Tripe overcomes a bad rap, landing on menus around Philadelphia

Most of the customers at Stargazy, chef Sam Jacobson's British pie-and-mash shop, come in very hungry and leave very happy. Most.

"I've had a woman throw a tantrum here," says the relocated Londoner, who opened last fall on East Passyunk Avenue. The trigger for her freak-out: spotting the word tripe on Stargazy's menu board. Jacobson had made a pie filled with bits of the beef stomach, slow-cooked in the French style with cider, cream, brandy, mustard, and herbs, as a daily special. And that, as it turned out, was not what she wanted to see.

She was "literally stomping her feet angrily and going, 'No, no, no!' She just freaked out," Jacobson says. "I laughed and said, 'You know, you could just get something else.' "

This distressed patron is far from alone when it comes to an adverse reaction to tripe, the stomach of a grazing animal, usually a cow, which for centuries has been eaten by cultures around the globe.

Here in Philadelphia, tripe is being served at an increasing number of establishments, at high-end restaurants and at taquerias and sandwich shops. Chefs from diverse backgrounds cook the cut in a dizzying array of styles, relying on myriad ingredients and techniques.

Tripe is popular in French, Italian, and Portuguese cuisines; Mexicans love it, too, and it's equally big throughout Asia, in China, Vietnam, and beyond. Philadelphia, even, has an indigenous tripe dish: pepper pot soup, which can be traced back to Washington's brutal winters in Valley Forge.

Persuading timid customers to give tripe a try is not the only challenge for chefs. Proper tripe preparation is often time-consuming, but fans feel that the results - a hearty, slightly funky starting point, cut by complementary flavors - are worth the trouble.

At Vernick Food & Drink, chef Greg Vernick soaks tripe for a week in alternating baths of milk and saltwater before braising and serving it Italian-style, in a fire-roasted tomato sauce - a cheffed-up riff that shares some DNA with the tomato-and-tripe sandwiches served on Sarcone's rolls at George's in the Italian Market.

At Zeppoli, in Collingswood, it takes four days for Joey Baldino to complete his tripe Ragusa, a Sicilian preparation with Arabic influences. It's rinsed, soaked in milk, brined, and boiled before it's cooked for hours with garlic, herbs, eggplant, cinnamon, and white wine.

Luz Jimenez, of the South Philly taqueria Los Gallos, is another chef who dedicates ample time to tripe prep. "It's hard work," says Jimenez, who spends hours each week soaking, rinsing, and cleaning raw stomach. "But a lot of people like it, especially my community."

Here, tripe is offered as the showcase ingredient of menudo, the soul-stirring stew that's a staple of many Latino families' weekends.

"Mexicans, we know what it is. Other races sometimes, they're afraid to try it," says Jimenez, who's quick to point out his old-school Italian customers are among his biggest menudo fans. "But once they try it, they love it."

Though chewy "book" tripe does show up in some capacities locally - sliced and served chilled in Han Dynasty's beef and tripe in chili oil; floating with beef and tendon in bowls of Vietnamese pho - honeycomb is the most frequently used, due to its consistent shape and texture.

That latter characteristic might hold the key to wider-spread tripe conversion. "Texturally, it's a challenge," says Townsend Wentz, of Townsend and A Mano. "It's not similar to much."

At A Mano, Wentz and chef Michael Millon include tripe in a Bolognese made with braised pig's snout, finishing the dish with crispy guanciale (pork jowl) and crunchy chickpeas. At his eponymous East Passyunk restaurant, Wentz offers a variation on Basque piperade, cooking tripe down with peppers, onions, and capers before topping with bread crumbs and grated Parmesan. "You don't want the tripe to have the most texture in the dish," he says.

At the outset of the process, Wentz boils his honeycomb tripe as many as three times in salted water to reach the desired tenderness.

Given its longevity and across-the-board popularity, you might wonder why tripe elicits such strong opinions, while other off cuts, such as tongue and sweetbreads, have actually managed to muster up some love in recent years.

Chef Chad Kubanoff, who owns Northern Liberties Vietnamese BYOB Same Same with his wife, Kien Giang native Thuy, has run into similar apprehension among customers. Figuring that pha lau, a traditional Vietnamese offal soup that includes tripe, would be too tough a sell for an American audience, he decided to slice his into strips, aggressively season it ("a lot of garlic and too much fish sauce"), bread it in rice flour, and fry it, producing an end result that resembles Shore-style clam strips. He has even fooled a couple of regulars with the approximation.

Han Chiang, of Han Dynasty, sees the labor-intensive, painstaking processes behind tripe as a true sign of kitchen skill. "That's the hardest part in culinary," he says. "Anybody can make a Kobe steak taste good. How are you going to make tripe taste good?"