reservation, secured weeks prior by filling out a Google form I found through a link on Grothe’s personal Instagram, I’ve already Venmo’d her $55 for the meal. I’m here for “A Night in Lizbon, AKA a Big Ass Tapas Party.” Grothe dreamed up the two-hour Spanish-and-Portuguese-inspired meal with her friend Jakub Piven, who was raised in Spain and is now the sous-chef at My Loup. Sthridhlja with pecans and chilies in a salsa rossa Every month, or whenever she feels like it, she unloads the stash of folding chairs and tables from the coat closet and drags her roommate’s larger couch into the living room to turn the apartment into a venue called Couch Cafe. I’m sitting on a stool between Grothe’s kitchen and living room. It’s the sort of color-blocked industrial rental that could work as a sound stage for New Girl or any analogous sitcom about millennials who never go to work. We’re in her Northern Liberties apartment, a labyrinth of bedrooms shooting off a central living space. Only we’re not at Fiorella when Grothe feeds me paella arancini. Now she works at Fiorella, Marc Vetri’s tiny pasta spot on Christian Street in Bella Vista. She got hooked on restaurants, working her way up from dishwasher to processing collard greens and vacuum-sealing hay. Then, one day during the pandemic, chef Randy Rucker of River Twice in East Passyunk posted on Instagram that he needed someone to fill in for a dishwasher who had called out. The work became tedious, as perhaps you’re imagining it might. (Grothe had considered the other options, too: Logging “seemed fine” but wasn’t for her, she says, and there isn’t much crabbing to be done in Oklahoma.) Grothe continued on the path of meat supervision in a few cheesesteak factories around Philadelphia. It was the only industry she could think of that looked to be more dangerous than crabbing or logging. I want to live that life.’” In Oklahoma, she started her career as an industrial safety manager for a meat production company. In 2018, she came to Philly from her home state of Oklahoma after watching a Bon Appétit video of its mustachioed on-screen talent eating 16 cheesesteaks in 15 hours: “I was like, ‘That’s disgusting I want that. The idea to reconfigure the geometry of paella had never once crossed my mind, but blowing up tradition and making something anew seems almost instinctual to Grothe. Golden, crispy and implausibly light, the rice balls are loaded with shrimp and fresh English peas, punched up with saffron and lobster stock. Grothe fishes out half a dozen arancini from a tabletop fryer on the counter. As if she hasn’t distilled the unmistakable flavor of the Spanish rice dish into spherical fried treats. “I made you paella arancini,” Liz Grothe says to me with the matter-of-factness of a lunch lady divvying up peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Dinner at Santé, a supper club hosted inside sommelier Dan Solway’s Bella Vista apartment / Photography by Paolo Jay Agbay
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