"Restaurants are hard work and I'm not sure if we even deserve them."

Greedy Dms - Silver Iocovozzi

Silver Iocovozzi co-runs runs Neng Jr’s with his husband Cherry Iocovozzi in Asheville, North Carolina. It’s multi, multi award winning and describes itself as “introducing Filipinx traditions and heritage” and researching the “food pathways, origins, and overlap with the history and hospitality of the American South with Filipinx vibrance.”

I haven’t eaten at Neng’s, but I have had a barbecued (Southern, smoked) pig cooked by the pair. This was upstate, for two friends’ wedding, after I jealously watched Silver motor up the driveway in a massive truck, brand-new smoker in tow, brought all the way from Asheville. Within minutes we were driving to an organic farm to pick up the pig - friendship was instantaneous.

Cherry Iocovozzi ministering to the pig

It was the best pork I ever had.

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Jago Rackham: What’s your view?

Silver Iocovozzi: I’m outside looking at my fire pit and the huge gap in my fence from a tree falling down. It’s beautiful the grass is green again and there are wild onions growing.

Can you cook them?

I was thinking about it - yes you can! I mostly want to pull them out of the ground and sniff the ripped bundle like a kid.

Do it!

Smells like dirt and onions. They’re juicy.

I bet they’d be good wrapped around some meat and roasted.

Oh yeah that sounds perfect. I’m thinking that with a crisp apple. Maybe I need a snack. An apple.

Are the apples good in North Carolina?

They’re so good. I don’t know enough about all of the different varieties, but we have a lot of orchards and I love using apple wood to cook with. Apple trees have such haunted looking branches and driving by orchards any time of year is really beautiful.

Sounds like where I’m from.

I brought some fresh tamarind from a recent trip from the Philippines. It’s so different from the preserved tamarind you get from an Asian market. It tastes like a Granny Smith, so they’ve just been on my mind since.

Would you use Granny Smith instead of tamarind in a dish? Like - make a reduction?

I think it would lose its sourness. But I’ve done this thing with soups (soup is healing) to give it more body — I’ll cook down apples with vinegar and garlic cloves and blend it into a puree and swirl it into a soup, and the broth just sticks to it like a slurry.

That’s really nice - I put apples with lots of roasted meat, sometimes so it almost becomes a stew, but never in a soup. So clever. You were just in the Philippines - but you were born in the US, right? You’re an army brat?

Army brat 🙂‍↕️

I was born in Parris Island SC, which is a Marine Corp military base — my dad was a DI. My parents met in Japan, in Yokohama. My mom did two main gigs there, one of them was being a paid date at Filipino bars and the other was as a singer and entertainer at a karaoke bar, where they met. This was the mid 80’s.