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How Vedge restaurant's signature dishes were created

WHAT MAKES Vedge Vedge and not Horizons? Rich Landau explained the thinking behind three of Vedge's signature dishes: * Little leaves and herbs, rutabaga, smoked shiitake, pistachio, green onion.

WHAT MAKES Vedge Vedge and not Horizons? Rich Landau explained the thinking behind three of Vedge's signature dishes:

* Little leaves and herbs, rutabaga, smoked shiitake, pistachio, green onion.

"The entry-level dish into the Vedge repertoire, but when you get into it, this is probably one of the more intricate things on the menu because of the way we put it together.

"You won't just be eating a bunch of green. You're not going to taste chlorophyll. You're not going to be like, 'Wow, I'm grazing, look at me at the vegetable restaurant, grazing . . . wow, isn't this remarkable.'

"The rutabaga, which is just one of my favorite vegetables in the world, we slice very thin and we roast it down in the oven with a touch of sherry vinegar, olive oil, fresh thyme, salt and pepper. We julienne them, and it has the amazing texture of cheese and it's just awesome in salad."

* Garbanzo bourdetto, tomato, mint, oregano, olives, white beet skordalia.

"In 'For Your Eyes Only,' James Bond goes to Greece and he orders bourdetto. And I said, 'What the hell is that?' So I googled it and did some research. It's a casserole dish in Greece. It's very rustic, and I've really never seen it on a menu anywhere. But if James Bond can eat it, so can we.

"We're gonna do this with garbanzos cooked with tomato, white wine, peppers, onions, mint, oregano, dill. That flavor profile we've used before at Horizons and really enjoyed. . . . It's haunting, almost, the way they come together; the end effect is greater than the parts of those herbs.

"The really cool part about this dish is the skordalia, which is one of my favorite things in the world. It's essentially potatoes and sometimes bread, sometimes almonds, with olive oil and a touch of sherry vinegar, made into a paste. It's a Greek dip. I love it because it usually has 10 cloves of garlic in there. It makes you healthy in the wintertime, which is really nice.

"We're gonna make our skordalia with white beets instead of potatoes, a little bread and some olive oil, and it's just going to sing on top of that Greek-inspired stew underneath."

* Braciole: Smoked eggplant and cauliflower, salsa verde,

olive bagna cauda.

"This is one of my all-time favorite dishes I've ever done in the 17 [years] that I've been serving food to people. Number one, I love eggplant, but you've got to cook it right. What we do is to slice the eggplant really thin, paper thin, and we just give it a slight roast in the oven so it just turns translucent. It's not chewy, it's not white and gummy, it's just translucent. And we stuff it with smoked eggplant and ground-up cauliflower and wrap it up.

"This dish also has a special meaning: It's downsized from the Horizons menu into one of these medium-sized plates. At Horizons, OK, we came up with this braciole . . . I loved it, but it was busier than it needed to be.

"This was our inspiration: We got to stop when this dish was done. It's going to be one-note, simple brushstrokes, the way food should be. It's not going to be too busy.

"There won't be colorful oils or microgreens or fried leek cages or sparklers on top of it."

- Vance Lehmkuhl