Interview with Renaissance Man Matt Hranek

EVERYONE EATS | MAR 9, 2021

Matt Hranek

FOUNDER & EDITOR OF WM BROWN MAGAZINE

Matt Hranek is a full time traveler, explorer, eater, and drinker. He is also a part-time photographer, filmmaker, blogger, occasional TV host and founder/editor of WM Brown Magazine. Matthew has 20 years' experience navigating airports, train stations, hotels, restaurants, and bars worldwide. Mostly on the road and with his ear to the ground, he is inspired by the old school as well as the new. He is constantly on the forage. Find Matt on Instagram at @wmbrownproject.

INTERVIEW BY ROSIE ELLIS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOLLY CRANNA

MATT'S UPSTATE NEW YORK OASIS

Matt and his wife Yolanda have captured an upstate New York magic that is hard to come by elsewhere. They've curated the perfect getaway outside the city where they make magnificent lunches, like clams and chorizo with white wine.

BREAKFAST

In the most recent phase of my life, I don’t eat breakfast anymore. You get to a certain age, where unfortunately your metabolism just slows down. I like to drink, and I like snacking while drinking so I’ve gotten into this intermittent fasting thing that seems to be working for me. When I do eat breakfast, it’s always very protein heavy. I grew up with an American diner in my life (my aunt owns a diner) so a fried egg in the morning with some kind of breakfast meat is something I love. I absolutely adore any form of a breakfast sandwich and I would include the burrito in that, but I have to pick a lane on how often I do that now. I drink coffee all day long. I love drip coffee and have a very handsome Dutch Moccamaster that I use everyday.

LUNCH

I don’t put a lot of ritual in lunch unless I am traveling. I will make a distinct effort when we’re in Italy or France to make a real meal of it. When I’m in the city I eat lunch on the fly, but when I’m upstate at the house, we’ll wake up in the morning, make a coffee and then think about lunch. I love hot dogs ... grilled hot dogs with a kind of curry onion relish that I remember eating when I used to go to school in Austria. There’s a very good German deli upstate that makes the most amazing sausages and frankfurters. Lunch tends to be very seasonal; it encompasses everything from soups, sandwiches, big salads, grilled clams to the hot dog world. Upstate, I definitely take advantage of the ingredients that are around us. I also love the simplicity of a great Spanish tin of sardines with good butter and day old bread. Those kinds of things I really respond to. I keep all kinds of onions in the pantry – there’s nothing better than a tin of sardines with chopped scallions or a red onion and some good vinegar. If tomatoes are in season, I’ll chuck some of those in there too, but the real planning, unless we have guests, is dinner.

DINNER

When I’m making dinner, it varies depending on my location. The quick-fire dinner that I absolutely love, and that would definitely be my last meal, is grilled sausage with some kind of sautéed bitter green. I think it is the most heavenly combination ever, and that I will eat across all platforms, houses, destinations. It’s also so easy and has such big bang for your buck. I have Weber grills all over the world; anytime I’ve ever rented a house that didn’t have one, I just went to the thrift store and bought one. I’ll grill all year around, we’ll put seafood on the grill, clams on the grill, and then I’ll ease into braises and things like that. I am definitely a very protein heavy dinner-lover, I just feel like I’m the better version of myself when I’m eating those kinds of foods.

DESSERT

I say that I don’t have a sweet tooth, but I certainly do. The desserts I gravitate towards are mostly ones that are kind of sloppy in texture. In Paris we had the most divine rice pudding I’ve ever had in my life, it was thick, rich, custardy ... and a chocolate mousse that was dense but not too sweet. I also like a pavlova, crunchy meringue with fruit, or just ice cream. My daughter makes the sickest carrot cake and the most amazing chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies. My biggest argument with her is ‘will you please put raisins in the cookies?’ and she’s like ‘absolutely not’. It’s so obnoxious; she’s a very stubborn Taurus. But when I regained taste [post Covid], I made her make me oatmeal cookies with raisins.

SPEED ROUND

Dream dinner guest?
James Beard.

Go-to comfort food?
Classic Italian sausages are my go-to for sure.

Favorite celebrity chef?

I am in deep man-crush love with Jacques Pépin. I love how unpretentious and modest he is; although he’s well into his 80s now, he’s still so sharp.

Favorite neighborhood restaurant?
Prime Meats and Frankie’s were my [New York City] go-tos. I loved the environment, I loved the food, I loved how I felt there, I loved how I knew the two Franks who owned it. It was like my Cheers. I also love places like Raoul’s, Dante’s, Il Buco Alimentari, Altro Paradiso. I just want to eat like an elevated peasant.

Last thing you ordered for delivery?
Sushi. As a family, we’ll order the stuff that we know we can’t do ourselves, or do well. So that’s either old school Chinese (give me a kung pao chicken and an ice-cold Qingdao) and probably some Indian. I usually lean into the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese worlds that require the kind of skill set I don’t have.

Caffeine of choice?
I always start my morning with drip coffee, but there’s a steady flow of espresso in my life.

Secret food hack?
I have a hard time poaching eggs, so I will drop the egg in a pan, add a shot-glass of water and cover it for 10-15 seconds just so the albumen is set up, and that’s my make-shift poached egg. It doesn’t have as sexy of a shape, it still looks like a fried egg, but you have control over the density of the albumen and the yolk. I do that all in a non-stick pan and it’s kind of flawless.

Best place to shop for kitchenwares?
My absolute favorite place, which I’ve been going to for 30 years, is E. Dehilliren in Paris. It’s where Julia Child and Chuck Williams were buying their stuff – things like crazy needles for poultry and the perfect spatula. It’s trapped in time with these guys who wear little green work-coats, and everything is hand-written and all-wrapped up in brown paper. Ever since going to Paris, first as an assistant, and now more for travel, I always make an effort to buy one thing.

Whose routine would you love to see on Everyone Eats?
I’m always a fan of over-the-top eaters, so someone like Bourdain or Dom DeLuise. Those characters are few and far between now. I probably would have enjoyed eating and knocking a few back with Hemingway, we actually share the same birthday.

Favorite restaurant in the world?
Chez Georges in Paris. Some would complain it’s too touristy or too American, but it’s always been my fantasy of what a little French bistro is: the way it looks, the way the menu is, the way the food is served. They start you out with radishes and butter, you get a carafe of inexpensive Burgundy, a steak frites, and you feel like you’ve arrived in Paris with that. It always reminds me of why I fell in love with going to restaurants.

Go-to cookbook?
I have a massive collection of cookbooks, they’re the only kind of book I truly love to read. There’s a book by Jaques Pépin called More Fast Food My Way that was originally a PBS series. I reference that book a lot for quick-fire stuff, I love his technique and simplicity. I also reference the Cook’s Illustrated Best Recipes book, because those guys did all the science behind it.

Best city for food tourism?
In terms of variety, I think New York is great although it does require a lot of homework and attention. It’s an epicenter of so much ethnicity and creativity. San Francisco is another favorite American city to eat in - I love Zuni’s there and the tacos in the Mission.

Five items always in your kitchen:
Onions, garlic, good oil (grapeseed, olive oil or otherwise), tons of tinned fish. There’s an amazing market in Fall River, MA called Portugalia, that is the equivalent of EATALY but for Portugese food. They sell online now and so I use them as my single source for anchovies, sardines, tuna. There also has to be some bottle of booze in the mix.

Go-to market or grocery store?
I shop like a European in the sense that I’ll go to four different places and get four different things, but I love Peck’s Market in Upstate NY. It’s a little mom-and-pop chain, and there’s something about it in the way it has listened to all these people over the years, from the locals to the transient and worked to build an inventory of amazing stuff: both local and hard-to-find products, some ethnic foods, great fish, cheese and yogurt and the coldest beer.

Favorite food family tradition?
The Christmas Eve meal that I grew up with, growing up Southern Italian, was one of the most epic meals I’ve ever had in my life. I didn’t care about Christmas as much as this feast of fish: stewed salted cod, flat fried smelt, slow sauteed escarole with garlic, then the finale was this red sauce that was stewed with stuffed calamari heads and tentacles. You’d get this amazing, romano cheesy stuffed calamari head, which you would have over linguine. I waited all year for that. Fighting over the last of the calamari was the real tradition.

Cocktail of choice?
The Negroni is the world’s most perfect drink: it’s perfectly proportioned, you can start with it, you can end with it. I’ve never been dealt a hangover with a Negroni, that is an absolute fact. I also love gin martinis. I like drinks with two to three ingredients, that really celebrate those ingredients and don’t require a lot of fanfare.

Most overrated food trend?

Micro-greens and foam. If I never see either again, I’ll be so happy.

What's the best dish you make?
Growing up, I definitely leaned into my Italian heritage and my meatballs were so good (because of my mom). Then my cooking got slightly more complex, and I discovered the joy of braises. Now the thing I love to cook the most (and that I think I’m the best at) is something with a piece of meat in it.

Best snack between meals?
I read a statistic that, on average, Americans eat 17 pounds of potato chips every year. I’m a sucker for potato chips, popcorn, pretzels, salty almonds. If we’re upstate, I’ll make little focaccias. And grilled clam bread is one of my favorite things in the world to have with a martini.

Cooking playlist?
When I’m upstate, I love listening to “Let It Bleed” by The Rolling Stones ... but that doesn’t mean I won’t listen to The Smith’s, Elvis Costello and Drake. Thank god for Spotify.

Where do you feel most like The Regular?
I always had this fantasy about being a ‘Regular’ somewhere. I always envied the guy who would walk into my aunt’s diner, or walk into some sandwich shop on 5th Avenue, and the guys over the counter would say, ‘Oh, Tommy, the usual?’ and a chicken salad sandwich would magically appear. So I had a fantasy of that, but I never really eat the same thing twice. I could never eat a chicken salad sandwich everyday, so that was this thing that always kept me out of ‘The Usual’.

I get disappointed if you go to the same place over and over and the food changes or dips. I used to love the hanger steak on The Odeon menu, I felt like I was the coolest person in New York, that I’d just walked into a novel, and then they just stopped serving it… I find myself dialled in to places that I really enjoy socially in terms of drink as well. I love Dante’s for that. They’ve really eased the pain of the pandemic with their Negronis to-go. There’s something about their generosity and solidarity, the sense of ‘we’re all in this together’, that when I was in the city, I was probably there the most regularly.

THIRD SCOOP

You've written a book on the negroni that’s coming out this summer. Can you share a little bit about why this classic cocktail is so special and what readers should expect from a book on the topic?

When you’ve figured out your adult palate, it’s one of those drinks that appeals to it so perfectly. It’s bitter, there’s a touch of sweet, there’s a bite of gin, it’s proportioned 1:1:1 – how do you screw that up? The color makes me happy, the garnish of orange is just this brightness that’s so nice. It doesn’t put you on your tuchus straight away, but it definitely gets you out of the gate, and I think it reminds me of what I love about Italy, it pairs well with food.

What inspired me to write the book was that, whilst I am not a professional bartender, I’m a professional enthusiast, and I feel like I’ve been influenced by all these great bartenders and Negronis I’ve had around the world, so why not compile the inspiration of those things?

The way I was seeing cocktail books was that there were always like 60 recipes for a Negroni... I just don’t need a smoked one under a hat, and also what are these books for, except the at-home bartender? I wanted to create a book to inspire but not intimidate. Even though I probably have more skills than not, I still don’t like complicated recipes and I felt that it was my responsibility to deliver this straight-shooter approach to the drink. It’s really been a love affair for me, they come from a really personal place – the ones I’ve most enjoyed, and the people that I’ve trusted to make variations. I’m very skeptical of the variations, but if my buddy Morgan Weber, who is the consilier of Mezcal in Texas, is going to make me a Mezcal Negroni, I’m gonna fucking try it.

What are some brands – food, fashion or otherwise – that you’re excited about these days?

I’m a big Drake’s fan in terms of men’s style, and in his classic thoughtful approach to a modern wardrobe. In the car world, I will always be in love with Land Rovers. In terms of food trends, I think this particular moment that we’re in has had people focus on the things that really nurture them emotionally and make them feel good and comfortable and safe. I like when food does that – I like eating like an elevated peasant. I don’t think we need so much more display, than we need just thoughtfulness.

Similar to The Regular, WM Brown Magazine emphasizes a certain lifestyle of leisure, cocktails, beautiful things, extravagant meals ... an appreciation for the old world. How do you preserve that in the modern world?

We have a responsibility to preserve it by talking about it in order to keep it relevant and in-style. The old school should always be integrated into the new school – ultimately it’s the past that influences the future. I think about that with food ... you know the grilled sausage worked so well for so long for a reason, same with the nuance of the barber shop and the straight-razor shave. I’m not anti-modern by any means, but I like the digital to be paired with the analogue and I think a lot of that is in old-world craft and art. The smartest people are often the ones taking advantage of both of those historical perspectives.