Eat: Honest Recipes, Like This Beef Carpaccio, Will Never Go Out of Style

Prune turns the big 20 this year — which is, we often joke, actually 140 when counted in fiercely competitive and fickle restaurant years, where one can go from sizzle-hot to morgue-cold in a New York minute. I’ve been reflective about making it this far, which is to be expected, but I’ve surprised myself by how overearnest we’ve sometimes become. Who have we been and what have we accomplished and what have we meant and to whom have we mattered? I’ve found myself wondering, with bloated self-regard, perhaps unwittingly swept up in the current cultural moment the restaurant industry is having?

But with two consecutive five-year renewals of my lease automatically built in and soon to start — ticktock — time is short for any such ponderosity about what a restaurant now is and what its sphere of influence may be and the responsibilities it may shoulder. And I find myself, cleareyed, considering the coming 10 years that will hopefully bring Prune to a robust 30 by anchoring in the question that has always kept this ship steadfast: Is the food honest, true and delicious or isn’t it? And if it is, let’s keep making it.

Which leads me to beef carpaccio. Specifically the version with a few hot fried potatoes scattered on top of the greens and finished with a few drops of truffle oil that I know from the late Judy Rodgers of the still-perfect, still-fresh, still-vital and well-over-30-year-old Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. I’ve been craving it ever since that early morning weeks ago, when while walking the dog, tree branches still black and budless against a cold fog, the pooch stopped to squat where there was a startling patch of rather advanced crocus shoots pushing up through crusty snow. Maybe it was a more general ache for spring itself that led to my travel fantasy, of spring in Venice, also foggy and chilly, where beef carpaccio was invented at Harry’s Bar, but I went to work that day with a full-fledged craving for it and got busy. I know the dish has been misused, bastardized, overproduced, poorly executed, egregiously interpreted; there has been carpaccio of tuna, of swordfish, of mushroom, of cauliflower, of pineapple and, I’m not kidding, one that I saw in the mid-’90s featuring ostrich — but here is a sane and satisfying version of the classic.

In order to achieve the thin and even slices, which can be a tricky bit of knife work, freeze the beef until it is quite firm, even stiff. It’ll maintain its shape and resist the pressure of your knife, which otherwise would crush the extremely tender meat. Once sliced, pounding the beef between two sheets of parchment is most common, but I love the more gentle and less noisy method of ironing it flat and thin with a few firm strokes of a rolling pin. Using chilled serving plates will keep the beef cold, which will lend the spectacular contrast to the hot fried potatoes when you get them all together in one bite. You can use the traditional arugula leaves as written here, but also try it with biting peppery watercress and see what you think. One of spring’s earliest crops — my craving for cress is like a muscle memory; at the first whiff of a thaw in the air, I’m hungry for it — it tastes quite right against the truffle oil.

Truffle oil is itself a topic for a future column; I dropped it 20 years ago as all chefs did when it was exposed as synthetic. You would have to have had an impressive sense of self-esteem and a remarkably sturdy mast to face the headwinds of embarrassment to admit that you rather loved a few drops of the affordable crap on your warm French fries. But for now, buy a decent one, and add a few drops both to the greens and to the hot potatoes. We can spend the next 10 years deciding what stays and what goes.

In the meantime, I must attend to what a vital 30-year-old restaurant could look like, and the things that will always keep her, as I joke, “Zuni-fresh” and “Zuni-lively.” Is it time to consider “filters” and “going viral”? Should I give up writing my lists on the backs of grocery receipts with whatever’s at hand — eyeliner pencil, black Sharpie — and get myself a bullet journal? Pitch the care of people and take up the practice of “radical self-care”?

Or is the secret to aging well right in front of us, in the details of restaurant work itself: keeping the juice for the cocktail freshly squeezed, the ice cubes clean and rock hard, the parsley chopped at the last minute, the butter kept cool but not cold, the cheese ripe, the french fries piping hot?

I’ll let you know in 10 more years, if we are lucky enough to make it that far.

Recipe: Beef Carpaccio