savor — guide to food & dining on the azalea coast
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Chef Michael Greczy
has been trying to alter the perception of
rabbit at Cobblestone Café, his new down-town
Wilmington eatery. There diners can
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find options like roast rabbit sandwiches
and pulled rabbit salads. For Greczy, eat-ing
rabbit just makes sense and he added
it to his menu when he found a local sup-plier
of New Zealand white rabbit meat
— Carolina Pete’s Rabbitry in Claremont,
North Carolina.
“I know rabbit is one of the healthiest
meats you can eat,” Greczy says. “Also they
reproduce quickly and don’t take up a lot
of space so they are much more sustainable
to mass-produce rabbit than beef or other
animals.”
Spending time on his sister’s farm helped
open his eyes to the benefits of eating rab-bit,
Greczy says.
“My sister has a farm down in Florida
and I lived with her a while to help her get
it set up and one of the things we looked
into was raising rabbits,” he says. “So for a
while I have been really interested in rab-bits
in general just in working with her and
when I came here I wanted to try to imple-ment
rabbit into the menu.”
Greczy says rabbit mostly tastes like
chicken, but it’s leaner. For those willing to
try, he says samples are available.
“Some people come in and are happy to
see it because they have had rabbit before
and you don’t see it everywhere, and then
there are the people that come in and say,
‘Ew, you have rabbit?’ But once we explain
the reasons why we have rabbit, they are
willing to try and even sample some.”
Unlike rabbit, duck is a game meat vari-ety
that most diners are not afraid to try
and it has become a year-round staple at
local restaurants like the Brasserie Du Soleil
where Chef Engle uses a moulard duck
variety from the Hudson Valley. Moulard
is a cross between Peking and Muscovy
ducks, and Engle says it is a popular choice
for his patrons any time of the year.
“I know rabbit is one of the healthiest meats
you can eat,” Greczy says. “Also they reproduce
quickly and don’t take up a lot of space so they
are much more sustainable to mass-produce
rabbit than beef or other animals.”
Roast rabbit can serve as a protein substitute in any dish using chicken, which
Cobblestone Café Chef Michael Greczy favors because of the meat’s low sodium
and fat content. On the café menu is the pulled rabbit on a fruit harvest salad with
caramelized walnuts tossed with peach vinaigrette.