FOOD & DRINK FEATURE
DISHING IT OUT Supperland pastry chef Liana Sinclair visits 300 East BY TIMOTHY DEPEUGH
“You want to know my secret?” Liana Sinclair — pastry chef and goddess, currently to be found slinging rich, moreish, and glorious pies at Supperland in Plaza Midwood — leaned over her pimento cheese burger on a warm Saturday night, almost daring us to reply. Here she was, on a rare night off, fresh from Texas, already taking the Charlotte food scene by storm, and she was about to share the secret of her success. I may have nodded yes, or I may have stopped breathing altogether. “It’s that I don’t have a sweet tooth,” she finally explained. The lines across my forehead must have given away my shock, but it turned out I was in good hands, as this cunning pastry chef once worked as an aesthetician. Long before that, Liana made her US debut on a JFK tarmac, arriving from South Korea at 5 months old to be adopted by a Mormon family in upstate New York. “I was the good kid growing up,” she told me. “Straight A student. A really conservative family, though. My dad wanted me to go to a regular college to be a lawyer or a doctor, which I tried — for, like, a week or two.”
LIANA SINCLAIR SETTLES IN AT 300 EAST.
And that’s how she ended up as an aesthetician. “I dropped out of college, went back home, and then went to school to be an aesthetician. I don’t know, I was working at a spa, like doing facials and stuff.” She could see the stereotype in my eyes. “I wasn’t doing nails, Tim.” “I didn’t say anything,” I replied, reaching over to grab another piece of toasted, buttery baguette and a spoonful of goat cheese — silky and oozing — to slather on top.
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Liana’s rules of the freezer
ROAST CHICKEN AT 300 EAST PHOTO BY KENTY CHUNG
We were at 300 East — and we were hungry. When I suggested the venue for dinner, Liana didn’t hesitate to accept. “All the people I’ve met so far have told me I needed to come here.” Nearly everyone in Charlotte who does pastry, she was told, has spent time at the Dilworth institution, so as the new pastry chef in town, a visit was a foregone conclusion. Because the photographer was late, we didn’t know whether to wait or go ahead and order, so
PHOTO BY KENTY CHUNG
we compromised and opted for the goat cheese appetizer. “God, this is good,” she said. There was a time 12 years ago when things could have turned out differently. Liana almost took the savory path with her culinary career, but explained, “I am way too neurotic to go savory.” She felt more at ease in pastry, with her Type A personality. “You know what savory cooking is like, right? Throw a bunch of stuff together and kind of adjust it, and it will be nice. But pastry — pastry is like science.” “So you can tell your dad you’re a scientist after all!” I interjected. “Exactly,” she said. “I’m a food scientist. Yes, you can play with the rules once you know all the rules and you, like, know how things work. But you can’t just take the baking soda out of something and hope that things turn out OK. There are rules.” Sometimes those rules are unspoken. When I offered a suggestion about a certain dish on Supperland’s savory menu that would require use of a freezer, she recoiled like a cat taking issue with its own shadow. “No, that’s not going to happen. That is my freezer. There are unspoken rules in the kitchen, like about the freezer. And Liana’s table. Someone fucking took my tape from my table yesterday. Can
you believe that?” The tape, it really does need to be said, is blue painter’s tape — the kind used when finishing accent walls at home or, in Liana’s case, for making labels. “She’s like, ‘I just need a piece,’ and I said, ‘Please don’t touch my tape’ in a way that made her think I’m crazy. Because she doesn’t know the unspoken rules.”
A meal at 300 East
By then the photographer had arrived, and we ordered our mains. Liana’s pimento cheese burger was triumphantly plated in a way that suggested the need for its own orchestral accompaniment. She tore through it with gusto. Our photographer, Kenty Chung, went with roast chicken — a well-seasoned plate of protein that was perfect, in his case, for building up the triceps he uses to hold his camera aloft. (I would be lying if I said Liana was the one who pointed them out to the room.) I, however, was less enthusiastic about my shrimp cakes, which tasted to me more like cornmeal flavored with shrimp, but it was hard to focus for too long on them, as Liana was not ready to put the tale of the blue tape behind us.
