Ask food lovers in Charlotte where to go for breakfast, and they will send you to Grey’s Diner and Community Kitchen, which chef Sam Diminich opened this past spring. His other place, Restaurant Constance, has gotten nods from the James Beard Foundation and Michelin.
But when it comes to food close to his heart, Diminich is a simple guy. Take Thanksgiving. His favorite childhood dish was the Stove Top stuffing his mom doctored. “It was straight out of the box, but the way she made it was something I held on to,” he says. “Simple is sometimes the perfect thing.”
His recipe for creamed carrots blends that appreciation for unfussy food with the culinary tricks he’s learned since he began as a dishwasher at the Italian restaurants his family owned in his hometown of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The idea for the dish is rooted in an early cooking stint at the former Sea Island Inn there, where servers in tuxedos would walk through the restaurant with casserole dishes serving classics like creamed spinach. “That’s where I fell in love with food and hospitality and ingredients,” he says. “The African American cooks in the kitchen knew so much. I remember following them around, trying to absorb as much info as I possibly could.”
Drug and alcohol addiction derailed Diminich’s cooking career, to the point that for a time he lived on the street. But with a lot of help, he made his way back to the kitchen. Sober since 2014, he’s now a chef who cooks precise, balanced dishes, whether at his diner, at his intimate ten-table restaurant, or when providing meals to the city’s recovery centers.
Creamed carrots originate from French cuisine. Julia Child offered a popular recipe for them in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, first published in 1961. Diminich landed on his version after a visit to Isaac Oliver’s Harmony Ridge Farms in Tobaccoville, North Carolina. “I tasted carrots pulled straight from the ground,” he says. “They were almost naturally sugar infused, and I wanted to create a dish that honored both the ingredient and the farmers behind it.”
He cuts some of the carrots into oblique chunks and juices the rest to enhance the cream reduction. If you can’t juice your own carrots, try to source the freshest you can, ideally from a local juice bar. In a pinch, bottled versions will work. The carrots caramelize in a pan while heavy cream and carrot juice infused with thyme reduces on the stove. They finish cooking in the cream mixture, creating a luxurious sauce.
At Restaurant Constance, Diminich serves the dish with braised meat like spiced pork shanks, but it would be a study in simple elegance on a Thanksgiving table. “It’s flavor on flavor,” he says, “but it all circles back to those carrots.”