Special Sauce: Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo on the Neighborhood Restaurant [1/2]

Published: Feb. 7, 2019, 11:15 p.m.

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I am constantly on the lookout for good neighborhood restaurants. The kind of restaurants that treat me like a regular even if I\'m not; where the host greets me warmly even when it\'s really crowded; where the food is consistently serious and reasonably priced; and, most of all, where I feel well taken care of at all times. \\xa0 So when I read Kindness & Salt: Recipes for the Care and Feeding of Your Friends and Neighbors by Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo, who own Buttermilk Channel and French Louie, two terrific neighborhood restaurants in Brooklyn, I knew they\'d be great guests to have on Special Sauce. And I wasn\'t disappointed.\\xa0 \\xa0 Both Doug and Ryan fell in love with restaurant work right away. For Ryan it was antidote to high school; he started washing dishes at a country club when he was sixteen. "I hated high school," Ryan says, "I wasn\'t into sports. I got into the kitchen, and I felt right at home." \\xa0 On Doug\'s first day in a kitchen, he was asked to go through a crate of live lobsters and separate the bodies from the claws. "So I never had seen that done anywhere else before, but it\'s not easy to take a lobster\'s claws off while they\'re still alive and it\'s a pretty messed up thing to do," Doug recalls. "And they were flopping all over the place and snapping at me. That was a trial by fire...But I loved it." \\xa0 When they decided to open a restaurant in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn together, they had a specific kind of restaurant in mind. As Doug says, they wanted it to be "sort of a hub of the community as well as being one restaurant for all occasions. So a place where you can go with your kids and also come back for a fancy dinner. That\'s when I know we\'ve really succeeded, is when see those same parents who came in with a high chair and they\'re back for their anniversary." \\xa0 And while that may seem like the perfect definition of a neighborhood restaurant, I asked Doug to expand on the idea, and he said, "I think it\'s a place that if you live near the restaurant, that you can come back to multiple times in a week and have different experiences from the menu and from the service, and from the drinks and everything. You can come in and have dinner by yourself; you can come with your family, you can come with your kids. Because a neighborhood restaurants means that you get a lot of people from the neighborhood regularly, and they can\'t really do that if it\'s just a tasting menu restaurant or it\'s a steakhouse." \\xa0 There\'s lots more to dive into in this week\'s episode of Special Sauce, like the secret (or non-secret) of Ryan and Doug\'s superb fried chicken, so I hope you tune in.\\xa0 \\xa0 --- \\xa0 The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats:\\xa0https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/02/special-sauce-doug-crowell-ryan-angulo-1-1.html

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