Six years ago, chef Mitch Prensky - a certified creature of New York's culinary scene (L'Ecole, Mesa Grill, March, and Daniel) - was still feeling his way around Philadelphia, where he had relocated at the urging of his wife-partner, Jennifer London (now Prensky), a diehard product of the Great Northeast.

The couple had set up a catering outfit, Global Dish. They did (besides the usual parties and bar mitzvahs) occasional one-night restaurant stands, popping up in unconventional settings.

One of them was at a big, rawboned space at 10th and South, a Vespa shop where the Prenskys had catered a party event before - and for which Mitch was paid with the black Vespa scooter he still rides to pick up ingredients in Chinatown or at DiBruno Bros.

When the scooter shop closed its doors a few years later, the couple opened their "urban farmhouse" of a restaurant, Supper, at the address - its first Modern American plates a little precious (and pricey) for some tastes, its later fare (a pork belly reuben, anyone?) still inventive, but far more relaxed, homey - with a sense of humor.

Rick Nichols: It sounds like you might have been genetically programmed for this business, even though you once thought jazz drumming was your destiny.

Mitch Prensky: My parents owned a quiche business in the '70s, Quiche by Rhoda Lee. That was my mom. My grandfather had fought in World War I, and befriended a French guy who'd given him the recipe. He showed my mom how to make it.

R.N.: So did she just go straight into business?

M.P.: No, she was baking the quiches [at home near Nyack, N.Y.] and giving them away. But people said they were so good she should sell them. Her first account was Zabar's and later they sold them at Dean & Deluca, Balducci's, and d'Agostino's. I still remember Saul Zabar tasting it. He tasted everything. The coffee, the smoked salmon. A guy walked around behind him with a spittoon. Saul would taste and spit.

R.N.: So Zabar's is why you became a chef?

M.P.: No, I hated going to camp and other normal stuff. I'd rather go with my dad on the delivery route. Or be with my mom cooking in the kitchen. My babysitters were Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Gourmet magazine. It was a little strange; I was 9 years old.

R.N.: Didn't I overhear you telling [former Gourmet editor] Ruth Reichl at a fund-raiser at Supper about your brief career feeding Dead Heads?

M.P.: Very brief. Maybe twice while I was working as a line cook at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill, a buddy of mine said we ought to make quesadillas for the Grateful Dead shows. The Dead Heads loved grilled cheese. So we tie-dyed our chef's jackets and sold grilled goat cheese and vegetable quesadillas. Half the time we ended up giving them away. I think our biggest night was $40.

R.N.: So what was up with the drumming thing?

M.P.: Well, I did get tired of the food scene for a while. I went to music school and studied with Joe Morello, the drummer who did "Take Five" with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. So I was into drumming, music, and jazz performance. It was my escape. But if you want to be cured of something, study it in college; what you were using as an escape, now you need an escape from that. Which was cooking again . . . cooking was my escape from studying music.

R.N.: After working the kitchens around Manhattan, you married a Philly girl. You thought you could just move to Philadelphia and take the city by storm?

M.P.: Our plan was to open a Philadelphia restaurant in 1995. We moved down here. But you know the saying, "Man makes plans, and God laughs." We didn't know the lay of the land. We opened Global Dish, the catering company, instead.

R.N.: Anything strike you as different from Gotham?

M.P.: For one thing, there

seemed to be more restaurants

with windows on the street in

New York. Here we'd walk past Jimmy's Milan and go, "Wow, is this a private club?" It was all bricked up.

R.N.: Maybe that's why you were attracted to the Supper space two years ago. The tall sunny windows? I see you've changed the menu somewhat - slightly larger portions, slightly lower prices, even those boneless Moroccan-spiced chicken wings with the tangy cubes of jellied yogurt seem to have gone more down-home.

M.P.: We've loosened up a little, gone a bit more homey. I cook stuff that I like to eat. The chicken wings are finger food now. First we brine them and smoke them and slow-cook them in a birch-beer glaze, do a crust of black pepper and salt. We serve them with a buttermilk dressing with raw scallions. For starters we've got a crab latke. And truffled deviled eggs. A main-course pork belly with purple yam puree and pineapple mustard.

R.N.: And now you've started lunch? Lunch at Supper?

M.P.: Yes, we've even got a house-made, 100 percent pork shoulder hot dog. People always say you never know what's in a hot dog. Well, we know exactly what's in ours. I

Contact columnist Rick Nichols at 215-854-2715 or rnichols@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://gophilly.com/ricknichols.

Mitch Prensky's recipes for holiday hors d'oeuvres are on the facing page.