The 8 Dishes That Made My Career: Jamie Bissonnette

The force behind Boston's Coppa and Toro charts his path from vegan to nose-to-tail savant.

Jamie Feldmar

Jamie Bissonnette is well-known today for his knuckle-to-toe tattoos (a ham bone on his hand says eat offal), proficiency around a pig carcass, and the lines out the door of his two perpetually packed Boston restaurants, Coppa and Toro. But before the rave reviews, the James Beard nomination, and the Food & Wine People’s Best New Chef award, Bissonnette was a Connecticut punk-rock kid, straight-edge and vegan.

The siren song of the kitchen called early—Bissonnette conducted Saturday-morning breakfast experiments at home and sliced his way through an after-school job at the local deli as a teen. After an early graduation from culinary school and a stint staging in Paris—where his boss threatened to fire him if he didn’t start eating animals—Bissonnette began working his way up in kitchens in Boston.

Kitchen gigs at Pigalle and Clio led to headlining spots at Eastern Standard and KO Prime, and finally a big break when Boston restaurateur demigod Ken Oringer tapped Bissonnette to man the stoves at Toro. Today, the nose-to-tail aficionado is a co-owner and chef of both Coppa and Toro, the latter of which is scheduled to open an NYC outpost later this year.

Forthright and self-aware in conversation, Bissonnette is a man with a complex food history. When his seven-year run as a vegan came to an end, the influx of different meat flavors came as “an explosion,” he says; and though he’s known for his carnivorous, offal-infused dishes in his restaurants, Bissonnette says he cooks mainly vegetables at home.

Here, Bissonnette shares the dishes that brought him to where is today, from mom’s toaster-oven chicken wings to classic steak tartare in Paris.

Jamie Bissonnette is well-known today for his knuckle-to-toe tattoos (a ham bone on his hand says eat offal), proficiency around a pig carcass, and the lines out the door of his two perpetually packed Boston restaurants, Coppa and Toro. But before the rave reviews, the James Beard nomination, and the Food & Wine People’s Best New Chef award, Bissonnette was a Connecticut punk-rock kid, straight-edge and vegan. The siren song of the kitchen called early—Bissonnette conducted Saturday-morning breakfast experiments at home and sliced his way through an after-school job at the local deli as a teen. After an early graduation from culinary school and a stint staging in Paris—where his boss threatened to fire him if he didn’t start eating animals—Bissonnette began working his way up in kitchens in Boston. Kitchen gigs at Pigalle and Clio led to headlining spots at Eastern Standard and KO Prime, and finally a big break when Boston restaurateur demigod Ken Oringer tapped Bissonnette to man the stoves at Toro. Today, the nose-to-tail aficionado is a co-owner and chef of both Coppa and Toro, the latter of which is scheduled to open an NYC outpost later this year. Forthright and self-aware in conversation, Bissonnette is a man with a complex food history. When his seven-year run as a vegan came to an end, the influx of different meat flavors came as “an explosion,” he says; and though he’s known for his carnivorous, offal-infused dishes in his restaurants, Bissonnette says he cooks mainly vegetables at home. Here, Bissonnette shares the dishes that brought him to where is today, from mom’s toaster-oven chicken wings to classic steak tartare in Paris.
1. Kosher dill pickle with liverwurst

My first time eating a kosher dill pickle with liverwurst was pretty memorable. I was in the store with my mom, probably seven years old, sitting in the grocery cart with my legs hanging out. My mom was getting liverwurst, and she’d always eat a little piece while we shopped. And since I always wanted a pickle from the festering cesspool of bacteria that was the pickle barrel, one day, my mom just decided to rub some liverwurst on the pickle as a snack. It seemed natural enough, and I’ve been hooked on liverwurst ever since.
2. Mom’s bean and meat chili

My mom can only make three things that are edible, and chili is one of them. She makes it in a crock-pot with dried beans and a ton of Budweiser, and she cooks it for, like, two days. It smells so damn good; we’d eat it with a little pat of butter on top. Today, I always have some sort of chili incarnation on my menus.
3. Mom’s chicken wings with honey BBQ sauce

This is another one of the three things my mom can cook. Her recipe involves powdered BBQ spice, which she’d toss on the wings before smothering them in butter and honey. She’d cook them in the toaster oven on high, until they just started to caramelize. Every once in a while we do wings here [at Coppa] for staff meal.
4. Scrambled eggs with cheese

The first thing I cooked for anyone was scrambled eggs with cheese on toast for the college kids who were painting our house. I must have been 11. I had watched my mom make eggs, and I noticed when she was making them that they were better at a certain point before she overcooked them. So I made these guys really greasy, slimy soft scrambled eggs with cheese on rye, and they loved it. From that point on, scrambled eggs became one of my favorite things to cook. If there’s one thing I was put on this earth to do, it’s cook eggs.
5. Steak tartare in Paris

I had been a vegan for six or seven years when I went to Paris to stage, and that’s where I started eating meat again. One of the chefs I was working for told me I needed to start tasting dishes, to go out and enjoy food—he asked, “how can you come up with new ideas if you don’t eat everything? You don’t even know what flavors go together.” And he was totally right. By the end of the week I was eating foie gras and steak tartare, which I just totally fell in love with. My palate and my ability to understand food and flavors was exponentially better after that. Now, I crave steak tartare all the time—I have to have it at least once a week.
6. Cassoulet

I remember having my first taste of cassoulet in Paris and being completely blown away by the flavors. I never knew slow-cooked beans could be so amazing. When I staged at Pigalle in Boston, Marc Orfaly taught me how to make it, and now, I cook it every year for Christmas—braised lamb shank and duck confit, plus stock, beans, and Toulouse-style sausage.
7. Tripe

As I started cooking and working my way around various restaurants, I had some awesome tripe, as well as some really not awesome tripe. I worked for a while in Phoenix, and I hated pretty much everything, but I loved the Mexican neighborhoods, because I could go eat menudo on Sundays. I started to want to learn how to cook it myself, so I read a lot of old cookbooks and learned how to really cook it down and impart as much flavor into it as possible. When people who said they hated tripe tried mine, they said it was the best they’d ever had, and I’m really proud of that. Today, tripe is always on my menus.
8. Spaghetti carbonara at Bricco

Back in the ’90s, Billy Grant at Bricco in West Hartford taught me how to make carbonara the real way, with eggs, pasta, and Parmesan. This dish made my mind explode with its simplicity. I had worked in a bunch of Italian restaurants, with off-the-boat Italian guys who made very traditional Neapolitan stuff. They never made carbonara. I always said I liked the creaminess of carbonara, and they’d laugh at me and lecture me about how there was no cream, but they never taught me how to make it. When I got to Briccio, Billy had his grandma’s recipe on the menu. He taught me the finesse of using simple ingredients and turning them into something divine.

The 8 Dishes That Made My Career: Jamie Bissonnette

1. Kosher dill pickle with liverwurst

2. Mom’s bean and meat chili

3. Mom’s chicken wings with honey BBQ sauce

4. Scrambled eggs with cheese

5. Steak tartare in Paris

6. Cassoulet

7. Tripe

8. Spaghetti carbonara at Bricco

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