Meet the Sous Chef: Shane Hume

Shane grew up in Camp Hill, born just across the river in Harrisburg, and if you want to know what first ignited his eventual connection to professional kitchens…pizza. He’s a sucker for it according to him. Simple comfort. Pasta is a close second. 

He finished school in 2014 and got into the industry the way most people who are still in it years later get into it: he needed a job. And the job was washing dishes at Evergrain Brewing Company. He doesn’t have a reason for loving food beyond loving to eat it. That’s still his answer when you ask why he cooks. No manifesto, just an appetite that turned into a career. The trade was mostly taught to him by one person: our current Chef, Ben Beaver, who hired Shane at Evergrain and who Shane credits with nearly everything he knows, technical and otherwise. Chef Ben gave him his first chef’s knife, and it’s still the possession Shane says he’d grab first if the building were on fire. He put in the work and as a credit to his abilities, Shane went from dishwasher to Sous Chef. No shortcuts. It’s admirable. 

He doesn’t own a cookbook. Never has. What he knows came from watching, doing and reading whatever’s online about food and the business of it. He is fascinated by Marco Pierre white and how he became the youngest chef in the world to hold three Michelin stars. Ask him his favorite thing to cook and he'll say smashburgers, no hesitation, because they’re fast and they’re always good, and there’s something honest in keeping it simple. He’s cooked Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese and Irish cuisine. For some upcoming menu ideas, he is focusing on French. 

Off the clock: manga, anime, eating around town for ideas and inspiration, and chilling at home with his girlfriend and their three cats. His advice for cooks staring out, unfiltered: don’t rush it, work smarter not harder, and be kind, because you don’t know what the person across the pass is dealing with. 

A Glimpse Into A Menu Update

Somewhere around the middle of August,the menu has to change a little bit based on summer produce. It starts with Chef Ben walking up and saying "here's my ideas." Nothing formal about it. We've worked together long enough that I trust the instinct behind it. 

That's the part I truly enjoy. Just the two of us, no one else in the kitchen, and I'm tasting every dish as he builds it. I take notes while I chew. Does it make sense? Is there balance? Is something on that plate that doesn't need to be there? Half the work isn't adding, it's subtracting. A garnish gets swapped, or dropped. One ingredient that was doing too much, or nothing at all, comes off. We iron it out dish by dish.

Then it goes cold and administrative for a while. Food costing: what the dish actually costs us to make, what we need to sell it for, and where that number has to sit against everything else on the menu and what a guest will believe it's worth. That math doesn't care how good the tasting was.

Once the price makes sense, Chef reaches out to Kennedi and Hunter, our Marketing Manager and in-house photographer, respectively, to schedule and shoot under the restaurant's own light, both natural and artificial. It goes into the menus, the website, the socials, digital buttons in our ordering system.

Last stop before a guest sees it: staff tasting with Chef. He walks them through why each dish is on the menu, not just what's in it. The reasoning, the allergens, what can be modified and what can't. They need to be able to answer a guest's question before it's asked.

At last one of the best parts I think of being a chef…a guest orders that new dish and you and your team get to make it. That feeling is hard to replicate.

Before the First Plate

Chef Ben settles on a Table 14 menu about ten days out, and it starts with what's actually ready, not what he hoped for. Last month it was squash blossoms. Stone Arch had a Scottish Highland strip loin worth building a course around and Mangalitsa pork shoulder ready for the rillette, Central Market had heirloom tomatoes with a good balance of sweetness and acid.

The duck breasts go into cure first, salt and sugar packed on by hand, cured for sixteen hours before they're seared and finished. The corn for the amuse gets shucked, cut, salted, and packed into jars to sour on its own for the better part of a week, checked daily by taste rather than clock. Pork shoulder for the rillette goes into a slow confit the same week, then gets pulled, shredded warm, packed tight into ramekins under its own rendered fat, and left to set overnight in the walk-in.

The day before, the pasta dough is made and left to relax, covered in the walk-in overnight. The AM cook has a note that says to pull the dough out at 10am so later that day Chef can roll out the fava bean raviolo by hand, egg yolks reserved and refrigerated separately so they hold their shape when the raviolo gets filled. Pork belly goes into cure for the lardon, plum mostarda reduces slow on the back burner until it holds a trail for two to three seconds when spread with a spoon, and the ube potato pave gets built in layers, pressed under weight, and left overnight so it slices clean instead of falling apart on the plate.

The day of, focaccia comes out of the oven early enough to cool before service, spoon bread gets mixed to order in small batches so it never sits, and the broccolini is trimmed and blanched to the exact point it needs to finish on the flat top in under two minutes. Demi glace gets skimmed one last time. Chef lays out his mise en place and plateware in the same order as the previous month's Table 14 menu.

Sous Chef Shane takes the lead in the kitchen for service that day so Chef Ben can concentrate on Table 14 execution. By 6:30pm, six plates of the amuse bouche leave the pass and head for the dining room with Chef Ben in tow. 

-Paul

What Summer Teaches the Kitchen

In February, cooking is mostly persuasion. You're building flavor into something that doesn't have much of its own, layering stock and fat and time until a piece of root vegetable tastes like it should be on the plate. In July, the job flips. A tomato walks in already finished. The work becomes knowing when to stop touching it.

That shift changes the mood of the whole kitchen, not just the menu. Prep goes faster because there's less to prep. A peach doesn't need a marinade or a reduction, it needs a knife and someone willing to leave it alone. Zucchini and yellow squash get shaved raw instead of sauteed into submission. Slicing cucumbers barely see a knife before they're on a plate, while the pickling ones go straight into a quick brine the same afternoon they come in. Green beans get a fast blanch, an ice bath, and nothing after that. Sweet peppers go on the grill until the skins blister and peel away on their own. The hot ones get tasted first, one at a time, before anyone decides how much of the dish they're allowed to ruin. Cooks who spend all winter hunched over reductions get an afternoon where the biggest decision is whether the corn gets ten seconds on the grill or none at all.

Eggplant is the one holdout, and it earns the extra work. Salted and pressed to pull the bitterness out, then given real heat, it's the rare summer vegetable that still asks something of the cook instead of arriving finished.

The hard part, the part that actually separates a good cook from a great one, is that doing less is harder than it sounds. Anyone can add ten ingredients to a dish. A cherry tomato needs nothing but a knife through the middle. A slicer tomato wants nothing but salt. Romas hold their shape well enough to go into a quick sauce when the others would fall apart in the pan. It takes a different kind of confidence to serve a tomato with Maldon sea salt, a quality vinegar and good oil and trust that it's enough. Chef Ben tells the new cooks this every June and they don't believe him until they taste what a true heirloom tomato of Lancaster County can do without much help. 

A flat of heirloom tomatoes sits on expo station at Per Diem, open on the counter, the smell of them filling the pass before anyone's touched a single one.  It happens every summer.

 Paul

How the Smash Burger Took Over

There's no single origin story for the smash burger, just competing theories. Some trace it to state fairs in the early twentieth century, where portable griddles flattened ground beef for speed in front of lines that didn't stop moving. Others place its roots in the Depression, when meat was expensive and scarce, and stretching a pound of ground beef across more patties, cooked hard and fast on a flat top, fed more people for less money. Both theories agree on the underlying logic. Speed mattered, and a flattened patty cooked through in under a minute, which meant a single griddle could turn out a meal as fast as a line could move past it.

What both origins share is necessity. The smash burger wasn't invented by anyone chasing flavor, it was the byproduct of scarcity and volume, the kind of cooking that happens when there isn't enough money or time to do it any other way. Somewhere in the last decade, a technique born from having less turned into a technique people pay extra for. The crust that used to be a side effect of stretching meat thin is now the entire point.

The technique stayed practical straight through the diner era that followed. Diners and drive-ins were smashing patties on flat tops in the mid-twentieth century, mostly out of necessity. Flattening the meat meant faster cook times, more burgers per shift, less propane burned waiting for a thick patty to come up to temperature. Steak n Shake and the original In-N-Out both built early identities around thin, hard-seared patties, though nobody was calling it a smash burger then. It was just how you cooked a burger fast and cheap.

What makes the method work is surface area. A thin patty forced hard against a hot flat top develops a crust through the Maillard reaction almost instantly, that deep brown lace of caramelized protein and fat you don't get from a thick patty cooked slow. Nobody should temp a smash burger. There's not enough mass in a quarter inch of meat for a thermometer to tell you anything useful, and by the time you got a probe in there you'd have already blown past the window. The whole format runs on time and sight instead, thirty seconds until the edges lace and the color shifts, a flip, maybe fifteen seconds more with the cheese melting on top before it comes off. The thinness that makes the crust possible also means the patty cooks through fast, well past medium most of the time. You're not choosing a temperature so much as choosing how much crust to build, and doneness follows from that.

The modern revival traces to Smashburger's founding in 2007 and accelerated hard through the 2010s, when chains and single unit shops alike leaned into the format, usually two thin patties, American cheese melted directly on top, a soft potato bun, diced onion smashed into the meat itself so it caramelizes alongside it. Shake Shack's ShackBurger uses a version of the technique. So does nearly every new burger concept that's opened in the last decade.

Is it still going strong? By every visible measure, yes. It's become close to the default burger format in casual dining, the way the thick pub burger was twenty years ago. Whether that holds for another decade or gets replaced by the next obsession, I can't say. But right now, if you order a burger almost anywhere in this country, there's a real chance someone in the back is pressing it flat.

-Paul

Where Your Meat Comes From Matters

Ten minutes down the road from Per Diem, next to Speedwell Forge and the Wolf Sanctuary, Steve and Allison Garman run Stone Arch Farm. I worked for them. We started with 100% purebred Mangalitsa pigs, foraging the property on their own, and added the Scottish Highland cattle later. Grass fed, grass finished. Steve and his family cut the hay and grow the barley themselves for supplemental feed. The only shot any of those animals ever got was iron, at birth. No hormones, no antibiotics. I sold that meat to chefs and restaurants in Lancaster, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Washington D.C. I knew what I was selling because I'd walked the pasture it came from.

So when Ben put a Stone Arch Highland strip steak on the Table 14 tasting menu, I wasn't tasting a new ingredient. I was tasting what happens when the person cooking it knows exactly what animal it came from.

Highland cattle don't carry fat the way a commodity steer does. The breed grew that heavy double coat instead, because in the Highlands the hair does the job of keeping an animal warm and the fat doesn't have to. No subcutaneous layer means no fat cap on the strip, the part of a commodity steak thick enough to render, baste the meat from outside, buy you a few extra minutes of forgiveness on the heat. Take that cap away and the loin runs narrower too. What fat is there lives inside the muscle as marbling, not outside it as a cushion.

That's the gap between cooking a cut and cooking an animal. Most kitchens buy "NY Strip" and run one method against whatever shows up under that name, whether it grew up on pasture at Stone Arch or in a feedlot somewhere with a different zip code. I spent a few years on the other end of that supply chain. I can see and taste which farms come correct, which animals lived the life the menu claims they lived.

The steak came off dark at the center, closer to the deep red of a working animal than the bright pink of a feedlot cut. Dense and mineral, with a faint gaminess underneath, the taste of grass and herbs instead of grain. The grain of the meat is tighter too, firmer under the knife, more flavor per bite because there's less fat standing between your tongue and the muscle. You don't get there by treating Highland beef like a leaner version of something else. You get there by knowing the animal before you ever turn on the flame.

-Paul

A Father's Day Reflection

Nobody tells you about the laugh.

They prep you for the sleeplessness. The crying you can't decode. The way you'll stand over the crib at 3:00am watching his chest rise and fall because you can't stop yourself. The first time his chin drops so far into his neck in the car seat that you pull over, run around to the back door, and stand there on the shoulder of the road with your heart in your throat until you see his chest move. People tell you about the sleeplessness. Nobody tells you about any of that other stuff. Nobody tells you about his very tan skin as a newborn. It’s not something I thought would come to my mind. Why does our son have a tan when myself and his mom are so pale? Then you find out about jaundice in newborns…and laugh in the car after leaving his pediatrician’s office.

What they also don't mention is the first time he laughs. Really laughs. Not the reflex smile, not the gas grin. The real one. Full body…a chuckle. Like he discovered something that had been there the whole time, just waiting. 

It stops you completely. Whatever you were doing, whatever you were worried about, whatever version of yourself you were performing that day. Gone. You're just standing there, trying to hold it together in front of a person who is four months old. And all it took for Graham was a random ladybug toy that spins I could use to mimic a stunt airplane. 

My parents have photos of me as a kid. Not many. The ones that survived are soft around the edges, half the faces bleached out by bad exposure or a flash that didn't know what it was doing. Some are bent. Some are stuck together and ripped. A few have water damage. That's the record. That's what they gave to me to hold onto.  

My son is thirteen months old and I have thousands of him. Sharp, searchable, backed up in the cloud. Daycare sends photos throughout the day. I take a look when I can. I get to watch my baby become a toddler in real time, from wherever I happen to be standing. Nobody's parents had that, until very recently.

I have video of the laugh. I can watch it whenever I want. I've watched it more times than I'll admit…along with the hundreds of photos I have of him and my wife. It’s a great way to doom scroll in a healthier way before going to sleep. 

Thirteen months. I haven't slept many full nights.  I've also never laughed that hard, felt that intense, or understood so clearly what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. Both things at once, all the time.

Happy Father's Day to anyone in the thick of it.

-Paul 

Table 14

There is no theme for our monthly tasting menu, Table 14. No region. No culinary concept borrowed from somewhere else. What there is: a chef with twenty-some years behind him, a list of what's available from the farms he trusts, and seven courses to fill. 

No cuisine to defer to. That’s a freedom most chefs crave. 

Our tasting menu has a logic that exists before the ingredients do. When the logic comes from the cook and not the concept, Chef can work backwards, build the arc, move from lighter to heavier, decide where the acid hits and where that rich sauce comes into play.  Which technique can help serve his ideas and which ones could distract from it. Without one, you're designing the blueprints and constructing the building at the same time. 

The amuse bouche of squash blossom goes into tempura batter not because it fits a theme but because that's what Chef’s experience tells him. Flash fried, gone before it turns limp. The Lititz produced pork belly gets 24 hours because it’s better at 24 hours than 18 or 36. The central market goat milk for the agnolotti pairs with the local mixed mushroom brodo. Ben knows there is a connection between the land that those goats graze on and the mushrooms that grow in similar conditions.

What holds it together isn't a concept. It's a point of view.

Look at what this menu preserves. Pickled watermelon radish, preserved lemon, fermented chili, pickled green tomato. June is arriving with everything it has, and Ben is still reaching for the jar. That's not nostalgia for winter. That's a cook who understands that brightness needs tension, that acid earned through time does something fresh sometimes doesn’t. The snap peas and green strawberries in the burrata course tell you exactly where you are in the calendar. The fermented chili on the pork belly tells you Ben hasn't forgotten where he's been.

The Scottish Highland NY strip steak gets crispy tallow pave and burnt onion demi glace. These pasture raised cows are just down the road at Stone Arch Farm, ten minutes from the restaurant. The poussin cared for by Earl Keiser gets albufera sauce and brown butter ube puree. These aren't local ingredients reaching for technique. That's a cook's full range showing up, the kind of range that only comes from years of building it, sitting right alongside whatever the farm had ready that week. The second Thursday of every month, six people sit down at one table. What arrives in front of them is twenty-some years of cooking distilled into seven courses.

-Paul

Table 14’s First Menu: June

Tempura Squash Blossom

Koji beet mousse, meyer lemon, pickled watermelon radish,

 baby basil, pistachio, whipped chevre, basil oil

House Burrata 

english pea and preserved lemon espuma, 

snap pea & green strawberry salad, ramp panko 

 24 Hr Mangalitsa Pork Belly

 smoked salsa verde, fermented chili, popcorn grits, 

pickled green tomato salsa 

Goat Milk Agnolotti

 mushroom brodo, shaved truffle, braised local tuscan kale 

 Tea Smoked Poussin

albufera sauce, brown butter ube puree, white asparagus

 Scottish Highland NY Strip

crispy tallow pave potato, grilled spring onion and baby zucchini,

 burnt onion demi glace

Lancaster County Cheese

whipped honey, house focaccia

Elderflower Panna Cotta 

cardamom sponge, strawberry pearls