“I would have 10 restaurants open right now,” says Jason Lage, ticking off ideas spanning cuisines and continents. But it’s not that easy to find a space, talent, staff and a community ready to embrace paying for quality food. While Lage hunts for locations, his restaurant group, Evolution Food Group, is throwing monthly pop-ups at his restaurants, Market Table Bistro in Lovettsville and Cocina on Market in Leesburg.
Last month featured fried chicken and fixings, and on Feb. 17, it’s all about Jewish Comfort Food.
Scanning Lage’s menus at the hyper-seasonal, modern-American Market Table Bistro, the Mexican Cocina on Market and Market Burger, it’s not obvious Lage learned how to cook from his French, Jewish grandmother in Scandinavian-populated northern Minnesota.
“There was more smaltz on [the table] than there was butter,” he says of his grandmother’s home. Elma Shwartz left France for the United States in 1915 and lived on more than 10 acres of land, filled with chickens and a garden to feed the family year-round.
By age 5, Lage helped his grandmother kill chickens on a stomp out back, fixed with two nails to hold the head. “The first time I did it, and she lobbed the head off and the chicken started running around without a head, I ran back into the house and cried. I was a little shook up upon the whole deal,” he says. His sister came to comfort him and from then on, he says, “my job was to catch the chickens.”
They used the whole animal, hence the rendered chicken fat, or schmaltz, on the table. Lage plans to serve schmaltz with crispy chicken skin and rye bread with caraway seeds, another nod to the European-Jewish influences of his youth. Lage is still tinkering with the menu, but ideas include pickled fish—Lage’s uncle would ice fish and smoke varieties of whitefish he caught in local lakes—chicken soup, latkes and brisket. The night will start with inspiration from the other side of world: Israeli and Middle Eastern food like hummus, pita, labneh and falafel.
The pop-ups are served family style with guests mingling at communal tables and include two drinks—Manischewitz sangria, anyone?—for $65.
“My grandmother was my single biggest influence in the kitchen,” says Lage, whose grandmother passed away in 1988. “You can look at what I’m doing today and trace it to how I grew up cooking, grew up eating. She’d think this was cool.” // Jewish Comfort Food pop-up at Cocina on Market: 7 W. Market St., Leesburg; $65
This post originally appeared in our weekly food newsletter. Subscribe here.
