlington that he started as a weekend pop-up in Plainfield in 1995. To my dinner inquiry, Bogart replied yes, that would work. He offered his van — with its pandemic-approved eight feet of space from front seat to back — as a dining room if the weather was too lousy to eat outside. He asked if I wanted him to order our food at Umami, an Asian takeout spot that opened on Main Street in Stowe in early September. “Would love it if you order!” I wrote back. The rain held off, but the sky was a gloomy gray and the evening air chilly when we met outside Umami. The tall grasses in the park down the hill from the restaurant were dead, the trees bare. As we carried two bags of food to one of the picnic tables — all three were empty — I remarked, “It’s a funny time for a picnic.” “We’re funny people,” Bogart replied. We had each driven about 40 miles for the meal. Bogart, 72, traveled from Worcester, where he’s lived for 50 years. I came from Burlington. The last time I’d seen him was more than a dozen years ago, when it was OK to hang out in a walk-in refrigerator with 42
SEVEN DAYS NOVEMBER 4-11, 2020
SALLY POLLAK
B Y SA L LY POL L AK
JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR
Picnic in the Park
He described himself in a similarVERMON manner: “I never made up a single dish. Every recipe I used had a real long history. I often would say I’m just a copycat.” I was intrigued to learn from Bogart that our excellent hot-and-sour soup is made to order in the wok. The deeply flavorful and rich, almost stew-like soup is packed with pork, shrimp, chicken, tofu, mushrooms, lily buds, mung bean sprouts, bamboo shoots and spring onions. The base is chicken stock, made daily and kept hot on the stove. The ingredients are sliced so finely, and the wok burns so hot, that the soup cooks in about 45 seconds. When the soup is ready, it’s poured into a quart container over red and black vinegar and white pepper, a method that keeps the flavors vibrant. Our meal included wonderful chow fun with shrimp, and bao with braised pork belly. Eating the housemade rice
YOU CANNOT BE A BAD TREE CLIMBER,
AND YOU CANNOT BE A BAD CHEF. S T EV E B O G A R T
Steve Bogart drinking hot-andsour soup at a park in Stowe
someone you barely knew. That day in his Burlington cooler, he told me about the ducks hanging there and smoking over jasmine tea and hickory chips. In Stowe, eating in an open-air refrigerator, we talked about cooking with a wok. (It’s properly seasoned, he told me, “by the time you throw it away” — after four or five weeks of heavy, high-heat restaurant use.) We discussed hot-andsour soup, pork belly, and rice noodles — all part of the Umami takeout on the picnic table. We drank soup from the containers and beer from 16-ounce cans
of Madonna, a double IPA from Zero Gravity Craft Brewery, that I had brought from home. A renowned chef of classical Chinese cuisine, Bogart had special insight into the meal. The chef team at Umami includes two people, Silas Tanner and Dusty Berard, who trained and worked with Bogart at A Single Pebble. His son, Chris Bogart, a chef based in Portland, Ore., consulted with and cooked briefly at Umami on an extended visit to Vermont. “Dusty and Silas,” Bogart noted, “they’re classicists.”
noodles in the chow fun is like “swallowing clouds,” Bogart described. Pork belly, he told me, is difficult to do right. “You want the fat to be almost gelatinous,” he said. “Dusty’s a master at pork belly.” I was especially pleased to eat Bogart’s namesake — Admiral Steve’s Chicken — with him. Cooked in a sauce that contains four types of soy sauce, along with sesame oil, vinegar, sugar, ginger, and roasted and fresh garlic, the crispy chicken is served with steamed broccoli. “It’s an honor,” Bogart said of having a dish named for him. A duck hanging in a walk-in refrigerator makes for interesting conversation, but Bogart can top it. Over dinner, I learned that his late father, Larry Bogart, was an early and influential activist in PICNIC IN THE PARK
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