A chef's childhood feast

Greg Vernick has opened restaurants from Vancouver to Qatar for superstar chef Jean Georges Vongerichten. And while cooking at that French chef's Manhattan namesake on Columbus Circle, along the route of the Thanksgiving Day parade, he routinely roasted 50 turkeys on that holiday.

But when we asked Vernick to create a menu for a home-cooked Thanksgiving, the chef took inspiration from the annual turkey dinner his mother made when he was growing up in Cherry Hill.

"It was always a great day with family and friends and simple, home-style cooking from Mom," said Vernick, 31, who moved back to the area last summer with his wife, Julie, to open Vernick Food and Drink near Rittenhouse Square.

He took those childhood memories and spun them into his own Thanksgiving dishes, creating a menu from appetizers to turkey and trimmings, using the same philosophy that has made his casually elegant restaurant one of the hottest reservations in town.

"We like our food to have little pops of flavor," said Vernick, "little hits of impact - spice or acid - not too overpowering, not too spicy, just elevating it, brightening it."

So, instead of a basic salt and sugar brine for the turkey, Vernick went with apple cider and soy sauce, which not only introduced a more complex dimension, but also resulted in a lovely caramelization during the roasting, creating a deep golden-brown bird. (And - the true test - even the white meat had great flavor, with no need to drown it in gravy.)

The chef also came up with a "hot sauce gravy" with pan drippings, hot peppers, and fish sauce to liven things up.

Candied ginger brightened the traditional cranberry sauce. And he added some zip to his mother's root vegetable hash by adding celery root to the diced sweet potatoes and butternut squash, then bound the vegetables with caramelized onions "almost like a jam," adding a layer of sweet to the savory. He finished it with a few fried eggs on top.

For the sweet potatoes, he didn't want to mess with his mother's recipe, a family favorite. So he asked her to make it and bring it to the restaurant where he and his staff had assembled the early-Thanksgiving spread.

"Oh, I don't use a recipe," said Beth Vernick, who showed up right on time, casserole in hand. "It's just sweet potatoes and egg whites and a little brown sugar with pecans sprinkled on top."

Thanksgiving was a special holiday, Beth Vernick said, and she always started preparing the night before. While she was busy cooking, the rest of the family would go all the way to Upper Darby for take-out pizza from Pica's, where she and her husband had gone when they were dating.

"I think that is when we knew Greg was going to be a chef," she said. "He reproduced that pizza at home, just nailed it at about 8 years old."

Of her own Thanksgiving dinner, she was modest: "Oh, my cooking is nothing like Greg's," she said. "I use a bag of stuffing mix and supermarket sausage."

Her son reimagined her leek and sausage stuffing, using leftover ends from his popular toasts-with-toppings at the restaurant, and adding his own house-made turkey sausage, fennel seed, raisins, and sage.

And of course his holiday menu would not be complete without a Thanksgiving version of his signature toast: pumpkin and brown butter over grilled Metropolitan sourdough. (But don't look for any of these goodies at Vernick Food and Drink on Thanksgiving; the restaurant will be closed as the clan dines at Mom's.)

Vernick came up with the toast idea after sampling such snacks all over Spain and Italy.

"I was traveling on a budget, and it's such a great way to snack your way through a city. . . . I just fell in love with it. . . . It was so simple, but so amazing. I decided I would really like to have that on my menu."

Luckily, there are plenty of diners in Philadelphia who share Vernick's love of simple cooking with flavors that pop.

"I was a little worried what would people think," he said. "In the end, it's just toast. It's just roast chicken," he said of the most popular items on his menu. "But it is better than what you can do at home.

"I know I got it right when I see the server set that roast chicken down on that table, and I see the smile . . . I just love seeing that."