Next to his desk in the Oliveto back office, Chef Paul
Canales has taped a diagram that captures the restaurant's reverence
for pork.The diagram shows a hog divided into sections, such as the shoulder and the leg. All of these sections are labeled "good," except for the belly. It is labeled "real good."
Pork is a constant at Oliveto. The menu revolves around it.
On any given day, prep chefs can be seen breaking down a hog into various cuts - shoulder, loin, leg - and then processing them into porchetta, pancetta, scallopine, sausage or salumi.
For an uninitiated guest to the kitchen, it can be startling to see a
pig's head simmering in a stock pot or a chef hefting a hand saw on one
half of a 200-pound carcass.Yet if you want restaurants to be respectful of the meat they serve, extracting every ounce of flavor and using all parts of the animal, then these scenes shouldn't shock you. Many chefs run far tidier kitchens by relying on industrial meat processors to do their butchery, delivering meat cuts that are shrink-wrapped and ready to cook.
To read the rest of this post, with more photos and a rundown on how Oliveto processes a whole hog, go here.
