As a kid, Wyatt Piazza connected with the natural world by helping his dad out in the family vegetable garden. He holds dear the memories of foraging with him in the woods of Vermont during summer vacations.
In his work as a chef today, Piazza creates vegetable-forward recipes for Kiddo, the restaurant he and his wife, Elizabeth Drake, opened last year in Washington Square West. The pair agrees that it isn’t enough if a dish looks, smells and tastes good; it must also make the world a better place. At Kiddo, food strengthens ties between the Earth, the local community and Pennsylvania producers. Earlier this year it was ranked as the number five top new restaurant in the country by USA Today.
Piazza and Drake met while studying at Cornell University. “We actually met working in a restaurant — of course,” Drake says. And they knew that they wanted to open their own restaurant one day. They were drawn to “the nexus between food and the environment,” Drake says. “Food [is] the thing that connects us to the Earth almost more than anything else.”
Partnerships with Honey Brook Harvest Collective, Kneehigh Farm, Hill Creek Farm and Horse Shoe Ranch, among others, fuel the pair’s mission to weave sustainability into every plate served.
Kneehigh Farm delivers fresh produce boxes each week for both the kitchen and community members who pick up their orders at the restaurant. Their menu varies to accommodate the changing seasons and availability at local farms; they recently received 300 non-GMO, free-range guinea fowl from a Honey Brook grower — on a hand-shake agreement — for the dinner menu.
Although some customers expected a vegan menu, Piazza and Drake focus on making each dish adaptable for any diet. Piazza begins with a vegan base and doesn’t make non-vegan ingredients essential to most dishes. For example, on the brunch menu, a homemade sourdough muffin with smoked chestnut mushrooms, tomato jam, basil pesto and a side of house potatoes is perfectly delicious with or without a sunny-side egg on top. Including complex textures in each dish is a hallmark of Piazza’s cooking.
“I’m really happy a place like this exists,” says Kiddo regular Allyson Hardy, who likes the importance the staff places on vegetables and sustainability. She dines often with her fiancé, who is vegetarian and doesn’t drink alcohol. “We trust the bar to make him something fun,” she says. “It’s nice that we both feel so taken care of.”
Piazza and his staff work hard to make sure nothing goes to waste; leftover apple bits from a tempura Honeycrisp dish, for example, are used to make an apple shrub for the bar. And whatever can’t be cross-utilized goes into the compost bin collected by Circle Compost.
Kiddo was named after an experience Piazza had while managing a culinary garden in California. One day, a child ran up to a giant Berkeley tie-dye tomato — red with green stripes; he picked the tomato and shoved his face into it. Juice was running everywhere, Piazza says. The tomato passed the taste test, and Piazza says that kiddo’s enthusiasm stayed with him.
“I do this because I love it,” Piazza says. “It just pours out of me from my life and my experience. The food and the dishes, I put everything that I have into it. And I’m really blessed that people like that.”
