“We have many customers who only know us one way or the other,” says Mary Margaret Cullen, or Mitzy, as she is known, owner of 187 Rue Principale in Emmaus. “We’re kind of like the Gemini of restaurants,” she says, laughing.
She is referring to the fact that her restaurant serves an innovative, crêpe-driven brunch menu seven days a week, starting at 8 a.m. At night, you might say that Rue takes on another identity, that of a French, seasonally driven Modernist dining spot—the white tablecloths signal dinnertime. To the unfamiliar bystander, it may seem confusing, even contradictory. Upon closer inspection of the menu, continuity is clear; it’s just a little unusual for a fine dining spot to fully embrace brunch, in a classy French kind of way. The juxtaposition comes from executive chef Dustin Selvaggio, who equally adores Dr. Pepper and passionfruit and who offers Pappy’s Cider in sphere form, as an amuse-bouche. Cullen’s children call them “high-end Gushers,” referencing the cheap, squirty candy. Selvaggio is also a chef who takes the elements of a cheesesteak into tartine form, with shaved venison, pickled onion, roasted maitake and Camembert cheese. A far cry from South Philly’s “wiz wit.”
That mindset of taking common assumptions about flavor combinations and traditional food preparations and habitually turning them upside down and inside out is what drives great chefs, but it’s a hallmark of Modernist cooking, or what some call molecular gastronomy. “Dustin gets his inspiration from everywhere. That’s just his deal,” says Cullen.
When Cullen decided to open a restaurant, her initial concept was brunch, and let’s be clear, Rue’s brunch is a refined, thoughtful affair, with buckwheat crepês for savory fillings (trout with cardamom crème fraiche, pancetta with leek fondue) and sweet ones with honey-scented goat cheese. However, Selvaggio, 33, opened her up to the idea of incorporating cutting-edge ideas into the dinner service. He had the fortune of being the first person she interviewed, which, of course, involved cooking for her. After dinner, she had her chef. “It was the best meal that anyone has ever cooked in my house,” she says.
Although Selvaggio has spent time inside Edge and the Glasbern Inn’s kitchens, working at Rue is a bit of a homecoming. He lives in Emmaus and loves the town, and he grew up in Zionsville with grandparents who gardened and ate seasonally.
“They were awesome cooks,” he says. In high school, he worked under James Beard Award nominee Michael Adams at the Farmhouse. Perhaps the most formative experience came from his externship after graduating from the Johnson and Wales culinary program, with Disney World at the Victoria and Albert restaurant at the Grand Floridian Resort. “There is no food cost; there is no budget. The sky is the limit,” he says. In chichi resort environments, the aim is to really wow the customer, with exacting standards. “It’s never just all right—it has to be perfect,” says Selvaggio.
That fastidious attention to detail and artistry comes into play with Modernist cuisine, which puts science to work in the kitchen to push the boundaries of flavor and presentation. It isn’t about bells and whistles and fancy equipment simply for the sake of it. The food has to benefit. “I don’t go for effect. If it accents the dish, we’ll do it.”
Cullen is more effusive. “He is thinking of things nobody has thought of,” she says. “He’s like a mad scientist.”
Selvaggio didn’t learn the ins and outs of this approach under a specific chef. “I was always pushed away from it by my mentors,” he says. He became well versed in these techniques the old-fashioned way—doing it himself. Besides, any chef worth his or her salt (black, pink or otherwise) spends a fair bit of money on cookbooks and reads them voraciously for education and inspiration. Selvaggio’s choices included mainstays Heston Blumenthal and Harold McGee. For a guy who loves cooking and science, it’s an apt approach; before he took the job at Rue, he was studying for his master’s in forensic entomology. Yes, he was studying the remains of bugs. “I wanted to study the effect of GMOs,” he says. (Don’t worry—there won’t be any bugs on the menu any time soon.) “For me it’s a never-ending quest to unlock the secrets of food. This is the first time I’ve gone full-blown with it. I was hesitant at first, though,” he says.
Thankfully, the hesitation was short-lived. Many restaurants, including some in the Lehigh Valley, incorporate elements of Modernism in their food prep (typically sous-vide cooking), but it’s not always evident in the presentation. At Rue, the kitchen uses a rotary evaporator “to concentrate flavors, or to make them more subtle, depending,” he says. It can also reduce an ingredient without altering or reducing its flavor. That’s what he uses for those “high-end Gushers.” “We make them through the process of reverse spherification. We force a chemical reaction between salt, obtained from seaweed, and calcium, which forms a thin gel casing around the liquid,” he says. When you put it in your mouth, it pops. At Rue, the meats and many fruits and veggies are cooked sous-vide, a method that’s best described as a slow poach—foods are placed in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag and cooked in a controlled, low-temperature environment for many hours. Oh, and a bonus for those with celiac disease—this type of pantry doesn’t rely on rouxs for starches and thickening, but instead, favors xanthan gum, tapioca starch and maltodextrin, among other, more sci-fi-sounding things.
One of the more sublime aspects of dining at Rue is the kitchen’s ability to riff, to vary a theme or an ingredient. Selvaggio will treat one ingredient several ways, to play with textures and expectations. “I have been surprised and delighted by the way a single ingredient can be completely transformed. I enjoy presenting our guests with dishes that are composed of single ingredients in many different forms,” he says. Take the beet salad, for example, with pickled and salt roasted beets, along with a goat cheese sphere. Rosemary, relegated to potatoes and poultry, is transformed into a powder of concentrated piney earthiness to complement the beets. When presented with plates like this, I never know where to start. This heady approach is like a game, a puzzle, whose pieces unlock the mind of the chef. Restaurant manager Jesse Dech shows images on a tablet of what Selvaggio has created with watermelon (Grill it! Compress it!) and radishes in warmer months. “We have fun here,” he says.
Indeed, the menu at Rue is heavy on the local, seasonal and fresh, and so there is always something new to look forward to. Regular contributors to the kitchen’s magic (including Selvaggio’s childhood Alf stuffed animal) are Primordia Mushroom Farm, Gottschell Farm, Kirchenberg Farm, Wild Fox and Stryker Farm; the latter, Selvaggio says, makes “the best bacon ever.” Other choices that cannot be local are environmentally conscious; the fish is either fair trade or sustainable, “so the Earth benefits from it as well,” and he makes choices to serve monkfish instead of sea bass. The duck comes from the last duck farm on Long Island, Crescent Farms. Even the bananas are fair trade. “We look into every single purveyor. We want to find the best,” says Cullen.
One of the more progressive aspects of Rue is that tips aren’t accepted. The practice seeks to bring balance to the front and back of the house, both in financial and practical terms. Cullen assures she is paying her workers far above the minimum cash wage for tipped employees. The move encourages a sense of team spirit, which can create a more consistently pleasant experience for customers from every aspect of service. Such gestures go a long way, too, toward an attempt to treat restaurant service with the professionalism
it deserves. “We have excellent servers here. They have to remember an unbelievable amount of information,” she says. This includes not only knowledge of the beverage program, but the farms, ingredients and the methods and techniques employed for various menu items.
You have to keep on top of things at a place like Rue, where, because it is as Cullen says “a true farm-to-table restaurant,” the menu changes daily, in small ways, to reflect what’s available. But it also receives a “drastic overhaul” every season. “I get an idea about what I want to do, and then I have to just do it or I get crazy,” says Selvaggio.
That is the mind that is bringing you brunch and dinner. Your pick. Or both. Just get to know the iterations of Rue Principale, whose name, you guessed it, is a riff on its address.
187 Rue Principale
187 Main St., Emmaus(yes, the name is its address)610.928.0418 | 187rueprincipale.com
Hours:
Brunch: Sun. & Mon. 8 a.m.-3 p.m., Tues.-Sat. 8 a.m.-4 p.m., Dinner: Tues.-Sat. starting at 5 p.m.
Reservations:
Recommended for weekends; call or use OpenTable
Parking:
Street
Payment:
Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover
Specials:
Tues.: Family dinner means meals served family style. Wed.: Half off bottles of wine. Thurs.: Three-course meal for two is $75 per person. Happy Hour takes place Tues. through Fri., 5-6 p.m., with $6 wines by the glass and $8 cocktails. Dech recommends asking for the 187 mimosa at brunch, served with orange “caviar” bouncing around the sparkling beverage.
What to Order:
It is hard to order poorly here. Many crêpes change seasonally, but the one with honey-scented goat cheese mousse, toasted hazelnuts and PA maple sugar is a winner. On the savory side, the smoked rainbow trout and the pancetta leek are popular. The Croque Madame crêpe boasts Jamon de Paris, young Comte cheese and local fried egg. The ingredients in the quiche may rotate regularly, but it’s encased in puff pastry and Selvaggio says “it’s like a pillow in your mouth.” Dinner? Where to start? The aforementioned beet salad, the lapin degustation and the coq au vin are popular.
