Good Taste tells you where to stick your fork in the Bay. This week, I’m putting Firenectar on everything.
Chef Emari Stevens sent me a bottle of his new hot honey the other day. It’s called Firenectar, and it’s disappearing quickly in my kitchen because it has paired well with everything I’ve put it on, including fall fruit, yogurt, and fresh mozzarella cheese.
The best experiment so far: using Firenectar instead of sugar in a rice vinegar solution added to the freshly-cooked sushi rice that had plans to be rolled up with a can of tuna mixed with Japanese Kewpie mayo. Firenectar’s blend of California wildflower honey, Champagne vinegar, aged black garlic, and spicy-fruity Peruvian aji charapita peppers results in the versatile condiment.
“My friends are gonna make fun of me, but I’ve always been a bougie guy,” Stevens laughs over a plate of Firenectar-dipped chicken wings at Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in North Beach; the sauce has been added to the appetizer’s options. “I like to use the best of the best ingredients.”
Restaurant owner and global pizza champion Tony Gemignani has always made his own hot honey — he even experimented with keeping his own bees atop the restaurant back in 2010. He was one of the first in the country to start offering hot honey with pizza.
Stevens has been working on Firenectar for about a year and a half. Gemignani told me that he gets pitched on different condiments and ingredients on a daily basis, and was not in the market for hot honey. But he was so taken with Stevens’ ideas for Firenectar that he assisted in its fine tuning.
He then created a pizza with sweet, hot, and umami qualities to showcase it: a blanket of thinly sliced Snake River Farms Kobe style American beef, applewood-smoked bacon, fried onions, green onions, mozzarella, BBQ sauce, and Firenectar. The Sicilian-style pizza is called The Bay Area. Stevens is a meat-centric chef, as can be witnessed in cheeky social media videos. He learned to cook from a class in high school, then from watching food TV, YouTube videos, and his family in the kitchen.
Stevens would like to collaborate with more chefs and restaurants that he respects, participate in food events, and to deepen his product line in the category. He is thinking about doing an even hotter honey as well as limited edition releases in the manner of a rare sneaker drop in the style world.
His father Earl Stevens (aka the rapper and personal influence E-40), has had over a decade of success in the food and beverage world. E-40 followed his blueprint of working independently in music to launch brands of wine, liquor, sausages, ready to drink cocktails, frozen burritos, and ice cream. I wondered what Emari had learned from watching that particular family hustle.
“I learned that it costs a lot of money!”
Firenectar is available online (including wholesale cases) and at Giovanni Italian Specialties, Gemignani’s petite shop on the next block from Tony’s Pizza Napoletana. Pro tip: while you’re there, pick up some of the Tony’s Pizza dough balls for the freezer.
