Paillard of Chicken with Tarragon and Flake Salt

As a child walking into an Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s North Beach district, I would put on a brave face and glue myself to my father’s side. A cacophony of sensations would accost my nose, my ears, and my staring eyeballs. The smell of stale red wine overlaid with steaming starch. Preoccupied waitresses shoving their heavy bodies through the thick yellow air, moving from table to table with armloads of bread and heaping plates of sea creatures smoldering under garlic and basil. Greasy overhead speakers thumping from their tattered baffles; a dishwasher roaring in the back; and overlaying all, the incessant thudding of a wooden mallet slamming a defenseless piece of chicken or veal. Indifferent to my concern, my father would smile. “Howard!” the restaurant owner would bellow, wading through the crowd to deliver a tumbler of red wine. And the two would launch into boisterous talk about herbs and oils and salt, my dad gesturing appreciatively to the monster with the wood mallet and saying, “Yes, yes, chicken very thin.” For much of my childhood, I thought the measure of a good restaurant was the ferocity of the butcher up front pounding flesh, and the ensuing experience of meat so wonderfully tender and mild that it melted away the world’s hazards. With a flourish of flake salt to accentuate the play of texture and savor on the palate, this paillard is quick, easy, and enormously satisfying. If you like, substitute veal cutlets for the chicken, using Italian parsley in place of the tarragon.