JJ Johnson’s Journeys Bring Him Home

NEW YORK — Rice was one of the chef Joseph Johnson’s first loves and first heartbreaks.

His earliest remembered taste of it was in his grandmother’s asopao, a Puerto Rican dish that is not quite stew, not quite soup. It’s made of rice simmered in chicken broth and white wine, with collapsed tomatoes, sofrito and olives leaching their brine.

This is food that warms you, changes you from within. Johnson, known as JJ, called it simply soupy rice, and drank it by the cup. But after his grandmother died, the only rice that appeared on the table was “this Uncle Ben’s nonsense,” he said — bland and mushy. “It was never right.”

He held a grudge all through culinary school, failing at pilaf and doing his best to avoid the grain. The turning point came on a trip to Ghana with the restaurateur Alexander Smalls, an owner of the Cecil in Harlem, where Johnson was the executive chef until last summer.

In Ghana, the men were served jollof rice, hot and smoky. “I’m sweating, but it’s really good,” Johnson said. He wanted to know: “Why is their rice better than ours?”

He reached out to Glenn Roberts, the founder of Anson Mills and a scholar and champion of heirloom and native grains, to find out more about the West African rice, an indigenous crop called Oryza glaberrima. Out of Johnson’s studies came FieldTrip, a fast-casual restaurant that he plans to open in Harlem in November, after a preview in September at the U.S. Open.

The menu, with dishes cooked to order, is built around five pedigreed strains of rice. They include Nostrale, first planted in Italy in the 15th century, delicately earthy; Mountain Violet, a purple-husked, glutinous variety from the largely inaccessible Cordillera mountains in northern Luzon, the Philippines; and sweet Carolina Gold, grown in the South Carolina low country since before the American Revolution.

Carolina Gold might be paired with a gently fried chicken thigh and a swath of tamarind barbecue sauce. Mountain Violet might arrive half gooey, half crispy from a quick press against the flattop. One certainty: There will be soupy rice.

The name FieldTrip is a playful nod to Johnson’s travels. He will still be traveling come fall, from FieldTrip’s storefront under construction uptown to the Henry, the lobby-level restaurant at the Life Hotel north of the Flatiron Building, whose kitchen he took over this month.

There, he has returned to the elevated African-diaspora cooking that was his signature at the Cecil, this time with a few smoke-drum backyard favorites thrown in. “When my mom came to the Cecil, she said, ‘There’s nothing for me,'” he recalled. “I said: ‘Mom, there’s poussin. I put a lot of effort into this stuff.” Now a roasted half-chicken, rubbed with jerk, appears alongside the likes of lamb suya with kimchi and piri-piri clams in a bath of fennel and Asian pear.

He still hopes that Oryza glaberrima will one day anchor the FieldTrip menu. He’s got a lead on a farmer in Brazil who might be growing it, and another in upstate New York. The search continues.

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109 Lenox Ave. (Malcolm X Boulevard), November.