Enmoladas and entomatadas in to-go packaging at Claro
By Kathleen Furore
EDITOR’S NOTE: Just as I was searching for someone to interview for a story about how to maintain the flavor and quality of restaurant food for delivery, I stumbled upon a March 30 article in the New York Times. One of the sources appeared to be the perfect person to contact: T.J. Steele—the executive chef/ owner of Michelin star-rated Claro in Brooklyn, New York and one of Starchefs’ 2019 Rising Stars. And perfect he was! Steele was more than willing to share his experience of launching food delivery in the midst of the pandemic— an experience that offers lessons I think every restaurateur can learn something from.
There’s one fact that sets the stage for T.J. Steele’s pandemic-inspired tale of bringing delivery service to Claro: The restaurant was never, ever set up to deliver its award-winning Oaxacan cuisine to customers’ homes. As he told the New York Times, he’d always felt it just wasn’t worth the effort.
But desperate times called for desperate measures, as they say—and when news came that New York City’s restaurants would go dark for inside dining on March 17, Steele sprang into action.
“We listened to the news really carefully, and our core group decided right away that we would do whatever we were allowed to do to stay open,” recalls Steele, who admits it was a scary time for him and his staff.
As the restaurant’s website notes, “‘Claro’ means ‘clear’ in many different senses, but also means ‘of course’—a phrase that’s used to put a person at ease.” It’s a fitting name for an establishment whose owner saw the situation so clearly and decided he would, of course, do whatever he could to keep business going.
Claro Pre-Pandemic
When Claro debuted in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood in August 2017, Grub Street, the popular food blog from New York Magazine, described it as “Steele’s paean to the foods and people of Oaxaca.”
It was an apt description.
Steele, after all, had lived part-time for many years in Oaxaca, where he cultivated relationships with craftsmen, artists, mezcaleros, cooks and farmers. The menu includes dishes made from the region’s GMO heirloom (criollo) corn, and most everything on the menu—including the masa, cheeses, chorizo and moles—is made by hand. Meat and produce are organic and locally sourced when possible; and diners lucky enough to land a seat in the backyard patio can watch tortillas being pressed, and tlayudas, memelas and tostadas cooking on the woodfired comal.
Those hand-made dishes and the ingredients used to make them—so illustrative of Steele’s dedication to his craft and his love for Oaxaca—always have been at the heart of his vision for Claro. But when the pandemic hit, some things became impossible. “We knew we couldn’t keep doing the same things at the restaurant that we’d been doing before,” Steele says.
The Transformation
Though he’d never taken the time to craft a delivery menu, Steele undertook that task practically overnight, turning to his own experience of dining on delivered meals— something he’d done myriad times as a resident of New York City.
“I had a lot of experience of getting takeout at home and being pissed off at what I got—so I had to try to minimize that,” Steele says of his approach to creating a delivery menu full of food that would not only offer value but also “show up like the customer wants it to.”
Steele admits the process of remaking the menu—which, as he remembers, started on Friday, March 13—has been a work in progress. There have been tweaks to both the dishes being offered and the packaging it’s being delivered in—all made with the goal of making food that travels well, Steele says.
Fine-tuning the Food
Every restaurant, of course, has to make decisions about what to offer on its delivery menu based on many factors. For Steele, tacos didn’t make the cut. “I think tacos are best when the tortilla is warm…and I see the time it takes for food to be delivered,” he says. “If a taco sits for almost an hour, it won’t represent the food or my restaurant in the way I want it to.”
Quesadillas are a different story. “The fat in the cheese will absorb into the tortillas and keep them malleable— there are enough juices [in the contents of quesadillas] to prevent them from drying out,” says Steele.
Two of the top sellers are Claro’s takeout version of entomatadas and enmoladas. The enmoladas, Steele says, “felt like a [Mexican version] of a to-go lasagna.” Even ceviche made the menu. “It’s one of my favorite things!” says Steele. “I was hesitant at first about having raw fish [for delivery]…but we keep it in separate bags away from the hot food. It’s gone over really well.” (
Tweaking recipes was also a key step in making some dishes more delivery friendly. The seared duck breast in mole negro is one example. Steele switched the protein to a braised short rib. “A duck breast would arrive cold and dry and would be ruined if it was reheated in a microwave,” Steele explains.
Perfecting the Packaging
Adjusting recipes for delivery is just the first step in making dishes more deliverable. Packaging is the second (and perhaps equally important) part of the equation. If the sauce has dried out and the cheese has hardened or slid off the top of the enchilada a hungry customer had been craving, all the work put into the preparation won’t matter—the dried out enchilada is what that customer will remember the next time he or she is choosing a restaurant for their next takeout meal.
As experienced a chef as Steele is, even he struggled with the optimal way to package Claro’s meals to go. He turned to foil containers that could be popped right into a customer’s oven if they needed to heat the dish once it arrived. “The dishes don’t have to be removed from the container to be heated,” he says.
Listening to customers’ requests for “green” packaging, he switched to all sustainable containers. Some fell short. “They definitely cost more money, and some we tried were not very good—for example, the moles would soak through,” says Steele.
What Lies Ahead
Daniel Leeb
T.J. Steele in Oaxaca
Delivery has been instrumental in keeping Claro afloat in the past several months filled with unprecented challenges. But as important as it has been, Steele doesn’t think he will continue with delivery in its current form once things return to normal.
“We did it to support our community, keep our doors open and support our employees,” Steele says. “Mexican food has a stigma of what it is worth price-wise and we went above and beyond because we were conscious of how people were suffering.” But delivery platforms take such a big chunk of profits that Steele says the business was “cycling money through the bank but not really making that much.”
Steele will, however, keep some aspects of the delivery program he sped to create. Take his homemade chips. “I never would allow chips at the restaurant—we had tostadas and that was as far as I went with that,” he says. But he’s been making chips (which he mills and grinds the corn to make, just as he does for every dish he makes with masa) and selling them along with salsa via delivery; those will stay on the delivery menu.
Another addition that won’t disappear: the bags of masa Claro has been offering by the pound for customers who want to make their own tortillas. “If we sell 10 pounds a day we feel like champions—it’s more a fun thing, but we maybe make a little money off of it, too,” he says.
What the future holds for the restaurant industry as the coronavirus ebbs and flows is anybody’s guess. But whatever happens, delivery likely will remain an important piece of the puzzle for many Mexican and Latin restaurants—which makes it imperative for operators and chefs to do all they can to optimize their delivery menus in ways that maintain the quality and flavor of the food being delivered during COVID and beyond.