Two for the stoves

CALL it the battle of the soft-shell crab. Quinn Hatfield, chef and co-owner of Hatfield’s, didn’t want them on his menu -- they’re best eaten simply, he thought, and he knew that they’d be so popular that he’d be cooking crabs all evening instead of artfully plating his signature dishes. But the L.A. restaurant’s pastry chef disagreed. And last weekend, Hatfield pan-fried crabs until they sold out.

Hatfield’s pastry chef admittedly has more clout than most. She’s the restaurant’s co-owner -- and the chef’s wife. “It’s unbelievable how much they sell,” said Karen Hatfield. So it was a smart decision from a business standpoint, but also from an aesthetic one: Arm slightly twisted, Quinn created a dish that was simple yet elevated. The crabs, lightly seared and matched with a nuanced succotash, were fantastic.

This kitchen dynamic isn’t just one restaurant’s brief epiphany; it’s becoming an increasingly common business model. Husband-and-wife teams, almost all chef-pastry chef combos, are helming an impressive number of L.A.’s best new restaurants -- it’s a trend that’s reached such critical mass, that it’s actually changing the L.A. restaurant scene. In addition to Hatfield’s, there’s Fraiche in Culver City and Marche Modern in Costa Mesa -- all open less than a year and all owned and run by married duos. Bastide, that temple of culinary aspiration on Melrose Place, will have a married pair as executive chef and pastry chef when it reopens next month. And then there is the first wave, restaurants that opened in the last few years with chef couples heading the kitchen, including the acclaimed Literati II in West L.A. and Beacon in Culver City.

None of these restaurants follows the old European model of the well-toqued man running the kitchen and his wife, aproned and smiling, out front. This is a new paradigm: a small, serious restaurant run (and usually owned) by a team of highly trained chefs. These are small, focused restaurants that work to articulate the technical skill and aesthetic choices of two people with a clearly defined -- and very united -- front. The menus are vastly different, from Beacon’s Japanese fusion to Fraiche’s gutsy Italian to Marche Modern’s sophisticated take on French country fare. But there’s a similarity in the seamlessness of the menus, in the intimacy of the restaurants, and in the purposefulness of, as the Hatfields repeatedly called it, “the big picture.”

“We wanted to be the only two people in charge,” Quinn Hatfield said of the decision to leave Cortez in San Francisco, where they were co-chefs, and open their own place in Karen’s hometown. They wanted control, freedom -- and symmetry. “We’ll eat in places and the dessert menu and savory menu will be too different,” said Karen said. “We have really similar ideas.”

The Hatfields were quick to point out that it isn’t easy, with the long hours and the stress of running a business. “But it was never a choice,” said Karen. Quinn agreed: “I’d never have this kind of trust in anyone else.”

The rise of the neighborhood restaurant -- small, serious, chef-owned -- has increasingly made opening a little restaurant with your domestic partner not only feasible, but actually practical.

Jason and Miho Travi, chef-co-owners of Fraiche, recently sat down between lunch and dinner service at their outdoor patio, where passers-by kept interrupting to ask if they could get a table. “It’s kind of amazing that chefs can be married to normal people,” said Jason, looking exhausted, his chef’s whites spattered in sauce.

Like the Hatfields, they divide the kitchen: Jason’s the chef, Miho’s the pastry chef. “We have a good balance,” Miho said. “I think that’s the key, just to give each other space, to know when to back off, and that, no matter what, we both have each other’s back.”

It’s striking that so many of these restaurants divide the kitchen along what are essentially gender lines. But though pastry has always attracted more women than men, it’s no longer a secondary province in the kitchen. In the last decade, pastry has come to the forefront, with flamboyant desserts and inventive pre-desserts on the menus of such restaurants as Heston Blumenthal’s the Fat Duck -- and even entire dessert restaurants, like New York’s Room 4 Dessert.

That kind of cachet helps, as does the business acumen of many of these pastry chefs -- and the fact that though the husband is often billed as executive chef, the wife is making many of the decisions. “We’ll fight it out over the little things,” Karen Hatfield said. And the big ones? “He doesn’t fight those battles.”

A number of these new couple-run restaurants have another thing in common: Wolfgang Puck. Both the Travis and the Hatfields met not at culinary schools nor through mutual friends -- but while working alongside each other in Spago. So did the couple behind Ame in San Francisco and the famous duo behind Campanile.

Sherry Yard, longtime Spago pastry chef, worked with both Miho Travi and Karen Hatfield (whose marriage she jokingly takes credit for) in the pastry kitchen. And what about her boss’s reported soft spot for workplace romances? “Oh my God,” Yard said. “He’s the biggest instigator ever.”

Puck’s e-mailed response was as measured as his recipes. “After spending so much time at work,” he wrote, “it’s easy to have many common interests and fall in love and marry.” And if your boyfriend works 3,000 miles away, it helps to have a boss who calls him for you.

That’s what happened with Lissa Doumani and Hiro Sone, co-chef-owners of Ame. The pair met at the original Spago in Hollywood in 1983, where Doumani was working in pastry and Sone was training for Spago Tokyo with Puck. After Sone returned to Tokyo, Puck would call him up in Japan -- and then hand the phone to Doumani in Spago’s L.A. kitchen.

The pair’s transcontinental relationship resulted in a business and personal partnership that’s lasted more than 20 years.

“We watch over each other’s things,” Doumani said. “Even though I would never intrude on one of his dishes and he wouldn’t on mine -- it’s an extra set of eyes.” Doumani said the most difficult aspect of running a restaurant with her husband is menu planning. “You can’t rest on your laurels,” she said. They argue over seasonality, and who gets to use a marquee ingredient (“I couldn’t do a chocolate bread pudding with dried cherries when he was doing duck with cherries”).

And they questioned whether they were up for Ame, their second restaurant. “Just to buy new chairs for Terra took us two years,” Doumani said, “because we couldn’t agree on anything. Hiro wanted; I refused. We still don’t have them.”

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Workplace concerns

MANY restaurants, particularly large ones, require that employees who date each other sign policies to insure against sexual harassment suits. Off the record, employees at Cut and Spago will say they had to sign such agreements. Spokeswomen for the restaurants would not comment.

But most smaller restaurants don’t have such policies --and restaurants run by chef couples are particularly mindful of having a double standard.

At Literati II, for example, pastry chef Kimberly Sklar, who met her husband, chef Chris Kidder, when they were at Campanile, said that restaurant didn’t exactly encourage chefs who date each other. “It can get uncomfortable,” Sklar said. But they don’t want to be hypocritical either. “That’s why we don’t have a policy.”

With or without policies, the perils are obvious. When relationships sour within a kitchen crew, one party usually moves on. But when they are business partners, things can get complicated. West Hollywood’s Sona restaurant and Boule patisserie, for example, are owned and run by chef David Myers and pastry chef Michelle Myers, even though a spokesperson has confirmed that the two have separated. (Both refused comment.) But their new West Hollywood outposts, brasserie Comme Ca and Boule Atelier, are still slated to open in late summer.

“It’s the oldest business model in the world,” said Mark Peel, chef-owner of Campanile and himself half of what was probably L.A.’s most influential chef-pastry chef couples. Peel and his former wife Nancy Silverton met at Spago, then went on to open Campanile. After they divorced, they split their businesses, which also included La Brea Bakery. Asked what advice he has for chef couples opening restaurants, Peel said, “It lives and dies on mutual respect; if you don’t have that, no legal verbiage is going to help.”

As for the Spago connection, Silverton, now co-chef-owner of Mozza, sounded amused. “Wolf and Barbara created restaurants that chefs are happy to work at -- and then they’re happy, they fall in love,” Silverton said of Puck and partner (and former wife) Barbara Lazaroff. “Wolf used to say there was something in the sugar.”

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Partners ease pressure

INSIDE the tiny kitchen office at the still-shuttered Bastide -- its counters wrapped in plastic for a paint job, the copper pots that hang like an orchestra timpani section newly polished and gleaming -- new executive chef Walter Manske took a breather from planning the highly anticipated menu with his wife and pastry chef, Margarita, called Marge. “We have the same hours, the same pressures,” Walter said. “It’s a hard business; that makes it easier.”

The chance to cook together at Bastide was a huge draw (“I called him,” Walter said of Bastide’s owner, Joe Pytka), as he was returning to Los Angeles, where the two had met 10 years ago while cooking at Patina. Then the pair headed north, working together at L’Auberge and Bouchee in Carmel.

Though Marge didn’t start out in pastry, her interest in baking blossomed in Carmel. When she couldn’t find bread she liked, she began baking it herself, a tradition she’ll continue at Bastide, using 7-year-old sourdough starter she brought with her to L.A. She agreed that this division helps maintain balance in the kitchen. “Maybe because you’re on opposite sides of the kitchen,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to be doing the same job.”

This natural separation between the hot kitchen and the dessert kitchen is also logistic. At Marche Moderne, helmed by Florent and Amelia Marneau, it’s all in the timing. “When I get busy, she’s not as busy,” executive chef and Patina alum Florent said of his wife, Amelia, who is co-owner and pastry chef.

When orders on the line are firing, Amelia works the front of the house, as she’s come in early to do her desserts. Then, when work on the lines eases off, Amelia plates the desserts while Florent emerges from behind the counter of the open kitchen and mingles with their guests. It’s an easy -- and logical -- trade-off, especially for a small, family-run restaurant.

Not only can you see the kitchen, but it feels as if you’re actually at home with the chefs. Which, given the fact that your chefs cohabitate and probably spend more time in their professional kitchen than in the one they have at home, you probably are.

“I wish we were this organized at home,” said Karen Hatfield, who with her husband tries to “work backwards” to apply the organization of their restaurant to their home.

Unsuccessfully, she said.

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amy.scattergood@latimes.com

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Soft-shell crab with succotash and sauce gribiche

Total time: About 1 hour, 15 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From Quinn Hatfield of Hatfield’s restaurant. You will have some gribiche sauce left over; this can be used for spooning over asparagus, poached eggs, chicken or steak. Fresh garbanzo beans for the succotash are available at farmers markets or you can omit them and double the amount of peas in the recipe.

Sauce gribiche

1 egg yolk

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1 cup rice bran oil or vegetable oil

2 hard-cooked eggs, chopped

1 teaspoon capers, chopped

1/2 teaspoon chopped anchovies

1/2 teaspoon chopped parsley

1/2 teaspoon chopped tarragon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Place the egg yolk in a medium-sized bowl, then whisk in the mustard and vinegar. Slowly whisk in the oil, in a thin stream, forming an emulsion. Stir in the hard-cooked eggs, capers, anchovies, parsley, tarragon and salt. Adjust with water if too thick. Set aside. This makes 1 1/2 cups sauce.

Soft-shell crabs and assembly

1/2 cup shelled English peas

1/2 cup shelled fresh garbanzo beans

1/3 cup shelled fava beans

8 small soft-shell crabs (trimmed and gilled)

Salt to taste

Cayenne pepper to taste

1/3 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup instant Cream of Wheat

1/4 cup canola oil, divided

1/2 cup butter

Freshly ground black pepper

Sauce gribiche

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Add the peas to the boiling water and blanch until the peas are just tender, about 1 minute. Using a long-handled strainer or slotted spoon, remove the peas from the boiling water and immediately place them in an ice bath, then drain them and set aside. Using the same pot of boiling water, repeat for the garbanzo beans; cook until just tender, about 1 to 2 minutes. Place them in an ice bath, drain and set aside. Then place the fava beans in the boiling water and cook 30 seconds to 1 minute. Put them in an ice bath and drain. Break the outer skin of each bean and squeeze the bean out of its skin. Set aside.

2. Clean the corn of all husk and silk. Cook the corn (on the cob) in simmering salted water for about 10 minutes, or until tender but crisp. Remove the cooked corn and allow to cool to room temperature, about 10 minutes. Cut the kernels from the cob and set aside.

3. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Rinse the crabs under cold, running water and pat dry with a paper towel. Season the crabs with salt and cayenne pepper (about 1/8 teaspoon salt and a small pinch of cayenne per crab). Brush the top side of the crab with buttermilk. Then lay the brushed side in the cream of wheat. Crust only the top side.

4. To cook the crabs, work in two batches or with two 10-inch heavy-bottomed saute pans or skillets (you don’t want to crowd the pan). Heat 2 tablespoons of the canola oil for each batch over high heat until it starts to smoke. Add half of the crabs, crust side down, to each pan. Immediately place the pan in the oven. Cook for about 4 minutes until the crust is golden brown, then flip the crabs and cook for an additional 3 minutes or until done.

5. While the crabs cook, warm the vegetables. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Add the corn, peas, garbanzo beans and fava beans and warm through. Don’t allow the butter to brown. Season with salt and pepper.

6. Divide the succotash between four plates. Place two cooked crabs on top of each. Top each crab with a tablespoon of the sauce gribiche.

Each serving: 933 calories; 46 grams protein; 52 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams fiber; 62 grams fat; 20 grams saturated fat; 284 mg. cholesterol; 585 mg. sodium.

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Almond cherry tart

Total time: About 1 hour, 40 minutes, plus chilling time

Servings: 8

Note: From Karen Hatfield of Hatfield’s restaurant

Tart dough

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup plus 2 1/2 tablespoons powdered sugar

2 1/4 cups plus 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, sifted

3/4 cup almond meal, sifted

1 egg

1. Using a hand-held or standing mixer, blend the butter and sugar just until almost smooth (don’t overmix). Add the flour and the almond meal, then the egg. The dough should be smooth without any lumps or butter streaks, but be careful not to overmix. Gather the dough into a ball, wrap with plastic wrap and chill for at least 3 hours or overnight.

2. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and roll out on a lightly floured surface to about one-fourth-inch thick and about 12 inches in diameter. Roll the dough around the rolling pin and carefully lift it into a 9-inch round tart pan. Lift the edge of the dough with one hand; use the other to gently press the dough into the bottom and against the sides of the pan. Trim the edges of the dough against the edge of the pan, and chill the tart in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

3. Put the tart on a baking sheet and bake with weights for 15 minutes. Remove the weights and continue to bake for another 15 minutes, until golden-brown. Remove from oven and let cool to room temperature.

Frangipane and cherry filling and assembly

1 cup sliced blanched almonds

1/2 cup sugar, divided, plus extra for sprinkling

7 tablespoons butter, cut into 1-inch pieces

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons brandy

1 egg

1 tablespoon milk

1 pound cherries, pitted and halved, divided

Unsweetened whipped cream

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. To make the frangipane filling, grind the almonds in a food processor with 2 tablespoons of the sugar.

2. Using a hand-held or stand mixer, mix the butter until creamy, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Add in the remaining sugar and continue to mix until fluffy and blended, about a minute.

3. One ingredient at a time, add in the salt, brandy, egg and milk, scraping the bowl after each addition. Beat in the ground almond mixture.

4. Layer 2 cups of the cherries in the bottom of the tart shell, spread the frangipane mixture evenly over the top and sprinkle with 2 teaspoons of sugar, or to taste. Bake for about 45 to 50 minutes, until the top of the tart is browned all over. Slice the tart and serve warm, with a dollop of whipped cream and a few fresh cherries garnishing the top of each slice.

Each serving: 669 calories; 12 grams protein; 64 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams fiber; 42 grams fat; 19 grams saturated fat; 128 mg. cholesterol; 63 mg. sodium.