She opened her first restaurant when she was 25, a Northampton taqueria called Cha Cha Cha. She helped open chef Nancy Oakes’s acclaimed San Francisco restaurant Boulevard, traveled around Europe while she was waiting for a job at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse to open up, and then, instead, on a whim, decided to move East. She graduated from UC-Santa Cruz, then attended California Culinary Academy, where she fell in love with food. They are made with poblano peppers and San Marzano tomatoes from Kitchen Garden Farm in Sunderland.Ībkin’s parents returned to America, eventually settling in the Bay Area. If Coco & the Cellar Bar’s chiles rellenos may be the most legit version in the Pioneer Valley, this is the reason. Abkin would spend summers with her mother’s mother, following her around Mexico City, to the butcher shop, to buy produce, then home again to make dinner. Her father’s mother made borscht, latkes, and more for their family gatherings. Both of her grandmothers were excellent cooks.
“I grew up in a family rich with food,” she says. This month, the two release their first cookbook, “Curry & Kimchi: Flavor Secrets for Creating 70 Asian-Inspired Recipes at Home,” out Oct.
(The place is named for their daughter, Coco.) Abkin is a perennial semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef: Northeast award. That is, if you can get a seat at the upstairs/downstairs restaurant where Unmi Abkin and Roger Taylor have been serving their own decidedly non-classic New England cuisine for eight years. It is autumn, the time of year to make a pilgrimage to the Pioneer Valley, to pick apples, look at leaves, and eat killer fried chicken at Coco & the Cellar Bar. Outside on Main Street, lined with the charming old brick buildings of Western Massachusetts, a man capers barefoot on a traffic island, holding a sign that exhorts passersby to go vegan and stop using plastic. In the open kitchen, chefs make dinner for young couples, multigenerational families, and white-haired professors entertaining acolytes.
Coco and the cellar bar windows#
EASTHAMPTON - The dusk light filters through the big windows of the dining room, and Billie Holiday sings in the background.
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