“How did Oklahoma City’s Nonesuch, a 22-seat tasting-menu spot from three chefs whom no one has ever heard of, in a city that no national critic has ever paid attention to, become America’s best new restaurant?”
Thus read the overlong headline printed in 2018 in Bon Appetit magazine about New American restaurant Nonesuch.
It was a photo he came across by chance on Instagram that impelled the editor-in-chief of Bon Appetit to fly from New York to Oklahoma City and try Nonesuch on a whim. He found three young chefs who foraged every week in state parks for rare delicacies – such as poor man’s pepper and Queen Anne’s lace – planned their ever-changing menus over steaming bowls of pho in a nearby Vietnamese diner, and used novel ingredients, like grilled chicken hearts, coriander flowers and cow’s colostrum custard. All from Oklahoma, these chefs combined their talents with strange, pioneering techniques to produce unexpected, complex flavors that clearly made quite the impression.
At about the same time, Moore native Garrett Hare, also incredibly young, was at cooking school in New York City. He interned at Babbo, a lauded West Village Italian spot, worked in Colorado, then ended up with a job at Nonesuch.
“It was very loud, very fast-paced, very intense. It was everything I needed,” says Hare, who today is the executive chef of Nonesuch, a restaurant which has just been named a semi-finalist for the James Beard Award given annually to the best restaurant in the United States.
At Nonesuch, dishes evolve with the seasons. Catfish, once dressed with fermented greens, is, when the greens run out, served with garlic. Similarly, the restaurant has evolved. At least 80% of ingredients are still Oklahoma sourced, but a recent dish used imported octopus coated with a glistening black Mexican molé made from beet trimmings, squid ink and preserved fried chiles. Today, no ingredient, no cuisine, is off limits.
Some things, however, don’t change.
“It’s definitely a collaborative kitchen,” says Hare. When a new dish is created or an old dish is modified, everyone has input. People learn, grow and blossom on the job.
“It’s been so rewarding,” says Hare, “watching people progress.”
Another constant: “We never think of things in the box,” says Hare. This inventive mindset is propelled with a fascination for all things pickled, cured and fermented; the dehydrator works overtime. Shiitake mushrooms are fermented, and the juice seasons a soup. Then the mushrooms are smoked and dehydrated, the resulting powder used to flavor another course. They make koji, an ancient Japanese technique for cultivating edible mold and using it to make miso.
“It’s a labor of love,” explains Hare. “It takes months and months of work.”
Last year, the James Beard Award for best restaurateur went to Kelly Whitaker in Colorado. An Oklahoma native, Whitaker acquired Nonesuch a few months later. It’s a happy deal.
Whitaker’s interests are so aligned with Nonesuch that, had he not been a restaurateur, Hare would surely have hired him as a chef. Whitaker is smart enough not to tamper with genius.
“He’s very collaborative,” says Hare, “offering his group’s resources to help us achieve our full potential.”
Whitaker, like Hare, is big on preservation and zero waste. He’s brought a mill down from Colorado. Now they can make their own bread with local grains. He’s also installed a huge Japanese robata grill, and the team has been experimenting with smoke: smoked peppers, smoked butter, fish, tallow. Whitaker, Hare enthuses, “brings energy, pushes us to think outside the box, think about every aspect of service. He’s just what this restaurant needed.”
