Bobby Flay’s Chicken Surprise

Bobby Flay opened a new restaurant, Gato, a few months ago on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. Flay has been a celebrity for the better part of two decades. But he works in the open kitchen at Gato the way people do when they come to New York to make a name for themselves: head down, concentrating, hard. “It’s all I want to do now,” he said recently.

There is a chicken breast on the menu at Gato, served moist and salty beneath a tarragon salsa verde, with crisp potatoes, goat cheese and a tangle of dandelion greens. There is always a chicken breast on a Bobby Flay menu; there has been practically since his start, when he was the chef at Miracle Grill in the East Village.

At Bolo, the elegant little jewel box of a restaurant Flay had on 22nd Street until 2007, when the building that housed it was sold, the chicken came pan-roasted beneath a blanket of what Flay called Spanish spices, with a vibrant green mint sauce rich with chiles, honey, salt and mustard. The dish was one of the restaurant’s best sellers. I ate it about 3,000 times there before eventually obtaining the recipe and starting to make it at home.

Gastronauts and other food obsessives may sneer at the white meat of a chicken breast, preferring the darker, fattier taste of the thigh and leg, but Flay has never cooked only for them. Flay cooks chicken breasts that don’t taste of sawdust and string, but of chicken itself, pure and clean beneath a big-flavored sauce.

You can, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/magazine/chicken-surprise.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSectionSumSmallMedia&module=pocket-region®ion=pocket-region&WT.nav=pocket-region&_r=0

The recipe: http://www.nytimes.com/recipes/1016604/bobby-flays-pan-roasted-chicken-with-mint-sauce.html