Chef Recipes Made Easy

Shoppers at the Boston store Louis Boston have a superb lunch option: the excellent Asian food by F&W Best New Chef 2006 Pino Maffeo. Here, F&W simplifies his best recipes.

Pino Maffeo of Boston’s Restaurant L, in the swank department store Louis Boston, is one kind of chef by day and another kind by night. At lunch, this F&W Best New Chef 2006 serves simple Asian food, like quick, flavorful stir-fries and steaming bowls of noodle soup. At dinner (with double the number of cooks and half the number of customers), Maffeo prepares what he calls "modern European food," like an appetizer of coconut-milk mozzarella with pineapple. He says the dichotomy balances him, though staffing can be a challenge: "My daytime crew could never cook at night—they’d have no idea what’s going on." Maffeo’s hope is that customers who come for lunch will return for dinner, and vice versa. Here, the F&W Test Kitchen streamlines eight of Maffeo’s lunch dishes to create fast, delicious recipes for any time of day.

Published February 2007