- There's no rhyme or reason for like,
if it's Italian or Southern.
For me it's more of like a state of mind.
You think of country ham on one side,
prosciutto on the other.
Or you think of corn: polenta on one side,
or grits on the other.
With Southern food and Italian food,
it's just the familiarity of it all.
For a long time in Italy, especially in the South,
everybody was very poor.
So growing up in the Southern US, it was the same thing.
Everybody was super-poor, and so what they did
was they made the most of what they had.
To me it seems obvious, right?
Because they both come from cucina dei poveri,
what they call it in Italy.
So it's like cuisine of the poor.
I don't want Popina to be something
where people expect this huge Southern thing, right?
If you ask a lot of chefs in the South,
the burden is almost like, always have biscuits and gravy.
That's not what Southern cuisine is about.
It's just like if you go to Italy,
you don't see spaghetti and meatballs;
there's no eggplant Parm everywhere.
There's just has much terroir for the food in both places.
Most of the food at Popina is Italian first,
and then we either try to make it feel Southern on purpose,
or it just naturally happens
just because that's the way I cook.
Some things, there's not a single Southern thing
about them, but it's delicious.
The johnnycake is smoked lamb neck,
Alabama barbecue sauce.
The johnnycake:
So outside of the corn that goes in the johnnycake,
there's no Italian aspect to it.
We knew that people were gonna want fried chicken
if there was anything remotely Southern
about the restaurant.
So we needed to figure out a way to make it Italian.
So that's when we just started to experiment
with Milanese -- so the hot chicken Milanese.
Hot chicken.
The thing is, I recently just got back from Nashville,
so I was all giddy about hot chicken.
It's delicious -- it's kinda cheating,
we know that but people love it.
We season the chicken breast with salt, pepper,
lemon zest, and toasted fennel.
Then it gets in panko, buttermilk,
and then the super spice mixture
that has like eight or nine different things in it.
I wanna say like the spicy level is more Hattie B's,
but the way we sauce it is more Prince's, I guess.
And to accompany it, we wanted something
that would cool it down --
and I love ranch.
I'd eat like a fat kid growing up:
I put ranch on pizza, corn dogs, salad --
whatever it is --
but we wanted something bitter, too,
to combat the spiciness, and so ranch with radicchio,
lots of herbs, and that's how the hot chicken was born.
The food at Popina is pretty much just what I wanna cook.
We have a lot of people that come in and they're like,
"It's not so Southern."
And there's plenty of Southern things on the menu,
but there's not the things
that they equate with Southern food.
Growing up in the South, you're either a turnip family,
or a collard green family,
and we grew up with collard greens.
As far as I know, you can't cook collard greens,
without the smoked ham hock.
Ham hock and collards is very comforting,
and it's ubiquitous with Southern cuisine.
I found that was another easy transition,
so it's like pork and collards, low and slow,
pasta sauce, low and slow.
And it's just worked really well for us.
Pappardelle is also very comforting noodle, right?
It's hearty.
We make ours with a little bit of semolina,
so there's a little bit more bite to itm
so it adds texture to the dish that you don't always
get from the soft pork, the collards.
I love pasta.
I like eat pasta everyday.
I make pasta most days.
There's anywhere from three to four pastas on our menu,
depending on what we're digging at the market.
We always have some sort of fresh pasta.
When making the pasta, it's like
the most peaceful time for me.
I'm up here by myself, I'm staring out the window,
it's nice and sunny, there's people walking by.
We always have Franca overwatching
while we're making the pasta, so it works.
We'll special a fresh pasta out,
depending on what I want to cook.
The crawfish carbonara, we came up with it one day.
We just started an experiment.
Where I grew up, you don't see a lot of crawfish
unless you go to like an event that's focused around crawfish,
and that is nothing we were ever gonna do growing up.
But it's obviously a huge Louisiana thing.
When we got the crawfish, and I started thinking about it,
for some reason I immediately went back to the carbonara.
It's simple, it's pancetta,
it is picked crawfish meat, tail meat.
Then we take the heads and we make a crawfish stock
with lotta heads, lots of garlic, white wine, turmeric.
Then sometimes we fold ramps in,
depending on whatever the season is.
It only made sense for us to garnish the top of the dish
with a little bit more Old Bay after it's done.
I always ate well growing up.
And I don't mean eat well like, we had fancy dinners
because we didn't -- we were very poor growing up --
but my grandma always cooked dinner.
Anybody you ever ask what their favorite version
of whatever dish is, 99 times out of 100,
it's "my grandma's this" or "my grandma's that."
It may not always be because it's the most delicious,
but it's because it makes you feel the best when you eat it, right?
If you're around somebody that, they love you,
they love feeding you, they love nourishing you,
they take care into what they give you.
But as far as the nonnas go, or the grandmas go --
I mean, one day I hope I can make biscuits and gravy
as good as my grandma,
or I can make orecchiette as good as Franca here.