When you eat a meal at chef Taylor Knapp’s longtime North Fork pop-up dinner series, PawPaw, it’s advisable to set aside all your garden-variety notions of what it means to dine out.
Not because it’s weird — it’s not. Or that it won’t be enjoyable — it truly, truly is. It’s just not your average, or even far above-average, continental hit parade of plates du jour. Although the du jour part? That’s kind of the crux of the whole thing.
With his penchant for local partnerships with growers like Condzella’s Farm, Bayview Farms, North Fork Fresh Eggs, Crescent Duck Farms, 8 Hands, KK’s the Farm, Deep Roots and Treiber, and weekly foraging treks to the woods, thickets, fields and shores of the East End, more often than not Knapp doesn’t even know what the Saturday menu will be until the morning of that week’s PawPaw.
“PawPaw doesn’t chase trends or attention,” says Leslie Merinoff, owner of Matchbook Distilling and The Lin Beach House, both in Greenport, where PawPaw dinners have been served monthly for half a decade. “Taylor is sharing his view of the North Fork through his food. It’s so genuine. It’s so delicious and so nourishing. You can taste how much he loves to cook for you.”
You might eat things you’ve never tried, or — even better — try them in Knapp’s utterly reimagined, thoroughly playful presentation. Through his work and skill, he captures a sliver of a season that only exists in a particular moment in time, once a week and for only 20 guests.
It’s fleeting and beautiful and fun — approachable because, well, you’d be hard-pressed to find a meal that’s not centered or accented by tastes you know, but it will always be a splendid spark and awakening to your tastebuds. You might not be able to identify everything on your plate or in the multi-course evening that unfolds, but the smells and tastes will haunt you deliciously like a voice you recognize but can’t quite place. But after 10 years of doing this, alone in the kitchen dinner after dinner, is Knapp’s enthusiasm for his pop-up deflating? Not even a quarter teaspoon.
First Fruit
It’s kind of funny that the Greenwood, Ind.,-born chef named his decade-long pop-up after a fruit that’s not in great East End proliferation, to say the least (although his resourcefulness has indeed led him to two precious local sources).
“It used to be this thing — I’d tell people, well, we’re named after it, and it’s really yummy, but I can’t get it for you, and it’s never gonna be on our menu,” Knapp laughs. “But now I can tell people, ‘Come back in September and we’ll have fresh pawpaw on the menu.’ And, you know, that’s fun.”
It all goes back to the grandfather who would become his greatest culinary influence. Even though Knapp has landed celeb-stage stints with progressive, internationally lauded chefs like Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 in Manhattan, René Redzepi of Copenhagen’s Noma and Alinea’s Grant Achazt in Chicago, a wooded swathe of land that belonged to his grandad is where he found his calling.
“He was always getting us to eat these unusual things,” says Knapp, “which is where the whole pawpaw thing came from. He was an Eagle Scout, so he did a lot of foraging. He knew how to find mushrooms and could identify plants and leaves and trees. He did a little bit of hunting, some fishing. He was an outdoorsy man, for sure. He was probably the biggest food influence that I had in my life.”
His grandfather had a piece of property out in the country. It had a small trailer for shelter, a little pond and a thick spread of woods where the Knapp kids would pluck morels, wild American persimmons and, his favorite, pawpaws. “We would go as kids, me and my siblings, and we would hike and fish and all of that good stuff,” the chef recalls. “And one of the things that we would do is we would go and pick pawpaws.”
Indiana is so smack dab in the middle of prolific pawpaw land that the fruit is sometimes known there as the Indiana banana, a moniker that touches on both its geographic hotspot and hints at its wonderfully oddball tropical nature.
“The pawpaw is the largest indigenous fruit in the U.S. — it kind of looks like a mango, and it grows wild all over the Midwest through Pennsylvania,” Knapp says. “When you taste it, you definitely get banana and mango. I think it’s also got this kind of funk to it, almost like a very, very mild durian — an intoxicating, cheesy funk. It’s hard to describe, but it’s there.”
When Knapp has it on hand it appears in myriad ways, from savory to sweet courses like the pawpaw pie he has made, similar to a banana custard with dulce de leche and a little burnt meringue, or folded into a sweet-leaning sauce for salty roast duck.
“That’s the best of both worlds because everyone thinks about duck when they think about Long Island,” he says, “and then to kind of pair it with pawpaw, which is where I’m from, it’s a great combo.”
But the fruit also has a blink-and-it’s-gone nature, typically ripening in September and only good for a day or so once ready to be eaten.
“They come and go very quickly, which is one of the things that we tell as part of the story [of PawPaw]. The dishes that we do kind of come and go very quickly, and we don’t really do repeats of many things,” Knapp says. “You capture it once and then it’s gone again, kind of like the pawpaw fruit.”
A (North) Fork in the Road
Knapp went to culinary school at Johnson & Wales in Providence, R.I., simultaneously working at the fine-dining restaurant Gracie’s, then took a brief but pivotal period for an externship with Noma in Denmark. Gracie’s had a guest chef series in which award-winning North Fork chef Keith Luce was one day invited to participate. He and Knapp hit it off and Luce told him about the restaurant, Luce & Hawkins, that he was about to open at the Jedediah Hawkins Inn in Jamesport. Would Knapp like to head to Long Island and help him launch it? The young chef agreed, hitting the road for the North Fork following graduation.
After that, Knapp went on to help another favorite local spot open its doors: First & South in Greenport. Meanwhile, he was trying to start his own business on the side, farming snails for chefs (perhaps not so ironically, the symbol of the Slow Food movement) through his then nascent and now successful company, Peconic Escargot.
“I had no idea the work that was going to be involved and the time and the red tape with opening up the snail farm,” he says. “So very quickly, I realized that I was not going to be making money selling snails anytime soon.”
The pop-up idea began to percolate as a no-overhead way to pay the bills while the snail farm got its legs (or, perhaps, its single cilia-clad foot), but Knapp needed a name. One day, while listening to a segment on NPR about a Southern regional language dubbed pawpaw French, his mind homed in on those days of picking the fruit with his grandad.
The first PawPaw occurred in the winter of 2015 at Aldo’s in Greenport. Knapp served Long Island-raised duck, some fresh local peanuts he’d stumbled across and wild sorrel at a long, communal table cobbled together from Aldo Maiorana’s Front Street café, topped with a swathe of rough-edge, wheat-colored muslin, candles in paper bags and simple white dishes. It was a sold-out hit.
Lin on Me
After that, chef Scott Bollman of Bruce & Son offered Knapp and his wife, Kate, who was handling the front-of-house, the use of his morning and afternoon mainstay on Main Street in Greenport for the pop-up, since his restaurant was typically closed at night. Word quickly spread about the forward-thinking dishes that Knapp spun from foraged and locally farmed ingredients — a quail egg and smoked ham mousse, formed into an egg shape and encrusted in a bright green mix of herbs dubbed “Green Eggs and Ham”; crispy, delicate duck tongue with mulberry mustard; sunflower hearts that are a dead ringer for artichoke; softshell crabs with beetroot and local hops; meal-starting hot or chilled teas made from things like foraged white pine, wild blueberries and beachy bayberry or honeysuckle, among the myriad native plants brewed into an aromatic snapshot in time.
Merinoff also gave Knapp the occasional use of The Lin Beach House for the dinners. It was here that he spotted an old, rather large rotisserie, leftover from The Lin’s former incarnation as the Shady Lady. He got it back in working order and began doing epic duck-centric, multi-course dinners with it. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Knapp reached out to Miloski’s Poultry Farm in Calverton, got them to supply him with their chickens and made to-go dinners that kept him in business.
“We packaged it up kind of like this multi-course meal. The takeout bags had a menu, and they had flowers and they had a candle in it. You’d start off with this chicken bone broth and duck fat biscuits, and then you’d have the chicken, and there’d be a couple side courses and a dessert,” Knapp recalls. “It was a three-course meal with some to-go cocktails in there from Matchbook Distilling.”
Permaculture Pop-Up
For the last five years, The Lin Beach House has been PawPaw’s pop-up home.
“Taylor and I share a reverence for the natural world, for the growers and the gatherers, for the magic of our home, the East End. It’s a care for people, process, place. I see that in his food — how tuned-in he is to the ingredients, to the seasons, to the rhythms of the North Fork,” says Merinoff.
She had her first taste of Knapp’s culinary stylings at Bruce & Son’s, when she was just launching Matchbook. “I remember feeling completely charmed — the kind of meal that lifts your mood and casts a glow that stays with you as you step back into the real world,” Merinoff says. “Which is to say, I was an instant fan.”
It’s a good fit for both, as Merinoff’s distilled products tend to have a wild, local moment-in-time bent, with products like the mezcal-ish Late Embers, a spirit distilled from sunchokes and fermented with local honey, and the popular Blind Duck brandy, made from blackberries sourced from Sep’s and Treiber farms.
“When we took over the Shady Lady and began transforming her into The Lin Beach House, I started planting the seed,” says Merinoff of PawPaw’s longtime residency at her boutique hotel. “And here we are. The pop-up feels like something rooted — and still growing. I hope we’re still doing this 10 years from now.”
The nature of a pop-up makes it a bit sticky to verify, but Knapp’s PawPaw may well be the longest-running one since the trend gained traction in the early 2000s. It’s still year-round, with three dinners per month in the high season, and two in the quieter winter months, and it’s still something brand new and exciting every single time.
“It’s still a pop-up. Well, I mean, I joke that it’s probably the longest-running pop-up, and probably more of like a residency because we are always at the same place, but there hasn’t been another word to describe it,” Knapp laughs. “I find that all of it is still just exciting to me. Food can be surprising, and can make you think differently. And, you know, it’s a bit of an art form as well. It’s more than just a meal.”
