Gold Cash Gold to feature seasonal 'farmstead cuisine'

Corktown's handsome Gold Cash Gold will open for dinner Saturday with a menu that is strictly seasonal, local, hand-crafted — and inspired by the way farmers around the world grow and prepare their food.

"Whether you're in Tennessee or the south of France or the countryside in Italy or even in Vietnam — in any farm that's there, you raise your own animals, you grow your own food and you use everything," says chef Josh Stockton, 31. "Nothing goes to waste. ... That's how I was raised cooking."

The words "local" and "seasonal" are thrown around too easily these days, but Stockton takes them so seriously, he calls his cooking "farmstead cuisine."

Some of the plates will look simple, he says, but "a lot of time and energy went into the food. You see a finished sausage on the plate, but we got a whole pig in, broke that down, cured it, ground it and stuffed it, and it finally made it to the plate."

The menu will be brief — about 14 items out of some 30 that he will rotate on and off the menu — and prices will be moderate. His most expensive dish is the braised short ribs, priced at around $21. A fried chicken plate with half a chicken, homemade cornbread and hot sauce gravy will be about $16, he says.

Shelves of canning jars filled with his house-made pickles line the dining room wall, suggestive of all the pickles, jams, vinaigrettes and sauces he makes — not only for flavor's sake, but to avoid wasting good, usable ingredients.

Take his braised pork cheeks in green-chili stew: The seeds weren't needed in the stew and were about to be thrown out, along with the stems. Instead, he said, "we pureed them with white vinegar to make a sauce that's not even all that hot. It's just this nice, funky hot sauce that's made with leftovers."

That philosophy of using existing materials rather than wasting them is evident throughout the restaurant — literally from floor to ceiling — in a renovation and design executed by Phil Cooley and his sister-in-law, Meghan McEwen, both part of the Cooley family, owners of the building.

The beautifully crafted ceiling is fabricated from narrow strips of wooden lath, which were salvaged from the walls of the former pawn shop where Gold Cash Gold is located. (The restaurant's name was part of the pawn shop signage and is so iconically Detroit, it was even used by an early 2000s Detroit rock band.)

The honey-colored dining room floor was taken apart board by board from a Detroit school that was about to be bulldozed and was reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle — preserving the image of a huge eagle painted on the wood.

The rustic stained-glass panels on the dining room wall and elsewhere were once warehouse windows, rewelded by Cooley himself, using glass made and fitted by his father-in-law. Brass chandeliers came from an auction house.

And the wooden benches along the walls were factory beams, salvaged and refinished by Cooley at the Ponyride community industrial center nearby. The beams are so massive, a truck would have been needed to move them, but the cooks pushed them through the streets on wheeled platforms to the restaurant, the chef says.

Moving to Detroit from Las Vegas to open Gold Cash Gold is a homecoming for Stockton — a chef's son who grew up in Warren and graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in New York.

His career since then has included jobs at the Michelin-starred Daniel Boulud Brasserie in Las Vegas; work at the world-famous Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, where he practiced butchery and charcuterie, and most recently as executive sous chef at Allegro restaurant at the Wynn hotel, again in Las Vegas.

But one of his earliest culinary influences, he says, was his grandfather's farm in Tennessee, where he and his family went for holidays from the time he was a small child. "It was a working farm, with hundreds of heads of cattle and pigs and turkeys, a smoke house, a canning house, everything." It's where he first learned that "you use what's available and what's around you," he says.

Other members of the Gold Cash Gold team are sous chef Adam Verville, former chef at St. Cece's in Corktown; sous chef Reid Shipman, former chef de cuisine at The Stand in Birmingham, and baker Natalie Zarzour, who was assistant pastry chef at Longman & Eagle in Chicago before joining Gold Cash Gold.

Zarzour will head a bread program "we are taking very seriously," Stockton said. Zarzour will bake five breads fresh daily, including three designed for a special daily bread basket served with three house-made spreads for $5.

When the restaurant opens, Stockton hopes customers will be willing to share dishes and tastes with their companions — the way virtually every chef does.

"When I go out to eat with three other people, we order six or seven things and everybody shares and tries them all. It's not an appetizer-entrée sort of thing, so we're trying to promote that" sharing around the table, he says.

"Hopefully, over time, people will try our style," but they can order in any way they choose, he says. "Too many chefs forget that you're here to serve the guests."

The restaurant will open Saturday and Sunday for dinner only and begin serving both lunch and dinner Tuesday, Stockton said. Both meals will be served daily except Mondays, when the restaurant will be closed. Reservations will be accepted only for parties of eight or more, Stockton said. (2100 Michigan; 313-242-0770 and www.goldcashgolddetroit.com)

Contact Sylvia Rector: 313-222-5026 and srector@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @SylviaRector.