House of the rising son: It’s very rare for star chef Ari to cook at home anymore. (photograph by michael persico)

Supper Club

Chef Ari Weiswasser cooks at home with Mom.

by Mara Zepeda

Eileen Weiswasser is reviewing the recipe for rouille, a sauce that often accompanies bouillabaisse. The recipe is written in precise cursive handwriting and, between the soup and sauce, spans three pages.

It comes from Jan Gresch, an avid cook who taught the Good Cooks Cooking Class, which Weiswasser attended weekly for more than a decade. It’s an incredibly detailed recipe and includes instructions like “cook on high for six minutes and 30 seconds.” Weiswasser meditates on the rouille: Process the eggs, yolks, salt, oil and dry mustard to create homemade mayonnaise. Then the additional ingredients—olive oil, hot sauce, white wine vinegar, fish stock. “This isn’t what I do … I’ve created shortcuts. I’ve learned how to simplify things.” She’s managed to abridge the recipe down to four ingredients.

We’re standing in the home kitchen of her son Ari, head chef at the recently opened Pearl, a pan-Asian spot up the street from his Center City condo. If Eileen has worked to simplify and streamline these last few years, Ari has learned the opposite in the kitchens of Restaurant Daniel, Striped Bass and Le Bec-Fin.

He experiments with obscure Asian ingredients and calls on a network of friends in the business for advice on employing complex chemical compounds to create miniature balls of melon caviar or infused foams. But today Ari and his mother have decided to tackle bouillabaisse—not the version served at Pearl with kaffir lime and coconut rice, but the traditional recipe of his childhood.

Outside the city swelters at 98 degrees. Inside it’s a cool 67, and Ari and Eileen are hard at work over a pot of simmering saffron-scented broth. Ari tosses in mussels, clams, cockles, king prawns and hunks of red snapper and watches carefully for the shells to open. “This is the first time I’ve used this stove,” says Ari, “and I moved in in March.”

It seems that the days of home cooking are far behind Ari (as evidenced by the Chinese takeout containers in his fridge) and his mother (who prefers to go out), so this afternoon’s lunch pays homage to years gone by when “the kitchen was the center of our household,” as Ari remembers it. He recalls his mother making gazpacho, paella and tuna tartar, or introducing skeptical friends from school to artichokes and blini and caviar. Now it’s his mother’s turn to be impressed by her son’s culinary skills.

She’s watched Ari’s ascension in the restaurant industry from the front row. “The first time I saw him in a torque I started to cry,” says Eileen. She remembers “how much better he chopped” when Ari came home on vacation from the Culinary Institute of America. She recalls amassing ingredients for two weeks straight to fulfill his Thanksgiving dinner shopping list.

She dines at Pearl on a biweekly basis. During a tour at Restaurant Daniel the chef himself said to her, “Thank you for sharing your son with me.” Eileen is getting used to sharing her son, now with Philadelphia diners lining up to experience the Vietnamese short ribs and yuzu cheesecake with a fortune cookie crust.

But for today it feels right to leave behind the bustle and din of the trendy restaurant and enjoy a comforting bowl of Provençal broth and crusty French bread topped with tangy homemade rouille.