Bacon 101 with Adam Lucks of Comet Café

Hunger-smashing comfort food, an intimidatingly cool rock star waiting staff, and a cozy atmosphere are among the many calling cards for Comet Café. But it’s all window dressing next to the East side restaurant’s real star attraction, bacon. There’s the free bowls of bacon every Sunday. There’s the zesty bacon pancakes. There’s the bacon that comes in every bloody mary, one of the city’s best. “For a dollar we’ll put bacon on anything,” says head chef Adam Lucks, who shared some of what he’s learned from years of experimenting with what the USDA calls “the cured belly of a swine carcass” with Decider.

You really can add bacon to anything, even—or especially—if it sounds gross
“We believe if it’s good, it’s better with bacon. I have yet to find a single food that’s not good with bacon. I’ve tried it all. Chocolate-covered bacon is awesome. You wouldn’t think so, but you dip it in chocolate and it’s delicious. We’ve made bacon apple pies that are awesome. You mix the bacon in with the crust.  Anything with a salty and sweet combination, it’s easy to work with. Even cooking with pork bellies, it has the most amazing texture. It just melts away.”

Yes, he really means anything
“One of our baristas, Dr. Nick, he made a bacon latte that was just awesome. You take bacon fat and steam it into the milk, and then mix it with espresso and a little bit of vanilla syrup and top it with crumbled bacon. It was delicious. We found out if you let it get too cold, the bacon fat starts to solidify a bit and it gets a little greasy if you don’t drink it piping hot. We call it the farmers’ latte.”

The bacon dish the government doesn’t want you to try
“One that we wanted to do but the Health Department wouldn’t let us do until we installed another sink is bacon caramel vanilla milk shakes. There are fantastic. They are unbelievably awesome. It’s just caramel syrup, vanilla ice cream, and finely chopped bacon, and you put it together. Again, it’s that sweet-salty combination. You’ve got this really sweet milkshake, and then you get these little bits of salty, smoky bacon bits.”

Bacon as retirement plan
“If you want to come in and eat two pounds of bacon that’s your choice. It’s horrible for you. It’s fat, it’s sodium, it’s nitrates, it’s terrible for you. But I don’t think anything that is really good for you can actually taste that good. The worst it is, the better it tastes. If I can knock part of my generation by feeding them bacon then I’ll have Social Security benefits.”