Quinn’s Table: Too Much and Garlic are not friends

From a spotless kitchen in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, to a backyard chili party in Osceola, Wisconsin, this month’s recipes celebrate family favorites, happy accidents, and the joy of feeding the people you love.

The kitchen was barely wider than a hallway. Quinn’s Minneapolis apartment had been built in the late 1950s, and its galley kitchen held on to every bit of summer heat, with no air conditioning to chase it out. There was nowhere to hide from what he was cooking, and that night, what he was cooking was garlic.

Officially, it was shrimp scampi: spaghetti, double the suggested amount of shrimp, chunks of onion, a shower of parsley, lemon to brighten the dish, and copious amounts of garlic. It was the first meal he had ever made for Neil in his apartment, and he wanted it to impress without looking like he was trying too hard. Oil crackled as the shrimp hit the pan. Then came the garlic, and more garlic, and then more. The warning sign for Neil should have been a counter littered with the peels of an entire bulb of garlic. No amount of butter or Parmesan could save him.

“Retroflectively I could agree it was pretty garlicky,” Quinn says. “It was coming out of our pores.”

The smell filled the tiny room and stayed there. They ate, they laughed, and if nothing else, the evening settled one question for good: Neil was definitely not a vampire.

Quinn, for the record, thought it was pretty great. Neil admitted later that it had completely blown out his senses. He married Quinn anyway.

Meet Quinn

Quinn Alt grew up in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, in a house where the kitchen was always spotless and the party menus were always ambitious. After studying at Michigan State and starting his career in Minneapolis, he now lives in Osceola, Wisconsin, with his husband, Neil. He cooks for Neil most nights and for a rotating crowd of friends and family whenever he can.

Ask him to describe himself and he’ll say he’s empathetic, caring, and someone who wants the people around him to feel heard and empowered. His cooking works the same way. For Quinn, a meal is a way of making people feel looked after, and the best dinners are the ones where everyone leaves a little happier than they came.

He also runs The Alt Table, which makes him the first guest at his own table. This month, we’re cooking through his story: his mom’s baked mac and cheese, Great Aunt Kathy’s butter cake, the garlic-heavy scampi that didn’t scare Neil away, and the chili that brings his Wisconsin friends back every fall.

A Place for Everything

Quinn’s mom kept a clean house, and the kitchen was no exception. Nothing sat on the counters except the coffee maker. The toaster lived underneath, the stand mixer lived on top of the fridge, and the sink was empty by the end of every day.

Weeknight dinners were roasted meat and vegetables, because his mom loves a good veggie, but they were rarely eaten at a table. The family ate in the living room in front of the TV, and everyone had their spot. Quinn’s was the corner of the couch, where he mastered the art of leaning his drink precariously on the edge of the couch backer and the wall so it wouldn’t tip.

When his mom was cooking and Quinn was home, Quinn was in the kitchen too. His mom always reached for the same small white handled serrated Cutco knife for nearly every job. That knife is older than Quinn and duller than it used to be, but that has never slowed her down. She was a gifted host who built full menus from small sit-down dinners all the way up to massive friend and neighborhood parties that were legendary, clam bakes, christmas parties, neighborhood st patties crawls, birthdays, and the list goes on. Quinn would always have a pot to stir or a baguette to slice. “The ends were my payment,” he says. Days before the event, the two of them would spend ages studying the table, deciding where every dish should sit.

Still, his mom has always called herself a “recipe cook.”

“If you can read, you can cook.” – Mary Kay Alt

“She means she could never create from nothing,” Quinn explains. “She’s a great cook, but she only thinks so because she follows a recipe.” Quinn believes her talents go above and beyond “just a recipe cook” proven by her spectacular track record. “I see her in myself too, and attribute my love for food and entertaining to her.”

No dish sticks in his memory more than her baked mac and cheese. For every birthday, holiday, and gathering, it came out of the oven orange, a little greasy, and loaded with elbow noodles. It was made with full-fat mayo, sour cream, a full pound of cheddar, and two tablespoons of onion powder, an amount Quinn admits was overpowering but also the whole reason it was so good. Best of all for a busy host, it could be assembled the day before and baked the day of.

“It brings me back to my childhood house,” Quinn says, “where the dining room is packed full of people raving about Mary Kay’s Mac N Cheese.”

When Quinn made his own version, with real caramelized onions in place of the powder, his mom gave it her approval, though there was some debate about the difference between caramelizing onions and just sautéing them.

Recipe: Caramelized Onion & Sausage Baked Mac and Cheese

Great Aunt Kathy’s Butter Cake

In Quinn’s family, some recipes aren’t really owned by anyone. They just get passed along. Great Aunt Kathy’s butter cake was one of them. It came from Kathy, but it was Quinn’s mom who made it, over and over, because everyone asked her to.

“I see a lot of Aunt Kathy in my mom,” Quinn says. “That amazing, warm personality. She loves to host and can make anyone feel welcomed enough to have a genuine good time.”

The cake itself was simple. A box of yellow cake mix, an egg, and a whole stick of butter were pressed into a 9×13 pan for the crust. On top went a layer of cream cheese, egg, and powdered sugar, whipped together and spread edge to edge, then baked until golden and crackled. Quinn loved helping, especially pressing in the crust and spreading on the topping. It was always served cold, so the squares held their shape and kept their gooey bite: a chewy, sandy crust under a rich, sweet layer that nearly melted.

It was requested at every gathering, and no one requested it harder than Uncle Georgie. His strategy was to enlist a cousin to text Quinn’s mom and say how much she really wanted butter cake. Everyone had their suspicions, but the cake got made.

Only recently did Quinn learn that the family recipe is actually a classic St. Louis gooey butter cake. To him, it had always just been Aunt Kathy’s. When he made it for Neil for the first time, Neil was shocked by how rich it was.

“When I taste it, I feel like I’m transported back in time,” Quinn says.

Recipe: Cream Cheese Marbled Gooey Butter Cake Bars

It Takes a Yes Man to Reach 150 Restaurants

Quinn’s first job out of college, at Land O’Lakes, brought him to Minneapolis. The start was a little lonely in a new city with no friends. “I didn’t have plans to keep me busy, and I was feeling alone,” he remembers.

Then he met Heriberto. They developed a friendship where Quinn would send a quick text asking if Herb wanted to go out somewhere, and the answer was always yes. Herb became his ultimate yes man, and for a while they went out to eat about three times a week. They look back on those days and think maybe that was a little unhinged.

Quinn started keeping a list, partly for himself and partly for everyone else. “If someone asked for recommendations, I didn’t want to forget,” he says. The list became his personal rating system, and over about two years it grew to roughly 150 restaurants, most of them visited with Herb. His favorite was Quang, where the egg rolls are incredibly crispy and even better drowned in fish sauce. Close behind is Bar La Grassa, home to what he calls the best pasta in the city.

Minneapolis is also where Quinn met Neil, on Hinge. Their first date was at a brewery, and their second was at an indoor arcade bar. Not long after came the scampi night in that hot little galley kitchen, when Neil learned that Quinn’s love of garlic runs deeper than most people’s.

“Honestly, I may have been okay with it. Neil confessed later how it blew out his senses.”

The scampi has changed a lot since then. There’s much less garlic now, and the cheese and acidity are balanced so no single flavor takes over. Somewhere along the way, a dish that started as a funny story became something he makes regularly.

“I think the humor of accidentally using way too much garlic is what bonded us over that meal,” Quinn says, “even if it wasn’t a success.”

Recipe: Lemon-Garlic Shrimp Scampi

Three Fires and One Promise

Every fall, Quinn and Neil open their yard in Osceola for their annual chili party, now in its third year. They make one promise to their guests: “There will be chili.”

Year one taught them a lot about hosting. There was one small fire pit and a circle of chairs too wide for anyone to feel the heat. Everyone loved the chili, but they loved it cold. The next year, Quinn and Neil built three separate fires so guests could gather close and stay warm.

The chili gets reworked every year. His version lands somewhere between Texas-style chili (meat and chiles) and classic American chili (tomatoes and beans), with hand-crushed tomatoes for brightness and seasoned Italian sausage alongside the beef for savory depth. He has finally taken his stance, there will be no beans.

“I just don’t like beans in chili,” Quinn says. “It feels like filler, and I want more meat.”

When Quinn thinks about the chili, he thinks about the people who show up for it, and about all the amazing people he has found since moving to the Midwest.

Recipe: Hearty Tomato Beef & Sausage Chili

Quinn’s Table Today

These days, Quinn cooks mostly for Neil, and he cooks nearly every night. He isn’t a fan of leftovers, so he would rather make something fresh than reheat yesterday’s dinner. A typical weeknight is a balanced, complete meal for two. Shrimp scampi, the dish that once overwhelmed them both, shows up almost weekly now, because it’s simple and comes together fast.

He also inherited his mom’s love of hosting, and he is always looking for a way to impress a guest, whether that’s friends and family around his table or a backyard full of people and three fires. He is quick to accept the responsibility of Kline family gatherings, partly because they are centrally located to everyone and maybe mostly because he has the need to control the menu.

The biggest recent change is how he cooks. Where his mom follows the recipe, Quinn increasingly looks forward to writing his own recipes, tinkering, testing, and trying again. “I’m constantly trying to improve these days,” he says. That goes for the mac, the chili, and especially the scampi.

Pass It On

If someone could learn only one dish from Quinn, it would be shrimp scampi. “It’s so simple and so delicious,” he says.

He hopes people remember “the thought and care that went into creating a great, warm, loving experience.” And for anyone making his scampi for the first time, he hopes they’ll feel what he felt in that tiny kitchen: the love of personal connection, the kindness in cooking for someone else, and the humor in making mistakes.

Just go easy on the garlic. Or don’t. Some of the best stories start with too much of it.

From Their Table to Mine

This month is a little different, because the table is mine. It’s still the way every Featured Table will work: I take the stories someone shares, find what made each dish matter, and develop an original recipe that honors that memory while making it my own.

For my mom’s mac and cheese, I kept the creamy, crowd-pleasing comfort and the make-ahead ease, then swapped the onion powder for real caramelized sweet onions, lightened the mayo and sour cream, and added browned Italian sausage. For Great Aunt Kathy’s butter cake, I kept the pressed crust and gooey cream cheese top, but made the crust from scratch, added a custard-style batter layer for lift, softened the sweetness, and brightened it with lemon zest. The scampi is a completely new build, with seared shrimp, shallot, white wine, butter, and lemon, and far less garlic than the original. The chili keeps changing every year, and this year’s gochujang and Aleppo pepper are the “alt” at its heart.

These recipes are my developments, inspired by the people and memories behind them, not family recipe cards reproduced. That’s the whole idea of The Alt Table: every recipe here carries someone’s story, cooked in my own way.

This Month’s Menu

• Caramelized Onion & Sausage Baked Mac and Cheese
• Cream Cheese Marbled Gooey Butter Cake Bars
• Lemon-Garlic Shrimp Scampi
• Hearty Tomato Beef & Sausage Chili

[Subscribe to The Alt Table newsletter] to get the bonus recipe straight to your inbox, plus next month’s Featured Table before anyone else.

About the Bonus Recipe

Every Featured Table comes with one extra recipe that never appears on the site. It goes only to newsletter subscribers.

Each month, one story from our guest’s table doesn’t make it into the article. Maybe it’s a dish a grandparent made only once a year, a late-night meal from a first apartment, or a recipe everyone asked for but no one ever wrote down. I save that story for the newsletter, develop a recipe around it, and send both straight to subscribers’ inboxes. It’s the part of each feature you won’t find anywhere else.

Since this month’s table is my own, I’m skipping the bonus this time around. But starting next month, every Featured Table will have one, and I’ll give you a hint about it right here at the end of each article.

[Subscribe to The Alt Table newsletter] so you don’t miss the first bonus recipe or next month’s Featured Table.

Next Month at The Alt Table

For years, the kitchen in Chalfont belonged to my mom. Lately, someone else has been claiming more and more of it.

Next month, we’re pulling up a seat at Clarence’s Table. My dad has a love for fire, smoke, and patience, the kind of cooking where the best part happens low and slow. In recent years he’s taken over more of the household cooking, and he’s brought the grill and the smoker with him.