Welcome to Restaurant Recipe Month. Each week in August, we’ll bring you restaurant inspired recipes so you can recreate the magic of eating out at home.
Recently, plain celery has been in the spotlight. Nowhere is this more evident than at Finn Stern and Stella Denning’s Oakland restaurant Daytrip. There, celery appears in the form of salads on almost every table.
Conceptually, I think of Daytrip’s celery salad like a cake with layers of flavor and texture. At the bottom hides a provocative spicy and creamy habanero aioli. Rising from this pedestal are piles of penny-sized, intensely refreshing, crunchy celery slices tossed with parsley and fresh lemon juice. Finish with a generous heap of aged sheep’s milk cheese and a drizzle of lemon verbena oil.
This structured (not salad) salad packs everything you want in every bite. Elegant but unpretentious. Light and fresh, but also full of salt. This is a salad that proves celery excels as a stand-alone dish, but it also serves as a great prelude to a restaurant’s hearty main dishes. It feels like celery is one of the most important salads in the Bay Area right now because it shows us something we never thought it could do. It raises our expectations with its flavor profile and redefines the way we enjoy even the simplest and most available ingredients.
As deceptively easy to make as it sounds, “But believe it or not, a celery salad recipe can take four to six hours,” Stern and Denning told me recently at a restaurant. Only lemon verbena oil is soaked in fresh leaves and the oil is infused with its unique citrus mint flavor for several hours before being cooled, blended and strained.
Our lemon verbena oil is made with love, so we decided to sell it in our restaurants in convenient squeeze bottles. Combined with the habanero aioli, which is also on sale, you can easily recreate the restaurant version of the salad at home.
You don’t have to limit these magical seasonings to just one salad. Stern also recommends drizzling the oil over stone fruit salad, fish such as salmon, or using it in a simple vinaigrette. Aioli is incorporated into nearly all staff meals in the form of sandwich spreads and rice bowl flavor enhancers.
Oh life is unfair. You can’t just stroll down the street to buy seasonings. So this week, I’m going to show you a simplified version of Day Trip’s celery salad that you can make at home.
First, instead of making aioli, buy store-bought mayonnaise such as Kewpie and mix it with freshly chopped habanero and lemon for a day trip.
You might fantasize about meandering through the foothills of Sonoma County or picking up fresh lemon verbena at the Marine Roots stand at the farmers market early in the morning, but in reality you probably won’t. .
Instead, I use dried lemon verbena found at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. online, shared by Stern, is a simplified version of lemon verbena oil that is ready in about 25 minutes. You can’t replicate the solid oil he makes at the restaurant, but adding a dash of fresh lime and lemon zest gets it pretty close.
Everything else in this recipe is basically what it’s done in a restaurant, but I’ve scaled it up a bit so you can enjoy more of this all-important celery salad.
To Christian Reynoso: food@sfchronicle.com
celery salad on a day trip
Serves 2 (or 4 as a small appetizer)
A crisp, refreshing and comfortingly salty take on Day Trip’s celery salad, this salad is a homey homage to Oakland’s restaurant practices and is perfect for any occasion. Fresh lemon verbena can be difficult to find, but dried leaves work well here and are available online and at certain markets. For a hearty meal, pair it with grilled meats and vegetables or rich buttery pasta. This recipe calls for a little extra habanero aioli for sandwiches and rice bowls, and a little extra lemon verbena oil for making a vinaigrette.
1 cup neutral oil, such as rice bran oil, grapeseed oil, or canola oil
1 ounce dried lemon verbena or 2 ounces fresh lemon verbena leaves
1 lime (with skin)
1 large lemon with skin on (reserve lemon for juice below)
1/2 cup Kewpie mayonnaise or any high-quality commercial mayonnaise
3 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice divided (about 1 large lemon)
1 small habanero chile, stemmed, deseeded and chopped
2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt or 1 teaspoon fine sea salt, or anything else you like
2 cups celery slices (about 5 large stalks)
1/2 cup parsley leaves, lightly stuffed
Sheep’s milk cheese aged 3-6 months (edible) such as Pecorino and Fiore Sardo
To make lemon verbena oil: Heat the oil in a small saucepan over medium heat to 190 degrees. Use a thermometer to check that the temperature has reached this temperature, immediately turn off the heat and stir in the lemon verbena, lime zest and lemon zest. Cover and steep for 20 minutes, then strain through a small strainer or cheesecloth into a bowl. Set aside while you make the habanero aioli.
To make habanero aioli: In a small bowl, combine mayonnaise, 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice, and habanero chili. Taste the aioli (it should be really spicy!) and season with a pinch of salt if needed. Transfer to refrigerator and cover until use.
To make a celery salad: In a medium bowl, combine celery, parsley, and 2 teaspoons salt. Let it sit for a few seconds. Add the remaining 3 tablespoons lemon juice, mix again, and let sit for 30 seconds (any longer or the celery will begin to wilt).
Spread half the habanero aioli into a 4-inch circle in the center of the plate. Lift the celery salad mixture with your hands, drain excess liquid back into the bowl, and place the mixture over the aioli in a flat circular motion, ensuring that it completely covers the aioli.
Add a thin layer of pecorino cheese over the salad and add as much or as little as you like, as the saying goes, “make it rain”. (At restaurants, cheese is sprinkled all over the salad.) Drizzle lemon verbena oil over the top and serve immediately.