The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Seamus Mullen of Tertulia

From frying trout on an organic farm in Vermont to serving New Yorkers a Spanish dish that translates as "fucking great," the chef looks back on his most memorable meals to date.

Regan Hofmann

Seamus Mullen may be one of the only chef in New York City who went to Spain and did not come back with delusions of modernist grandeur. “I’m so disgusted by the whole idea of deconstructing things; if it’s good, why would you try to take it apart and present it in its elements? It just annoys me.”

He did the grand tour, alright, with stints in the kitchens of Mugaritz, in Michelin-swagged-out San Sebastián, and at Àbac and Alkimia in Barcelona, but what he took away from those two years was an almost old-fashioned respect for ingredients and classic technique. “It was exciting—particularly because I was a lot younger—seeing new techniques that everyone’s writing about, but I really fell in love with real cooking: making stocks and braises and really good roasts. I remember at the height of it, when people were serving food with pipettes and bags of aroma that you were supposed to smell when you took a bite and all that horse crap, I knew that pretty soon the next trend was going to be, like, who could make the best risotto. The pendulum always swings back and forth.”

That seeds of that skepticism may have been planted during his first trip to the country 20 years earlier, when he was a high school student still wrapping his head around the idea of quail’s eggs and ElBulli was just a madman’s hideout in the hills, not yet an international status symbol. Or maybe he developed it because, as a farm kid in Vermont, he grew up with a pragmatist’s view of food and its origins. It wasn’t until a post-collegiate trip to Sonoma and some well-timed drunken advice that Mullen ever considered cooking could be a career, rather than a dead-end job. “I didn’t want to finish my degree, I didn’t want to be an academic. I was lost and confused about what I did want to do. My grandmother and I spent four or five days driving around Sonoma, getting totally wasted and eating, and she was like, ‘Listen, you should just cook, because that’s what makes you happiest. You’ve got to do something for the rest of your life, you’ve got to make a living, and you can make a living cooking.’”

So he did—first in San Francisco and New York, then back in Spain, where he returned to chase the flavors he’d fallen in love with as a student. On his return he put that knowledge to use, opening Boqueria in the model of the classic tapas bars of Barcelona, then Tertulia, which transplants the cider halls of Asturias to the West Village. His cooking today continues to wrestle with those classic ideas, deploying an ever-evolving variation on themes that focuses on incorporating new techniques and influences while still tasting unmistakably true to its roots.

Here, the chef relives the experiences that continue to drive him forward, from a friendship with O.G. sushi chef Eiji Ichimura, to snacks at a Spanish Communist Party clubhouse.

1. Mutti’s Troutlings

I started fishing when I was pretty small; we had a neighbor in Vermont who was an avid angler and he kind of took me under his wing and took me fishing. I remember the very first trout I caught on my own—I had to have been 5 or 6, I was really little—and I took them home to my grandmother, who taught me how to clean and gut them. She showed me this dish, which has become one of the most memorable things from my childhood. They were teeny—I think then the legal limit for trout in Vermont was six inches, but I’m sure these were smaller than that—and she just dusted them in flour, made a little brown butter, and then fried the troutlings on both sides and threw in a scoop of capers and squeeze of lemon juice, and that was it. We would hold them at head and tail and eat them like you would eat finger food, then she would take the bones and fry the bones up a second time, and we would eat the bones. I spent most of my early childhood with my grandmother—she was kind of my primary caregiver—and she cooked a lot. She went to the Cordon Bleu in the 1930s in Paris and lived with the Sabatier family; she was a very skilled cook, and definitely loved food. That was probably my earliest foundation in cooking. I loved cooking from the get-go. I think initially, just being a boy, I liked the appeal of being able to use a knife. I was always obsessed with knives—I still am a little obsessed with knives, so that was a big part of it. And then just…I liked to eat, and being able to make food was very liberating—my brother and I were both very independent kids, and we were kind of left to our own devices for much of our childhood, and we had to cook for ourselves. There was an independence to it that was really appealing.
2. Sayori at Ichimura (NYC)

A good friend of mine is Japanese, and he grew up for the first part of his life in Tokyo and then moved to New York when he was like 10 or so. His dad was a Japanese businessman, and Eiji Ichimura, who is now the chef at Brushstroke, was I think a private sushi chef for his bank, or a corporate sushi chef somehow. I don't remember how, but he knew Ichimura-san, and when Ichimura opened his own restaurant on Second Avenue he took me there. There were no white people there, it was all just Japanese businessmen, there was no sign on the door—it was very, very traditional in a way that most sushi in New York is not traditional. We had all this stuff I'd never had before; sayori was one of those fish and it blew my mind. It's called needlefish in English, and it's just this really wonderful small, thin fish—it has sort of the consistency of Japanese herring but not quite as fishy. To this day it’s still one of my favorite fish to eat at a sushi restaurant. Ichimura opened my mind to so many different things—you know, he had bonito that he would age in soy in clay pots, he made all of his own sauces, every individual piece of sushi was dressed for you. I became obsessed with his food and started going all the time, and Ichimura and I became buddies. And then I went away to Spain, and when I came back and went to his restaurant, it was gone, and I had no idea what had become of him. I didn't have his contact information, and then I read the New York Times review of Brushstroke and suddenly there he was! He came into Tertulia one night when I wasn't here and left his card and we reconnected. I've since been into Brushstroke a few times and had amazing meals. He's one of the most incredible sushi chefs I've ever encountered.
3. Grilled Woodcock at Asador Etxebarri (Spain)

I went with a chef that I worked with to Etxebarri, and we just had an amazing meal; it was the first time I’d ever had woodcock, and it was the first time I’d ever had game that was really ripened. I think it was a friend of [chef Victor Arguinzoniz] that had shot it, and it was definitely funky; it was in the autumn, so they just hung it outside in its feathers for, like, two weeks. They have an area in the back where they keep all the firewood, because everything’s wood-fired there, and they have game hooks where they hung the wild game that they would get, which was definitely illegal. In Spain you can’t serve anything wild—same thing as in the U.S., you can’t serve any real wild game. The cool thing was that they cut the head in half, because the whole thing with woodcock is you’re supposed to suck out the brains. It’s the only bird that you can cook whole, with the intestines in, because the bird takes a shit right before it flies.
4. Cap-i-Pota at Alkimia (Spain)

Cap-i-pota is a very traditional Catalan dish—it literally means head and foot, and it’s usually made from the whole face of the veal and veal’s foot. If you go to the butcher, you can buy cow’s face or veal’s face, and they just peel the whole thing off the bone. The lips and the snout are what have the most gelatin in them, while the tongue gives a really rich flavor. Because there’s so much gelatin it’s really unctuous, it’s got this incredible mouthfeel. This was when I was working at Alkimia, we had it on the menu—the chef is an incredible guy, and it was such a traditional, rustic dish, but done really beautifully. We did it sous-vide and then took the face and made a torchon, which was sliced in really thin slices and served with lots of fresh vegetables and olive oil. It was a really intense, rich dish. It’s not really offal, but it’s offcuts—secondary cuts—and it was the first time I’d had secondary cuts really elegantly prepared. It changed a lot of how I think about meat in general. The reverence for using the whole animal really came from, for me, living in Spain, where every aspect of the animal has merit.
5. Duo of Sardines at Boqueria

I love sardines, but all these foodies and chefs talking about how much they love them say, “Oh, grilled Portuguese sardines, they’re so amazing.” I actually really don’t like grilled sardines. I find that 99% of the time when people grill sardines, they just cook them too hard, and because there’s so much oil and fat in them, the oils in there go bitter really quickly. The third time I was in Spain, when I was working there, I really got into sardines; I think it was because I was working in restaurants and the way we handled fish was so different from how I’d seen fish handled before. This is a dish that we did that was on the opening menu at Boqueria, and it ended up being one of the best-selling dishes. [Frank] Bruni actually wrote about it, and he was like, “In a city where nobody eats sardines, suddenly I just watched plate after plate after plate of sardines coming out the kitchen.” It was sardines prepared two ways: We took a butterflied sardine, made a filling with chopped pine nuts, olives, lemon zest, chiles, and herbs, and that would get rolled up and the tail would get stuck through the little slit where the dorsal fin was. That would get lightly breaded and really quickly fried in olive oil. And then, for the other part, we would take two fillets and those would get cured, and we'd take smoked olive oil and gently confit the fillets in it. The whole thing was served over marinated heirloom tomatoes. That still is one of my favorite sardine dishes to this day.
6. Roast Suckling Pig at Boqueria

This was a technique I learned working at Abac, where we’d get these nice little pigs in and we’d cure them for a couple of hours in salt, sugar, and pimentòn, then rinse them off and break them down into quarters and confit them at really low temperature in good lard. We’d let them cool, take out all the bones, then peel off the skin and put the skin side down in a hotel pan, put the meat back onto the skin, cover that with plastic wrap, put another hotel pan on top of it, and put it in the walk-in underneath a keg of beer and let it sit there for a couple of hours. You get this perfect loaf of suckling pig, which we'd then cut into paves that would go skin-side down onto the plancha with a weight so the skin got super, super crispy, and then we would turn it over into a shallow pan of the same fat that we had cooked it in. We would use that fat over and over again, and every time you cooked the pig it tasted better and better. The natural gelatin really holds it all together…I mean, you can throw transglutaminase in there if you want and it’ll stick together even more, but you don’t need to. If you do it well and you assemble the whole thing [correctly], that’s all you really need to do. Wylie [Dufresne] has put it really well: “100 years ago, some of the techniques we consider as completely normal, like steaming for instance, were unorthodox and completely avant-garde.” There are things that have come out of modern kitchens in the past 10 years that are now accepted techniques that everybody does, and sometimes they do really make things better. Even transglutaminase; we use meat glue to make our sausages better. We’re still making a traditional food product, but we’re using a little bit of science, or an understanding of science at least, to bring it along.
7. Chawanmushi at Soto

The first time I had chawanmushi it really blew me away. That silky texture of steamed coddled eggs with gingko nuts in it, and a little bit of smoked fish and teeny little shrimp and a little bit of sea urchin; all of that together was just awesome. It was like, "Wow, you can make eggs have this texture?" There’s just so much craft involved in Japanese food, and there’s a reverence for tradition and a dedication to trying to improve upon tradition, rather than trying to make it seem as though you’re so much better than tradition. At Suba I did a royale that was basically a langoustine chawanmushi—the way you get the texture of the egg is you mix the beaten eggs with dashi, pour it into a ceramic cup that has all of the other ingredients at the bottom of it, and then steam it all in a bamboo steamer. So instead of using a dashi, we made a langoustine stock with the shells of the langoustine and the head, and then it had little pieces of the tail at the bottom of the bowl, and some other stuff that I can't remember. Same idea.
8. Cojonudo at Tertulia

The original cojonudo was probably the first thing that I ever had in Spain. When I went to Spain in high school I lived with a host family, and my host father was this crazy communist, a member of the Spanish Communist Party. He took me out literally the first day I was there to the Communist Party headquarters, which was a bar—in classic form, the communists were all alcoholics. The bar didn't have any chairs, all they had were empty beer kegs with pillows on them. So we sat down— I was 16 years old, and we drank beer, which was pretty wild for me to be drinking with an adult, and he kept ordering these little fried quail eggs with a piece of chorizo on toast. I was pretty apprehensive about it because I'd never had quail eggs before, but he finally convinced me to have one and it was awesome. It's called cojonudo, and that means, in Spanish, “Fucking great”—like, if something's “cojonudo,” it's fucking great. And it's called that because it's…fucking great. When we opened Boqueria I really wanted to have it on the menu, because it was my earliest food memory of Spain. When we opened Tertulia, I wanted to do a similar thing but update it to reflect the spirit of the restaurant. So we played around and came up with this idea: We have this great grill, so we take pig's cheeks, cure them, and then smoke them for several hours on the grill until they're cooked all the way through and super smoky, kind of like face bacon. We slice that, cut it into little squares, and that gets crisped on the plancha. To give it more texture, we use just the crusts from a Pullman loaf and cut it into little squares as well, and that gets toasted on the plancha right next to the pig's cheeks, so the fat from the pig's cheeks moistens that little piece of crusty bread. Then we fry a quail egg, and everything comes together as one bite. It's kind of a signature dish here; it's the perfect little individual bite.
9. Arroz a la Plancha at Tertulia

I love risotto, but obviously you can't really cook it in a Spanish restaurant—that doesn't really make sense. Here, we make the rice two ways; we start it as a risotto, and then as you're finishing it, rather than turning it onto a plate, we turn it straight onto the plancha and use spatulas and just carefully roll it so it gets crispy on the outside, almost like a crepe, and the rice gets all gooey on the inside. The idea was to simulate the socarrat you get from paella, but to marry that with a risotto, which is creamy and unctuous and one of my favorite things to cook. I wanted to incorporate Iberico ham into dishes rather than just serve it as a complement to dishes. The idea was to create something that was like a total food chain: There's mushrooms and celery and a real woodsy, wet-garden feel going on, and then there's snails, which in the wild would be eating the mushrooms and the celery and things like that, and then there's Iberico ham because, in the wild, the Iberico pigs would be eating snails. And then there's the human who's eating all of it. The woodsy funkiness of the snails goes really well with the mushrooms, and Iberico ham has a really great, rich, funky, musty flavor to it too, which obviously comes from the aging process—we never thought that a dish with snails would be one of our best-sellers, but it turned into one of those untouchable things on the menu.
10. Crudo of Hamachi at Tertulia

I've always loved raw fish [in Japanese food], but I also love non-traditional ways of preparing raw fish, handling them with the same integrity and level of seriousness. We do a lot of stuff with raw fish here—the grill factors so importantly into the cooking here in the restaurant; almost anything that we serve here touches the grill at some point, and raw fish is no exception. We'll take the fish and lightly cure it, then we'll wrap it in cheesecloth and pack it in ice and cold-smoke it inside the grill. It won't actually cook, but it'll take on this beautiful smoky flavor, and then we'll slice it thinly and serve it as crudo. That's just a way of keeping the flavors of the grill and the flavors of the restaurant present in a dish that wouldn't otherwise see the grill, and it really works beautifully. There's a flavor that food cooked over hardwood gets that you can't get any other way. I knew that it was going to be important in the restaurant, but it wasn't until we opened and we started playing around with the grill that we discovered that it's just this incredibly versatile cooking implement—it's at once the most simple and complex way of cooking.

The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Seamus Mullen of Tertulia

1. Mutti’s Troutlings

2. Sayori at Ichimura (NYC)

3. Grilled Woodcock at Asador Etxebarri (Spain)

4. Cap-i-Pota at Alkimia (Spain)

5. Duo of Sardines at Boqueria

6. Roast Suckling Pig at Boqueria

7. Chawanmushi at Soto

8. Cojonudo at Tertulia

9. Arroz a la Plancha at Tertulia

10. Crudo of Hamachi at Tertulia

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