What happens when home cooks recreate restaurant recipes?

Let's see, as Kate Morris takes on the iconic Black Dog clam chowder in her kitchen.

Ruth Reichl, Joan Nathan and Francis Lam are three iconic food writers who recently spoke to me (and a roomful of others) about the pitfalls and pratfalls of home cooks trying to turn a chef’s recipe into a success .

So many famous chefs – Alice Watters, Ottolenghi, Jacques Pepin, Bobby Flay, Anthony Bourdain, the list goes on and on – have published gorgeous cookbooks featuring their signature recipes. These books make me drool with envy. I turn the pages, fantasizing about hosting glamorous dinner parties and serving Julia Child’s Coq au Vin or Gordon Ramsey’s beef wellington; Mary Berry’s Lemon Drizzle Cake would definitely be on the dessert table.

Dreams aside, despite one successful outing with Julia Child’s Coq au Vin, my success rate with famous chef recipes has been in the  single digits. These dishes take a commitment I don’t have and skills and talents too hard for me to master. Plus, as Joan and Ruth and Francis shared, the recipes themselves can be daunting. What exactly does it mean to brunoise a vegetable, or to put tomatoes into a Cambro? Why do chefs measure in kilograms and not cups? You get the picture!

Which is why I am beginning an occasional series: “Home cooks recreating signature recipes”.

We begin with Kate Morris recreating the clam chowder recipe from the Black Dog Tavern on Martha’s Vineyard.

A cuppa chowda’ at the Black Dog Tavern

The story of the Black Dog starts with a man, a dog and a boat.  Robert Douglas was an Air Force fighter jet pilot who spent his childhood summers on Martha’s Vineyard. After retiring from the military, he went to Maine and got a job in a boat yard. A curious and experimental dude, he became obsessed with traditional boat building. He ultimately designed and built a 108 foot topsail schooner, which he sailed from Maine to the Vineyard In February 1964. This is what he built:

The Shenandoah, built by Robert Douglas, who sailed it to Martha’s Vineyard in 1964 and took up “forever” residence on the island.

In 1967, he brought his dog, a black lab he named “Black Dog”¹, on board the ship.

Winters were cold and long.  One cold day in 1969, over a bitter cup of coffee and a dry, packaged, store-bought donut, Douglas and his builder friend Allen Miller began fantasizing about how great it would be to have a place on the island where people could enjoy a good cup of chowder and friendly conversation year-round.  The dream became a sketch on a napkin which turned into a reality in 1971 when The Black Dog Tavern opened its doors on the harbor in Vineyard Haven Massachusetts.

It was an immediate success. Everyone said that the chowder was just right.

Flash forward to today. The Black Dog franchise is now an empire of restaurants and retail stores. Its owns 2 tall ships and a non-profit that runs programs for the island kids. You can see people around the world wearing clothes with a black dog logo. And the chowder is still going strong.

Here’s Kate, at the Black Dog Tavern, explaining why she decided to tackle the recipe:

And here she is making the chowder and overcoming the inevitable obstacles faced by the home cook when tackling a restaurant recipe.

I love how this video captures an experimental and inventive home cook stumbling on - and overcoming - the unexpected. The video is a little less than four minutes and worth watching to the end!

Finally, Kate and I went back to the Black Dog so Kate could “taste test” their chowder vs hers. Turns out, both are pretty good!

If you want to try this recipe at home (and I recommend that you do!), click here. It will take you immediately to the Black Dog Chowder Recipe.

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I need your feedback! Please tell me what you think about this post and the idea of stories featuring home cooks making signature recipes.

And…..if you would like to be featured re-creating a favorite recipe, let me know by leaving a comment or email me at anne@trustedtables.com:

1. Black Dog was a name of a character in Treasure Island.