OBW Company Christmas Dinner

We closed early on Friday night the 23rd to all sit down to Christmas dinner together. Although we are often together, the whole crew sits down to dinner together once a year. The planning started a couple weeks out with me canvassing the crew about what they wanted to eat.

We all still had visions of last year's dinner dancing in our heads: ossobuco of pork, risotto milanese, and kick-ass collard greens braised with smoked turkey necks. You can see from last year's menu what we like to eat: hearty braised comfort food with no frou-frou. Keep your lobsters and caviar, bring on the braised meat.

Everyone except me would have been satisfied with the same menu as last year; I always want to do something different. This year, after much soul searching, it finally came to me while watching the Food Network; this would be the year for porchetta, that crackling piggy delight of Italian heritage. Add some gnocchi with pancetta and black truffles and a reprising of the braised collard greens and the menu was set.

Wild Boar-Stuffed Porchetta

Porchetta is a stuffed pork roast that probably originated in central Italy. Often you will see a whole pig stuffed and spit-roasted. Here we imitate that with pork belly that I prepped by butterflying it and curing it for 48 hours with ground fennel, ground coriander, salt, and sugar.

After rinsing the cured belly, I covered it with a wild boar forcemeat flavored with orange zest, black olive purée, ground fennel, and minced garlic. You see the belly here rolled and tied, ready for the oven, and then once it is cooked, all crispy and brown.



Potato Gnocchi with Black Truffles and Pancetta

I took this opportunity to show Tony and Travis how to make traditional potato gnocchi, without eggs. Anyone can add eggs and make gnocchi. It takes some practice to make gnocchi without eggs and the practice is worth it. With eggs, you get lumps. Without eggs, you get light pillows of goodness.

Tony, peeling the potatoes for the gnocchi. Travis in the background. We generally don't serve potatoes at the restaurant and when we do, they are not the russets that make the best gnocchi. You may notice the retail bag of tiny russets that I had to run out to the grocery store to fetch.










Travis, ricing the potatoes.
















Gnocchi on the hoof, awaiting their turn in the pot of simmering water.









The finished product, mixed with butter and truffles and pancetta, topped with grated cheese, and baked.

Collard Greens Braised with Smoked Pork Neck

Chef's Tasting

Here are the photos from last night's Chef's Table. We used our customers as guinea pigs in a sense: we were auditioning new dishes for the main dinner menu. In most cases, this is the first time we've tried these dishes. Some may go on to feature on the main menu, some may get tweaked and tried again, and at least one will be relegated to the bit-bin here on the blog.

Dueling Pork Belly. You may have noticed a theme to recent Chef's Tasting menus: pork belly. In our quest to convert people to the Pork Belly Legion™, we seem to be serving it everywhere. Here, we have two quick one-biters for our amuse course.

The first (closest) is the way we have been featuring pork belly on the main dinner menu since we first started experimenting with this combination back in November for another tasting. Sitting on a mound of grits is the pork belly, which is drizzled with local hickory bark syrup, and topped with what we are calling a red grape "olivada" after the Italian condiment of the same name. It consists of red grapes, olives, capers, anchovies, lemon juice, oregano, and olive oil.

The second presentation (the farthest away) is a classic Vietnamese treatment of pork belly, but one we've never featured here at the restaurant. I braised the pork belly in a sauce that I made from caramel, fish sauce, black pepper, and shallots. You see the pork belly sitting on a mound of grits, topped with more of the braising caramel sauce, and topped with a cilantro leaf.

Seared Sea Scallop. This dish is the result of us having baby Shanghai bok choy, lop cheung (Chinese sausage), and pickled mustard greens in the cooler and trying to find a way to use them. Coupled with this, Matt just delivered us a huge bunch of chicken feet when he last brought us rabbits, so we had a big batch of super good chicken stock in the cooler as well. Soup was a natural thought given this bunch of ingredients, but we decided to change the form and do the old soup in the wonton trick. In the photo, you see a soup-filled wonton down and a quarter of a baby bok choy, cilantro leaves, pickled mustard greens, green onions, and lop cheung coins over, with a scallop topping the feast.

What you don't see is a tiny bit of the fish sauce caramel from the pork belly underneath the wonton. When the guest cuts into the wonton, the ginger-flavored chicken stock spews forth, mixes with the caramel, and fills the bowl with a delicious soup broth. It worked as intended, but the guests seemed non-plussed by the dish: they didn't seem to know how to eat it. Not knowing how I should eat something has never stopped me from trying, but then I am not most people, and that is why we test some of these dishes at the Chef's Table before launching them in the main dining room. This dish, as good as it looked and smelled and as fun as it appeared to us to be, will probably never make it to the dining room.

Wild Mushrooms on Celery Root Latke. There is nothing earth shattering here, just plain old-fashioned deliciousness. In recent weeks, we have really taken a liking to celery root paired with wild mushrooms and this is that pairing's latest incarnation. The chanterelle mushrooms (the last of the season before we switch to hedgehogs for the winter) are finished old-school, with veal demiglace and heavy cream. Classic French habits die hard in old chefs!

Roasted Red Drum. This is a test use of Tony's puttanesca-style lentils. I am a big fan of lentils with fish; the pairing just works for me. And pasta puttanesca, with it's bold seasonings, just may be my all-time favorite pasta dish. Here you see the lentils flavored with olives, capers, anchovies, garlic, basil, and crushed red pepper flakes under a piece of drum that has been rubbed with olive oil, salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, and garlic, and then roasted. This is headed for the dinner menu this weekend. It will probably perplex customers, but I love the pairing and the plate presentation is clean and inviting.

Jerked Veal with Sweet Potato Spätzle. And now for something completely different and a dish that will never go any further than this. We've been serving a classic schnitzel with spätzle on the dinner menu this week. Tony had the idea of taking that dish and doing a Caribbean riff on it. The veal cutlets were rubbed and marinated with our house-made jerk paste then grilled, sliced, and stacked Lincoln Log-style. On top of this stack you see a cranberry salsa made from cranberries, lime, jerk paste, allspice, and cilantro. The salsa was pretty good and may be something we would try again. Next to this you see the sweet potato spätzle, browned with brunoise of sweet potato, and finished with a touch of grated ginger, lime zest, and allspice. I was unhappy with the presentation and the Caribbean flavors just didn't add anything to the dish; they weren't bad, but if they don't add anything, why are they there?

Caramel Apple Butterscotch Bread Pudding. What? This doesn't look like a bread pudding? Well, it is. These small local Blushing Golden apples are hollowed out and then baked with the bread pudding inside. Sauced with house-made dulce de leche, crème anglaise, and a touch of maple syrup, this dish was a fun way to finish dinner.

2011: December 15th

The is the 24th and final posting of the series about One Block West Restaurant during 2011. It's been a year of a lot of changes for the better at the restaurant and I have greatly enjoyed writing about what has happened. I will follow up on or about December 31st with an index to the series and a few notes summarizing the year, but this it for the series. I hope that you have enjoyed reading along.

After a great run this fall, business has come to a screeching halt. Although I should be used to it after nine full years at this restaurant, the nearly instantaneous cessation of business after Thanksgiving this year surprised me. The first weekend in December is always miserable for two reasons. First, the travelers that we depend on for the bulk of our weekend business are spending the weekend at home because they were on the road the weekend before for Thanksgiving. And second, any potential local business is obliterated by the local holiday house tour. The second weekend is hardly any better. Collectively, the first two weeks of December are historically two of the worst weeks of the year, and so they have been this year.

Because of the dearth of customers, it has been a real struggle to sell the food we have prepped. Even though we know it is a slow time, we have to be prepared to have a busy night at any time and that means prepping more food than we think we have good reason to believe that we will sell. As I mentioned in the last posting, unpredictable is the new normal. And after a slow weekend on the 9th and 10th, we got bombed out of nowhere on Tuesday the 13th. We were barely staffed and barely prepped for more business than we did the entire weekend before.

But the overall slow time has let me get things done in my office that I haven't had time for in at least four months. For example, I have been through a lot of old paperwork and shredded and recycled anything not necessary to preserve. I've sent several massive bags of shredded documents to recycling in the last couple of weeks. And, I am already starting to close 2011, getting a jump on this heinous annual chore.

I keep three years of files on site: the current working set in one file cabinet, last year's in another, and the prior year in file boxes. Each year, another set of files gets moved to offsite storage. This year, I have already moved the 2009 files offsite and removed the 2010 files from the backup file cabinet and boxed them for onsite storage. Left to my own devices, I wouldn't keep this much documentation on site, but certain agencies, ABC in particular, require that we keep two years of documentation on premise.

This month, as I have paid the final bill for each vendor in 2011, I moved the 2011 file from the current vendor filing cabinet to the backup file cabinet. At the end of this process toward the third week of January, the current vendor filing cabinet will contain only active 2012 files.

I have noted with some satisfaction that over the years, the amount of paper that I am storing has grown smaller and smaller each year as more and more vendors switch to paperless billing. Killing fewer trees each year is a good thing.

I mentioned last posting that I spent considerable time on the telephone with an examiner from the Virginia Employment Commission because the dishwasher I fired in October filed for unemployment. I mentioned that my track record with the VEC has only been about 50-50 in the past. Their decision arrived this week in a letter stating that our former dishwasher has been denied unemployment benefits because he had a well-documented history of tardiness and absence from work and because he admitted to the same. I don't wish the guy ill will but I do have a problem with people filing for unemployment when they were fired for not bothering to come to work.

Special event menus always seem to sneak up on me and catch me unprepared. Once again this year, the New Year's Eve menu planning got away from me. I like to have the menu done by the first of December when we open the book for New Year's reservations, but this year, it was the 7th before I published it. After a few calls from customers wanting to know what was on the menu, I finally took off early on the night of the sixth and spent 2-1/2 hours working through the menu with Ann. At least half the ideas on the menu are hers—she remembers dishes that I have cooked that have long escaped my mind. Hell, I can't remember what we served at last week's Chef's Table.

The long and short of it is that we started booking reservations for New Year's Eve on the 7th this year. That morning, I came in, typed up the two menus, published them to the web site with pricing, updated the web site to promote the menus, and decided on seatings and put together a seating chart.

You may recall from the very first posting in this series that last year, we did two seatings two hours and fifteen minutes apart and still had some tables that took longer than that, creating a bit of a traffic jam at the beginning of the second seating as new guests arrived and had nowhere to sit. So this year, I spaced the seatings two and a half hours apart with seatings at 6:00 and 8:30. You might think this is early for New Year's Eve and it is: our customers are not a late partying crowd. They come here to eat before going wherever they are going to ring in the new year.

And this year after a lot of thought on my part, we are returning to a prix fixe menu after a couple of years of not having a special menu, just offering our standard à la carte dinner menu. I think people are ready to celebrate this year; I know I am. And the prix fixe menu is not the only change this year. Even when we did a prix fixe menu in the past, we had about four choices for each course. This year, I have done something entirely different in creating two separate menus, a standard one and a vegetarian one, neither with choices. This is probably going to put off some people and I'm OK with that. My goal this year is to serve customers who are coming to the restaurant to have One Block West food, not customers who are going out to order the filet mignon that they can get at any other decent restaurant. This will be my 10th New Year's Eve dinner service at One Block West and this year, I'm doing it on my own terms.

After sitting in a warehouse in Hagerstown for five days, our new bar stools finally arrived, in the pouring rain. It seems that every time we have to offload furniture or equipment from a trailer, it is pouring rain. With the arrival of the bar stools and the hanging of purse hooks on the bar, the bar renovation is now complete. It's been a long time coming and I am very pleased with the results.

This past week, we were faced with a new twist on the old credit card scam. A guy called at lunch time with a NYC area code and said he was visiting from out of town and wanted to order some food for the rest of the week and have it delivered. But, he didn't know what days we are open or what is on our menu. When informed that we do not deliver, he wanted to order lunch and dinner to-go for the remainder of the week, despite the fact that our dinner menu changes nightly and we have no clue what we're serving for dinner three days hence. The server told him to go look at the lunch menu on the web site and call back with a specific order for today. Good thinking on her part. He never did.

The word for this past two-week period is "short." As in, we got shorted a bunch of stuff that we ordered. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to order something, such as a case of portabella mushrooms, only to find that it mysteriously never made it onto the truck? And it's doubly frustrating if that causes you to not be able to serve a dish on your menu.

And this happens all the time with wine and beer. With more than 70 wines by the glass, we just don't sell much beer, but the beer we sell is from a small microbrewery that has seen phenomenal growth and demand for its product. And they have just moved from their old brewery to a brand new bigger one and in the process, we got shorted on the stout we ordered. Goes with the territory, I suppose. Wine is even worse, coming and going, changing vintages and prices without warning. Despite our best intentions, there is always going to be a wine or two on the list that we just don't have.

A case in point: we have a shiraz that is very popular and is prone to be out of stock for months on end, so we buy large quantities to see us through from container to container arriving from Australia. We were getting low a couple of weeks back, so I called my sales rep and inquired when the next container was arriving and if they had enough in stock to carry us until then. I was told that the next container arrives in January and yes, they had plenty in stock to cover our re-orders between now and then. So we reordered last week and—of course, you've already guessed the outcome—no shiraz. Despite our best intentions at managing our distributors, they can foil just about any plans we might have. "Roll with the punches" is my mantra.

And this past week, Travis tendered his resignation to move to, coincidentally, Hagerstown. This has been coming for a long time and I had expected him to leave the first of the year anyway to go to culinary school, so I have been bringing along a new line cook as a backup. So, we are going into the new year with a new cook. So goes the restaurant business. I'm not sure what Travis' plans are—there aren't any culinary schools near Hagerstown—but I thank him for his service here and I wish him the best in the future.

Speaking of line cooks, one of my former cooks surprised me with a visit at lunch last week. I am very pleased to see that he has matured considerably and is now cooking at The Greenbrier in a very respectable kitchen. One Block West alumni are now in good kitchens around the country; one is a sous chef at a very fine dining place; several are working their way up in big kitchens; and a couple are executive chefs in their own right. It is gratifying to see that they have gone on to do good things with their lives and in their professions. It is my hope that each of them goes on to be a better chef than I am.

We also did a photo shoot with Around the Panhandle magazine and I spent a considerable amount of time doing an interview with a writer for that magazine, which is distributed primarily in the three counties just north of us, Morgan, Berkeley, and Jefferson counties in WV. The restaurant is supposed to be featured in the upcoming January edition. Photoshoots are always difficult for us, especially for magazines because of their long lead times. Our menu is seasonal and what is seasonal for a photoshoot today is not seasonal eight or twelve weeks down the road when the magazine is published. But I've been coping with this problem for years, given that I write articles for food magazines and am always working a season or so ahead.

Those of you who have been reading along through this series will remember that I had problems with my microgreen supplier. He only supplied product in the warm months and then it became too much for him to deliver to me. Back in the fall, we switched to another supplier whose product was not as good and was more expensive. And after about four weeks of working with her, she wanted to almost double her prices. Given that she was already priced above market and the quality was not quite there, I told her that I wouldn't be ordering any more product from her, which may have been her goal. She knew I wasn't happy with her standard product or her weak justification, "All my other chefs are happy with the product." I am not most other chefs and I won't use any product that isn't first class, so I just severed the relationship before it got any worse. She can go on supplying her other chefs and I will move along elsewhere.

And finally, the company Christmas Dinner is on my mind. Or rather the menu is on my mind. What to serve to a very jaded bunch of restaurant employees? You can keep your lobsters, caviar, and foie gras—we see it all the time. The initial word on everyone's lips was "braised." We all want non-fussy comfort food and we want meat, meat cooked low and slow for a very, very long time.

Last year I cooked ossobuco of pork, risotto milanese, and collard greens braised with smoked turkey necks. And I shucked a box of Cavendish Cup oysters from Malpeque, Prince Edward Island. The oysters were briny and fabulous, the osso was so tender and delicious, and it sure is hard to beat a classic like risotto milanese, but I did. Those collard greens are the thing that everyone remembers vividly and were the first dish to go.

I made them for my then-dishwasher who grew up in North Carolina where greens are a way of life. He hadn't had greens in forever and was constantly asking me to make collards for him. And I did, finally, for Christmas. Quoth he, "These are better than my grandma made." Rule number one of the restaurant business: never set yourself up for a comparison with grandma, because she wins every time. Rule number two: if you're going toe-to-toe with grandma, you better knock her out. I knocked her out.

So how to top this? This year I want to do something different and I have gone around and around about sundry braised meats, but there is just no getting around the fact that the pig is king. No meat is as succulent or as flavorful. And as I was struggling with reprising the braised pork shanks, I happened across a late night show on the Food Network that mentioned porchetta. It was a Bart Simpson "Doh!" kind of moment. And then Ann mentioned gnocchi and I was off to the races. And so, I am going to serve a sinfully unctuous porchetta (cured, rolled, and stuffed pork belly roasted for 8-10 hours), potato gnocchi with black truffles and pancetta, and yes, Grandma Williams, collard greens slowly braised with smoked pork necks.

As I wrap up this series about the restaurant, which has caused me to focus on the blog in the last year (as opposed to the web site, the newsletter, the Twitter feed, or Facebook), I have been looking for something to drive me to keep moving the blog forward. It occured to me this week that we have a new international grocery here in Winchester and although I am familiar with thousands of ingredients and although we have hundreds in our pantry, in a troll through the store last weekend, I saw dozens that I have never worked with. So, for 2012, the crew and I are going to be playing with two new ingredients each week. Stay tuned for our experiments with alien-to-us foodstuffs in the new year.

I leave you with the delightful vision of our staff Christmas dinner, a sense of anticipation (hopefully) for the new series of postings in 2012, and thank you very sincerely for reading along with me this year and wish you the merriest of Christmases or whatever holiday you celebrate.

Roses

Here it is December the 10th and it's not only been very cold for early December recently, we've had two snows already and yet the roses in front of the restaurant are into their third bloom of the year, showing no signs of slowing down. The pink and red roses peaked 3-4 days ago so they are a little past their prime for photography, but the yellows are just hitting their stride, especially the Peace-like one just below.

It wasn't a good year for tomatoes or grapes or squash or a lot of things, but apparently, 2011 has been a terrific year for roses. Mine have had the best year ever. They're a good bit of work, but they are spectacular!

Polenta 101

Why do so many people have an entirely nonsensical approach to making polenta (or grits or mealie pap or cornmeal mush or mămăligă or whatever you call it in your culture)? Why? Why, each time I have a new cook start working for me, do I have to unlearn him of bad habits? Why are recipes from Food Network, Washington Post, and the New York Times (respectable institutions all) just so nuts?

This comes to mind because I just stumbled upon these words of wisdom in The Virginia Housewife from 1824 which shows that somewhere along the line, somebody had common sense:

When along the way did we forget to mix the cornmeal into cold water to prevent it from lumping so that we didn't have to stand over the hot pot whisking constantly and vigorously while slowly dribbling the meal into the boiling water?

Cooks everywhere, if you don't know this technique, here is my Christmas gift to you.

Quince and Dried Cherry Strudel

Quince and Dried Cherry Strudel. Diced quinces and dried cherries cooked in syrup with a cinnamon stick; gianduia; gianduia powder; quince syrup; maple syrup; crème anglaise; pimentón-sea salt sunflower seed brittle.

2011: December 1st

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I certainly did and I was really happy to have a day off to spend with friends and family; what a great break away from the restaurant, if only for a day! Days off come rarely in this business and I cherish them. Welcome everyone to the December 1st update from One Block West Restaurant. It hasn't seemed like a full year since I started doing these twice monthly posts, but here I am sitting down to write the 23rd and next to last installment. Wow, has this year flown by!

Thanksgiving opens the holiday season and naturally causes a lull in business. For example, Wednesday night before Thanksgiving saw zero diners grace our doors. Getting blanked is highly unusual and is usually reserved for when it is snowing heavily. Those times are predictable and I will open the business by myself to save labor costs, but we had the full Wednesday night crew on that night, staring at each other and playing cards. I do believe that we will close the Wednesday before Thanksgiving next year.

Still Thanksgiving week was not all doom and gloom. Business the weekend after Thanksgiving seems to be a predictor for how people are feeling and I am happy to say that we are back up to 2007 levels. Not back to the glory days of 2005 and 2006, but back to the year when business started its long slow slide for the toilet. Despite the lousy start to the week, it finished fairly strong and that is promising.

Even though the general business trend this year is up over the past couple of years, business is, if anything, much more volatile than ever before. That is to say that the highs are higher and the lows are lower than I can ever remember. I've never known such a time when we have had so few customers one night to be followed with so many the very next night. This is making staffing and prepping damn near impossible. Years ago, I used to have a very good feel for how many customers we would do on a given night. Today, I have no clue. Unpredictable is the new normal as we head into the holiday party season.

I wrote that last sentence rather hopefully. I hope we have some holiday parties this year, but so far, none are booked and nobody's calling either, just like the last three years. Several years ago, 5 and 6 companies would be competing for the same time slots for parties and we would do double our normal monthly business in December.

The holidays always cause me anguish in trying to balance the need of the business to bring in money (and in the past few years, to survive) versus my employees' desires to have time off to spend with their families. And count me in on that too: I want time off as well! 2011 is especially bad because Christmas Eve, a day that we are normally closed, falls on a Saturday, our biggest revenue day of the week.

Christmas Eve is normally a horrendously slow and painful day in the restaurant business here in Winchester and so we gladly close. But with it being a Saturday this year, what to do? After much anguish and considering that 2011 has left us in a reasonable cash position heading into the dreaded dead months, I have decided to close as a gift to my staff and to myself. Naturally, immediately upon taking that decision, we have turned away reservations for a quarter of the dining room. And so it goes. There are never any right answers.

There's not too much more to say about this two week period because it has been so slow. We started off with a bang, with several back-to-back tastings that kept us busy in the kitchen. At least all these tastings gave us something to focus on during a slow time. They create a lot of work in the kitchen for the simple reason that in general nothing on the tasting menu appears on the nightly dinner menu, and so the entire tasting menu must be prepped from scratch. And they keep the front of house staff hopping during service because there is a new wine to be served with each course and new silverware to go on the table with each course. And of course, the servers are frequently in the kitchen communicating with us about timing and pacing of the courses. It's a lot of work for everyone, but we enjoy it. Here are some photos if you like.

Friday night after Thanksgiving saw more traffic on that particular night than in years, but it was a night when people who rarely go out to dinner, especially at fine restaurants, descended en masse on restaurants, very much like Valentine's Day. As a result, we had more food sent back on that one night than in the entire month of November. It happens. It can be a little (OK, a lot) irritating to have perfectly good food sent back, but what are you going to do? Make these customers happy once a year and they will go tell all their friends that they have been to your restaurant, giving you great exposure, and they will come back next year at the same time and spend more money.

Moreover, that evening we were doubly blessed with tables from urban areas such as Washington, DC and Westchester County, NY that had very superior attitudes, sending subtle signals designed to let us know that we are second class citizens, inferior provincial beings, out here in Podunk, VA. With these kinds of tables, it is a no-win situation. When the table starts with the idea that because we are in Nowhere, VA, the food cannot be as good as it is back home, the evening is guaranteed to be miserable for us, especially the front of house staff who bear the brunt of the superior attitudes. Some of these tables do come around by the end of the evening, but those that do not, they are a pain in the rear to the bitter end.

And speaking of pains in the rear, I spent 25 minutes out of my busy day yesterday on the phone with my dear friends at the Virginia Employment Commission because the dishwasher that I wrote about firing in the last posting has filed—quite unsurprisingly—for unemployment benefits. Despite the fact that during the interview the ex-dishwasher corroborated everything that I stated about his failure to come to work and his subsequent termination and despite the fact that he copped a serious attitude with the VEC examiner, it is my experience that it is only 50-50 that his claim for benefits will be denied.

In talking with other business owners, my experience is not unusual. Even in what appear to be open-and-shut cases, the VEC seems prone to award benefits. And we business owners don't like this, because we get taxed in proportion to the amount of benefits that get paid out. I suspect, on no particular evidence, that the VEC has a mandate to take it out of businesses' hides because otherwise, many of the unemployed would end up on the welfare roles, taking money not from businesses but from the general fund. Just saying.

And finally, an update on the renovation. The bar floor is now painted and the bar update is complete save for the bar stools, which the manufacturer now says will ship today, December 1st. And what do you know? I just got an email that the chairs have been transferred to an LTL carrier for delivery to the restaurant. Currently they are en route from Grand Rapids, so I expect them in about a week or so, the vagaries of LTL trucking being what they are.

The next edition will be the final, the 24th, in this series. I hope you will join me then as I wrap up 2011 and its highs and lows. And now, off to worry about our New Year's Eve menu and prep for the Chef's Table this evening. Thanks for reading along. Until next time, eat and drink well.