Lucy Gellman Photo
Hutchinson and Lishchynsky have launched [oink].
When [oink] co-founder Craig Hutchinson entered the restaurant business as a chef in 2009, a reprieve from the financial sector job he had started right after college, he had one goal in mind: get good. Like, really good. Like, good enough to open a restaurant.
He put in long hours, transitioning from Brookline’s storied The Country Club to Boston’s Harvest Restaurant and again to Radius, tucked away in the city’s financial district. It was there that the then-chef-de-partie met Alex “Nuevo” Lishchynsky, and had an instinctive feeling that he had found the right partner in crime.
Except it was 2010: the economy was still recovering from collapse, and the upscale restaurant business — at the very heart of discretionary spending — was struggling. Lishchynsky moved from Boston to New York, getting work at Il Buco Alimentari under chef Justin Smillie. Hutchinson, a self-described “hometown kid” from Bethany, came back to Connecticut to work as the head chef at New Haven’s Caseus Fromagerie & Bistro on Trumbull Street. The two stayed in close contact.
And then, in 2014, conditions suddenly seemed right to start trying. Hutchinson gave Lishchynsky a call. Lishchynsky gave him a resounding “yes” immediately.
Now the two are launching [oink], a Connecticut pop-up series that started its New Haven chapter this month with a Sunday brunch series at Caseus.
“Our dream was always to have a restaurant together,” said Hutchinson in an interview on WNHH’s “Kitchen Sync.” “Part of my dream was to come back to New Haven and cook for the community that I grew up around, with all this newfound big city knowledge. When I called up Nuevo [Lishchynsky] to let him know that I was ready to pull the trigger on doing something with a restaurant … we’ve always been firm believers that two minds are greater than one, and that’s why we’re doing this together.”
“The most exciting part about opening a restaurant is finding yourself,” Lishchynsky added.
The idea for [oink] arose when the two realized they weren’t quite ready to open a full-fledged restaurant — something they will be doing later this spring, but that’s another story. They wanted to experiment with what Hutchinson calls a “real” pop-up: a one-time event specifically for restauranteurs who don’t have a home base.
“We exist for a day, and then we disappear into thin air,” Hutchinson said.
The duo hold themselves to a high standard: while [oink] is Lishchynsky’s playful riff on Mooo, a steakhouse in Boston (“because pork is better than beef”), the one-time pop-up philosophy runs deep. After a number of pop-up dinners in late 2015, they debated introducing a series, ultimately deciding it was honest enough to the pop-up ideology only if it changed the menu every time, and ended after a finite series of weeks.
“We went back and forth for a while on never doing series,” Hutchinson said. “The problem with series is that when you are able to give the public, your guests, the same thing every single week, you start to turn into a restaurant. When you appear at a farm, and then you appear at a fine dining restaurant, and then you appear at a bar, and then you go appear at a warehouse … it’s kind of like this underground scene of like ‘where are they going to be next?‘ That was our vision from the beginning, before we even moved here … I think that’s fun and exciting.”
For them, that means seasonal produce and complete transparency with diners about what is on the menu, their plate, and their bill.
“A lot of places overuse the phrase ‘farm to table,’” Hutchinson said. “I think that just because you have a couple of ingredients from your menu that come from a local, sustainable farm … I don’t think that constitutes you as being farm to table. I think that’s a marketing ploy to get a foot into the door. What we do is seasonality, it’s responsibly sourcing. It’s not kitschy, it’s not to get ticket sales to go up, it’s not part of a trend — it’s the future of food.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “Writing menus this time of year, it’s not easy … but I think that when you truly embrace it, like we do — we think very differently about this topic. We really don’t see it as us trying to be part of a trend. We have a message that we want to give to the public, which is: you can make very, very delicious fresh seasonal food at a lower price.”
“In my opinion, in five years, this type of conversation shouldn’t even happen,” added Lishchynsky. “Every restaurant should be doing this. Every restaurant should support their state, their region, and just source from their area … if more people bought from farms, farm vegetables would be cheaper.”
On a recent Sunday at Caseus, that meant a brunch that played to winter’s strengths: freshly-milled rye flour and polenta bread from Farm to Hearth in Haddam; preserved, peppery Connecticut tomatoes, ladled over grits as a bright reminder of summer; local eggs from Koan farms in Woodbridge; East Rock coffee from owner Dave Oricchio served in delicate china and heavy ceramic cups. Each week, the two have looked at how they can change “typical brunch dishes” into “less-boring” versions of themselves. Like “Los Tres Golpes,” a Dominican dish comprising two fried eggs, fried salami, fried cheese, plantains, and toast that was Lishchynsky’s go-to late-night meal in New York. To “[oink] it up,” the chefs substituted smoked polenta bread for the customary WonderBread, made their own salami from Walden Hill pork, and put pickled onions over the top.
“We’re not changing anything about the dish. We’re just sourcing differently,” said Lishchynsky.
“You’re still hitting the hearts,” Hutchinson added. Lishchynsky finished his sentence as he spoke: “But you just put thought into it.”
[oink] will host two more iterations of the Sunday Brunch Club on January 17 and 24th. For tickets, visit the pop-up’s website. To listen to the full interview on the subject, click on or download the audio above, or subscribe to WNHH’s new “WNHH Arts Mix” podcast, available for free in the iTunes app or any podcatcher.
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