Agent Orange

Big changes are afoot at South Street's Pumpkin triumvirate.

by Drew Lazor

Drew Lazor

Ian Moroney and Hillary's Bor's triumvirate of bright-orange South Street businesses — Pumpkin BYOB, Pumpkin Café and Pumpkin Market — is in the midst of mini-evolution, growing and contracting at the same time.

The married couple has moved out of the Café (1609 South St.), which opened four years ago, due to an irreconcilable disagreement with their landlord. Luckily, they were able to shift the operation directly across the street to the two-year-old Market (1610 South St.), which now boasts a tightened-up selection of local groceries and produce in addition to the Café's lineup of from-scratch soups, sandwiches and ready-made dishes. They've renovated both levels of the market to accommodate the absorption of the café; upstairs now has the walk-up deli case, while the downstairs features 14 seats.

While both Moroney and Bor wish it hadn't happened this way, they're rolling with it, and "want to continue to be a force in the neighborhood," according to Bor. And recent changes at their restaurant (1713 South St.), which opened in 2004, are bolstering that plan — they've brought in Buxco native Christopher Kearse, a well-traveled chef who's put in work at Chicago's Tru, Alinea and Charlie Trotter, The French Laundry in Napa, and Lacroix and Blackfish here in Philly, to run the day-to-day of the BYO.

It's still very much Moroney's restaurant, and he and Kearse have worked together on menu items since Kearse first landed at Pumpkin six months back. But the restaurant is unique in that the typically rigid hierarchy of the back-of-the-house — sous chef answers to chef de cuisine, chef de cuisine answers to executive chef, and so on — doesn't exist here. "Our kitchen is a little different. It's not totalitarian," says Moroney. "If you have a strong kitchen, you let people do what they can do."

That's precisely the approach Moroney's been taking with Kearse. The two chefs' styles, even down to plating, could not be more disparate. Moroney sees his plates as "clean, functional [and] not terribly artistic," while Kearse, who's built a modern-cookery skill set from past gigs, is as detail-oriented as they come, arming himself with tweezers and squeeze bottles to piece together his playful presentations.

"Familiar flavors, done differently" is how Kearse characterizes his approach. A winter salad, for example, is built up with raw, cooked and pickled vegetables in a menagerie of forms, garnished with a crunchy "soil" of pumpernickel bread and a rich walnut purée created with agar-agar, an algae extract that thickens liquids. His stuffed-and-smoked quail is served with a gel of red wine, mulling spices and dried cherries (another agar production) with dehydrated chestnuts, grated and scattered across the middle of the plate in fastidious cairns.

Drew Lazor

Kearse knows that some diners can be reluctant to embrace these techniques — they're science-y and unfamiliar, which is why the chef strives to catch a "balance between creativity and respecting the ingredients ... but also a sense of entertainment and experience, which is something I look for when I go out to eat."

Though Kearse wrote the whole of Pumpkin's winter menu, expect more collaboration between him and Moroney moving forward, as their approaches are complementary. "He's very meticulous, [and] Ian is more spontaneous," says Bor of the pair.

"You're not yet seeing exactly what he can do," says Moroney of Kearse. "Only the beginnings of it."

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)