Hampsten Fox changes the menu at her restaurant seasonally, and the current dinner lineup is an exhilarating culinary romp inspired by a lifetime of experiences, memories and travel. The decidedly not-succinct list includes 22 dishes, and many include components with which diners may be unfamiliar. "I do like to seek out unusual ingredients, because I'm constantly learning, too, and I like to introduce guests to those items," she says.
So how does something like Sicilian lobster broth with busiate — an eggless, corkscrew-shaped pasta — or spice-rubbed chicken served with taboon, a Palestinian flatbread, make its way from the chef's mind to the menu to the plate?
"One of the things I usually do is I make a list of ingredients, but I also do a mood board with words," Hampsten Fox says. For summer, those words, which often come out in poetic phrases, include terms like "bold," "sexy" and "steamy." Water is also a major summer inspiration, notes the chef, who grew up near the Jersey shore, now owns a house on the Baja peninsula, and has done a lot of traveling to coastal cities.
In creating what she calls her "dream list" of ingredients for the season, she leans into her ever-changing culinary passions. This year, she says, she's found herself taking "a deeper dive into the Aegean, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern" cuisines. She enjoys creative writing as well as cooking, and is currently working on a short story called "The Summer of My Dill Content," she notes, adding, "I just fell in love with dill."
From the final, lengthy list, "about 75 percent of the ingredients get put into the menu in one shape or another," Hampsten Fox says. Either because of sourcing or other logistics, or simply changes as dishes are being developed, ingredient options like Jimmy Nardello peppers, sweet crab, sea beans, green banana and popcorn shoots didn't make the cut this time. But swordfish, sand pears, tamarind, vanilla beans and baby back ribs did.
"What I have been finding is, lately, I have to leave. I have to leave the restaurant; I have to leave my own house. To make this menu, I left the country," Hampsten Fox says of the process of turning the ingredient list into actual dishes. At her home in Mexico, she set to work, a task she likens to composing songs. "You have to hear the notes before you can hear the music," she explains. Then when you actually make the dish, "you can see what's out of tune, and then you can put the album together."
But the work doesn't end there. Once Hampsten Fox has "made the album, I have to come back and teach the violinist and the cellist," she says, gesturing toward her kitchen staff. "I've got to get them to hear the music. It's a process. It's actually a very emotionally stressful time to flip the menu for the kitchen."
The final step, she adds, is putting together "a bible called 'Know Your Ingredients'" for the staff, with not only information about things like allergens and basic descriptions, but also context for the inspiration behind using certain items, including any personal connections.
Taboon, a Turkish flatbread, is served with the chicken dish on The Bindery's summer menu.
Molly Martin
This season, one of those things is spices, which Hampsten Fox sources from Burlap and Barrel. "Baharat, sweet and smoked paprika, urfa chile, silk chile — I'm just crazy about that stuff," she says. While lemon and anchovy were the initial ingredient ideas for the current chicken dish, for example, the chef opted to use black garlic and sumac, pairing it with the urfa, aleppo and sesame seed-sprinkled taboon, which is traditionally cooked in a clay oven but here is charred on the grill.
Tomatoes are prevalent throughout as well — not just in raw form, but in various sauces, like the plum tomatoes in the lobster broth for the busiate; preserved tomatoes in the eggplant puttanesca pappardelle; and the deep, smoky, tomato-based sauce for the cod, which also has guajillo chiles.
Seafood, too, plays a starring role. "I feel like we ate so much seafood growing up, we had barnacles coming out of us," Hampsten Fox jokes. Her personal "pet favorite" right now is the Little Neck clam soup with green garlic and corn, which was inspired by one of the dishes her mom loved to make, clams casino. "It just makes me feel like home. I have a lot of nostalgia around clams," she says.
Another highlight of dining at this restaurant is the chance to experience less common varietals of familiar produce, like Green Zebra tomatoes that come in a salad with plums; extra-sweet Sugarkiss melons, which are served as a chilled soup with prosciutto butter toast; and the graffiti eggplant in the cod dish. "Why would you just put 'melon,' 'eggplant' or whatever on the menu?" she asks. "Because they do have names, and I do seek them out."
While the menu is lengthy, there's one clear place to start: the borek with ezme, which is a "Turkish condiment, but it's also like a salad," Hampsten Fox notes. "'Ezme' itself means very small, almost crushed." For her version, the chef combines tomato (making yet another appearance) with strawberry, red pepper and red onion, plus some cooling fresh mint, which is served with a cheese-stuffed pastry covered in crunchy seeds. As the description notes, "Yes...you want it for the table."
One must-order replaced a longtime staple, the smoked rabbit pecan pie. "Obviously, rabbit is one of my all-time favorite ingredients," says Hampsten Fox, who fell in love with it in Italy and later learned that her father's family had raised rabbits and pigeons in order to have enough food to eat after emigrating from Poland to New Jersey.
The new dish, rabbit cannelloni with poblano and smoked cheddar melted on top, was inspired in part by cannelloni that the chef ate in Tuscany, as well as a rabbit roulade she used to make. The result is a rich, baked pasta dish that maintains just enough summery lightness, thanks to the addition of dressed greens from Altius Farms.
Even with the new seasonal menu in place, Hampsten Fox continues to develop other dishes for a packed lineup of upcoming events that include the James Beard Foundation's Taste America: Denver dinner, which will take place at The Bindery on August 10, and We Don't Waste's Fill a Plate for Hunger fundraiser on September 7 at ReelWorks. "Summer is our concert tour," she says.
For all of the constant innovation, though, she's never worried about running out of new ideas. "My mind is constantly going," she says. "I am curious, and I never stop wanting to learn."
And so the hits just keep on coming.
The Bindery is located at 1817 Central Street and is open from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. For more information, visit thebinderydenver.com.
