Chicken liver mousse is Philly’s latest restaurant menu hit
Could it be that the culinary sleeper hit of 2023 is…chicken liver mousse?
This winter, the hearty, velvety spread seems to be ubiquitous. At Gass and Main in Haddonfield, Peanut Butter is substituted in for a game of disguise involving ants on a log. It’s poured into hearty cannoli bowls at Fishtown’s Tulip Pasta & Wine Bar. At Ambergris in Queen Village, it’s formed into a ball and dipped in cocoa butter.
In some restaurants it anchors a composed toast, like in a kitchen where it’s spread on country bread, drizzled with pear mustard, and then topped with pine nuts and smoked dates. But in far more places, it’s easy to be a go-to variable in a sweet/sour+savory+bread equation. A little taste: Cry Baby Pasta (fig mostarda, pistachios); Ember & Ash (brioche, pickles); Abe Fisher (rye toast, pickles); Bar Hygge (roasted foccacia, pickled red onion); and Spring Mill Cafe (baguettes, gherkins).
Chicken liver mousse is nothing new in Philadelphia. It has graced menus since at least the 1970s and gained prominence in the ’00s. By 2019, it was the recurring star on Craig LaBan’s Favorite Liver Dishes list. (Nick Elmi, please bring back ITV’s Chicken Liver Mousse Stroopwafel!)
But mousse’s current dominance seems to eclipse that peak of the late 2010s. Why? Some cooks point to inflation.
“It’s a pretty affordable menu item that you can pull on without losing your tail like everything else,” says chef Lee Styer, who serves chicken liver mousse on The Dutch’s dinner menu, which has been on the menu for over 12 years since its predecessor , fund.
Styer browns apples, onions, rosemary, and thyme in bacon fat, deglazes the pan with brandy, then sears the chicken livers. He purees them with cream and then pushes them through a fine sieve. The key to its silky texture is barely cooking the liver. “Well-done livers tend to be gritty and grainy,” he says.
The mousse was on the Fond’s opening menu in 2009 and became one of the restaurant’s mainstays — so much so that it stayed on even when the East Passyunk Avenue spot changed its concept. “People still come for it.”
A customer favourite
Across town in Rittenhouse, another mousse has been on the menu since day one, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. There, chicken livers soaked in milk are mixed with slow-cooked onions, garlic, butter, and cream. Puffs of mousse liberally adorned with apple butter and mustard seeds sit atop toasted squares of brioche. The bar menu morsel has exceptional staying power due to its popularity.
“We brought back three items post-COVID,” says Chef Chad Williams. “We were had have.”
Williams put the mousse on the restaurant’s opening menu to honor its place in his culinary memory. “When you start cooking, you eat some things that you’re not familiar with that really blow your mind,” he says. The chicken liver mousse at DC’s former Cashion’s Eat Place was one of them.
“Before I started cooking, I wasn’t really an adventurous eater,” he recalls. “That was one [dish] it just seemed so delicious. It should be repulsive, but it’s amazing.”
While some chefs relish the deep, tongue-in-cheek “original deliciousness” Williams describes, others just can’t.
“I hate chicken liver mousse,” explains Bloomsday chef Kelsey Bush.
But Bush was persuaded to put it on the Bloomsday menu after front-of-house staff asked for it. Also, poultry supplier Earl Keizer brings in livers whether he wants them or not, Bush says, so “it’s a great waste stream product.”
The deal was sealed when sous chef Jared Witt stepped in to prepare the mousse. “He does it just like his grandmother did,” Bush says. Witt soaks the livers in buttermilk to remove any metallic flavor, then sear, emulsify with butter, and strain until completely smooth. A quenelle mousse comes with rotating pickled side dishes (“something spicy and fruity”) and Merzbacher bread.
Though she’s still not a fan, Bush has found something to love about chicken liver mousse. It “can be this hip, avant-garde, fashionable thing, or it can be that thing that grandma made for you.”
A hearty treat
Chef Chris D’Ambro is taking the avant-garde route at Ambra, Southwark’s sibling’s tasting menu restaurant, where mousse and toast have been a staple since 2016. But D’Ambro and longtime sous chef Ryan LaFrance wanted to push boundaries, so in 2017 they began developing something different: a chicken liver candy. It was inspired by chef Dominique Crenn’s Kir Breton Amuse Bouche, a cocktail cleverly encased in a cocoa butter shell.
D’Ambro and LaFrance adapted this technique for what is essentially a “liver lollipop”. It’s a three-day process that begins with baking mashed Primal Supply livers in a water bath — to preserve their pink color — and then squirting them into spherical shapes. Half of each ball gets a candied pistachio, the other is filled with beet agrodolce. They’re chilled, mashed on a skewer, then dipped in cocoa butter with a little beet juice (accidentally added first) for flare.
The candy has evolved since its debut in 2017, but the same principle has always been anchored. “You want the texture to break up that creaminess, and you always want some sweetness and some acidity — to create that one bite without using a piece of toast,” says D’Ambro.
Still, there’s something undeniably satisfying about chicken liver mousse on toast — especially one with the luxuriously airy texture it has at Redcrest Kitchen, where Chef Evan Snyder whips up the mousse every half hour. “I get a bit neurotic,” he says.
Snyder channeled childhood in a recent Toast, a mashup of PB&J and ants on a log. A generous layer of mousse on a thick slice of brioche is topped with Concord grape jelly, pickled celery and crushed smoked peanuts. The livers themselves are cooked with “tons of port…a ton of garlic and shallots, a ton of butter, a good amount of cream.” It’s no wonder it’s delicious.
Chicken liver mousse for Snyder has a nostalgia, a connection to the chopped liver he reluctantly ate as a child. “In my head I was like, ‘If only I could make this chopped liver tastier…'” he says. “Cooking fine dining teaches you how to make things that you didn’t particularly enjoy growing up taste much better.”
And that’s perhaps another reason why this simple, hearty treat is on so many menus today: it warms us up for what’s to come.
As Chad Williams says, “You don’t start them with tripe. You start them with chicken liver and that softens them.”