Goat Brains and Veal Kidneys Now Cost an Arm and a Leg

Chintan Pandya gets excited when he talks about cooking with offal but not so much about the escalating prices. “We single-handedly fucked the price of goat brains in the city,” says the chef behind award-winning, always-packed restaurants like Dhamaka and Semma. When Pandya first served goat brains at the original Long Island City location of Adda in 2018, the price was $4.99 a pound; these days, at the reimagined version of the restaurant in the East Village, he’s paying closer to $12 a pound.

For Pandya, offcuts like goat kidneys and lamb testicles (which he stews together in a rich broth at Dhamaka) were once friendly entries on the P&L sheet. But the economics of offal have changed in recent years. Their popularity has risen, and so have prices, which are now edging closer to prime cuts of meat. But the chefs who love them, and who cook for diners that will happily order them, remain undeterred. Pandya simply shoulders the added expense: “It’s not about the pricing. It’s about the philosophy.”

About a year and a half ago, E. Alex Jung wondered whether New York had entered a new golden age for offal, making the case that intestine, trotters, and “bouncy opaque pieces of knee cartilage” were all signs of a gnarly-bits renaissance. Since then, the list of spots selling this kind of cooking has only grown: chilled beef-tendon “salad” at I Cavallini, sweetbreads with risotto at Borgo, sweetbreads with mushrooms at the new iteration of Fedora, and an entire offal flight at the rejuvenated Le Veau d’Or in midtown, where owners Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr wanted to honor the restaurant’s legacy with rustic French preparations of kidneys, sweetbreads, and calf’s liver. “Instead of having to debate which one to put on the menu,” Nasr says, “we decided to put all three together on one dish.” The result became a signature: Les Délices “Veau d’Or” — a trio of organ meats served in mustard sauce enriched with veal stock. (The menu also regularly features recipes like tripe à la mode and calf’s brains with lemon butter and chanterelles, inspired by Le Baratin in Paris.)

Of course, not all offal preparations are throwbacks to time-worn bistro recipes. At Bridges, Sam Lawrence serves sweetbreads with rose-pink lamb chops and charges $44 for the plate. “Right now, sweetbreads are one of the most expensive meats I purchase for the menu,” Lawrence says. He buys his sweetbreads mainly from small purveyors in upstate New York, and prices have reached as high as $22 a pound, on par with other beef and pork he serves. “The availability of good offal is better than it ever has been,” he points out, so the quality helps justify the expense, as does the ceremony of serving it: “There’s been a shift toward a sense of occasion and a sense of opulence and, with that in mind, offal has a place.”

Sweetbreads in particular are not only prohibitively expensive, but they also require a multiday prep process that involves cleaning, soaking, poaching, and peeling before they’re ready for service — further compounding labor costs.

At Le Chêne in the West Village, chef Alexia Duchêne’s version of foie gras Lucullus — a layered terrine of fatty liver and braised beef tongue — takes four days to prepare. “We wanted to showcase foie gras, something that is ultraluxurious and obviously expensive, but in a way that’s accessible,” she says.

Even if the return on investment can be low, selling any offal gives chefs a sense of satisfaction. At Pitt’s in Red Hook, where chef Jeremy Salamon serves cornmeal-dusted sweetbreads with Lady Edison Ham from North Carolina, single-digit unit sales on any given night feel like a win. “We have 30-day dry-aged rib eye on the menu for $90. I sold 17 of them in one night,” Salamon says. “But I’m much more excited when we sell sweetbreads, even when we don’t sell nearly as many.”

Related

• How This New Golden Age of Offal First Began