Olio's Famous Egg Salad

When I opened Olio back in 2012 I wanted to pay a simple homage to my grandma Frieda (Safta Frieda).  She wasn't a great cook but some of my fondest and most vivid food memories are from her tiny house where our family gathered every Friday and holiday.  Her egg salad was my favorite as a kid and that's why I decided to put it on the menu.  Originally, I served a large scoop of it in a bowl with slices of toasted white bread on the side -- identical to the way Safta Frieda did.  But it was such an anomalous item on the menu of a new and hip wine bar/eatery that hardly anyone had ordered it.  My cooks pleaded with me to take off the menu: "we're tired of eating this stuff for family meal every day, chef!"  We were only a three month old restaurant, so I don't remember what exactly led me to audaciously rename any dish -- and let alone an unpopular one -- "famous", but I did.  The Egg Salad was now appearing on the menu as "Olio's Famous Egg Salad".  At that same time, I also instructed my cooks to mound a spoonful of the egg salad on a piece of bread and send it gratis to every diner.  Not before long, Olio's Famous Egg Salad gained such notoriety that people literally travel for it.  To this day it is still the most ordered item on the menu.  We make about 1000 pounds of it a month!

So what's so special about it you must wonder.  The recipe is simple: hard boiled eggs, caramelized onions, a little mayonnaise, salt and pepper.  When we serve it, we grate a little lemon zest to cut through the sweetness of the onions (my contribution to the original recipe).  The trick to this egg salad is to run all the ingredients through a meat grinder to achieve the mousse-like texture.

But the story is much deeper, which makes its success even more profound.  Bear with it me.

My father was unable to attend the opening of Olio, and when he visited us for the first time, we were already the talk of town.  Evan Benn of the Post-Dispatch rated us 4 stars (out of 4), and shortly after that Ian Froeb awarded us the esteemed "Best New Restaurant."  My dad was dining at Olio and was visibly very emotional.  I was in the kitchen and the server ask me to check in on my dad.  When I walked into the dining room, my dad said to me "I never thought I was going to have this taste again in my mouth.  It sent me to your Safta's house and to my childhood."  

Food has the power to transport you to places, physical and mental, sometimes very familiar and other times completely unknown, and elicit genuinely strong emotions.  That elucidation has become a guiding motif for us when we create (or recreate) new dishes and restaurants.  We always talk about "identity".  

This particular dish is also personally very meaningful to our family.  My grandparents survived the Nazi death camps and lost nearly everything they had.  But they had each other and vowed to stick together no matter the consequences.  On Yom Kippur and on Yahrzeits, our family eats chopped liver, the texture of which resembles mortar.  The symbolism of it is meant to commemorate the binding, the sticking together, and the building of foundation, without which our family would have never existed.  

You see, the egg salad was simply chopped liver without the liver, and was served to us as kids because we didn't like the taste of the liver.  I didn't know the story until my dad's visit to Olio that day.  I don't think that my insistence on keeping Olio's Famous Egg Salad on the menu and it's popularity happened fortuitously.  

What chance do I stand against kismet?