Philly chef opens a cooking-supply shop that stocks everything but the kitchen sink
‘Not yet,’ he says.
Cary Neff says he loves his private-chef job, his line of work since he sold his last restaurant 11 years ago. He also has a small kitchen that he caters out of, “but if I’m not doing any parties, I’m bored out of my mind.”
“I was really missing chefs and cooks and the whole restaurant world,” he said, quickly adding: “But I didn’t want to get back into the [unprintable adjective] restaurant business.”
Meanwhile, Neff, 60, is a lifetime collector and restorer of cooking equipment — not only the stuff the pros use but the brands that home cooks like. “I just love being around all this stuff. It gets me going.”
So in a free-standing brick building off the corner of 13th and McKean Streets in South Philadelphia, two blocks from his home, Neff recently opened his own cooking-supply shop of new and used merchandise.
It’s as if Fante’s, Kitchen Kapers, and the now-shuttered Previn somehow created a baby with eBay.
C.M. Neff: Cook Sup. Co. — even the name sounds vintage — is 500 square feet. It’s filled almost floor to ceiling with blenders, pots, pans, coffeemakers, bar supplies, pantry items, small wares — some new in boxes, others brought back to life. Sure, it’s a business, but it’s also a creative exercise for Neff, who enjoys kibitzing about the art of cooking while sharpening customers’ knives — a specialty — for $8 each.
“I find a lot of really cool lines that are good for restaurants and home cooks, a lot of French stuff,” he said, bounding around the shop’s narrow aisles the other day.
He stopped at a shelf of cast-iron pots and skillets, a longtime obsession. He speaks fluent Le Creuset.
“These are all ’30s and ’40s cast-iron that I restore and season,” he said. “And these are all a fortune.” He hefted a three-notch skillet with both hands. “This was on eBay the other day for $400.”
How much? “I haven’t even priced it yet.” You get the feeling that he wants to strike up a conversation first with a prospective buyer before setting the price.
Neff gestured to a Lodge pan, hanging from a hook, still new with its sticker. “Of course there are the new ones that you don’t have to spend a lot on,” he said.
Part of the buying experience is his Q&A. “If you don’t want to spend $300 on a Le Creuset, I can give you a cast-enamel, restaurant-quality, same kind of cooking experience, for about $80,” he said.
Much of the merchandise is new, and he sells professional-quality merchandise alongside less-expensive but quality items. You can pay $19 or $90 for a Laguiole corkscrew, for example, or a more ordinary corkscrew priced from $7 to $14.
Used kitchen appliances are a passion, and he said everything works.
Glowing red on a random shelf is a Jiffy Dog “hot dog sandwich” machine from the 1940s. You encase the hot dog in a box and place the box into the machine, where it’s attached to electrodes. It zaps the frank with electricity to cook it — a forerunner to the microwave oven.
Neff said he won it 15 years ago in an eBay bidding war against at least 20 others and bought it for at least $400. “Best offer,” he said.
Want to make your own pizza in a pinch? He has Don Pepino sauce in a can and Hayden Mills flour, plus Marc Vetri’s Mastering Pizza. The cookbooks! The library includes used editions of Nobu: The Cookbook, Salma Hage’s The Lebanese Kitchen, and Peter Callahan’s Party Food, among others. Up front, Joey Baldino from the nearby Palizzi Social Club dropped off copies of Dinner at the Club the other day.
Need a gift? He commissioned Kansas City Pennant Co. to hand-make felt pennants reading, “Yes, chef,” a nod to the TV series The Bear.
C.M. Neff: Cook Sup. Co. seems to have everything but the kitchen sink. “Not yet,” he said — though he found a farmhouse sink online and is considering buying it.
Neff came up in 1995 with Cary, a bistro on 15th Street near Walnut that served an in-vogue menu of what one critic affectionately called Pacific Rim-New World-New Wave cuisine, heavy on the fish. From there, he bought Sansom Street Oyster House (now Oyster House, back in the Mink family) and later had a Queen Village restaurant called Coquette, which closed in 2011.
Befitting Neff’s love of all things vintage, he had the shop’s product line — “new & used cook books, chef tools, knife sharpening, and cook’s collaborative” — stenciled onto the plateglass shop window in gold.
Also, “hours: by chance.”
Neff juggles the store with his private-chef’s duties, so for now it’s open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday to Sunday, and from 5:30 to 9 p.m. Monday to Thursday. He’s also reachable by cellphone/text, 215-990-5531.