Gjelina chef Travis Lett talks farm to table, staying local and spending $5 on scones

Gjelina, Cooking from Venice, California
(Photo from Chronicle Books website)

LOS ANGELES—Even Travis Lett’s beloved BLT wasn’t immune to the chef’s unwavering support of local and seasonal foods. If the tomatoes had to come from far away, the sandwich had to go away.

And so it is at Gjelina, Lett’s Venice, California, hotspot restaurant where even much-loved menu items are sacrificed if even a single ingredient passes out of season. “If I have to bring in a tomato from Chile or something like that, I think I’m better off not using those,” said Lett, pausing briefly while baking at the restaurant on a recent morning. “We wait till they’re available.”

The good news is diners increasingly appreciate he message as well as his method. During the past eight years, the New Jersey native has watched appetites and appreciation for seasonal produce grow. The child of parents who followed a strict vegan, macrobiotic diet said he’s encouraged by the demand for organic products. Still, he laments that people will spend $300 on jeans, but balk at spending $5 on a well-made, sustainably produced scone.

“I like jeans, too,” Lett said. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy those. I just find it strange we put this really intense scrutiny on the price of food you’re putting in your body, but we’ll willingly spend money in other ways.”

He recently spoke with AP about his new cookbook, “Gjelina,” the farm-to-table movement, and that road trip from Colorado to California he took in a roofless Jeep after finishing art school. (Edited for length and clarity.)

AP: Where does the name Gjelina come from?

Lett: My partner is from Detroit, although his family is Albanian. Gjelina is his mom’s name. That “Gj” spelling is really common in Albania. Naming restaurants is annoyingly arbitrary, like naming a band or anything else. And at the time I remember there was a lot of animal nomenclature, like The Spotted Pig (April Bloomfield’s New York City gastropub). There were naming trends at the time and we didn’t want to get into any of those. I remember seeing his mom’s name on some paperwork. I remember thinking, ‘That’s beautiful.’ It has this ethnic ambiguity to it. It sort of sounds Italian when you say it, but the way it’s spelled, it’s clearly not. It had this feminine elegance.

AP: You grew up in New Jersey. What drew you to Venice?

Lett: I went to school in Colorado, so that was kind of halfway here. I studied fine art, and I started cooking just as a means of paying for school. There wasn’t really an, “I want to be a chef, aha!” moment. By the time I was finished with school I had three or four years of professional culinary experience under my belt and it just made sense for me to keep cooking. I knew I needed to go to a bigger city. I thought, ‘Why not take a trip to “LA?” It was my 22nd birthday. I had an old Jeep Wrangler that I drove to LA—without the roof on it, which is actually a terrible idea. Don’t ever drive 1,000 miles in a topless jeep. It’s miserable. Just for the fun of it, I threw my resume around a little bit, and I actually ended up landing a job. Venice was just instantly the place I gravitated toward.

AP: What did you pick up from cooking three years in a Japanese restaurant?

Lett: There’s a clarity to Japanese cooking that was really eye opening to me. There’s a singularity to how they treat ingredients. A little less is more. I try and bring that sensibility. This isn’t an Asian fusion restaurant, but some of that sensitivity, that clarity I’m looking for.

AP: How do you develop your dishes?

Lett: When I was at the W, I had established a network of farmers I already worked with. At Gjelina, we wanted to push that a little bit more. Instead of just getting peaches and tomatoes and things like that when they were in season, I said, “Well, I’m close to the farmers markets, I don’t have these corporate restraints around me, I don’t have to buy from any other company at any certain level, let’s buy everything there.” Everything down to the parsley we finish dishes with. We really are just going off what’s available. Building the dishes ground up that way. A lot of the time I’ll start with a pile of fennel and say, “Wouldn’t that be nice with roasted fish on it?”

AP: Is there anything you cannot get locally?

Lett: No. If I can’t get it locally, I just don’t use it. In the beginning, we had a BLT on the menu. Fall came around and we took the BLT off the menu. You’d be amazed how hard it was for people to grasp that they couldn’t have that sandwich. Well, tomatoes are out of season, and people were like, “Dude, that’s my favourite thing on the menu. Can’t you get them from somewhere else?” So again, the conversation has changed a lot over the last seven or eight years.

AP: When people think farm-to-table, they often still think something that’s more high-end.

Lett: And often it is. The movement’s been marred in a way by this. “Oh, it’s a luxury for the rich.” You go to Whole Foods and drive a Prius and got your yoga mat rolled up. I think that’s sort of the archetype the organic movement is moving against. Broadly, it’s seen as a luxury for the rich. It’s not seen as a necessity for humans, which I believe it to be. So how do you shift that conversation? How do you shift that perception? I certainly can’t do it by myself with a restaurant. But it’s part of what we’re doing.

Rye rags with sausage, mushroom and fennel

“We cut pasta sheets into elongated haphazard shapes that resemble a small pile of rags when cooked,” Travis Lett writes in his cookbook, “Gjelina.” “The larger, rye-flavoured sheets of dough hold up beautifully to the substantial ragout of mushrooms cooked with sausage and fennel.”

Start to finish: 1 hour 15 minutes

Servings: 4

For the rye rags (pasta):

1 cup light or finely ground rye flour

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 eggs, room temperature

Fine sea salt

2 tablespoons water, room temperature

Semolina flour, for dusting

For the sauce:

1 large slice rye bread

1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus 4 tablespoons (or as needed)

1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds

1 clove garlic

8 ounces fennel pork sausage or sweet Italian sausage, removed from the casings

1/2 fennel bulb, finely chopped, plus 2 tablespoons chopped fennel fronds

6 ounces shiitake mushrooms

1/4 cup tomato confit or oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes

Kosher salt

1/2 cup white wine

1 1/2 cups low-sodium, chicken stock

Pinch red pepper flakes

Grated Parmesan cheese, to serve

To make the rye rags, in a medium bowl, sift together the rye flour and bread flour. In a small bowl, gently whisk the eggs, then drizzle them into the flours. With your fingers, mix to form a rough dough. Sprinkle in some salt and continue to mix until you have a shaggy dough. Add the water, 2 teaspoons at a time, adding just until the dough comes together. The flour will absorb the water as you knead, so add as little water as you can and still gather it into a shaggy dough.

On a lightly floured work surface, knead the dough until silky and smooth, about 3 minutes. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature for 20 minutes.

Lightly flour the work surface again if it needs it. You need some friction with the work surface, so don’t use too much flour, but sprinkle a light dusting if the dough starts to stick. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough about 1/16 inch thick. It’s good to roll the dough around the rolling pin and flip it over from time to time so that you roll both sides of the dough from the centre out to the edge.

With a knife, cut the dough into irregular-shaped rectangles 3 to 5 inches long. The more random they are, the more beautiful they look in the bowl. Dust the pasta rags with semolina flour, place on a baking sheet, then cover with a kitchen towel while you make the sauce.

To prepare the sauce, heat the oven to 350 F.

Brush the bread with 1 teaspoon of olive oil, then toast in the oven until completely dried, 15 to 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a small, dry skillet over medium, toast the caraway seeds until fragrant, about 3 minutes.

Rub the toasted bread with the garlic clove, then break the bread into pieces with your hands. Transfer to a food processor along with the toasted caraway seeds. Pulse to make small bread crumbs, stopping before they turn to dust. Or smash the bread and caraway seeds with a mortar and pestle. If the crumbs seem very dry, moisten with a bit more oil and set aside.

In a large skillet over medium-high, warm 2 tablespoons of olive oil until hot but not smoking. Add the sausage, breaking it apart with a wooden spoon, and cook until well browned, about 2 minutes. Transfer to a plate, leaving as much of the rendered fat as possible in the pan. Add the fennel bulb and mushrooms, then cook until beginning to brown, 2 to 3 minutes. Add up to another 2 tablespoons of oil to the pan if it begins to look dry.

Add the tomato confit and cook until lightly browned and fragrant, about another minute. Adjust the heat so you are searing and not steaming your ingredients. Season with kosher salt. Add the wine and stock to the pan and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan, until the sauce begins to thicken, about 3 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the rye rags and cook just until tender, 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the thickness of the pasta and how long they sat before cooking. With a slotted spoon, tongs or a wire-mesh strainer, transfer the pasta to the pan with the sausage and mushrooms. Cook over high heat just until the pasta is well coated with the sauce, 2 to 3 minutes.

If the sauce is too thick, loosen it with a few spoonsful of the pasta cooking water. Toss in the fennel fronds and red pepper flakes. Transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle with the seasoned bread crumbs. Serve immediately, offering the Parmesan at the table.

Nutrition information per serving: 610 calories; 250 calories from fat (41 per cent of total calories); 28 g fat (9 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 155 mg cholesterol; 870 mg sodium; 60 g carbohydrate; 7 g fiber; 5 g sugar; 22 g protein.

(Recipe adapted from Travis Lett’s “Gjelina,” Chronicle, 2015)