Cordelia is Moving Midwestern Food Forward
COVER STORY: The Cleveland restaurant, helmed by Vinnie Cimino, taps into the heritage of the region's past while looking to the future.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in today’s newsletter.
Cover Story: At the Cleveland restaurant Cordelia, helmed by a James Beard-nominated chef, the convivial kitchen staff serves up a fresh take on Midwestern fare.
The Order: Gott’s Roadside in St. Helena, California, is the perfect pit stop for burgers and tacos between Napa Valley wine tastings.
Weekend Reading: Chicago’s 20 best cocktails, a dry drinking den in Los Angeles, and a profile of prolific food writer
Featured Destination: Download your weekend itinerary for wine country in our Field Guide to Napa Valley, a 24-page digital dining guide formatted for your phone. (Free for paid subscribers!)
Our Favorite New Restaurant in America
CLEVELAND, OHIO — On a late December evening at Cordelia in downtown Cleveland, line cook Santana Sanchez was inching closer to the burger record: 87 in one night. We were there, watching it unfold from our seats at the chef’s counter, and yes, ordering one of those burgers. The energy was thrumming — each time a new order came in, Sanchez threw a patty onto the 36-inch flat top grill, surrounded it with shredded smoked cheddar, then folded the burger up into that crispy cheese skirt. He tucked the “burger box” into an everything bagel-spiced bun along with Kool Aid pickles, onions, and special sauce and sent it out. While Sanchez missed the record by two that night, the burgers he cooked were a big contribution to the total number of burgers that Cordelia sold last year: 13,000.
“It was ridiculous,” Vinnie Cimino, Cordelia’s executive chef and partner, laughs when telling me that total. “It’s not like we’re a burger restaurant.”
Cordelia is absolutely not a burger restaurant, but the “burger box” tells us a lot about this place and what they are striving to be. The burger evolved out of one that Cimino, who was nominated this week for the James Beard award for Best Chef Great Lakes, and Ryan Boone, the restaurant’s executive sous and pastry chef, were serving at their pandemic sandwich pop-up, FatBoy Sammies. “Our inspiration was fast food places we grew up with, whether that’s White Castle or [Akron’s] Hamburger Station,” Cimino says. The duo, who met while working at the now-closed Greenhouse Tavern, Jonathon Sawyer's influential Cleveland restaurant, kept money coming in during the pandemic by slinging burgers and sandwiches, like a chickpea sloppy joe. When Cimino and partner Andrew Watts, who also worked at Greenhouse Tavern, teamed up to open Cordelia in July 2022, the burger came along. “We opened on East Fourth Street, which is an entertainment district, and understood that we were going to see all walks of life,” Cimino says. But the burger got a little fancier to match its new surroundings; now, it’s shareable and comes with the crispy cheese skirt. “We want you to order the burger and other things and share them around,” Cimino says. “We developed a bun that's designed to be pulled apart and put picks in it and gave you a knife. It’s meant to be communal and fun.”
It’s also a dish that speaks to this moment in food. “Going through the pandemic, we didn't know what tomorrow was going to be like,” Cimino says. “People were getting back to connecting with familiar things. So we thought, why don't we give diners what we know they want, since it's the same thing we want. That's the burger box with its cheese skirt - these are all the crispy bits the cooks eat. Why are we not feeding them to everybody else?”
That idea led to the creation of Cordelia’s Midwestern menu, which the team dubs “Modern Grandma.” Cimino explains: “Ryan and I knew the food we wanted to cook and it was very much inspired by our heritage and how we grew up,” he says. “Andrew and I wanted to create this ‘quintessential Midwestern restaurant’ but we’re all from different backgrounds and cultures. What we have in common is what our grandparents and our families have shown us are these ‘Midwestern roots.’” They also wanted to support local — “Over our years in the industry, we've made a lot of friendships with farmers, butchers, fishmongers, and local purveyors,” Cimino says — while drawing on the techniques they honed during their years in the kitchen.
I’ve eaten at Cordelia three times, and I find that the food lands at this precise intersection — it’s festive and communal, it’s connected to the past and memory, and it’s technically sound and delicious. As a food writer who lives in the Midwest but did not grow up here, I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about what Midwestern food is, and its past, present, and future. While cooking from the past is not a new idea by any means, what the chefs at Cordelia are doing is pulling from a larger disparate past and knitting it together in a way that tells a new story about the Midwest. This history is not spelled out on the menus, which allows people to find themselves in the food. So even though I have no childhood tie to the Midwest, the artichoke dip reminds me of one from family parties — here, it’s just gussied up with rainbow chard and malt garlic chips. Those from the Midwest, and Cleveland especially, will find even more things that resonate.
“There are so many cultures in Cleveland and so many different pockets of culture,” says Cimino, who regularly visits AsiaTown (he sent us to eat the fantastic spicy beef chaoshou at LJ Shanghai while we were in town). “We derive so much influence from flavor profiles and the ingredients that we find. It's fun to be able to take those and spin them into this modern Midwest style of cookery.”
Take Cordelia’s cabbage and cold noodles, which are accented with honey, sesame, and chile crunch. “I grew up eating cabbage and noodles this time of year,” Boone says. “But going out to eat with my chef buddies to all these places in AsiaTown, we had conversations like, ‘all of this food is a version of cooked cabbage and noodles, it's what it's dressed with that’s different.’ We're making what we see as ‘Cleveland food.’ It's a little bit Asian, a little bit Polish, a little bit Croatian.”
Other dishes are perfected versions of Midwest classics, like the cannibal sandwich (which I dug into more deeply for Plate magazine) and the funeral potatoes. For that dish, Boone keeps the corn flake topping but adds in pho powder from an AsiaTown shop.
The overdressed greens are an homage to Akron, 40 minutes south of Cleveland, where Cimino is from. “One of my favorite restaurants there is this old-school Italian restaurant, Luigi's, where the house salad has romaine, black olives, tomatoes, way too much mozzarella, and Italian dressing,” he says. Cimino swaps in the Akron-invented white French dressing. “Everyone in Akron eats it on every salad, but nobody knows it in Cleveland,” he says. The Cordelia version is made with Duke’s mayo, onions, garlic, sugar, and vinegar, and he uses it to dress local hydroponic greens and tomatoes. Croutons, housemade kalamata olive salt, shredded havarti, and chunks of turmeric-pickled zucchini turn this into my favorite house salad.
There are more great dishes here — the corned lamb! The smoked chile pimento cheese that’s spread onto honey and za’atar-dusted chicharrones! — so the best approach is to order the Bellie Up menu. For $85 a person, the kitchen will just send you plates. This is also a good thing to do if you want to take care of tomorrow’s lunch; the fried chicken is terrific leftover. This format ensures that you save room for dessert, which Boone handles. The sweets take inspiration from Zero Zest, the ice cream shop at the end of the street he grew up on in Parma, Ohio. “This ‘90s candy shop ice cream store is the vision behind a lot of our desserts,” he says. That manifests itself in daily-changing ice creams topped with sprinkles, a riff on the kid-favorite bowl of dirt using miso brownies (he keeps the gummy worms), and, my favorite, the slush float, with basil soft serve, mixed berry jam, rosé granita, and meringue. “I’m recreating the things I loved growing up, just the way I want them now as an adult,” Boone says.
While I have lived in Chicago for 13 years, I’m still honing my idea of what Midwestern food is. But it feels like dining at Cordelia gives me the answer. “Midwest cooking is so much more than pierogies and kielbasa,” Cimino says. “So many people make it up. I grew up in a big Italian family and we ate pierogies and kielbasa but we had a lot more pasta and red sauce. Andrew grew up eating pierogies and Ryan grew up eating funeral potatoes. There are so many stories to tell that we owe it not just to us but all of our chefs. We say: ‘What's your story? Let's hear about it and let's narrate that story through hospitality and food.’”
2058 E 4th St, Cleveland, OH 44115
Wet January: For Chicago magazine, Amy spent several months putting together a list of the 20 best cocktails in the city. At the top of the list: The Navy Strength Old Fashioned at Queen Mary Tavern. “In this era of fancy techniques and infusions, wild garnishes and unorthodox flavors, it’s the very simplicity of this drink that makes it stand out,” Amy writes. “It sets a new standard for old-fashioneds, starting with the fact that it doesn’t use whiskey. Dan Smith, beverage director of this maritime-inspired tavern, tapped high-proof versions of rum and gin and mellowed them out with Demerara syrup, angostura bitters, and a little salt. It’s perfect.” If you’re in Chicago, I highly recommend picking up an issue (and a drink).
Dry January: Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison visited Stay, a new bar in Chinatown that focuses exclusively on zero-proof cocktails. “Stay looks to be the first free-standing zero-proof bar in Los Angeles,” Addison writes. “Art director Stacey Litoff-Mann and actor Summer Joy Phoenix (the youngest sibling of River and Joaquin) have partnered on the project. They each come from design backgrounds, and the space they’ve created is so ravishingly beautiful that I wandered around, peering for a good while at the overwhelming details, before even thinking about ordering a drink.” Follow the link above to see more of the space and read about their drinks. I’m intrigued.
January is Stupid: You may already be familiar with prolific food writer
. His day job is at The Takeout, but he is also the author of two Substack newsletters — , in which he covers Chicago restaurants, and , which … well … I’ll let this feature in Bon Appétit magazine tell the story. “His approach stands in stark contrast to food newsletters that seek to inspire epicureans with seasonal recipes and clever kitchen hacks,” writes Adam Reiner. “Lee doesn’t make weekly trips to the greenmarket or garnish his food with microgreens or edible flowers. His absurdist recipes, most of which are designed to fail, feature common grocery items and processed foods, transmogrified into unthinkable preparations—think Froot Loops as a pizza topping or Doritos pulverized, then boiled into grits. Flavor is an afterthought, if not an outright inconvenience.” Enjoy.— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
California Casual in Wine Country
ST. HELENA, CALIF. — Napa Valley is filled with great restaurants, but when we’re in the area, we always make room for one spot in particular: Gott’s Roadside. The restaurant, a James Beard Foundation America’s Classic, is in its 25th year serving up California-inspired roadside fare. It fills a unique need in Napa — Gott’s is counter-service and super casual, so you can pop by between wine tasting reservations. And, the food is great.
Burgers are the main focus, and our go-to is the double cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and special sauce. The ahi burger with ginger wasabi mayo and cabbage and cilantro slaw on a toasted egg bun, is also a favorite. If those ingredients sound good, but you’d rather have tacos, order the ahi poke tacos, with everything tucked into crispy shells. And add on a side of the fries with garlic butter and parsley — they may not be ideal for keeping your palate wine-tasting ready, but they’re delicious.
This being Napa, there’s also an affordable selection of classic California wines by the glass, bottle, and half-bottle. If this is your chance to gear up for your next tasting, opt for the organic soft serve and get it made into a coffee shake.
Gott’s has expanded to a few locations, but we love the vibe (and patio) of the original St. Helena outpost best. Want more Napa ideas? Read below on how to upgrade your subscription to get all of our Napa Valley recommendations!
Download Our Weekend Itinerary for Napa Valley
You can download all of our picks for wine country in our Field Guide to Napa Valley, a 24-page digital dining guide formatted for your phone. During the month of January, paid subscribers can snag a complimentary download on our website using the code they received in this month’s Featured Destination newsletter. (Paid subscribers also get 50% off any other Field Guide they’d like!) Upgrade your subscription today and get your free Field Guide to Napa Valley.
Want more? Chat with us on Substack, download our Field Guides, check out our archives, or follow us on Instagram @americanweekender. We’ll be back next week.
I’ve been back in the Cleveland area for a couple of years now and haven’t been to Cordelia - yet. If Kenney says it’s this fantastic, then I’m making it a priority to go there ASAP.
Loved the Cordelia write-up and pics. I NEED to try that burger!!