“I shouldn’t eat this,” Iliana Regan says, frowning at the tiny green ramp fruits in her hand. “If it’s poisonous at this stage I could be in trouble.” The young plants are usually eaten in the spring; as ramps mature they flower, fruit, and then go to seed. She decides against tasting them, but takes some with her so she can try pickling them later.
A couple days after that conversation, Regan sends me a text message: “Yes woods = god. If I have children the first will be named Dakota wolf. The second will be timber birch. . . . I’m not making that shit up.”
The best chefs have taken what worked and moved on from there, Fine says, and what they’re doing now is generally referred to as modernist cuisine. He compares Regan’s cooking to what Phillip Foss is doing at El Ideas, Chris Nugent is doing at Goosefoot, and Curtis Duffy will presumably be doing at Grace when it opens. “They’re all kind of in the postmolecular vein,” he says.
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Elizabeth will have the rare distinction of being one of four restaurants in the country to use the reservation system developed for Next, which requires people to pay up front to reserve seats—essentially buying tickets for dinner. Nick Kokonas, the business partner of Next and Alinea chef Grant Achatz, contacted Regan in August to see if she was interested in using it. “She’s putting together something very unique,” he says. “If you have an innovative system that you’re trying to roll out to the public, you want to be associated with other innovative people and businesses.” So far only Next, Alinea, and the New York restaurant NoMad use the system.
“Believe me, I’m not,” Regan says. “I think a lot of people think it’s too ambitious, but a lot of people in the industry couldn’t comprehend that I was doing what I was doing in my house. I was serving 25 courses by myself. I was going out and buying every single thing, gardening or foraging on my days off, and preparing everything. I didn’t have prep cooks or little elves sitting around my kitchen. I was peeling every single vegetable and washing every single thing and making every single gel, every single ice cream, every single stock, every single demi, every single everything. And then after that, building up to the dinners and having them, doing the laundry, cleaning the floors on my hands and knees, and then waking up to do the same thing again the next day. If I can’t do this, I’m a fucking pussy.”
The couple wasn’t looking to invest in a restaurant, Meier says, but Regan’s food made them want to invest in her as a chef. “We loved her ideas,” he recalls, “her energy, her foraging concept, the spin she would put on food, her storytelling.”
Elizabeth would take her out to eat, order a bunch of different foods, and have her try them—even the things that Regan was convinced she would hate, like raw oysters. Later, Elizabeth taught her to shuck oysters with a screwdriver. “She was the person I looked up to,” Regan says.
