Not So Fast – Slow Food at Sticks & Stones
By Catherine McGarry Miller
Britton Unkefer cooks in the slow lane, which isn’t to say he’s pokey. As head chef of Sticks and Stones in Brookfield, he serves between 120 and 200 customers expeditiously six nights a week.
Rather, Unkefer is a devotée of the Slow Food movement, the idea behind which is to stop and smell the roses, or in food talk, slow down and smell the chicken (or whatever’s on your plate). Sparked by the 1986 opening of the first McDonald’s in Rome, journalist Carlo Petrini founded the movement to save regional food cultures from homogenization by promoting food appreciation, preserving culinary traditions and using local and seasonal organic products. Chef Unkefer applies these principles at Sticks and Stones, employing locally-sourced foods, adapting his menu to seasonal fare, promoting these ideas with his staff and creating an atmosphere that engenders conviviality. “I love the artistry of cooking, but when it comes down to it, it’s food. And what counts the most is where it’s coming from and the quality when it comes in your door.”
Unkefer came to the culinary arts through his family. At thirteen, he began working at the family restaurant, Nelsen’s Hall on Washington Island, which served a country French menu, with his mother at the helm in the kitchen and his father managing the front. In college, Unkefer toyed briefly with the idea of medical school, but found his true calling closer to his roots. Trained at New England Culinary Institute in Essex, Vermont and the Domino Carlton Tivoli Hotel and Business School in Lucerne, Switzerland, he cut his teeth at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio, the Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River, Oregon and the Paper Valley Hotel in Appleton, Wisconsin.
There’s an emphasis on local ingredients. Carr Valley Cheese of La Valle provides the Cocoa Cardona, a complex hard goat cheese with unsweetened cocoa rind. The elegant aged Stravecchio parmesan from Antigo Cheese Company graces Umkefer’s signature risottos (“some of the best risotto you’re going to get anywhere, even though we’re not Italian”). Menomonie’s Sweetland Farms supplies the two-year-old undyed cheddar made from organic grass-fed Jersey cows. The Scottish Highlands beef comes from Fountain Prairie just north of Madison.
But occasionally, Unkefer’s high standards demand products that are only available from a distance, like the $6 per pound French butter he insists on using for the risotto and for finishing his sauces. The live lobsters for the bisque are flown in daily from Maine.
In Slow Food style, Sticks & Stones’ menu honors traditional dishes: Oysters Rockefeller, Seafood Cocktail, Lobster Bisque, Caesar Salad, Mixed Grill and Surf and Turf, which Unkefer defends preparing. “Most people will say ‘you can’t do hollandaise – it’s so old.’ I say, ‘Who cares?’ It’s a classic and it’s good.”
“The part of [Slow Food] I really like is sitting down and enjoying a meal with family and friends and taking time to sit and eat” explains the Chef. You’ll rarely find a box or can in Unkefer’s cupboard at home. He and his wife Sara make everything but their bread from scratch. Though Unkefer started baking bread at the age of five, a new baby at home leaves no time for kneading now. But at home, he says, “I try to get even more stuff from local farmers than I do at work.”
Though not a hunter, Unkefer revels in cooking game, which appears occasionally as a special. His other great passion is making classic terrines, European patés en croûte with veal and pork. “It’s really a fine art that has to be done right.” He tends to make the terrines himself because either the other cooks are “scared to do it, or I’m teaching them how.”
Otherwise a culinary populist, there’s nothing Unkefer insists on cooking himself. “I love teaching people everything I know, and if they don’t know it as well as I do, then to me I’m not doing as good a job as I should be. A lot of chefs will keep things to themselves and I don’t believe in that. I want everyone to know what I know.” VS
