Chef Charles Zhuo Innovates the Menu at Apt 115

Chef Charles Zhuo in the kitchen at Apt 115 (photo by John Anderson)

The way chef Charles Zhuo tells it, you'd think the fates were other than cruel.

"I kind of just came upon Apt 115 by chance," he says. "I answered an ad. Initially I was like, 'OK, let's just get out there and start making some money.' My reserve funds were running out, because I took a year and a half off, and it was like, 'Time to get back into the workforce!'"

Apt 115 was already doing well before Zhuo got involved. The intimate wine bar tucked into the modular majesty of apartments on East Seventh had a steady flow of wine lovers, curious locals, and foodie scenesters coming in to drink, buy wine, and enjoy little snacks within the quirky, retro space that features a curated soundtrack.

And that soundtrack? Is based exclusively on vinyl.

"I started out just pulling records from my shelf," says Apt 115 owner Joe Pannenbacker. The musician and oenophile opened Apt 115 in 2018 to indulge his love of music and wine, and now here the place still was, having weathered the pandemic, again serving up hospitality and bright style, an impressive array of bottles – and those vinyl records. "That was an original vision, and it'll never change. From the day we opened, we've always played vinyl – no DJs, no requests. We curate the records and we always play the whole record, that's part of the whole Apt 115 experience. We start out each night kind of mellow – last night we started out with Nina Simone – and then we'll get into, like, Cyndi Lauper or the Ramones, and then, by the end of the night we'll maybe have Slayer or something. After 11pm, anything goes."

Dishes from the Apt 115 tasting menu (Photo by Wayne Alan Brenner)

It was a mid-pandemic pivot that led to what Apt 115 is today. "We just had cheeses and charcuterie for a couple years, you know?" says Pannenbacker. "And then COVID hit and everyone went into survival mode, trying to figure out how to make it through another month. And there were so many pandemic rules and exceptions – like, you could open if you were a restaurant, if you had a food permit? And we had a food permit, but they wouldn't approve our menu, because you couldn't just do cheese and charcuterie. So we were like, 'OK, let's make some actual food.' So we did a pop-up and we called it Café Apt 115, and we had high-quality items, but we were doing basic things – but people really dug it. So we were like, 'Well, let's really do food.'"

And that's what led to chef Zhuo joining the kitchen staff.

"I put an ad out, and that's how we met Charles," says Pannenbacker. "He has a pretty extensive résumé with a lot of places that I admire, and we were just kind of on the same wavelength. And I was like, 'You can have the freedom to do whatever you want, as long as it's something I like.' Like, don't put foie gras or octopus on the menu, we don't do that here. And Charles has been with us for over a year. And when he was two or three months in, we had to acknowledge, 'OK, we're a full-on restaurant now.'"

Dishes from the Apt 115 tasting menu (Photo by John Anderson)

But to say that the man was hired to join the kitchen staff, that's an understatement: Chef Charles Zhuo is the kitchen staff.

"Apt 115 is super small," Zhuo tells us. "The whole space, including kitchen and bathroom and all that, is like 750 square feet. We have about 24 to 28 seats inside." Those seats are arranged around six or so tables anchoring the stylishly appointed interior, the dining area's wall shelves and window sills revealing a quirky, globally informed taste in books and objets d'art. A server circulates among the tables, distributing drinks, ferrying food, and informing the diners. Below the high western wall that's floor-to-ceiling with bottles of wine, there's a bar, too: a four-seater that forms a partial border between front-of-house and the chef's diminutive domain.

"The kitchen is literally, I would say, 15 square feet of actual, usable working space," says Zhuo. "It's my little corner that I work in now. Kind of a crazy setup, right? I have two induction burners and two toaster ovens – those are all the heat sources I have to work with. I do have a little fryer, but I can't fry up too many things, because that would smell up the place. So I try to limit what I throw in the fryer, maybe one dish on the menu."

And that's a relatively new thing, the variety of food?

Zhuo nods. "None of that existed before I signed on," he says. "Before, they were doing just a wine bar, with low-intervention wine, and serving, like, meats and cheeses, some nice mushrooms that'd be put in the toaster oven, and a tomato salad or whatever."

Dishes from the Apt 115 tasting menu (Photo by John Anderson)

But chef Zhuo was not one to remain satisfied with just a tomato salad or whatever. "I don't think Joe expected me to push as hard as I've been," he says. "The Apt 115 menu has changed a lot, but it happened one step at a time."

Stone crab with zucchini. Shishito peppers stuffed with deviled egg. Pork belly stew. Braised leg of goat with goat heart tartare. Duck soup dumplings. Sweet potato cereal. One step at a time, as walked by the chef who started out cooking at La Condesa in his college days. Who spent a year at Boulud Beijing in China. Who was hired as a cook at Bryce Gilmore's Barley Swine and, over four years, worked his way to executive sous chef there. And then –

"I went to D.C. to work at José Andrés' Minibar. It was an opportunity to work as a sous chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant, so I figured, if anything, it'll look good on my résumé. I would've stayed there longer, if the cost of living hadn't been so prohibitive." Add in his chef time for the growing Tatsu-Ya empire, and the man's got an impressive culinary rap sheet. So it's not just him that the capricious fates have smiled on: It's the folks who come to sample his tasty wares.

"I'm one of those people who's just obsessed with cooking, you know?" says Zhuo. "This is my craft, and I want to perfect it. That's what keeps me going: the craft itself, the love of cooking. And my food is eclectic, if anything – but, at the same time, I don't want to be serving ingredients that are extremely challenging to people. There is, on our menu right now, a course of tartare of goat's heart – and that's as out there as it goes at the moment. Maybe, after we've built up more of a clientele, I'll be a little bit more adventurous."

As for right now, having 86'd the sea urchin he'd briefly visited upon the menu, the food is just adventurous enough. Even for the chef himself.

"I recently did a fall menu change," says Zhuo, "and that first day was one of the hardest nights I had. Compared to the summer tasting menu, it has three or four extra plates. There's still the same number of courses to the meal, but the courses are getting a lot more complicated, with multiple components. Sometimes I look back on it, on my days off, like, this is getting a little bit out of hand. But, you know, I can't back down."

And yet, somehow, this gastronomic exuberance meshes with Pannenbacker's concept of people coming in to hang out and drink wine and listen to vinyl records?

Apt 115 proprietor Joe Pannenbacker (l) and chef Charles Zhuo (photo by John Anderson)

"I get to deal directly with Joe," confirms Zhuo. "He's the proprietor, and his main focus is on the wine list – that's his baby."

"We had 16 wines on the list when we opened," says Pannenbacker. "Now we're pushing 450 – I've literally worked on the wine list for five years. My original idea was to have a really small list, and it would change all the time, always have different stuff. But after a couple weeks, people saw that we had cool wine, and they were like, 'Do you have this, do you have this?' And I knew it wasn't gonna work – we'd need to have more wines. So I looked at places in Dallas and Houston, places in New York, San Francisco, and Europe. And a lot of these places, they have a lot of wines represented. And I knew it'd be more of an investment, but that's what I set out to do and, yeah, it'll probably never be finished? But our wine list is at 48 pages right now, and I'll add two more." He smiles, anticipating. "And then I'm done."

"That's why this place is good for me as a chef," says Zhuo. "Joe's an avid traveler and an eater of many things, so he's very familiar with all kinds of food. Because it's, ah, it's very hard to find restaurant owners who know what good food is? With investors, sometimes, they're in it for the money or something else, for a certain aspect of food. But Joe knows good food. And the beauty is that, with such an expansive list of wines, we can always find something that's going to pair well with whatever I'm preparing."

Pannenbacker smiles. "If you'd asked me six years ago if I'd ever want to own a restaurant, I would've said, 'Absolutely not.' Because I've worked in them – I know it's a lot of work. But I have a passion for it, and now we have Charles, so that's how it ended up."

Apt 115