Inside of Oakland's Marrow, next to a stack of tomes about meat and bones, sits a typed and framed complaint letter. It's addressed to Marrow's chef-owner, Jon Kosorek, but dates from his tenure at Fork in San Anselmo, six years ago. The letter is regretful and moralizing, from a patron who refused to return to Fork because it served foie gras.
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Kosorek displays the letter both to express his confusion about the foie gras ban and as a means of starting a conversation on a subject that's important to him: animal welfare. The topic is a big one, considering the fact that Marrow's theme is whole-beast feasting, and most of the menu is either cow or pork.
"I find it amazing that as a society we ban a product that the majority of the public doesn't understand, but then they go and eat their fast food and mass produced animal products without understanding that those foie gras ducks were most likely raised and processed in a much more humane fashion than most the animals are for commodity eggs, chicken, beef, milk, et cetera," says Kosorek.
And that's why he's trying to do meat the right way. He opened Marrow in a tiny space near a parking lot in downtown Oakland last year -- buying, breaking down, and serving one animal at a time. The menu is scrawled in Sharpie script on butcher paper, and while the sandwiches rarely change from the likes of Reubens and burgers, they're flanked by things like grilled terrines of headcheese (when pork passes through the lineup) or slivered Kennebec potatoes fried in honest-to-goodness meat fat. It sounds good, but on this dry stretch of Oakland, a $13 sandwich all but asks for pushback, and Kosorek has gotten a fair bit.
He's addressed the conflict in a beautiful and confounded post on his blog about what he calls the "malfunctioning bug" that keeps him lashed to tradition, to delivering the meat he loves. Kosorek doesn't understand what drives him, nor does he understand what anyone could have against a very good sandwich and morally upstanding sourcing practices. It's the same misunderstanding that inspired him to keep the foie gras letter, to communicate the message.
To be clear, Marrow is widely loved. The spot is often swamped with regulars who boomerang back for lunch day after day, despite a small menu that seldom changes. He makes the best Reuben in Oakland, and business has been good enough that Marrow will be moving to a bigger spot ten blocks away, complete with sit-down service and patio.
Every few weeks, Kosorek buys a whole cow from J Brand Cattle Company in Healdsburg, where the beef is quartered on the farm. The rest of the butchering is done in the Marrow's diminutive kitchen. On a recent visit, when a woman walked in asking to speak to Kosorek, he boomed from the back that she had to come all the way inside because his hands were covered in blood. I wanted to sneak back with my camera but I was already knee deep in a patty melt. I imagine this kind of thing happens a lot.
That patty melt is, in fact, one of the best things on Marrow's menu. Like the rest of the sandwiches, it is simple and fatty: chopped beef layered with a thick sheath of Swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing, and beautifully caramelized onions that weren't cooked beyond their sweet, plump crunch. The house-made ketchup is something of a mystery, though. The sauce has a sweet but vinegary bite to it, and I spent half my lunch trying to discern the spices. I tried to pluck the secret from Matt Butler, the guy manning the stove, but he assured me I'd have to pay my dues in the kitchen before I'd ever find out. If that means unlimited patty melts, I can't say I'm not tempted.
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