When she was executive chef at Eat Good Group's Gilded Unicorn, Mary Weaver was partial to the duck stroganoff. But since moving from downtown Spokane to Kendall Yards to run the Mediterranean-inspired Baba, she's become a fan of the pappardelle. Both are comfort foods — creamy, hearty, savory, flavorful — and both reflect Eat Good Group's approach to comfort foods with a twist.
Consider Baba's breakfast pita, which Weaver describes as similar to a breakfast burrito. "But it's a very Middle Eastern take on it with the lamb sausage and chermoula and the tahini and the feta," she adds.
Diners might be more familiar with tahini and feta cheese than the chermoula, a zesty sauce with North African origins but similar to chimichurri or gremolata in adding herby brightness to a dish. At Baba, Weaver uses it inside and over the top of dishes, such as shakshuka, but also as a marinade.
Lamb, for example, "has a flavor that is so unique and almost aggressive if you're not used to it," says Weaver, adding that many of the recipes she's working with call for marinating it, "playing with ways to highlight lamb but kind of temper it" for diners unused to its strong flavor.
"Marinating lamb in chermoula," Weaver explains, "you have that citrus that kind of breaks it down, but then you get the richness of all the herbs and spices and everything."
Shakshuka, a hearty, red pepper and tomato-based stew, is as vibrant in appearance as it is in flavor. And it's a perfect example of how Turkish, Syrian, Greek and related cuisines can be defined — and connected — by their use of warm spices, Weaver says.
"You do have a lot of tomato-based cooking in America, but when you look at cooking with tomatoes in Mediterranean or Middle Eastern style," says Weaver, they "use a lot of nutmeg and cinnamon and things that we associate [in American cooking] with being more sweet."
That makes for dishes with an interesting depth of flavor, says Weaver, who takes inspiration for Baba's seasonally rotating menu from several cookbooks like Simple, by celebrated chef Yotam Ottolenghi, and Yasmin Khan's Ripe Figs.
"The premise of [Simple] is taking just a few ingredients, but really highlighting them to the best of their ability without overcomplicating something, which is, I think, a super interesting dynamic," Weaver says. She's also a fan of Ottolenghi's Jerusalem, which was named Best International Cookbook by the James Beard Foundation.
"It's so much more than just a cookbook," she says. "It's actually telling you about the region and how dishes were developed during the history of that area."
Seeing the way a single dish may have evolved fascinates her, Weaver says.
"Shakshuka," she explains, "has roots going back into the 1600s and then depending on the region, it can be a lot more heavily spiced, have a lot more heat or, you know, you can have a lot of different pairings, but the basic idea of having some kind of spiced tomato base with eggs cooked in it is pretty consistent."
