Fresh pasta was one of the first things that had to go. The delicate noodles deflated in the box, losing that light, dough-suspended-in-clouds texture. It took two weeks to rethink the menu as Gemma restaurant careened into takeout-only at the beginning of the pandemic. And owners Allison Yoder and husband-chef Stephen Rogers had to yank a lot of levers they were hoping to never touch.
She never imagined they’d ever touch delivery — even carryout was a stretch pre-COVID — but there they were, relying on third-party company Caviar. Prices had to drop, too. But quality must stay the same. Yoder pays dearly for takeout tins that are inset with a gold-hued lining. If you’re paying for farm-to-your-table, the boxes should be nice. But what to put in them?
“Fresh pasta? It’s like mush,” Yoder says. “We were like ... what are we gonna do?”
So they experimented. And as it turns out, hand-rolled and cut egg noodles travel better than anything they had conjured so far for delivery. They went all in, so it’s egg noodles all the way down at Gemma.
Comfort food was one safety net. The good stuff. They morphed their famous rabbit pappardelle into a potpie for convenient travel. The shattery shell of chicken Milanese, a dish they had for late-night, didn’t need any updates. It moves just fine. What else?
“Let’s do a lasagna,” Rogers says. “It’s comfort. It’s what people are craving right now.”
Brass wheels cut crinkled sheets of egg-bronzed pasta. Béchamel — that silky, porcelain-smooth white sauce — was chosen over the standard clouds of ricotta. “We don’t do the American version,” Yoder says. Those gold-hued pans are ready to heat and go ― just 25 minutes in the oven at 425 degrees, followed by that torturous waiting period that we learned so well from Garfield the lasagna-loving cat: Prepare for mouth scald if you take a forkful right out of the oven.
Chef Troy Gardner, who runs TLC Vegan Kitchen in Garland, is keenly aware of home-cooking fatigue. When the pandemic first reared its ugly head in the spring, a whole bunch of us announced that we’d be cooking like French Laundry chefs during the shutdown. Now, thanks to the interminable nature of this virus, we are wrapping cold cuts around dill pickles while standing in the cold light of the fridge and calling it “dinner service.”
Gardner wanted to launch TLC as a ghost kitchen long before the pandemic. Once it hit, he assumed he’d be decked with delivery orders.
“It turned out to be surprisingly different than I imagined,” Gardner says. “Seventy percent of business was pickup. I was running out to cars a lot.”
His business idea of serving food outside the walls of a typical restaurant was a prescient thing. Still, he misses the art of plating. Chefs are like Dr. Frankenstein these days, grimly dismembering beautiful dishes and burying them in multiple to-go boxes. Gardner yearns to literally put food on plates.
But we adapt. Deep into September now, Gardner has employed a food runner. He’s got rolling warmers with sheet trays of wrapped lasagnas because the new art of plating has been replaced by the art of getting-it-to-your-car-in-style. Pizzas and lasagnas ― all vegan ― are shining stars.
What’s a vegan lasagna? Gardner begins with sauce on the bottom of the pan. Roma tomatoes, garlic, onion, red bell pepper, and a glug of red wine join things. Vegetables get roasted down into their essence. He scatters fresh and dry herbs, and that’s it. That’s the sauce. More sauce, then a sheet of pasta, sauce again, roasted squash, spinach, house-made vegan ricotta (it’s lemon juice-spiked tofu), and Impossible-brand Italian “sausage,” which beams with fennel seeds. Even more sauce, and then he blankets with fresh mozzarella (a cashew-based moozadell). It’s a stunning, savory vegetable cake.
It’s also been a leading dish for Gardner. It started out a special. Then, the lasagna outsold everything he had in its first week of existence. He’s in the works of hunting a few more TLC locations as the American public settles into lives of pickup and delivery.
“I don’t foresee opening up anything with a dining room for a while," he says.
And 66 years after a newspaper ad announced Civello’s Raviolismo’s grand opening, the tiny, family-run, East Dallas ravioli factory is thinking about adding sandwiches. While trendy joints blaze through 'grammable food, there are few things more soul-satisfying than an old-fashioned mom-and-pop joint “updating their menu” with such newfangled classics as “hot sandwich.” A meatball sub sandwich is on the way. Same with cold cuts ― because they’ve already got a lovely, simple lasagna.
It’s full of crumbled sauce and sticky cheese and good ricotta. It’s the anti-trend lasagna. It’s a Little Italy-inspired feast (small, medium or large lasagnas are their bread and butter). Civello’s drops a personal lasagna in a foil-lined sack with a slip of paper for cooking instructions. The undulating sheets of pasta get crunchy-edged in the oven. If you’re lucky, they’ll be cutting panels of fresh ravioli and forming them into pockets of ground beef when you walk into the shop.
But who knows what will come next? For the last few months, Yoder of Gemma has reached out to fellow chefs to maintain sanity during the crisis. They check in with each other. They see what’s working. Is it pizza? Does everyone have drive-throughs now? What if we did Sunday-only cheeseburgers?
“We don’t know what’s going to happen the next day,” she says. “It’s a new restaurant.”
Gemma is located at 2323 N. Henderson Ave., Suite #10. gemmadallas.com. TLC Vegan Kitchen is located at 520 Shepherd Drive #10, Garland (pickup only). tlcvegankitchen.com. Civello’s is located at 1318 N. Peak Street. civellos.com.