Old Dog
Heirloom Rustic Ales
December 30, 2024
If old dogs don’t do new tricks, then why am I confused about a mozzarella stick?
On the evening of December 30, the parking lot at Heirloom Rustic Ales hosted the debut of Old Dog, a Thai-ish food pop-up by chefs Erik Fabriz and Garett Lewis, whose food you may already know from their time at Et Al. I arrived about an hour after Old Dog opened for business to a line of 10 or so people, an early show of support they may or may not have anticipated. The line snaked even longer across the lot by the time I made it to the front.
They seemed just slightly in the startup weeds when I ordered, warning me of a wait for the zabb fried chicken as chef Lewis worked to bring an extra vat of oil to temp to keep up with demand. Zabb (rice powder, lemongrass, Makrut lime) is a seasoning I have waited years for, as I’ve not seen it on any food in Oklahoma not made by chef Fabriz, so an extra 20 minutes felt like small penance. (Fabriz formerly worked with James Beard Award-winning chef Andy Ricker of the Pok Pok restaurants, whose tremendously influential regional Thai food introduced new flavors to several cities across the U.S. before the closure of all locations in 2020.)
If you could distill Thai cuisine to a powder, it would be zabb: sweet, salty, sour, spicy. A choir of “Wait, what did I just eat?” ringing on your tongue for minutes after taking a bite. I was surprised that the dominant flavor to me on the zabb chicken sandwich, then, was the caramelized onion chile jam slathered on the bun. The jam was crispy with bits of fried onion and just the right amount of bitter, spicy but only just. It’s also worth noting I took the food to go, and the chicken was still crunchy, the sandwich still sturdy after a short car ride home.
The muu waan (sweet pork) som tum (papaya salad) entree was sweet on sweet on sour, with the almost jerky-like shredded pork served over steamed coconut jasmine rice. Each bite totally needed the papaya salad which, frankly, rocked. It was tart and crunchy, fresh and spicy … way spicier than anticipated, which sent me right back to the coconut rice. A satisfying trick. I ate it so quickly that I also accidentally ate a whole garlic clove, and nearly ate a whole Thai chile that had escaped its fate in the mortar and pestle. Subtlety is not the name of the flavor game at Old Dog. Keep your eyes peeled.
But I did not accidentally eat an entire Thai chile, so the bite I am still thinking about and am not sure I can communicate completely via written word is the curry cream cheese mozz stick. I’ve already waxed on here about my love of khao soi, a dish I seek out because I have no idea how to replicate it at home. Old Dog doubled down on my blind spot by incorporating fresh khao soi curry paste into a cream cheese mozzarella stick, an idea I have never heard of and would never have thought of and also don’t know how they accomplished.
It, too, was still remarkably crunchy on the outside and hot on the inside when I got home despite being the size of a fast food egg roll and likely containing close to a half pound of cheese. I’ve made mozzarella sticks before, and it’s not easy to construct them in a way that prevents the cheese from leaking during the fry. This one had excellent cheese pull, excellent curry-flavored cheese goo, nothing spilling out.
My partner said of the texture, “If you had told me that wasn’t real cheese, I would have believed you. In a good way.”
It also manifested in me a very real concern that I won’t be able to get my hands on another one (three) for a while. It felt like a little reward for me spending too much time poking around on Instagram, which is where you’ll find details about the next Old Dog pop-up on January 13 and others like and totally unlike it from other area chefs. If you go, get there early. By the time I’d unboxed everything for a photo at home, it was barely dark outside, and back at Heirloom, Old Dog had already sold out.
