“Everyone in Buenos Aires sees a psychiatrist,” Mr. Kalika said, “so of course I told my psychiatrist about this dream.”
In it, a man shouted that Mr. Kalika’s varenikes were terrible, inedible garbage.
“The idea is also to recreate how Jewish people have used wood for cooking,” Mr. Kalika said.
“Jewish cuisine is global,” Mr. Kalika said as he tended to a rack of short ribs on a recent trip to New York.
A Chef’s Argentine-Jewish Cuisine -
When the Argentine chef Tomás Kalika opened his restaurant Mishiguene in 2014, he had a recurring dream.
Mr. Kalika called it immigrant cuisine, and he knew what a few of his diners were thinking —
that his version of gefilte fish poached sous-vide, and his darling varenikes, were a little too cheffy.
Mr. Kalika worked for a while as a dishwasher on a kibbutz
and quickly took to kitchen life, eventually cooking for the Israeli chef Eyal Shani before returning home, charged with new ideas.
So Mr. Kalika added a disclaimer (“Bubbie’s are better,” it began) and carried on serving his tender thin-skinned dumplings, filled with potato and topped with gribenes, chicken skin and onion
that have been slowly crisped in chicken fat and freckled with black pepper.
