The Best Bowl of Beans I’ve Ever Had

Hillary Sterling is home for dinner just three nights a week. The other nights, she works as the executive chef of Ci Siamo, a bustling restaurant in Manhattan, where her team serves the best bowl of braised beans I’ve ever had.

Every day before the beans are served, Sterling, 45, tastes them, topped with a tinsel of fried rosemary and sage; a shower of Piave, a salty cheese not unlike a young Parmigiano-Reggiano; and a flourish of peppery olive oil and peppy black pepper. But she still cooks a pot of beans for dinner at least one of those few nights at home, usually on a Saturday or Sunday when she has the time to let them go on the stove. (Fridays are dedicated to late-night sushi with her wife, Tess.)

There are dishes you can’t really order at a restaurant (a proper Sunday roast), and those you don’t tend to make at home (sushi). But the beans at Ci Siamo, at once quotidian in ingredients and deluxe in flavor, helped cement for me that my favorite restaurant food is often the kind you can make at home, so long as you have the knowledge. A smaller kitchen with fewer hands and less equipment can still turn out a dish full of unexpected delights, the kind of food that makes you go, “Whoa, what’s in here?”

As with the best recipes, the devil is in the details — and the cook’s nature. How you make a pot of beans says a lot about you. Do you soak them in water overnight like a responsible adult, or go hot and fast until al dente? Are your aromatics deliberate or a fridge-cleanout hodgepodge? “Rule of thumb when cooking beans is to soak in plenty of water so they have room to expand,” Sterling wrote to me. Whether you soak your legumes is up to you, but I do think, as with rice, minimal soaking — an hour or two — results in more evenly cooked beans. The food writer Samin Nosrat once wrote in the pages of this magazine that the only surefire way to know if your beans are done is to taste five creamy ones in a row. “If my third or fourth bean is not quite done,” Nosrat said, “I just keep simmering.”

Parmesan Braised Beans With Olives

Another reason the beans at Ci Siamo taste so dynamic: Sterling uses at least four types. Any mix of white, brown and black works, in a variety of sizes — as smaller beans break down to create a velvety sauce. But if you’re a bean nut like Sterling, these are some of the specialty varieties she gets from her favorite store, SOS Chefs, in the East Village: flageolet, scarlet runner, small white, tiger’s eye and Tarbais. In my house, a common Sunday afternoon involves large white lima beans stained purple with small black beans. They’re braised for hours, directly in their soaking liquid, with Parmigiano-Reggiano rinds, bay leaves and fresh thyme sprigs. “No garlic,” Sterling said. “For some reason,” the dish doesn’t need it.

What it does need are the final decorations, each piece playing a part in the overall experience of these humble-luxe beans. First, do not fear fried herbs, whose woodsy crunch completes the dish; skipping them is like watching “The Devil Wears Prada” without Emily Blunt. They break the tension. You need only a very shallow pool of olive oil and a couple of minutes, at most, to turn fresh rosemary and sage into crispy, aromatic chips. I find a high-sided saucepan works best for this, as it reduces any chance of splatter.

The main joy of eating (and making) Sterling’s beans at home is the utter spontaneity of biting into a salt-bursting black olive that you may have thought was a black bean. That visual mimicry is a “little mind game” that Sterling hoped for: “I didn’t want you to know that you’re about to eat an olive,” she said. But to successfully land this stinger, you’ll want to seek out oil-cured black olives, which are dry-cured and then rehydrated in olive oil to create their quintessential buttery flavor and wrinkled texture — the ideal complement to these braised beans. Other mainstream black olives, such as Kalamata and niçoise, though delicious in, say, a salad, are a touch too bright, not to mention watery, and don’t provide the necessary richness.

Sterling came up with this dish in the middle of the pandemic, when memories of her travels to Milan, Naples, Calabria, Puglia, Rome and the Amalfi Coast seemed especially far away and when it seemed that the only things we were eating at home were bread, pasta and beans. I would say it’s time for a comeback, though it’s not as if beans went anywhere. They were here the whole time.

Parmesan Braised Beans With Olives