If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live with a Michelin-starred chef, you might try ordering from the delivery pop-up Ribs n Reds, available most weekends in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. During the first few months of the pandemic, the chef Bryce Shuman, whose midtown restaurant, Betony, closed in 2016, found himself cooking at home, for his wife, Jennifer—the special-events director at the NoMad Hotel, who was on furlough—and their six-year-old daughter, Emilia, a lot more than usual. Before March, he’d been working as a consultant and a private chef. Family dinners were something of a rarity, and suddenly having time for them felt like a silver lining.
But, Jennifer told me recently, “we did miss being in restaurants, and, doing what we do, we wondered, How could we still serve our community during lockdown? What’s something that would travel well and something that we ourselves enjoyed that we could share with other people?” Emilia was especially fond of her father’s spareribs. Those checked all the boxes. So Bryce, who grew up in North Carolina, built a heat-and-serve menu around them: half and full racks, delivered with a choice of sauce—smoked-honey barbecue, hot pepper, or sweet molasses—to glaze them in before warming them in the oven.
In the summer, when the Shumans launched what was at first called Ribs n Rosé, they layered juicy greenmarket tomatoes and peaches in a salad with fragrant basil; as temperatures dropped, it was replaced by a composition of tart pickled beets, watercress, and turmeric yogurt mixed with tahini. Half of an eggplant, crosshatched before being charred until lusciously pliant, was benched in favor of a frothy butternut-squash soup (made with a variety grown on Jennifer’s uncle’s farm, in Maryland), served with crème fraîche and brioche croutons and packaged, sweetly, in a Mason jar. And cans of Vinny sparkling rosé were switched out for bottles of Terrassen Cabernet Franc, both made with grapes grown in the Finger Lakes by the NoMad’s wine director, Thomas Pastuszak. The Shumans offered a special menu for Thanksgiving, and there’s another for New Year’s Eve, including beef tenderloin, brown-butter carrots, and maple-roasted Brussels sprouts (plus optional caviar).
A wonderfully coarse, crunchy coleslaw, featuring tightly ruffled wedges of cabbage, sliced green apple, carrot, and parsley in a honey-mustard dressing, has transcended seasonal shifts. So have the jarred dilly beans; the light, crumbly corn bread with honey butter; the bubbly baked mac and cheese, dense with Cheddar and paccheri noodles; and the excellent fried chicken, which comes with green-pepper ranch and is much better than it has to be, given the obvious emphasis on “the other white meat.”
Speaking of which: the ribs. Each rack—St. Louis cut, meaning that it comes from the belly side of the pig and gets trimmed into a neat rectangle—is slow-cooked and then finished under a salamander, a high-powered stovetop broiler found in commercial kitchens, resulting in fatty, crisp-edged meat that shreds easily off the bone, plus connective cartilage so soft and rich that you can eat it, too. (For those who avoid animal products, there’s also a whole roasted, molasses-glazed Koginut squash, its caramelized surface coated in toasted nuts and seeds.)
“It’s not exactly like what I do at home,” Bryce admitted the other day. “It’s kind of a step up.” Still, as exquisitely rendered as the dishes are, they all retain a humble, familiar, unpretentious quality. Before the pandemic, he had been looking toward opening another restaurant, something in the vein of Betony, which was a place I loved in spite of itself: the atmosphere was almost comically stuffy, the menu rife with luxury clichés, but the food was undeniably fantastic. I hope that Ribs n Reds—a portion of whose proceeds are donated to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund—lives on indefinitely, and that whatever Bryce does next leans even further into its spirit. (Dishes $7-$45.) ♦
