Back of the House: Josh Coletto Keeps It Real, Local
Josh Coletto’s dinners are utterly identical in their distinctness. Whether he serves them at home to his partner and baby girl, to hungry upstaters in his new gig as chef at Nighthawks, or at culinary adventurers at one of the dozens of legendary pop-ups he’s curated in the past few years, each one is an edible snowflake. Some of the same essential ingredients are there, but they’re each their own distinct, artful little universe.
“I can’t do anything related to food without completely obsessing over it,” Josh admits. He gathered a well-fed following at high-concept pop-ups in recent years, several of which took place at Troy’s Peck’s Arcade, and he hopes to replicate the vibe and spirit he cultivated at the series and provide service in an everyday format so “everyone can experience local, seasonal food that’s affordable.”
“I’m trying to bring the atmosphere of the popup to an every day spot,” he says. “But I want to make it accessible, so in addition to hosting special events and the occasional curated pop-up, we’ll also have a burger on the menu all the time and a takeout type of menu.”
Translating his vision into reality will be challenging. (As of press time, Nighthawks got its first delivery, one large cow, whole, from Mariaville Farm in Delanson, but had not yet opened its doors to customers.) Visitors to his pop-up series stumbled through space and time, into one of Frida Kahlo’s (in)famous, raucous but impeccably polished dinner parties with Diego Rivera, Trotsky and their many acolytes in Mexico City circa 1937.
But to Josh, it was just Cena Familiar, or Family Dinner, thrown for community members willing to sacrifice several hours and a modest fee ($75) for a multicourse meal plus beverages created around whatever theme enchanted and inspired him.
Cena Familiar felt impromptu in the best possible way but was clearly meticulously planned for months. Diners found pitchers of wine and rum-based cocktails made herbaceous with foraged sumac, goose and chicken liver tamales with lobster mushrooms, meltingly tender slices of beef tongue, tortillas to wrap around an aged, roasted boars leg, green salads made riotously colorful and fragrant with handfuls of edible flowers, charred cabbage slaw, pickled blackened spicy-sweet peppers, refried cranberry beans, beets and their greens in cream.
Platters of local melons, shortbread cookies with spoonfuls of dulce de leche flowing down their buttery sides, tres leches flan floating in an ocean of caramel.
Food was shared at a long table, community style. Running water burbled in the background. Unhusked ground-cherries and radishes with their greens as centerpieces. Plates passed down a shared long table. Artfully mismatched platters and bowls. Tales of torrid affairs, illness, the search for the meaning of life, the exchange of sausage-making tips, moans about issues with grant writers. Love, sex, pain, art, snacks, bureaucracy. Twinkle lights.
Can Josh’s high-concept culinary aspirations really go low(er)-budget? Well, it worked for Andy Warhol. And Josh’s work in general has long been a distilled version of a very specific, urbane and ideological approach to cooking, serving and eating food. It feels very contemporary but is rooted in the past. Maybe this is just the next step in its evolution.
“Everything I do, every cooking project I get involved with is with the hopes of bringing people closer together,” Josh says recently over an aromatic, complicated, locally roasted caffeinated concoction at Little Pecks (Peck Arcade’s daytime coffee bar.) “I think communities function better for everyone, especially kids, that way. And a big component of that is supporting local businesses. Every ingredient that can be local, is local. And I make every element myself when I can.”
Josh’s culinary activities are followed closely by a certain contingent of locally minded foodies, but for better or for worse, he hasn’t stayed in one place for long (until now, we hope). He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 2007 and moved out to Oregon to live with his best friend and do the whole early 20s punk-rock thing.
“It was great,” Josh admits, throwing up his hands. “We were young so we didn’t really care where we were sleeping. I toured around playing with a few bands, sleeping on floors, traveling for free to places I’d never been and being fed. It was strange, but wonderful while it lasted.”
He returned to his home base in New York to continue the punkrock thing and extend it to the kitchen. To Josh, separating his strict ideas about how food should be grown, sourced and cooked from his job is anathema. “I’d rather not work in food than agree to use food that isn’t grown locally,” he says.
There have been numerous culinary stages on which he’s performed to acclaim, some of the most notable being the late, lamented and dearly beloved Flying Chicken in Troy (where he helped establish some of their award-winning fried chicken recipes), as a cheesemaker at Old Chatham Sheepherding Company and as the maestro of the late, lamented and dearly beloved Rock N Roll Brunch at the Low Beat in Albany. He also ran cookouts at the Cheese Traveler on Fridays when the weather was nice in Albany and masterminded various warmly received pop-ups around the Capital District.
But, like any punk act worth its sweaty salt, Josh’s stints either ended due to creative differences (and no, he would not share any juicy details with me) or to a successful performer’s instinct to leave right when fans were at their most deliriously exalted.
While Josh’s culinary M.O. has had an undeniable impact on several beloved culinary outposts in the district, one has had an indelible impact on him.
“I worked with Raleigh Werberger over at the Darrow School,” Josh says, of the 365-acre school in New Lebanon in Massachusetts, on the site of the original Mount Lebanon Shaker Village. The private school focuses on experiential learning and sustainability, in all of its forms. “We worked together on a program called the Unhappy Meal. The concept was to deconstruct the McDonald’s Happy Meal and re-create it from scratch. With the high schoolers, we hatched chickens, fed them, butchered them and made every last bit of the meal, down to the bread. It was an amazing experience watching them understand that they helped nurture these creatures that now are giving us life and food.”
In addition to working on the Unhappy Meal project (the experience of which Werberger turned into a book, From Project-Based Learning to Artistic Thinking ), he coached kids through the process of preparing lunch for the entire school, worked with foreign-born students on re-creating their country’s culinary traditions for their classmates and guided kids through the process of growing, slaughtering and cooking their own food.
“These kids went from not being able to scramble an egg to eating pig brain,” Josh says. “The kids are the future, obviously, so having the opportunity to work with them and help them understand our deep connection to the people and animals who grow and produce our food has been a great gift.”
That point was driven home when he and his partner, Cait Denny, wilderness educator and director of the Chatham Children’s Garden, welcomed a daughter, Yarrow Helix Denny-Coletto, on July 28, 2017.
And the introduction of Yarrow added layers of joy and responsibility to Josh’s life, perhaps helping to make him ready to trade the transitory delight of pop-ups for a more permanent, rooted position at Nighthawks, which Howard Glassman, who owns the Low Beat, is funding.
“We want to do market, seasonal food for the upstate market,” Josh says. “So everything will be handmade, local and constantly changing, depending on what’s available from our farmers. We’ll use whole animals, every bit.”
At one recent Cena Familiar, the meat from the boar leg, braised whole and finished over hardwood smoke and an open fire, eaten in Josh’s from-scratch tamales with lashings of handmade salsa and pickled veg, tasted like the forest it once ran in, the fallen apples it foraged, rich and succulent like the cream it lapped up from the farm down the road. It tasted like wildness. Like flames.
A little dangerous. Surrounded by laughter, with a chaser of beer. Is this what food really is? Not always. But perhaps it should be. And now—lucky us—we won’t have to wait for the next pop-up for a taste.
Nighthawks | @nighthawkstroy
Peck’s Arcade | @pecksarcade
Mariaville Farm | @mariaville_farm
Little Pecks | @littlepecks
Culinary Institute of America | @theculinaryinstituteofamerica
Old Chatham Sheepherding Company
Low Beat | @thelowbeat
Cheese Traveler | @thecheesetraveler
Darrow School
From Project-Based Learning to Artistic Thinking
