Charlie Palmer’s Pork Belly with Melon TRY THESE R&I RECIPES: Apricot-Stuffed Loin of Pork Arepas de Puerco Asian Barbequed Pork Loin with Stir-Fried Vegetables Bacon Wrapped Pork Tenderloin Baked Ham with Spicy Honey-Butter Glaze Baked Pork Chop, Walnut – Dried Cherry Stuffing Barbecued Pork Smokehouse Cuban-style Sandwich Barbecued Pork Tortillas BBQ Braised Fresh Pork Belly BBQ Pulled Pork Braised Pork Belly With Fresh Shell Bean Ragoût >> Search for more

That’s why he now chuckles as he reflects on the popularity of the rich braised meat served at Crop Bistro & Bar, Schimoler’s restaurant in Cleveland.

“We now sell a ton of pork belly,” Schimoler says. “This current one on the menu, crisped belly with onion caramel and sweet-corn and red-pepper sauce, it’s flying off the menu. And here’s the thing: It has great yield, great food cost, and people can’t get enough of it.”

Chefs who are passionate about pork and creative with their preparations of it find that guests are more willing to play along now than in the past. “It’s encouraging to see our customer base embracing alternative cuts of meat and understanding that a pork loin [cooked to medium] is totally OK,” Schimoler says.

Making pork dishes enticing is a matter of creating excitement around the protein, says Jeffrey Fuelo.

A few years ago as executive chef for a corporate dining client of Gaithersburg, M.D.-based Sodexo, Fuelo gave pork chops a Thai twist. He coated butterflied chops with a paste of garlic, lemongrass, fish sauce, cilantro and oil, and then added a peanut-panko breading. “It is a good but not extremely technical product—it’s relatively simple to produce,” he says of the dish’s virtues.

Today, Fuelo is a regional chef with Northborough, Mass.-based Bertucci’s Brick Oven Ristorante. In casual dining, Fuelo remarks, items such as pork belly are still a few years away from the menu. Yet that, too, might change—slowly.

“We’re talking about pork shank and pork belly and over time, the acceptance will be there,” he says. “It really has to do with taste. And if it tastes good, people will buy it.”

Pork aficionados can be found in unexpected places, as Executive Chef Amar Santana discovered when he opened Charlie Palmer at Bloomingdale’s South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Calif.

Chef Ulrich Koberstein offers braised pig cheeks at The Immigrant Room at The American Club in Kohler, Wis.

“When I sat down with Charlie to go over the menu, he said, 'I don’t know how that’s going to sell,’” recalls Santana. “[He added] 'The pork belly, you can try it, but good luck. If it doesn’t work out, you can always change it.’”

It turned out that local diners willingly embraced pork not only in the pork-belly appetizer but also in Santana’s assortment of house-cured salumi.

Part of the dish’s success rests in its careful preparation. Santana soaks the meat in a brine comprising water, salt, citrus juices, spices and bay leaves. He leaves out sugar, finding that it causes the pork to brown too quickly. The belly is vacuum-sealed in a plastic bag, cooked for 48 hours at 59C (about 138F), cooled completely with a weight on top to compress the meat and then portioned into 4-ounce pieces. Portions are seared slowly, skin-side-down, for 45 minutes before service until the skin is thin and crispy. To order, the skin is recrisped in the salamander.

Recipe: Sous-Vide Pork Belly

Renewed interest in pork as a versatile, flavorful meat coincides with a drive among some chefs to buy whole, locally raised pigs to butcher in-house.

“Pork of the Day” is an entrée listed on the menu at Chez Pascal, a dinner-only restaurant in Providence, R.I. Every two weeks, Chef and co-owner Matt Gennuso purchases a 170-pound pig—the basis for the daily changing pork dishes he prepares.

To ensure that the endeavor stays financially viable, Gennuso needs to use the entire animal. He serves cuts from the popular midsection—loin, rib chops and loin chops—marinated and grilled. But when serving the rest of the animal, the kitchen needs to use a little more imagination, he says.

Chez Pascal’s Chef/co-owner Matt Gennuso buys a pig every two weeks and makes the most of every part of the animal, including the delectable belly.

With respect to the legs, some become part of Gennuso’s prosciutto-making experiments. Others are brined, grilled and served sliced with house-made sausage [see sidebar]. Head and trotters are simmered in stocks to impart body to the liquid. Shoulder and fatback are ground for sausages. Spareribs, which will be smoked or braised, are frozen until Gennuso has enough of an inventory to put them on the menu.

Andy Little, executive chef at Sheppard Mansion in Hanover, Pa., also is familiar with the particular challenges a chef faces with when purchasing the whole hog, particularly when one pig yields only about 10 to 12 orders of loin and 16 chops.

“You can’t call your supplier and say, 'I need 40 pounds of pork loin,’” Little explains. “Everything we have is coming in fresh, but sometimes we have to be more creative.”

He cures bellies for bacon and the legs for ham (he purchases peanut-fed hogs to try to recreate the taste of classic Southern ham). For dishes, he tries to put something familiar on the plate that customers are familiar with and pair it with something a little less familiar. For example, a braised cheek might be tucked underneath a slice of loin.

“As long as there is some kind of flavor memory for them, they’re going to be willing to try it,” Little says.