One Blog West

Vegetarian Chef's Tasting

2012-01-28T08:52:00.021-05:00

This is a tale about letting go.

Last evening, we cooked a 5-course vegetarian tasting on a relatively slow Friday night, slow enough to let me take photos, something that I was unable to do all during the fall when we were so busy.

I was really happy to have this opportunity to do a vegetarian menu. Getting away from the meat-centric menu really frees my mind, removes constraints about how dishes are usually prepared, and gives me freedom to just do what I am feeling.

I loved each and every dish on this menu and I think we did a great job of putting the ingredients that we have now in dead winter on a plate in a creative and inviting and (most importantly) delicious manner.

While we were very pleased with the end result, the journey in getting there wasn't all that simple. Some menus just write themselves; this one did not. Over the past few years of designing menus, we have come to understand that simplicity is better than complexity, flavor trumps presentation, and if it doesn't feel right, it isn't. In short, we've learned to let go of pet ideas if they don't fit. There's always another day, another menu, another opportunity to try out that new idea.

A potato cake. This menu almost got derailed by a simple potato cake. For some reason, the Ecuadoran potato cake called the llapingacho insinuated itself into my conscious brain and wouldn't let go. From there, it was an easy enough leap to a full Ecuadoran menu. Over five or six days of brainstorming, we found ourselves putting dishes on the menu simply because they were Ecuadoran, not because they highlighted our local ingredients and not because we had a flavor profile that we were trying to express in a finished dish. This is not the way to design a successful menu. If a dish doesn't speak to you as a chef, discard it and move on.

I finally heeded the warning bells that were gently dinging in the back of my brain and punted the whole Ecuadoran menu save for the llapingachos that sent us off seeking the elusive red herring. At this point, we freed ourselves to get back to highlighting our local ingredients such as Jerusalem artichokes, rapini, and Fairy Tale squash.

As the menu started forming, all of us collectively said about the same time, "I'm not feeling the peanut sauce on the potato cakes." So we struck the traditional peanut sauce and that freed us to strike the rest of the Ecuadoran seasoning (achiote and cilantro) and just to retain that singular characteristic of the llapingacho that makes it stand out in the world's pantheon of potato cakes: the grated cheese in the cake itself.

And that is the lesson to take from this menu: learning to let go is hard but necessary. Don't force it. Keep it simple and distill it to its essence. Feel it and do it.

And now on to the photos.

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup. We have a super abundance of Jerusalem artichokes in our cooler just now and they are a natural for soup. They bring an almost inimitable silky appealing texture to soup. The downside is that they can bring a dull and listless grey color to the party as well. To mask this, we added a tiny bit of roasted red pepper for an orange hue, but not enough to flavor the soup. Too much of a silky soup can really bore your tastebuds, so we had to bring some acid to the party, which we did in the form of a roasted red pepper and goat cheese mousse. The acidic goat cheese is just the thing to keep your palate refreshed. Paired with a lemony Spanish Albariño.

Yukon Gold and Two Onion Potato Cakes. Here are the llapingachos that started this whole menu, made from local Yukon golds with a grated three-milk (goat, sheep, and cow) cheese, green onions, and caramelized onions. To reiterate the cheese, we have sauced these cakes with a warm cheese and beer sauce, using the same cheese as in the potato cakes and a very hoppy amber ale to give the cheese sauce a touch of hoppy bitterness to keep it from being cloying. The green sauce is a green onion cream that brings a cool acid bite to counterpose the rich cheese sauce. Paired with Chilean Pinot Noir. This could have easily paired with a white wine, but the customer's preference is red wine.

French Onion Soup Bruschetta. Not really sure where this dish came from except that we were probably cold on the day that we brainstormed this and wanted soup to warm us up. This is an exercise in reimagining a classic soup. We took the soup and puréed it to become the sauce for the plate and put the onions on top of the croustade rather than under it. High cuisine? Not. Delicious? You bet. Paired with a medium-bodied, lower acidity Willamette Pinot from Yamhill-Carlton.

Rapini "Wellington." Again, I don't remember the genesis of this dish. With three of us throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks, creating dishes is a very crazy process. In any case, we decided to showcase our beautiful local rapini as a quasi-Wellington. I learned long ago that wrapping wet ingredients in puff pastry is a big fail, so we baked the puff separately and then topped it with the lightly bitter rapini, a duxelles of black trumpet mushrooms, and then a bit of herbed soft cheese to help marry the spicy earthiness of the mushrooms with the vegetal bitterness of the rapini. In the South, we always serve vinegar with our braised greens. The plate sauce of porcini stock and balsamic vinegar finished with a hint of cream (to round out the vinegar's tang) is a nod to that. Paired with a very high end Argentine Malbec.

Fairy Tale Squash Flan. Eat your vegetables! There's probably no more sinful way to eat your squash than as a silky flan flavored with cinnamon and maple syrup, and garnished with gianduia, crème anglaise, maple syrup, gianduia powder, a chocolate cigarette, crispy salted phyllo, and a pumpkinseed brittle flavored with pimentón and sea salt. Paired with a 10-year old tawny Port.

2012: The Alien Ingredient Series

2012-01-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

Each week of 2012 here at One Block West Restaurant, we are aiming to find, use, and document two new-to-us (aka "alien") ingredients for a total of 100 during the year. I have worked with hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of ingredients from all over the world in the past 30 years of cooking. But a quick trip through our new international food market here in lovely Winchester, VA reminded me that there are hundreds more ingredients out there that I have never worked with.

So the crew and I are on this mission to document what we find and are using, to not only broaden our own knowledge, but truth be told, to have some fun too. We love surfing through markets for cool stuff. We're just like kids in candy stores!

The 2012 Alien Ingredient Series

1. Dwarf Truffle Peaches
2. St. Germain
3. Culantro
4. Epazote
5. Banana Flower
6. Dragon Fruit
7. Pickled Eggplant
8. Coquitos

Alien Ingredient #8: Coquitos

2012-01-26T07:59:00.001-05:00

These tiny nuts come from a palm tree native to Chile called the Chilean Wine Palm (Jubaea chilensis). I first saw them on an episode of Iron Chef, the Battle Coconut where Morimoto had that crazy looking Coconut Crab. They look like fun, so I ordered some from the produce company.

Even though these little guys (see the nickel in the photo for reference) come from a different palm from the coconut, they look and taste just like miniature coconuts. What you see here is already husked and cracked out of its outer shell and is completely edible. I snacked on a couple for giggles, er, research, and they are just what you'd expect.

When the coquitos arrived, I happened to be making some chocolate truffles and walked by the pan of ganache on my way to fetching the mandoline to see if I could slice these guys into rings for garnish—sure can—when I decided that the accidental dipping of a coquito speared on a skewer into the warm chocolate ganache might not be a bad thing. Mounds on a stick, anyone?

Vote: Fun but not again—their cuteness cannot overcome their exorbitant price, given that they are pretty much limited to garnish.

Alien Ingredient #7: Pickled Eggplant

2012-01-24T10:21:00.000-05:00

Yeah, OK, I am a sucker for Asian condiments. I've tried gazillions and yet there are gazillions more to try. So when I saw these eggplants in the refrigerator case at the market, they just had to come back to the restaurant with me. I guess I chose them because of all the pickles I have eaten, none have ever been eggplant. It just never occurred to me that eggplants were pickled. And now I wonder why not, given that I pickle all manner of things including peppers, onions, green tomatoes, green beans, and okra.

But looking further into it, I see that pickled eggplants are common all over Asia. So now I feel kind of stupid, but then that was the point of this whole "alien ingredient" series: to learn, to play, to have fun. And these pickles are fun, too!

The eggplants are of a cultivar that I do not recognize, looking like tiny pickled green tomatoes. I am used to the Thai zebra-striped green eggplants, but these appear to have no stripes. In any case, the smallest are pickled whole while the largest appear to be quartered, with many simpled halved. They are very crunchy, perhaps just a tad too crunchy (quoth Alex, "I wish these were a little softer") and the brine is very aggressive in a salty industrial vinegar kind of way. I wish they had used a higher quality vinegar and less salt. The red chile is fairly mild as red chile goes. Of course, I am a chile head of the first order, so don't trust my judgement!

I think Alex summed it up fairly well: "Sort of like eggplant kimchee."

I am going to try these in two cooked applications. I think that they would be pretty damned tasty in a curry and tossed into Thai fried rice.

Vote: these are fun and addictive to munch on. We'd like to try putting up our own this summer because we know we can do a better job.

Paean to a Pen

2012-01-21T13:57:00.016-05:00

This week I was going through some of the thousands of photos that I've taken over the years and suddenly it struck me that there was a Sharpie in many of the photos. That got me to thinking about how this unsung and unglamorous pen is a staple of every restaurant kitchen and that Sharpies rank right up there with knives in terms of importance to chefs. In fact, I've never seen a chef's knife kit that didn't contain a couple of Sharpies. And we have them all over the kitchen.

I use them to label anything and everything. They write prep lists and cross items off prep lists. I use them to manage my ticket rail, crossing off the courses as they are fired and as they go out. I kind of freak out if I get into dinner service and there's not one in my jacket pocket. They are hanging by string in convenient locations in the kitchen—so they don't grow legs—especially near the freezer.

In case you think I'm alone, check this out.

We use them to label all kinds of stuff from our pantry staples

to the sauces and garnishes we use on the line.

They hang around all over.

And my jacket never wants for one or three.

They even go where I go (and claim what I own).

David Lebovitz, eat your heart out!

Don't Be Ignorant

2012-01-20T11:02:00.004-05:00

We have a new international grocery here in Winchester, VA and that's a great thing for the many foodies who have heretofore had to drive at least an hour in towards DC to satisfy their habits. We are very lucky to have this store here in town; it's the first East Coast outpost of a chain that until now has only opened locations in California.

The staff and I overheard a table comment the other day that they are not impressed with the store, concluding "It's only Mexican."

This broad-sweeping generalization really irked me (read "pissed me off"). This knee-jerk reaction to the customers who frequent the store which is located in one of the two major Latino neighborhoods in Winchester is ill-informed at best. One of the things that I really like about this store is that very few of the other customers look like me. I've met Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Malaysians, Filipinos, Koreans, Jamaicans, all manner of Africans, Mexicans from almost every state, and scores of Central and South Americans in this store. And everyone is asking everyone else, "What do you do with that?" It's a fantastic representation of the melting pot that is America and the antithesis of spoiled white-collar Winchester.

Looking through the aisles, you'll find produce, dry goods, and frozen goods from dozens of food cultures, everything from Chinese steam buns to Jamaican ackee to Nicaraguan fruits.

To dismiss this bounty as Mexican is ignorant. To dismiss the Peruvian, Nicaraguan, Brazilian, Honduran, Costa Rican, Mexican, Argentinian, Panamanian, Chilean, Venezuelan, Colombian, Salvadoran, Ecuadorian, and other customers as Mexican is doubly ignorant.

Don't be ignorant.

Alien Ingredient #6: Dragon Fruit

2012-01-19T15:40:00.000-05:00

I've known of these so-called dragon fruits for a very long time and I've seen lots of them around before, but none of them have seemed ripe enough for me to ever want to buy, until now. Spending some of my formative years in Texas (and specifically, crawling the bodegas and mercados), I have a good bit of experience with cactus fruits of many types, so I had a good idea that the hard bricks I had seen before were not ripe. This particular one was bright red and yielding, good signs of ripeness. Here you see it in comparison to a 48-count navel orange.

It turns out that I have grown the cacti that yield these fruits without ever connecting the dots—mine never fruited. The fruits are often called pitayas (pitaya blanca, Hylocereus undatus, with white flesh, and pitaya roja, H. costaricensis, with screaming fuschia flesh) and come from cacti that originated in Mexico and Central America, cacti that we often lump together under the common name Night-Blooming Cereus. They really do bloom at night (and for one night only!) and when they open, the white and cream blooms are spectacular and particularly fragrant.

The flesh of the fruit is white with small black seeds. Unlike the seeds in prickly pear (Opuntia spp.) fruits (tunas in Spanish), these seeds are small and barely noticeable when you eat them. Based on my experience with other cactus fruit, I was expecting to have to separate the seeds from the flesh and then make candy, agua fresca, sorbet, or jelly with the flesh. This fruit is very pleasant to eat from the rind with a spoon and is firm enough to dice for a fruit salsa. The firm but yielding flesh tastes first of pear (without the granular stone cells) and finishes with hints of strawberry and kiwi. It is not particularly sweet, just delicious.

Vote: yes, please! But not at $3.99 each!

Alien Ingredient #5: Banana Flower

2012-01-17T08:11:00.000-05:00

We were all super excited to get into this banana flower. It looks cool and exotic for starters. I have seen banana flowers for sale before at the big Korean supermarkets, but they have never looked like they were in good condition, so I always passed on them. And interestingly enough, I have never been to a Thai, Vietnamese, or Cambodian restaurant that featured them or I would have tried them out already.

After boning up on our banana flower prep skills on YouTube—who says the Internet is not a great thing?—we peeled this flower down to expose the flowers/immature bananas at the base of each petal.

And then we kept on peeling until we got to the tender heart that we split with a knife. After removing the fibrous core, we put a fine chiffonade on the banana flower and put the bits in acidulated water to keep them from oxidizing.

The taste of the raw flower was of bitter banana rind. We were hoping that blanching would help eliminate the bitterness. Not so. This dish of Banana Flower and Shrimp Curry looks great, but none of us could get beyond the bitterness of the banana flower.

Vote: Two thumbs down. We'd eat it if another chef brought it to our table as a special treat, but we won't be ordering any for ourselves. Major let down.

Alien Ingredient #4: Epazote

2012-01-12T08:29:00.000-05:00

"Looks like a Chenopodium, doesn't it?" I asked myself when I bought this bunch of epazote the other day because it sure looks like one of the herbs in that family, like the lambsquarters (C. album) that we have growing all over the back yard.

Funny that I should think that. It turns out that epazote was until recently classified by taxonomists as a Chenopodium, the same family that contains quinoa (C. quinoa). This native of southern Mexico, Central America, and South America has been moved from C. ambrosioides to Dysphania ambrosioides, for the one of you who actually cares about this kind of stuff.

I've long known of epazote, principally from reading in my Mexican Spanish-language cookbooks and in the Foods of Mexico by Diana Kennedy. I've also heard that it grows as a weed around these parts, but I have never encountered it growing in the wild in any of my foraging expeditions.

Epazote has been available for years from my produce company, but their price for it has always been prohibitive. And I have seen lots of dried epazote at various tiendas about town, but when I try a new herb, I want to try it fresh. Now that Food Maxx has big bunches of it for cheap, I brought this big bundle to the restaurant to check out.

It's a strong herb for sure, reeking to heaven of shoe polish, kerosene, and other scents that would warn most humans not to eat the stuff. The word "noxious" comes to mind. The taste of the raw leaf is a lot milder and not all that offensive. Blanched in water, the medicinal and industrial flavor comes right back. Sautéeing it doesn't help either. It is clear that a little bit goes a long way. And I read that the younger leaves are less potent than the older. The presence of panicles of flowers on this bunch would argue that this is pretty mature epazote.

Traditionally, it is used for its carminative (anti-flatulent) effect when cooking black beans. I will certainly add epazote to my beans in the future to see how it changes the flavor, but I don't have high hopes for it. I suspect that it is one of those things that you either grow up eating or you don't eat at all.

Vote: Mom, do I really have to finish all my epazote?

Alien Ingredient #3: Culantro

2012-01-10T07:57:00.003-05:00

It's not exactly accurate that I've never used culantro before; many years ago, a local farmer brought me three tiny leaves to play with, leaves that were much smaller than these. He was trying to grow it for me, but apparently, the herb is very tough to germinate and doesn't really care for our climate here in Virginia. Nonetheless, I wanted the guys on the crew to play with this cilantro-flavored herb from Mexico and Central America that often goes by its Puerto Rican name, recao. I've also heard it called sawtooth herb, a name that it comes by quite naturally as you can see in the photo.

Culantro and cilantro are almost interchangeable in cooking, but culantro is more pungent. I like culantro for cooked applications because the leaf is a lot sturdier. It is especially at home in the sofrito (seasoning base) called recaíto that is the basis for a lot of Caribbean and Central American dishes.

The rest of this bunch went into the various dishes for which we use cilantro.

Vote: As long as culantro is a lot more expensive than cilantro, we'll keep on using cilantro.

Alien Ingredient #2: St. Germain

2012-01-05T07:40:00.007-05:00

Elderberries: we're surrounded by them. We even have a guy who supplies local elderberry syrup to the restaurant. So with all that, you'd think I would be up on elderflowers and their potential. Not so.

I've been reading a lot about St. Germain over the last year: I get a lot of trade magazines and many of them have articles on the resurgence of the classic cocktail and the use of all kinds of specialty liquors, liqueurs, and bitters. I keep seeing cocktail after cocktail featuring St. Germain, an elderberry flower liqueur just launched in 2007.

We don't have a big bar program at the restaurant and so I don't get to play with all that many new drink ingredients. And I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a lovely control state where the state has the liquor monopoly. What this means is that we restaurants (Bar? Bar? You can't have no stinkin' bar in the antediluvian Commonwealth!), especially those of us not located in the major metro areas, can have a hell of a time getting specialty beverages such as St. Germain.

In fact, I think I tried about a year ago to acquire some St. Germain, only to be confounded by the Commonwealth. For giggles I tried it again last week and was surprised to find it on the standard price list, not the special order list, and was even more shocked to find that our local ABC store had it on the shelf.

Maybe those of you who frequent the ABC store already knew this, but I did not. It's not like we hang out down there with a restaurant to run and all. Also, we just cannot walk in down there and buy liquor. We have to phone or fax the order in and then go pick it up at least 24 hours later. So, we have no incentive to visit our friends at the local ABC store and thus are the very last to know what is in stock.

Long story short, a bottle arrived at the restaurant and I cracked the top. Wow! Now I knew what the fuss was about. This liqueur has a gorgeous perfume of passion fruit, pears, dried peaches, and dried apricots, but mainly of passion fruit. I could definitely work with this.

I can see lots of dessert and sauce applications for this liqueur. How about a splash of it in a fruit salsa, or crème anglaise, or crème brûlée? But mostly I can see excellent cocktails and I devised one that is still unnamed.

1-1/2 parts vodka
1-1/2 parts St. Germain
1/4 part Campari
2 dashes orange bitters
1/2 part fresh lemon juice
1/2 part simple syrup
Float of prosecco

Rim a chilled martini glass with colored sugar (this cocktail is tart). Shake all ingredients except the prosecco and strain into the glass. Float prosecco on top. Cheers!

Vote: Bartender, hit me one more time! A must-have for our bar and our dessert menu.

Alien Ingredient #1: Dwarf Truffle Peaches

2012-01-03T13:20:00.002-05:00

Dwarf truffle peaches. The name was enough to get me to order a jar of these sight unseen. I mean seriously WTF do peaches, truffles, and dwarves have to do with each other?

These come from Italy where they pickle the immature green fruit that they thin to reduce the fruit load on the trees so as to increase the size and flavor of the remaining peaches and/or so as not to overload the branches to the point where they might snap.* After pickling, they are packed in a truffle oil. This jar contains a full kilogram of product and a good liter of nice tasting truffle oil. In fact, the biggest win of this product may be using the truffle oil to flavor dishes long after the peaches are gone. I can already imagine browning spätzle in it or dressing green beans in it.

[*The original text, quoted from manufacturer's web site read: "any unripe tiny green peaches off the trees at the end of the season". There aren't unripe green peaches on trees at the end of the season.]

The peaches are the size of very large olives and are very crisp all the way through. The pit is undeveloped as you can see in the photo, so the whole thing is edible. The pickle cure is a bit vinegary but also a bit sweet. The peaches themselves are very crispy crunchy in a pleasant way. You wouldn't want to eat more than a couple of them (nor most other pickles) but they will make neat garnishes for charcuterie plates and would definitely make quite the upscale martini garnish.

You gotta love the label that looks like it was cooked up on somebody's home computer and printed on his ink jet printer. How sketchy!

Vote: pretty cool product packed in an oil that may be more useful than the product itself. We like these cute little guys.

Index to the 2011 Series

2012-01-01T11:26:00.002-05:00

During 2011, twice each month, on the first day and the fifteenth, I posted about what had happened at the restaurant since the previous post. The whole series gives a picture of a year in the restaurant business. This is the index to the series.

2011 was a crazy year that saw three of the worst months in our history and five of our best months ever. It started horribly in January and ended with a horrible December that saw no holiday parties and very sparse bookings for New Year's Eve. But on balance, 2011 finished up about fifteen percent from 2010 and the improved cashflow let me perform long-delayed renovations.

Given the roller coaster ride in 2011, I have no idea what to expect in 2012 as we start our tenth year at this location, except for more of the same.

January
January 1: New Year's Eve redux, trying to close the 2010 books
January 15: First snow of 2011, 2010 books closed, root vegetable tasting, new lunch menu, Valentine's menu planning, IRS woes, head line cook leaving

February
February 1: January worst month ever, escalating shrimp prices, Valentine's menu set, new cooking classes set, searching for new line cook, wine dinner canceled
February 15: Valentine's redux—"brutal," chef's tastings, cooking classes, staging line cook candidates, seafood vendor goes out of business

March
March 1: First local green veg of 2011, new lunch menu published, dining room renovation starts
March 15: Cooking classes start, new table top purchases, new table linens, dining room reconfiguration, South African wine dinner

April
April 1: April Fool's menu, taxes and more taxes, more renovation, tasting dinners
April 15: Food show, new chocolate, new menu covers, first morels, cooking classes end, new chairs arrive, new divider built, anticipating our annual vacation

May
May 1: Spring rains, asparagus and morels, dining room painting commences, Apple Blossom Festival, annual holiday
May 15: Recovering from annual vacation, prom/graduation/Mother's Day trifecta, deck opens, asparagus!, dining room painted

June
June 1: Rain, rain, rain!; busy-busy pre-Memorial Day; softshell crabs, English peas, strawberries; French class visits; Glen Manor Vineyards wine dinner; hypercaffeination; phone scams
June 15: Softshell crabs and asparagus are done, cherries arrive, dining room ceiling painted, wine list renovation, public demonstrations, planning for Linden wine dinner

July
July 1: June a fantastic sales month, produce company imposes minimum order, why dishes sell—or don't, Linden dinner redux, holes in the dining room walls, planning for garlic dinner, summer vegetables arrive in the market
July 15: Corkage fees and etiquette, lunch just dies, the health inspector visits, it is pickling season, peaches and corn arrive, local rabbits and lambs, electrical wiring

August
August 1: 100-degree forecast as bad as a blizzard forecast, it is hot in the kitchen, garlic dinner redux, shell beans arrive in the market, squash crop fails, tomatoes arrive, we respond by making fresh mozzarella daily, tweaking the menu
August 15: Business is on a roll, bad year for tomatoes, battles with the City, the dining room makeover is completely finished, Budweiser gets thrown out

September
September 1: Hurricanes and earthquakes, oh my!; annual Harvest Dinner redux; telephone data line woes; new coffee cups; public demo in hurricane rains
September 15: Leaves are falling on the deck, deluges of rain kill business and the grape harvest, Duck Dinner, new local beef turns out tough, more rabbits, first cassoulet of the year, ceiling collapse in the newly renovated dining room

October
October 1: Trees are starting to turn color, we get snubbed at Taste of the Town, drastic lunch menu changes, cool weather halts seafood sales, preventative maintenance, bar renovation commences, butterflies and hummingbirds stop in during migration, working in the dark, possible meals tax increase, Barrel 27 wine dinner
October 15: Crazy busy during leaf season, Around the World in 8 Courses, Balloon Festival weekend, another ceiling collapse, rude customers, hurry up and bake cheesecakes, exhaustion

November
November 1: Accademia di Cucina Italiana dinner; Quickbooks woes; short of table linens; overcooked risotto; sheer exhaustion; snap frost; celery root, collards, sweet potatoes and daikon appear at the market; dishwasher woes; hatchet job review; snow is forecast and really happens!
November 15: Business falls off a cliff, negative cashflow, new sculptures for the walls, wine list renovation, lots of chef's tastings, dishwasher woes get worse

December
December 1: Thanksgiving week redux, open or closed for Christmas Eve?, chef's tastings, dishwasher is fired, bar renovation is complete save for delivery of bar stools, unemployment hearing for fired dishwasher
December 15: Business is awful, no holiday parties this year, starting to close 2011, fired dishwasher denied unemployment, scramble to publish New Year's Eve menu, bar stools delivered and bar is reopened, line cook resigns, prep cook promoted, photoshoot, planning for staff Christmas party

OBW Company Christmas Dinner

2011-12-27T08:36:00.001-05:00

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

2011-12-16T08:38:00.014-05:00

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

2011-12-15T08:17:00.001-05:00

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

2011-12-10T09:22:00.004-05:00

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

2011-12-08T10:50:00.003-05:00

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

2011-12-02T08:39:00.005-05:00

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

2011-12-01T10:11:00.007-05:00

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.

Chef's Tasting

2011-11-23T07:17:00.035-05:00

Here are photos from a series of recent tastings. These dishes pretty clearly reflect what is in the farmers market currently. I really like how we were able to incorporate root vegetables in so many dishes. It happened organically as a function of what we have on hand (and on the brain) now rather than as an exercise in making a menu around root vegetables. Organically formed menus tend to be the best and I really like this menu for that very reason.

Squash Cake. Cake of grated yellow and green squashes long-cooked with cream and formed into cakes, garnished with tomato vinaigrette, tzatziki, pesto, and a pecorino tuile. I bought every last squash that Beth had about two weeks ago and we have been keeping them in the cooler and eking them out, trying desperately to hang on to a little bit of summer. We've never had summer squash this late into the year and it is really thanks to the crappy crop we had during the summer that Gene planted a second, late crop of which this is the very bitter end.

Cauliflower Mushrooms with Guanciale and Broccoli. No brainer, really, in that Joe just sent us a 15-pound cauliflower mushroom. With its delightfully woodsy scent, this mushroom is a real crowd pleaser and its resemblance to egg noodles often influences how we prepare it: today, very simply with some Jowciale (smoked hog jowl from our friends at Edwards) and tiny broccoli florets.

Napoleon of Seared Sea Scallops and Parsnip-Leek Latkes. This send up of scallop chowder features crispy sweet parsnip-leek latkes, a warm bacon-inflected leek and potato soup, cubes of roasted butternut squash, puffed wild rice (more addictive than crack) and mâche. After much experimentation, we have found that parsnip latkes benefit from 25% potato, to help them hold together and fry more crisply without burning.

Pork & Grits. In our mission to convert the world to the Pork Belly Legion™, it seems that no tasting menu can omit at least one pork belly course. Here you see our house-cured pork belly fried to a crispy turn atop creamy Anson Mills grits coarse grits with a splash of local hickory bark syrup and a red grape “olivada.” The olivada is a condiment that we made for a big Italian-themed dinner back in October, a condiment that we liked so much that we keep on making it. It is son of the Cherry Tapenade that I created back in the spring and consists of red grapes, olives, capers, anchovies, lemon juice, oregano, and olive oil.

More Pork. Seriously, what to follow pork belly but more pork? This dish was inspired by an incredibly beautiful savoy cabbage that I scored at the market and what you see is the answer to the question, "How shall we honor this beautiful cabbage?" What you see is a most non-traditional cabbage roll, stuffed with pulled pork shank and raw turnip julienne, then coated in Dijon mustard and rolled in panko and fried. It sits in a pool of pork gravy from braising the shanks and is garnished with a few chanterelles. I like to think of this as a very Western reimagining of a spring roll.

Grilled Five-Spice Venison Loin. This dish screams late fall to me. You see a five spice-rubbed grilled loin of venison with butternut cream, a root vegetable hash, maple syrup, and a fresh fig compote made with the last of this year's figs. The star of this dish is not the venison but rather the humble hash, made from cubes of guanciale, parsnips, celery root, butternut squash, and fingerling potato along with dried cranberries and onions, all flambéed in bourbon. This hash is insanely good!

Maple-Butternut Flan with Milk Chocolate Cremoso. What does a non-sweet eating chef use for dessert when there's precious little fruit about? Root veg, of course! Here you see a killer flan made of butternut purée, maple syrup, and cinnamon. The garnishes are a rich fudgy curl of milk chocolate cremoso (stolen shamelessly from pastry chef Hedy Goldsmith via Michael Schwartz, a chef whom I have never met, but who is clearly a fellow spirit), maple syrup, crème anglaise, gianduia (chocolate-hazelnut) powder, and a wicked good sunflower seed brittle that I made with sea salt and smoky pimentón.

2011: November 15th

2011-11-16T08:09:00.001-05:00

November has historically been a very slow month at the restaurant as people gear down from leaf-peeping season and gear up for the holiday season. This year, November has struck with a vengeance, I am sorry to say. Business had been cranking like crazy for months and over one weekend, it just stopped cold. Ouch!

Welcome to the November 15th posting about a year in the life of One Block West Restaurant. You can find the entire series here. We expect that November will be slow, but not as slow as it has been in the last two weeks. First, we had the unexpected snow over the last weekend of October that put a damper on visits from out-of-town guests, our bread-and-butter clients. Second, the time change from daylight to standard time played a big role.

Why the time change plays a big role is not clear; it just is. It's probably something psychological: when you come home in the dark after work and you get warm and comfortable at home, it is a pretty big step to go back out in the dark and cold for dinner. After a couple of weeks of this, people will get used to it and start coming back out, especially when they get tired of dining at home. But in a couple of weeks, it will be Thanksgiving and that presents its own set of problems for us at the restaurant.

The weeks before and after Thanksgiving are dead. People are worrying about what they will serve for Thanksgiving or worrying about their waistlines in advance of the big feast day. After Thanksgiving, people are too sated to want to go out or are worried about their waistlines post big feast day. In all, November is a bummer of a month in the restaurant business, at least in this part of the world where November is also synonymous with long stretches of cloudy rainy days.

November also sees a ton of cash flowing out to deal with the yearly renewals and taxes: business and worker's comp insurance, restaurant permit from the Health Department, ABC license, business license, and personal property tax. The negative cash flow in November is almost enough to make a restaurant owner sick to the stomach.

But the slowdown in business has some upside in that we can get things down that we have been putting off all fall. Now that it has been slow enough to get more work done on the restaurant, the renovation has really gained momentum. The bar is back in service after several months of having been a temporary storage room for the construction equipment. It is now entirely painted except the floor, which will happen just as soon as the concrete patches cure fully. And it is redecorated with a new sitting area. Besides the floor paint, all that is wanting is the new bar stools which should ship the week before Christmas, if the manufacturer stays on schedule.

In addition, the bare walls in the dining room and bar are bare no longer. I hung a bunch of metalwork sculptures on the walls on Sunday the 13th and Monday the 14th. These are a night-and-day departure from the prints and paintings we had on the wall previously. They are very modern and a bit edgy and I think they set a great tone for the food that customers will eat: the dining room is comfortable, but with a slight edge, just like my food. I am very pleased with the result and customers are loving it as well. Gone, gone, gone is the very old, heavy dining room with its scarlet walls and heavy drapes and old lady feel. Good riddance!

I need to give a big shout-out to my love Ann for all her help and hand-holding and guidance through the redecorating process. She has a wonderful eye, not only for furnishings, but especially for color schemes. If you need help, let me know; she is quite the interior decorator and will be happy to consult with you.

The extra free time is also letting me work through revising the wine list. Each week, it is a constant struggle to stay on top of our inventory, comparing wines on the shelf against invoices and the three wine lists to make sure that everything stays in sync and to catch any vintage or price changes. In recent weeks, we have run through a lot of wines that must come off the list, in particular rosés and 2010 whites. Both will come back in the spring as new vintages, but for the time being, there is no more 2010 to be had.

In addition, I am taking advantage of holiday price reductions to beef up parts of our list, creating a bit more work for myself. And I am taking a hard look a Willamette Pinots right now. 2010 saw a short crop because of spring frosts and birds at harvest and this coupled with a ton of other problems mean that I am going to have to be highly selective in my purchases to find good wine at affordable prices. And 2011 by most accounts is going to be about as crappy as our 2011 in Virginia. That said, I am buying heavily on 2009s with an eye to perhaps skipping 2010 or 2011. 2009 is one of those good value years simply because those-who-rate-wines have declared it a mediocre vintage, holding prices down. Great winemakers made great wines in 2009 and I am buying them at reasonable prices.

All this is by way of saying that managing a wine program like ours is pretty much a full time job. How I wish I could afford a sommelier to manage the program for me!

And now for something completely different. We have a problem table, but then, so do most restaurants. Our story is—I am certain—no different than that of many restaurants: there is a particular group of customers who come here to have a miserable time and then complain to anyone who will listen about how bad things are. Each time they come in, they have horrible things to say about the décor, the food, the prices, and most particularly, the service. They amuse themselves by running the servers ragged fetching this and that for them. It's a control game: they obviously have some issues in their lives that cause them to treat the servers like serfs. And on top of it all, they tip horribly, always well shy of 10%.

To make things worse, they post bad reviews of the restaurant on various electronic forums. They come to mind because they have been in twice in recent weeks. Our problem is that we have to deal with them, their grumblings, and their vile postings to the world about how bad things are here. Their problem is that they have run out of servers to abuse: they are known to all our servers by sight now and if they think that they had bad service before.... If you are a server and you have a table of perpetual malcontents who don't tip, where would that table be on your priority list? You want another loaf of bread? Yeah, good luck with that.

We have a Chef-for-a-Day program here at the restaurant that is a very popular Christmas gift for our customers. We sell a certificate that allows a guest to come work with us in our kitchen for a day and learn tricks of the trade, to see behind the scenes, and to hang with us during service. We have had several guest chefs in in recent weeks because most of these certificates expire at the end of the year. It's a lot of fun for our guests and we enjoy showing them some of what happens behind the scenes and working with them on various skills and techniques. Note, I said "some" of what happens behind the scenes. What really happens behind the scenes is only on a need-to-know basis!

In the past couple of weeks, we have done several Chef's Tastings including a memorable one on the 10th. Customers who want a unique dining experience often engage us to create a custom tasting menu just for them. These menus are typically seven to nine courses and feature dishes that do not appear on the nightly menu. We enjoy the creative aspect of these dinners, but they are an awful lot of work simply because nearly everything on the menu has to be prepared from scratch.

The customers on the 10th asked me to do a 7-course Indian dinner, which is highly unusual. Why not just go to an Indian restaurant for an Indian dinner? Because they wanted my take on fusing Indian technique and spices with our local products. It proved to be a great teaching exercise for the crew; none of them have ever done any Indian food before. Me, I've been cooking Indian food at home for 20+ years so I know my way around the basics of the cuisine, but still it was a great creative exercise and in the end, I really liked four of the courses enough to want to remember them.

Of these, the crew and guest favorite was called Tandoori Chicken Pizza. I made and grilled naan and smeared them with a sweet ginger pickle that took me about 6 hours to cook down. I made a big batch of tandoori paste and marinated chicken breasts in this, then roasted them. The ginger pickle was topped with sliced chicken, masala-scented spinach, and a drizzle of raita. Then into the oven and voilà: awesome Indian fusion food.

The next dish that I really liked was what I called “Baigan Bharta.” Baigan bharta is a long-cooked eggplant curry. I was able to find several tiny eggplants—the last of the year—at the farmers market and just barely roasted them so that we could scoop them out, stuff them with the baigan bharta, and re-bake them in the style of twice-baked potatoes.

I really enjoyed doing my take on lamb vindaloo, for which I made a classic vinegary vindaloo paste that I mixed with some yogurt to tame the spice, which could have overpowered the accompanying wine. I boned out a saddle of lamb and rubbed each of the loins with a masala that I made specifically for the lamb. At service, I grilled the loins to rare, let them rest, sliced them, and then tossed them in a bit of vindaloo sauce and served them in a puff pastry napoleon. As elegant and beautiful as this dish was, it managed to combine the flavor of the classic vindaloo with the succulent quality of perfectly cooked lamb, definitely the best lamb vindaloo I have ever eaten.

The final dish that struck me as worth remembering was the final course of the dinner, the dessert course. I made a quasi-traditional carrot halwa of grated baby carrots and coconut milk and cooked it down so that I could pack it into molds. Then we made a big batch of chai from black tea and spices, heavy on the black pepper, and turned that into a granita. Plating the dessert involved unmolding the halwa on a plate and topping it with a quenelle of the chai granita and garnishing with a cardamom crème anglaise. I thought this was a successful fusion of a classic Indian sweet with French and Italian technique.

Just to make this dinner even more memorable, I got a call from the client late the night before asking me if she could bring her vegetarian daughter to the dinner as a last minute addition. Because of the circumstances, there was no way that I could turn her down. But holy cow! I spent the morning of the dinner scrambling to make vegetarian versions of each of the meat courses. Just to top this off, we had a film crew in that morning for several hours shooting footage for a new TV commercial for the restaurant. I kept having to run back and forth from the kitchen where I was dealing with prep for the tasting menu and the dining room and bar to deal with filming issues. Quite the morning, I assure you.

And if you've been reading along in recent postings, our dishwasher woes continue, both hardware- and personnel-wise. In the last update, you will recall that I fired my long-time dishwasher for his inability to get to work. The first week of November, we used a fill-in dishwasher while waiting for the new one to start on the 8th. Fill-in dishwashers are OK for a shift or two, but by the end of a week, they always start slacking and doing half-ass work. Now that our new dishwasher has arrived, it is a slow process to teach him where everything goes. Each day, we wander around the kitchen looking for this and that: same story each time we change dishwasher. On top of this, he has had several racks of glassware returned to him by the servers for rewashing. Hopefully, this problem has been corrected.

Other than that, mechanical issues continue to plague us. Last Friday and Saturday were a pain in the rear because the sanitizer alarm kept going off. Dish machines like ours use a chemical sanitizer (expensive bleach, basically) to ensure that dishes come out of the machine in a sanitary condition. There is an audible alarm that alerts the operator if the machine runs out of sanitizer. Unfortunately, due to the corrosive nature of the sanitizer solution, it is wont to eat up tubing, hoses, and seals. And one of the hoses to the sanitizer had cracked and so the machine wasn't able to create enough vacuum to suck sanitizer into the machine. We were able to deal with the sanitation issue by pouring sanitizer manually into the machine with each load, but there was nothing we could do but listen to the damned alarm sound all night long.

That's about it for the pre-Thanksgiving tale for the restaurant. As much as I hate the Thanksgiving season at the restaurant, I love Thanksgiving at home—it's easily my favorite holiday. So, thanks for reading along and to you and your family, I bid you Happy Thanksgiving!

2011: November 1st

2011-11-01T11:27:00.009-04:00

Darn, I just finished writing the last posting from October 15th and here it is, November already! Welcome to the November 1st posting about all things One Block West, the latest in the year-long, twice-monthly series.

The first week of this period, heading into the weekend of Saturday the 22nd was crazy! The week started off slow enough, but we could feel it building momentum all week long heading into the prime leaf-peeping weekend of the year. I spent all of Monday and Tuesday just trying to dig out from all the paperwork that didn't get done the week before because we were so busy.

Tuesday and Wednesday we prepped like crazy for a private dinner for the local chapter of Accademia di Cucina Italiana on Thursday the 20th. This group, dedicated to preserving and promoting Italian cuisine, holds several themed dinners each year at restaurants all over the world. All the chapters hold their Ecumenical Dinner, the highlight dinner of their year, at restaurants at roughly the same time of year. Each dinner has the same theme; this year the theme was fruit and cuisine.

If you know anything about modern Italian cuisine, you know that fruit has very little place at the Italian table, with the exception of the traditional bowl of fruit and the occasional fruit dessert. Savory cuisine using fruit is rare. Worse still, the timing of this dinner at the end of October does not coincide with the availability of many of the most interesting fruits. And so it was quite painful to come up with a worthy menu featuring fruit, but it was equally a pain for all the chefs all over the world who were doing the same thing I was. In the end, I arrived at a menu that pleased me, although I overheard one self-important attendee exclaim for all to hear that he was underwhelmed with the menu. I did the best I could on the quite restricted budget that the group gave me.

I loved the antipasti: goat cheese-stuffed, prosciutto-wrapped grilled figs; crostini topped with caramelized onions, melted Gorgonzola, and fresh fig jam; and grilled focaccia topped with sausage and grape “olivada.” Olivada is the Italian equivalent of tapenade (or vice-versa) and we modeled the red grape version on the cherry version we did so successfully this past spring. I love the sweet-tart aspect of this delicious condiment.

Our secondo was a porcini, roasted grape, and walnut risotto which we made with verjus instead of wine. It was very difficult to balance the acidity of the verjus with the sweetness of the grapes, which roasting only enhances. In the end, I think we did pretty well.

The primo was a whole loin of Berkshire pork stuffed (roulade style) with macerated dried fruits and porcini mushrooms. I went heavy on the cherries in the stuffing because I wanted to pull out the very cherry aspects of the Tuscan Sangiovese-Syrah blend that we served with the pork. On the side were sautéed local cavolo nero and a mostarda, Cremona-style. Rather than domestic pork, I wanted to serve wild boar at this course, but that would have blown the entire dinner budget.

When I serve vegetables at an Italian dinner, I always cringe. As an American, I have the American taste for cooked but slightly crunchy vegetables. [For the record, I like my vegetables more cooked rather than less cooked.] Except in very modern Italian restaurants, there's no such thing as crunchy vegetables. Still, I let my taste guide me and served the cavolo just wilted and sautéed briefly in olive oil with garlic.

For dessert, our guests finished with an orange crostata, cooked upside down very similar to a tarte Tatin, but made with a polenta genoise batter. I developed this recipe many years ago using blood oranges (not in season until December) and it is always a hit.

And so the dinner on the 20th was the crowning glory to an otherwise miserable day in the restaurant business. Last edition, I mentioned that the 13th was a day from hell. The 20th nearly went down in the books as another. I came in around 6:30am on the morning of the 20th to complete all my taxes (sales, meals, Federal withholding, state withholding, and unemployment). It's always a pleasure to do this; one of the highlights of my month. If you didn't read that last statement with dripping sarcasm, go back and do it again and keep doing it until you get it right.

The first thing I did was to pay my meals tax, the easiest of the five taxes to compute. I generated the QuickBooks report stating my tax liability and went to cut the check for the amount due, which was in excess of $87,000! WTF! I started poking around and then I remembered that a couple weeks earlier, I had performed some database maintenance. Intuit sent out a newsletter that recommended tweaking the database for performance. Containing nearly ten years of data, my database needs some performance tweaks. So I followed their advice...and got screwed.

Poking around on the forums, I could see Intuit techs recommending to never do what I did and yet the bastards sent out a newsletter advising us customers to do exactly that. In the end, it took an hour of my day that didn't contain a spare hour to figure out how to make the reversing journal entries to fix Intuit's stupidity.

So you can imagine my frame of mind when one of the front of the house employees came to tell me that we had run out of table cloths. Now, a restaurant just doesn't magically run out of table cloths. They go out on tables one by one and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the pile of clean ones is shrinking and to take corrective action before it becomes a crisis. And there went another half an hour of my day while I scheduled an emergency delivery.

Going into a busy lunch and dinner, our dishwasher was out again, so I had to get a fill-in guy, one whose speed is not the greatest. For a multi-course wine dinner with tons of wine glasses in use, speed is requisite. Add more stress to an already stressful day. Topping this, I went to pull a bottle of one of the wines that we were serving at the dinner to make sure that I noted the correct vintage on the menu. I saw only two bottles on the shelf. More was supposed to come in with the delivery we got first thing in the morning, but it did not. Arrgghhh! Scrambling, I found another wine in stock to substitute, a much more expensive wine. I could hear the meager profit on the Italian dinner tinkling down the drain.

So just to top off the night, I tasted the risotto just as the antipasti were going out the kitchen door and I found that it was totally overcooked: one of the line cooks had par-cooked the base earlier that afternoon and had failed to cool it adequately, so it kept on cooking into mush. You have never seen three guys scrambling so fast to pull off risotto on the fly—they work at a sedate pace on Iron Chef compared to what we were doing. Oh and just to keep the day interesting, the rest of the restaurant was fully booked all night and we had to juggle tables left and right to send out the 25 plates for the Italian dinner amongst all the others.

Friday the 21st was super busy, but it seemed like a slow night when compared to Saturday the 22nd. On Saturday, the first ticket hit the kitchen at 5:14 and the last entrée left the kitchen just after 10:00. And in between, we cooked as fast as we could all night long. Exhausted just does not begin to describe it. When the young servers and line cooks are dragging along slump shouldered, well, use your imagination about the state of the chef. I honestly cannot tell you one thing about dinner service on the 22nd: it was and will always be a total blur. I vaguely recall that we did a 9-course Chef's Tasting that evening, but can't even conjure up one dish that we served. It was that busy.

I had great plans for pesto the week following. Beth and I had already talked and she was going to pull all her basil on Monday the 24th to bring to me so I could convert it to pesto, some for her, some for us. Likewise, I was going to cut all my basil and add it to the pile. No such luck. We got a snap frost Saturday night/Sunday morning. I first noticed it when I took the dogs out first thing Sunday morning, a little frost on the low spots in the yard. I kind of got this sick feeling in my gut and didn't want to walk around the corner to look at my garden, but I did anyway. Sure enough, the basil was limp and black. And not even the hint of a frost warning from the weather people!

Such is the natural progression of the seasons, I suppose. The turning of the seasons is now well evident in the market. On the 25th, Beth brought celery root to the market, joining sweet potatoes, collards, celery, komatsuna, several new varieties of apples, and daikon, all harbingers of winter. I haven't given in and bought sweet potatoes or parsnips yet. We're going to have those vegetables with us for a very long haul and while I am eager for my first taste of both, I know that I will be sick of them before very long. I bought the last tomatoes and the last summer squash of the year on the 29th and that is something of a miracle. Many years they don't last that long.

Business slowed dramatically the week after the 22nd, the last leaf-peeping weekend of the year, so it turned out. In a continuation of the trend during recent weeks, we had more dishwasher woes—our long-time dishwasher continued to be late and started to escalate interpersonal problems with other employees—so I interviewed and hired a new one who cannot start until November 8th. And our dish machine was leaving spots all over the glassware because of a broken rinse agent line.

This week also saw a hatchet job review on Yelp, a one-line, one-star review that states in essence "everything sucks at One Block West." Yelpers will ignore it because it is so ludicrous and devoid of content, but still, unless it was a drunk comment by one of my competitors, somebody had a bad experience with us and there is nothing I can do to make sure it never happens again, because I have nothing to work with.

Can you believe there was snow in the forecast for last weekend? Snow? In October? While the fall foliage is still beautiful? As I have mentioned over and over, the dreaded S-word in the forecast is enough to kill business dead in its tracks. Sure enough, we had no business on either Thursday or Friday leading into the Saturday storm.

Saturday was a different story however. I drove in to work in a couple of inches of mush, but with no difficulty and we opened right on time. The only exception to this was our dishwasher who called at 9:30 saying that he couldn't get to work. I hadn't yet notified him of his termination, keeping him on in the interim until the new dishwasher started on the 8th, but that phone call put a quick end to his 5-year career with us. A dishwasher who does a fantastic job with the dishes and who is quick but who cannot come to work is no kind of dishwasher at all. It is sad that we had to part this way after five years, but his personal life was starting to disrupt our business.

During the morning, we had the power go out several times, to the point where I turned off the computer to keep it from crashing and rebooting. But come 11:00am, our power was on steadily. I could see from comments other business owners were making on Facebook that working power was a precious commodity that morning. Trees, still laden with leaves, were snapping all over town, bringing down power lines. Somehow, we dodged the major bullet and as soon as we opened, people started coming in to get warm. And to drink. We sold more wine for lunch than we do during a lot of dinners.

Before I get into dinner, I do have to give props to the local ABC store which was open despite no power. They couldn't retrieve our order off their voicemail but were very accommodating when we sent an employee to see if he could get some liquor for Saturday night service. We called ahead but with no power, they had no phone. They suspended all the usual ordering BS and helped us get enough stuff on the spot to open for dinner. I know what a giant pain in the ass it is for them to process transactions manually and then to go back and enter them into their system after power was restored, so my my hat is off to them for helping us out.

Our dinner reservation book hovered right where it had been all week: almost empty. We would lose a table because of the weather only to have someone call again to reserve a table, but going into dinner at 5:00, there was no net change in the book. It looked to be a slow, miserable night, a fitting ending to a slow, miserable week. And anticipating this, I ordered very lightly for the weekend and we prepped only minimally. There is no sense in buying or prepping what you cannot sell.

Nothing really happened on Saturday night until about 6:30 when the phone started ringing for reservations later in the evening. At about this time, our already booked tables started coming in and then all of a sudden, the servers were starting to hustle a bit. It wasn't a huge crowd, but it was a lot busier than we expected and we started running out of things by 7:00. Customers were most understanding and the vibe in the dining room was great. To top it off, we sold more big ticket wines that night than we usually do in a month. Sales were great despite the weather. What looked like a money-loser week turned out to be OK. Whew!

Now that business has slowed, renovation of the bar continues and is nearing completion. With the exception of some minor trim, the bar is entirely painted. Very soon now we'll have it back in service, hopefully by the November 15th posting. Until then, I hope you eat and drink well.

2011: October 15th

2011-10-27T07:47:00.009-04:00

Welcome to the October 15th edition of my twice-monthly series on One Block West Restaurant during 2011. This is the 20th posting of the 24-part series. I have to admit that I am sitting here writing this long after the 15th of October based on notes I kept over the past couple of weeks. I apologize for not getting this out in timely fashion, but we have been at the peak of our crazy fall leaf-peeping season and there have barely been enough hours in the day to get prepped for dinner service. There surely have not been spare hours to write and I have been running on the verge of exhaustion for weeks.

During this season, we're like bears gorging on all the food we can find to put on fat to carry us through the lean months. Because of Thanksgiving, November is a lean month and soon enough, we'll be staring at each other wishing we had something to do other than scrub the kitchen. December will bring a burst of holiday parties (we hope; the past few years have seen companies flee from having parties). Then come January, February, and March—the starving time for us and many restaurants. But enough looking forward to the dreaded months and on with the tale of the bounty of October.

While there is a big Catholic church here, Winchester has never struck me as being a big Catholic town. Still, we can almost always count on fish being the big seller on Friday nights with meat and grilled items dominating sales on Saturday night. So I was pretty perplexed to start off this two-week period with an all-meat Friday night followed by an all-seafood Saturday night.

For me, selling all the meat purchased for Saturday night on Friday night is scary for two reasons. If Saturday is a typical meat night, there won't be enough meat to satisfy customers. And if Friday's fish doesn't sell on Saturday, the fish is not going to hold until we reopen on Tuesday. No worries this time. Saturday, October 1st saw nothing but seafood sales. Whew!

The week leading up to and the weekend of the 8th is a blur. This is not unusual because generally during October we are running at almost double our normal volume. But what is unusual is that the 8th saw us host two birthday parties simultaneously, while the rest of the house was packed. I have got to say that the evening of the 8th went extremely smoothly—both our front and back of the house teams are very professional and handled it well.

During the week leading up to the 8th, my partner Ann's birthday, we put a lot of work into designing and executing the menu for her birthday party. This year our instructions were "Around the World in 8 Courses," sparkling wine first course, red wine for the remaining courses, savory dessert course, and all courses to be comfort food. And she gave us a list of the eight countries. I've been cooking a long, long time now and have cooked a lot of food from all over the world, so this wasn't the challenge that it might seem. The hardest part was nailing down which country would have the starter course paired with sparkling wine and which would have the savory dessert course paired with Port. After that, the menu was straightforward.

The day before the dinner, I knew Ann would be stopping by after lunch when the guys and I would be sitting down to walk through our prep lists. And knowing that she had been asking (in vain, I might add) about the menu for days, I put together a totally bogus menu complete with prep notes on the side of it. Just for grins, I included baklava as the dessert course because I know she hates sticky sweet desserts. And that fake menu might have happened to have been nonchalantly placed on the table where she might view it. And Nosy Nelly that she is, she asked if she could look at it. It was funny to watch the contortions on her face especially as she got to the baklava course. She was getting torqued just reading the menu! Ann, honey, don't ever play poker! You have more tells than Carter's has liver pills.

I hear that she was pleasantly shocked to see the following menu upon the table when she arrived:

USA: Lobster and Truffle Macaroni and Cheese; Lobster Jus
Thailand: Roasted Duck Noodle “Soup”
Argentina: Arroz con Pollo Argentine Style
Spain: Piquillo Stuffed with Patatas Bravas-Chorizo Mash
Morocco: Lamb Kefta Briouat; Chizu
Italy: Gnocchi con Sugo di Cinghiale
France: Yellow-Eye Bean Cassoulet with House-Cured Duck Confit
Greece: Lemon-Pistachio Halvas Cake; Fresh Figs; Candied Walnuts; Port Reduction

And on top of this 8-course dinner, my friend Dennis had a party for his 30th birthday for about 25 of his family and friends. Saturday the 8th was memorable for being the day that I spent 17 hours working in the restaurant kitchen. Long days I am used to, but 17-hour ones are few and far between. Those extra couple of hours mean the difference between highly fatigued and absolutely crushed. Kids, if you think that a 10- or even 12-hour day is long, don't ever think about getting into the restaurant business. Those are short days for us.

I couldn't even rest the next day because I had to do my annual cooking demonstration at Arborfest at Blandy Farm, the State Arboretum of Virginia, just east of Winchester. Although my demonstration was only an hour, it took nearly six hours out of my day, my only day off a week, to plan, pack, travel, set up, demo, tear down, travel, unpack, and get home. This is not a fair trade-off for demoing in front of a dozen people. Last year there were upwards of 100. This year, a dozen. Not worth my time doesn't even begin to describe my feelings at giving up a precious day off. What Ann had to say about it cannot be printed.

I did get some down time on Monday the 10th, however. Although Monday is my day at the restaurant to get stuff done (accounting, repairs, busy work, etc.) without the intrusion of customers and the phone ringing off the hook, I decided to take this Monday off to go have a mini family reunion at my aunt's out in Wild Wonderful. Lunch was fantastic: fried chicken livers, turnips, collards, spoonbread, and so forth! I haven't had a mess of fried chicken livers in decades. They were so awesome! I kept snagging them as my aunt Susan would pull them out of the frying pan. Props to her! Are you intimidated at the thought of inviting a chef to dinner? Don't be. We eat anything and everything and are ecstatic that we didn't have to cook it!

Despite the rest on Monday, all the paperwork that didn't get done came back to haunt me during the week as we were jamming towards the Balloon Festival weekend, traditionally our biggest weekend of the year. Each year, the Balloon Festival at Long Branch, just east of town, draws thousands of people to the Valley and as one of the top restaurants in the Valley, we get inundated with customers. As luck would have it, our front of house manager took this weekend off to be best man in a wedding, so we were down a really good person for the weekend.

Leading into the big Balloon Festival weekend, Thursday the 13th was another day from hell in the restaurant business. Days from hell come along every so often and when they do, they're memorable. It started innocently enough, with Travis and me chatting in my office in the early morning about the night's menu. As we were discussing what to do with the bucket full of butternut squash bells (the seed cavities), we both heard water coming from upstairs and not a little water either, a veritable flood.

A hot water supply line to one of the upstairs sinks burst and the water had nowhere to go but down, through the freshly painted ceiling in the bar. The landlord's lackeys got the water turned off and we got the bar cleaned up and some of the damaged ceiling tiles removed, but we were without water for 90 minutes while we were trying to prep for lunch. Ever tried to cook without water?

In the midst of cleaning up the mess, we received a delivery from our specialty goods supplier. This delivery didn't help my mood one iota. In fairness, my sales rep emailed me the night before to let me know that we would be short a pasta because of issues with the manufacturer. And he called me first thing to say that a cheese I needed for my cheese plates was going to be short. And then the driver arrived with the cheese for our grilled cheese sandwiches—totally rotten, squishing around inside a plastic bag, a molten, disgusting, black and green mess. I just about went ballistic at that point. This supplier has always done right by me over a decade of doing business and I know that this trifecta was an anomaly, but still, I was left scrambling and I don't like it. I know we will take heat from some customers because of this. This just goes to show how dependent restaurants are on their supply chains.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, the lunch server showed up and it wasn't the one that was scheduled. The normally scheduled server's boyfriend died suddenly during the night and we were all left coping with that. To top off the staffing issues, our dishwasher did not show up and we got slammed for lunch. Dirty dishes were piled everywhere, limiting the space that we needed for prepping what was looking like a busy dinner service. I finally got a fill-in dishwasher, but he didn't arrive until 6pm, an hour after dinner service started. The cooks and I were washing dishes when we should have been prepping for dinner.

Something ridiculous happened during lunch. We had a big party that I believe might have been a bridesmaid's luncheon. One of the mothers ordered a Greek salad and it was duly delivered to the table. When I got a break between tickets, I went to the table to see how they were doing. I hadn't even opened my mouth when this woman stood up and started shaking her finger at me and screaming, "These olives have pits! I sell food for a living and you should buy pitted black olives, not these things!" I was just in the mood to tell her to fuck off, but thankfully I mastered myself and went back to the kitchen in silent anger.

I really do want to know what company this rude woman sells for, if only to make sure that I never buy a thing from them. Seriously, if you sell food for a living and you don't have the tact to address issues in private, I hope you're getting a good draw because your commissions can't be very good. Oh and one other thing, lady [the first draft had a slightly longer word here], for your horiatiki in Greece, they rarely pit the olives for you either. Get over yourself.

The tale of this day is like a late night Ronco commercial: "But wait, there's more!" We supply gorgonzola cheesecakes to Linden Vineyards to pair with their dessert wines for their special cellar tastings. I had been expecting them to reorder for several days and when I hadn't heard from them, I started making a batch of batter that morning just to stay ahead of the curve. Sure enough, no sooner than I put the first batch of cheesecakes in the oven, they called asking when they were going to get cheesecakes. Miscommunication of the first order and probably my fault! They booked a reservation for dinner so that they could pick up cheesecakes afterwards in preparation for a busy weekend at the winery. No pressure! I baked cheesecakes all afternoon and through dinner service and managed to send them home with a credible supply. You try getting slammed for dinner service and baking batch after batch of time-critical cakes at the same time!

Dinner was slammed from the moment we opened the doors. The phone rang all day with people trying to get in. Everyone decided that Thursday the 13th was the day that they needed to eat with us. We had to schedule our reservation book very carefully because we were down a server (the one whose boyfriend died) and because we had a big party coming in at 7:00. It's a careful dance to get big parties seated and get their orders into the kitchen without affecting the flow of the entire restaurant.

Around 6:00 this party called saying that they were going to be 30 minutes late and asked if it was OK. At the last minute with no ability to rebook their tables, what are we supposed to answer? "No, you can't come because you are going to screw up everything for everyone." A table that represents 20% of my dining room is like the 500-lb gorilla; it can come in any time it wants to and there is not a damned thing I can do about it except grin and bear it and know that it is going to f-up everything for everyone.

This big table took me to task the next day via email for a variety of service faults and issues with the food. While some of the issues I will stand up and take the heat for, a lot of the blame rests with the big party for showing up 30 minutes late. You can't explain to a customer that it really is his fault; you just have to man up and take it and know that under the circumstances, no other restaurant could or would have handled it any better. This business takes broad shoulders and a flame-retardant suit. A cape and superhero powers don't hurt either.

Happy, happy, happy was I to climb in bed and put this day behind me. And exhausted was I the next day as we prepped non-stop all day to get ready for dinner service. My body is used to two big nights a week, Friday and Saturday, and yet, we had already had two huge nights, Tuesday and Thursday. We get through our weekends largely on the adrenaline rush of being slammed. When you are already dog-tired, there is nothing so painful as dealing with 8-10 hours of prep work with no adrenaline rush.

In the last month, we have seen something very unusual for Winchester. We have been slammed with walk-ins after 8pm on Fridays. This has historically been a town that stops dining around 8pm and to have a big rush between 8 and 10pm makes us feel like we are in a big city. This is nothing for DC or NYC, but I assure you that after almost 10 years in this location, it is quite unprecedented for this area. I sure hope the trend continues.

Finally, I'll wrap this up on a humorous note. We got a call asking to book a table and we booked it. And then the customer started asking for directions, whereupon it became clear to both parties that the caller was trying mistakenly to book a table at a restaurant in Winchester, Hampshire, southwest of London. This has happened several times before with customers booking over the Internet, but never via telephone. I haven't a clue how you dial internationally using the access code for the US and not realize that you are not dialing England. No clue at all.

Thanks for reading along and stay tuned for next month's edition when we recount the highlights of leaf peeping season. Saturday the 22nd was a doozy. Until then, eat and drink well.

2011: October 1st

2011-10-01T10:27:00.000-04:00

After walking the dogs in the gusty rainy cold this morning and driving to work, my hands are cold all the way down in the knuckle joints. It's pretty toasty back here in my office right next to the ice maker which is roaring and putting out lots and lots of hot air. I'll warm up soon enough, but the chill, my days which have been starting in the dark for a few weeks now, and the first blush of orange color on the maple trees remind me that fall is really, truly here. There is no denying now that October is upon us.

Hi everyone and welcome to the October first posting from One Block West Restaurant, a twice-monthly update on what is happening at the restaurant in 2011. The entire series can be found here. I feel like the world has speeded up in the past few weeks; it seems only yesterday that I just posted and here I am doing it all over again. This is what happens when business picks up: things become a blur here with one day blending right into the next.

Just after I published the September 15th posting, I found out through the grapevine that our local Taste of the Town had been held. Not only were we not in attendance, we didn't get invited. I'm not really upset by this: we had a nice calm evening here at the restaurant instead of having to prep a lot of food and schlep our stuff out somewhere under less than ideal circumstances. But it makes me wonder what kind of event it really was when the top-ranked restaurant in the area wasn't invited. My customers seemed unaware that the event was held as well. General lack of planning I'd say.

On Tuesday the 20th, we launched our brand new fall lunch menu, a menu that has changed fairly drastically. The middle of September turned unusually chilly and that drove us to launch the new menu with its emphasis on comfort foods earlier than we had planned. The entire process took about a month, which is really quick considering all the pieces that go into changing a menu.

We started from the old menu, ruthlessly striking out any dish that didn't sell well enough. That saw the demise of some great dishes; but how great is a dish if nobody buys it? After this, we started looking at ingredients and when we found an ingredient that was used only for a single dish or one that was going bad before we could use it all, we either reformulated the dish or struck it off the menu.

Then with the help of our customers on Facebook, we brainstormed a bunch of new dishes. Then we took a hard look at each of those dishes to see if they were feasible to make with the equipment in our kitchen and to see how many new ingredients the dish would require us to have on hand. Dishes that cause us to bring on new ingredients don't often make the menu: we have very limited space on our line to store them.

We spent a day or two developing and testing recipes. For example, although we might wing a batch of roasted red pepper bisque the first time, we want it to taste the same way for each subsequent batch. So we record the ingredients and the process that we use in our recipe binder and then we tweak that recipe until we are happy.

And I spent considerable time sourcing new ingredients. For example, the grilled cheese sandwich to accompany the roasted red pepper bisque required a new cheese. Although we have something on the order of 20 cheeses in house at any given time to support our menu and our cheese plates, we didn't have a melting cheese suitable for grilled cheese for the simple reason that most melting cheeses are generally not distinctive table cheeses worthy of a cheese plate. I said most. You would not kick the melting cheese that I found off your cheese plate; you'd probably ask for more.

My task in sourcing the cheese was daunting. From among the thousands of cheeses my suppliers have on offer, I had to find one that is distinctive and delicious in flavor, that melts well, that comes in sizes we can handle (10 pounds or under), whose name is pronounceable by most Americans, whose name would help sell the sandwich and help underscore its uniqueness, and finally, that is economical enough to put on the menu at a price that is attractive to our diners.

After sorting through hundreds of cheeses, kicking out the blues, the goats, and the real stinkers, I came down to a very short list. And sight unseen, I felt like I hit a home run with the cheese I had ranked as most likely to work, Valfino from Roth Käse of Wisconsin. It has a beautiful golden paste like a great alpine cheese, nice beefy aroma from the washed rind, buttery flavor, first place award from the American Cheese Society, affordable, great name, and melts so well. But customers would judge. And they did. I never had a chance to ask about the cheese when doing table visits; customers were gushing about how good the cheese was before I could ask. Home runs don't happen often but they're a beautiful thing when they do.

The cast of the new lunch menu definitely takes its cue from the season. Butternut squash, pumpkin, wild mushrooms permeate the list. And the food forms are comforting: grilled cheese, bisque, risotto, ravioli. The dinner menu changes every night, so the seasonal transitions are gradual. Butternut squash appears at the farmers market and so it goes on the dinner menu. My seafood broker calls to tell me softshells are in each April, and so they go on the menu.

By contrast, the lunch menu changes only a few times a year. And so in cooking the same lunch menu for weeks at a time, we build up this great yearning sense of anticipation for the seasonal changes and when they happen, sometimes they happen in a drastic fashion, almost cathartically. And so it did this time. The fall lunch menu bears scant resemblance to its predecessor. Our yearning for fall foods is sated now, but given that the cycle is both natural and inexorable, we'll soon start jonesing for fresh asparagus, shad roe, and baby lettuces, all things that spring brings to the table. This constant anticipation is what keeps this grueling business fresh for me—there's always something new around the corner and I can't wait to see what it is, get my hands on it, and cook it!

One seasonal change that I dislike is that once the weather cools off, seafood sales stop almost dead in their tracks. We sold 50% less seafood in September than in August and last night, Friday night September 30th, the typical Fish-on-Friday night, we couldn't give seafood away. In accordance, I buy less highly perishable fish this time of year and I really cut back on the number of fish offerings on the menu. There is no sense in trying to sell something that customers do not want. Yet, there are still a few customers who love seafood and know that it is one of the areas in which our kitchen excels, a few who still order it. But this time of year every year, I have to listen to some smartie in the dining room say stupid stuff such as "Why don't you have a good selection of fish? What's the matter? Are you going out of business?" Yes, people often say things in public at a restaurant that they wouldn't say to their friends. Why is that?

And now to the more mundane. In the past two weeks, contractors have performed two semi-annual preventative maintenance chores for us. First our hood cleaning company came in and pressure washed the hood, the grease baffles, and the ductwork from the fan on the roof all the way down to the kitchen. It is vital to remove greasy residue before it becomes a fire hazard. And just after this, our fire suppression vendor came in and performed preventative maintenance on the fire suppression system mounted in the hood above all of our cooking equipment. This was our semi-annual checkup to make sure that if we should have a fire, that the suppression system would activate and spray down the equipment with a smothering blanket of foam.

I started repainting the bar in a continuation of renovating the restaurant, but business has really picked up and that is slowing me down. I can only really do work between lunch and dinner, but if we are busy enough that I have to be in the kitchen helping the line cooks to prep, painting doesn't get done. It's good to be busy and no complaints on that front, but it will be equally good to get the bar back in service.

Here's a question for you. Our online reservation form asks if the customer wants us to confirm the reservation via telephone or via email. If a customer specifies email, we email a confirmation to him. So why then does he turn around and call us to find out if we have booked his table before bothering to read his email? Just asking. I understand if you miss the confirmation because it got hijacked by your spam filter, but if you don't even look for the confirmation, I don't get that at all.

In the past two weeks, I've been sitting out on the deck while doing my menu planning, taking advantage of the cooler weather. It's high migration season for both Monarch butterflies and Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds and we've had no shortage of either. The Monarchs are attracted to sweet perfume of our fall-blooming native clematis (Clematis virginiana) which covers the back wall of the deck and some of the front screen behind the roses. At one point, I was counting Monarchs by the tens as they touched down on the clematis vines on their way south. The hummingbirds seem very attracted to the lantanas in the window boxes and to some of the verbenas, all of which are in full bloom now. I'm seeing multiple hummingbirds every day now and have since late August. In fact, we're seeing so many of the little creatures that we have delayed ripping out the lantanas and replacing them with pansies, so as not to remove what appears to be a welcome food source.

On Friday the 23rd, the fluorescent light in my windowless office went kaput. Ever try to type menus in the dark or otherwise run a business in the dark? Naturally, it had to happen at the busiest time of week when I just didn't have time to worry about it. And equally naturally, it couldn't have been something simple such as a bogus switch or a bad tube, both of which I have replacements for. And even more naturally, I had just taken all my electrical tools and parts back home after using them in the renovation of the dining room. It just had to be a bad ballast, which takes more time (especially in the dark) to replace.

Being the good Boy Scout, I have a couple spare ballasts in stock for emergencies. But no, the spare ballasts were too big to fit in the existing fixture. So early on Sunday on my one day off a week I had to go to Home Depot to get a new ballast. Surprise! The Department of Energy has banned T12 (inch and a half tube diameter) ballasts. Awesome! I had to buy a new T8 (one inch tube diameter) fixture and all new tubes. Now I have to stock two different tube sizes. Thank you DOE! It's not such a horrible thing; I'm just grumbling. T8s are much more energy efficient than T12s and that's a good thing, though payback is about 6 years out. In the course of remodeling the dining room, I did switch out the incandescent bulbs for CFLs which have an equally long if not longer recapture period. In any case, we are trying to be as green as we can be. Still, hanging and wiring a light fixture in the dark is a pain in the rear!

Tuesday the 27th was pure bedlam. Two of our servers were on vacation, one in Florida and the other at Myrtle Beach, taking advantage of a long Sunday to Wednesday break. Naturally I should have anticipated being down two people that we would be slammed. And we were. Out of nowhere, Tuesday night was busier than the preceeding busy Friday. And we were seriously understaffed. But we got the job done and most customers were extremely understanding of our plight. Still, there was one table that got its nose out of joint, but not a thing we could do about that except apologize.

A good bit of the last two weeks has been consumed with a political issue. The Winchester City Council is considering a proposal to raise the meals tax from 5% to 7%, for a total of 12% tax added to your restaurant bill when combined with the 5% state sales tax. The 2% increase would theoretically be earmarked for the school system as an additional source of funding. Naturally, the local restaurateurs (and a lot of other people in the city) are up in arms about increasing taxes, especially one that we feel is unfairly punitive to our business segment, but mostly because we feel we're being taxed enough as it is.

As a small businessman, I dislike this revenue generation tactic intensely. I have a budget and I have a revenue stream and I constantly have to adjust my expenses to meet not only the budget, but the actual revenue. So it really pisses me off that the School Board does not have to do the same thing. They will couch it in sweet sounding sound bites about it being in the best interest of our children, but I call bullshit. School Board, City Council, act like you're running a real business and quit taxing us to solve your lack of resolve and willpower to make hard decisions.

And finally, we capped off a successful two-week period with our September wine dinner on the 29th, a dinner featuring the wines of Paso Robles Rhône Ranger Barrel 27 winery. I generally select more subtle wines for wine dinners, but it was really a lot of fun for a change to create some big, big food to compete with big, big wines. For those of you who care, here's the menu:

Honeydew Soup with Thai Basil and Black Pepper; Prosciutto-Wrapped Grissino
Honeydew Gelée on Cucumber with Honey-Lime Greek Yogurt and Crispy Prosciutto
Grilled and Marinated Honeydew Wrapped in Prosciutto
2009 High on the Hog White (Grenache Blanc and Viognier)

Wild Boar Terrine with Pancetta and Pistachios
Cornichon; Honey Mustard
2007 Right Hand Man Syrah

Bison Short Ribs
Porcini Risotto; Bison Gravy
2007 Bull by the Horns (Petit Verdot, Syrah, Tempranillo)

Steuben Yellow Eye Bean Cassoulet with House-Cured Pork Confit and Saucisse de Toulouse
Crispy House-Cured Pork Belly
2007 Head Honcho Syrah

Chocolate Fig Clafoutis
Nutella Powder
2008 Hand over Fist (Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre)

And now that October is here, our silly season has officially begun. The next several weekends will be loco with all the tourists coming out to enjoy the fall weather, the gorgeous scenery of this beautiful valley that we call home, and the hopefully spectacular leaves. Please come and join the party, but remember, for the next month, weekend reservations are essential.

2011: September 15th

2011-09-15T12:30:00.000-04:00

It's hard to believe that there are only six posts left after this one in this year-long series of twice-monthly postings on what happened during the year 2011 at One Block West restaurant. Sitting out on the deck working on my menu in the late afternoons in the midst of a shower of golden falling leaves, I am reminded that summer is behind us now.

This summer wasn't a bad one in terms of business; up over last summer. Of course, business couldn't be much worse than it was last summer. I'm pleased to say that our month 9 (the two weeks on either side of labor day) was well up over the same month last year and was the best month 9 we have ever had. That said, month 9 is always one of the slowest of the year because of back to school, back to college, and all the last-minute vacations around Labor Day. If you've been reading along this whole series, you will remember that we use 13 4-week accounting months in our year so that we can compare the same 4-week period each year, hence month 9.

Our month 9 was up in spite of the nearly week-long rain from tropical storm Lee. For three days, our dining room was empty. But while that was bad for us, it was just awful for our winemaker friends who really don't want any significant rain during harvest season. Rain dilutes the fruit which then yields dilute wine (we'll skip the discussion on chaptalization and on saignage in this post) and promotes rot. Wineries in our area got between 3.5" and 8" of rain from Lee; no no bueno.

The slow rainy time gave the crew and me lots of time to focus on our Duck Dinner on the 10th, a private dinner arranged by a group of friends to whom we served 5 courses of duck. I love doing these dinners because duck is such a versatile red meat. It can substitute for almost any other red meat including beef or pork. These multi-course dinners force me to break the duck into parts (rather than roasting them whole) which is a very good thing. The huge muscular legs need a long slow braise to bring them to unctuousness while the breast (particularly that of the Moulard breed that we use) wants to be grilled or roasted to medium rare to bring out its almost steak-like quality. Roasting a duck whole is a sure way to undercook the legs and overcook the breast.

The menu:

Terrine de Fois Gras on Savory French Toast with Asian Pear Confit

Baby Greens with Asian Pear, Duck Cracklings, Duck Confit Threads and Duck Fat Vinaigrette

Duck Posole: Duck Leg and Hominy Stew

Cassoulet of Local Bird Egg Beans, Duck Confit, and Smoked Duck Sausage Topped with Grilled Breast of Moulard Duck, Garnished with Armagnac-Poached Prunes

Duck Egg Crème Brûlée Flavored with Lemongrass and Thai Basil

In addition, the slow time gave me time to focus on the new lunch fall lunch menu, which promises to be the first major overhaul of that menu in about three years. We're looking at launching the menu on either the 20th or the 27th. We're still sourcing ingredients, tweaking recipes, and costing the plates. Once that is complete and we have all the necessary inventory in house, we will launch the new menu. The servers have also been involved in the menu development process as much for their input and insight as for their training on the new menu. Things just work so much better when the whole crew is on the same page.

I am a huge fan of all things local and I go out of my way to source as much for the restaurant locally as I can. These past two weeks have really taken some of the wind out of my local sails, so to speak. First, a local farmer approached me about his beef. Although lots of local farmers can supply beef, what is unusual about his operation is that he has a herd big enough to supply restaurants AND he is selling cuts, not carcasses, in restaurant-sized quantities. I was super excited to be able to buy local beef where heretofore this really wasn't an option.

The first batch of short ribs came in and we braised them as we always do, to make a gravy out of the braising liquid and to serve the almost falling apart ribs over polenta. Ribs usually take about 4 hours to braise. After 5, these were still tough and even after 9 hours, they were tough and stringy to the point where I couldn't serve them. I donated them to the local rescue mission.

The conversation in which I told the farmer about his beef was difficult for both of us. Like most people, I don't like to deliver bad news and like most people, he doesn't want to hear bad news. But in an effort to help him grow, I owed it to him to lay it on the line. And I did, gently and politely. He was extremely apologetic and we are going to continue to try to make the relationship work, but damn, I wish this story had turned out so differently. I'm not sure which of us is more disappointed.

The second thing to shake my confidence in local goods was a blind tasting that we did on the 10th of Virginia Cabernet Francs, of which I have already written in a prior blog post. Bottom line: four of the seven Francs had severe technical flaws and the other three were just OK, but not OK enough for any of the tasters to want a glass to drink. Usually after these blind tastings, each taster will pour a glass of his favorite to drink. We opted for a bottle of Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon instead. Sad, sad, sad.

Moreover, during this period our microgreen supplier threatened to stop bringing us product, again. He's done this once before. For small farmers, getting products to market is a real challenge and it takes commitment, not only to make the deliveries, but to continue to deliver even when things get difficult. Things are often difficult when you are just starting out in a new business and trying to grow your client base. Initially, because you are new, things go great as people try you out. But then, business dips as you find out who your loyal customers are, and you have to redouble your efforts to build from that base. Same thing happens in the restaurant business as well. Our microgreen supplier doesn't seem inclined to commit to that.

It's a shame really because he grows an excellent product and because I have no other local supplier of microgreens. It's also a shame because as his client base expands, I could be a reference account, someone other chefs could call to hear good things about his product. But now, I may have no choice except to say that while his product is unimpeachable, he is unreliable. And nobody in this business needs an unreliable supplier.

Yet another local farmer called me this week with great plans to get into the pastured poultry business and grass-fed beef business. While I wish him well, I don't have high hopes. I have heard this story all too many times in the past. Farming is a tough, tough, tough business. I shared with him that we have almost no use for chickens, no matter how good. We are a high-end fine dining restaurant and customers who cook chicken at home as their primary protein source are not about to order chicken when they come out for a special dinner.

This past week we took delivery of more rabbits from another local supplier. I was sitting out on the deck last Friday morning shelling a half a bushel of bird egg beans for the cassoulet for the Saturday night duck dinner. In the hour that I was shelling beans, one refrigerated truck after another from all the big institutional food distributors rolled by going to all the other restaurants down the alley. And then my guy rolls up in a beat old truck with a cooler in the back, full of local rabbits and chicken feet for chicken stock. The juxtaposition of fresh beans, local proteins, and a beater truck against refrigerated tractor trailers of frozen and canned goods struck me as somewhat pathetic, especially since some of these restaurants claim to be using fresh and local goods.

On Sunday the 11th, I went by the restaurant before noon to pick up a batch of mini gorgonzola cheese cakes that I am supplying to Linden Vineyards for their tasting room, with an eye towards delivering them before their first cellar tasting at noon. It was not to be. We suffered our fourth ceiling collapse from water damage from the upstairs apartments, the fourth in two years. This was only a minor collapse in that we lost 3 or 4 ceiling tiles, but the thing that irritated me is that I just spent six months renovating the dining room only to have this happen.

In total disgust, I called the landlord at home and asked to have the mess fixed. Then I walked out and fumed all the way down to Linden. Half a bottle of gorgeous Petit Verdot 2006 helped reframe my mind, but when I arrived back at the restaurant at 4pm, some of the mess had been cleared, but water was leaking faster than ever. I could see this from outside: water was flowing down the front of the building. I called the landlord's son, the one who phoned me earlier in the afternoon to say that all was well, and unfortunately I had to get pretty forceful to convince him that the problem had grown worse and that it was unacceptable to wait for the plumber on Monday. Later that evening they did get it repaired and they did get the ceiling replaced and repainted by our opening hour on Tuesday, but I am still not happy.

Finally, I got some down time yesterday to type up some of our recipes. We actually do have recipes for some things that we make frequently for the purpose of ensuring consistency from one batch to another and for training new employees. But a lot of them are hand scrawled in a tattered old folder. It felt good to get these typed up and placed into a 3-ring binder. The restaurant business does not afford a lot of time to do simple housekeeping like this, yet it has to get done.

And that is the story from OBW. I'm looking forward to our upcoming wine dinner with Barrel 27 Winery of Paso Robles, CA on the 29th and I'm sure that will feature prominently in the October 1st posting. Until then, eat and drink well.

Virginia Cabernet Franc

2011-09-12T11:23:00.005-04:00

I had my faith in the Virginia winemaking community shaken pretty severely this past Saturday night when several of us sat down to a blind tasting of seven Virginia Cabernet Francs. The tasters reaction tells the tale: after tasting blind, not one of us wanted a glass of any of the Francs to drink. We opened a bottle of Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

Technical flaws abounded. One was so contaminated with Brettanomyces that it was undrinkable. Three were overripe fruit bombs with no backing acid or tannins; the grape varietal was indiscernible. One was so tannic we wondered if it was destemmed at all. Two had a nose bereft of fruit, but with hints of latex rubber.

But surprisingly, what I didn't taste was a lot of green fruit. This is a welcome change from prior tastings in which green vegetal flavors predominated. But then, 2008 and 2009 were pretty decent vintages for reds in Virginia. And hopefully we have learned that Franc's crop has got to be restricted.

I hear people state frequently that Cabernet Franc is Virginia's red grape. It is almost a mantra for some of these people. What I do know about the grape is that it is relatively easy to grow, tolerates a cooler climate, ripens early, and crops heavily. Are these people mistaking something that grows easily in Virginia for something that makes good wine?

While our samples did not include a couple of the best Cabernet Francs in the state, it did represent some well known wineries that should have made good wine. And that is scary.

After ten years of seriously tasting Virginia wines, if I had to pick a grape that could become a signature for this state, it would be Petit Verdot. But I wonder. If we can't make good Franc, why would we make good PV?

Winemakers, are you listening? I'm trying to be a cheerleader for the industry with my wine list and its focus on Virginia. But you have to give me something to work with.

Spanish Roulette—Padrón Peppers

2011-09-08T12:32:00.010-04:00

For years, I have loved padrón peppers, originally from the town of the same name in Galicia in far northwestern Spain. I've eaten these delicious treats at a few select tapas bars over the years, but padrón peppers are still really hard to find in the US. We are lucky to have a couple of growers here in Virginia and a couple more on the east coast from whom we can source them each summer. As you can see from the photo, they are small green fairly nondescript peppers.
The reason they are so highly prized as a tapa is that when fried in a little olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt as in the photo below, they are absolutely delicious. But there's a catch. You play Spanish roulette with these peppers: most are mild as they can be while some are pleasantly spicy (but not quite as spicy as a jalapeño). I've found that the older (i.e., larger) and more drought-stressed the peppers are, the spicier they are. This batch seems to be running about 20% spicy and 80% mild.
They're worth growing at home if you can find seeds and if you ever see them on a restaurant menu, worth eating.

2011: September 1st

2011-09-01T13:30:00.001-04:00

Earthquakes and hurricanes, oh my! Welcome to the September first installment of my year-long twice-monthly update on the restaurant. Let me start by saying what a crazy ride the last 16 days have been! Despite my praising the restaurant gods for the strong business in the previous installment, they took revenge on us in this 15-day period, launching first an earthquake and then a hurricane at us. Read on for more details.

On the 18th, we held our annual Harvest Dinner, which we have done each year since at least 2006 to honor the hard work and excellent products of our primary produce providers, Gene and Beth Nowak of Mayfair Farm. In the early years of this dinner, I didn't tell customers that the dinner would be vegetarian, surprising some of them after the fact when I inquired whether they realized that they had eaten no meat for dinner.

In the last few years, I have advertised the event as a vegetarian dinner. Our loyal customers have come to understand that I am very creative at vegetarian menus and that they are going to have a wonderful dinner despite the lack of meat. Plus, we have a big following of vegetarian customers for whom this is their one big fancy dinner of the year. Where else in this region can you get a creative multi-course vegetarian dinner paired with great wines?

This dinner was unique for another reason as well: it may be the only dinner that I have ever done in which looking back in hindsight, I wouldn't change a single dish. My feelings about this menu are unprecedented:

Hors d’Oeuvres: Roasted Red Pepper Canapés and Grilled Vegetable Hummus Canapés

Watermelon Gazpacho with Focaccia

Cantaloupe Carpaccio: Honey- & Lime-Marinated Cantaloupe with Blackberries and Blackberry Mozzarella

Scalloped Beets with Gorgonzola and Toasted Hazelnuts

Eggplant Burrito with Queso Fresco and Salsa Fresca

Fried Peach Pie with Crystallized Ginger Cream

This has been a really tough year for vegetables, so what we had for the dinner was fairly limited, the highlights being watermelon, cantaloupe, beets, eggplants, and peaches. What we didn't have at our disposal this year was a lot: green beans, tomatoes, summer squash, potatoes, and corn. It has just been too hot and too dry for these vegetables.

This dinner really forced me to focus on delivering vegetables such as beets and eggplants that are not crowd-pleasers in a way such that they would be appealing to most diners. And it forced me to focus on using fruit in courses in which I would normally use vegetables. All in all, it was a great exercise for my creative mind and I thought each course was spectacular in its own way. And the funny thing about this menu is that I didn't sweat over it. Like all my really good menus, I just sat down and wrote it down on a piece of paper and that was it. No handwringing, no sleepless nights, just five minutes of writing out a menu and done!

I am particularly proud of the eggplant filling for the burrito; had I tasted it blind, I would have never guessed it was eggplant. To make this silky purée, I peeled and grilled eggplants to get a good char on them, then chopped them and added them to a big pan of sautéed onions, poblanos, garlic, minced cilantro stems, and cumin. After cooking for about six hours, I let the mix cool and added raw sweet corn and more chopped cilantro. The contrast of silky eggplant purée and crunchy sweet corn was phenomenal. I was likewise pleased with the other dishes: the cantaloupe carpaccio in particular may be the best salad I have ever devised.

The scarcity of many vegetables this summer is a testament to the wicked weather we had in midsummer. After the hottest July on record—remember the 104-105F temps?—how weird (and how welcome) was it to have to put on a sweater after dinner on the 22nd of August?

At about 1:45pm on Tuesday the 23rd, I was sitting at my desk catching up on a pile of paperwork delayed from the week prior because of the prep necessary for the Harvest Dinner. All of a sudden, I heard this big rumbling roar and catering platters started falling off the shelves just outside my office. Earlier in my life, I spent a lot of time in California, so I knew we were having an (a totally unexpected) earthquake. Been there, done that a bunch of times in the past, and it's really not much fun.

I started to make my way to the dining room to escort our remaining tables out of the restaurant. The floor was heaving so much that it was like trying to walk on one of the crazy carnival floors where everything is out of kilter. By the time I got to the dining room, the tremors were largely over. The only damage, some stuff to pick up and put away and a lot of frayed nerves in the dining room—it could have been a lot worse. I've seen a lot worse firsthand.

I wouldn't have thought that such a dinky earthquake would have affected our reservation book, but it did. The east coast facilities directors of a well-known retail chain were to have dinner at the restaurant on the night of the 23rd, but with the earthquake, unknown impacts from aftershocks, and the impending weekend hurricane, they decided that they should remain looking after their stores that week. Who can blame them? On top of this, we had four other tables cancel. The result: a really bad night for us. We had twice as many cancellations as customers in the dining room. And so this business goes.

On the 25th, we started being unable to process credit cards. Between scanning the last credit card of Wednesday night service and batching out (the process we go through to get paid after we add the tips to the transactions), the terminal stopped dialing out. Thursday morning, I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting the problem before I called both the telephone company and our merchant processor, the people from whom I get the terminal and its software and who authorize and process the credit cards.

I ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with the help desk of my processor before we determined that it was either the hardware or the phone line. At 7:30am, do you know what a great feeling it is to get a live and knowledgeable human being on the phone to help with your problems? Once we determined the problem, she ordered a new terminal for me to be overnighted and set me up to process transactions via our office computer. And then, she went in and manually added all the tips to my transactions for the night before so that the servers could get paid. This is customer service and this is why it never pays to do business with fly-by-night low-cost merchant providers. This is why I will never leave my provider.

Back in the old days when the credit card terminal bit it, we had to get out the old-fashioned slider and the carbon receipts. Then when we got a replacement terminal, we would have to type in all the information from the paper copies—a serious pain in the rear. Now to be able just to process credit card transactions via a secure server over the web is fantastic. The Internet really has transformed how we do business in so many ways.

The local telephone company—the one that I pay for service—came right out the same morning and tested all the lines coming into the restaurant. All four of them had an issue that required Verizon to come out and fix. Presumably something happened on the incoming lines that fried the modem in our credit card terminal. In stark contrast to the responsiveness of the local telephone company, Verizon said that it will be up to a week before they could look at the problem. That is BS, but in point of fact, they did come out two days later and claim that nothing was wrong. After installing the new credit card terminal, we are still having problems as I write. I have escalated to Verizon management. I dislike Verizon intensely and will never willingly pay them for anything.

And now for a completely different subject. We don't sell beer at OBW: for every beer we sell, we sell hundreds and hundreds of dollars of wine. We have nothing against beer; we really like beer and we have always stocked microbrews by Troëgs because they are consistently tasty and made just up I-81 in Harrisburg, PA. But with 70-plus wines by the glass, our focus is intentionally on wine and on showcasing local Virginia wines.

In addition to the micros, we have always had one of the BudMiller light beers in the cooler too, just for the odd request, but mostly to make beer batter. The big beer distributors have always had a problem with us; we don't sell enough beer to be worth their while.

The original Miller distributor in town was great and we had no problems getting Lite. Then they sold out to a big northern Virginia distributor that made it clear that they didn't want to do business with us, so we left for the local Budweiser distributor who was super accommodating with us. This past year, they too sold out to a big distributor who just couldn't seem to service our account. They missed delivery dates and kept trying to deliver in the middle of dinner when I wasn't free to just run to the office to cut a check. It was all too easy to see how valuable a customer we were to them. I use the past tense because I just pulled the plug on them and all American light category beers.

As one of the cooks said, if we don't stock them, maybe customers will try a beer that actually has flavor. As I say, if we don't stock white zinfandel, why should we stock light American beer? So, now we are searching for another beer to add to our mix. Change is constant in the restaurant business.

Speaking of change, we just switched to new coffee cups. And the change was not nearly as simple as you would imagine: buy new cups, wash them, put them in use. These new cups are significantly larger than the old ones which proved to be too fragile and too expensive to replace. Our former coffee cups did double duty as soup cups for lunch, but the new cups are as large as our old soup bowls. So we had to rethink our lunch soup strategy and then our coffee pricing. These cups were causing our cream usage to go way up and as you know, cream is really expensive. So we had to bump our coffee prices just a bit. The new saucers are offset so that the cup sits off to one side affording us the room to put a small biscotto on the plate with the cup of coffee at least as some compensation for having to raise prices. And then, the new cups wouldn't fit where the old ones did, so we had to find a new place to store them. And finally, we had to reprint the lunch menus with the soup revisions. So many consequences from one simple change!

Speaking of storing things, years ago I thought that a fine dining restaurant should try to be all things to all people, and so I bought all five common kinds of sweetener for our table tops: white, brown, yellow, blue, and pink. And I have seen over the years that we have reordered white, brown, and yellow, but never blue or pink. Accordingly I have let the blue run out and the pink is on its way out. We get the odd complaint that we don't have the blue sweetener, but it's rare. Removing these two items from inventory frees up the space for two cases in dry storage. And this amount of space is a precious commodity that I can surely use for other things.

On Saturday the 27th, I did a tomato and garlic demonstration at the Tomato and Garlic TasteFest at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. Despite the cloudy breezy conditions, there were a good 150-200 spectators for my demo and everyone seemed pretty good natured about huddling under the tent as it rained, fallout from Hurricane Irene. Everything was so much better organized this year and I even had a microphone this year which made life so much better for me and the audience.

I made fresh mozzarella and an insalata caprese from that, the pasta/fish sauce that I call Ed's (caramelized garlic, tomatoes, artichokes, capers, and basil), and my new favorite appetizer, the PLT, a pork belly, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on focaccia. I have noticed that people in this area are really scared of pork belly, thinking that it is tripe or intestines or other offal rather than the uncured side meat (bacon) that it really is. A couple of whiffs of the frying pork belly and a small taste later and I converted dozens of people to the pork belly legion! The dining room was full of people at lunch that day asking for pork belly sandwiches—not on the menu anywhere—and we were happy to comply. Pork belly is surely a gift from the food gods.

And this nice lunch crowd was our bright spot of the weekend as Hurricane Irene plowed up the coast. No matter that all we got was a little breeze and barely any rain, the damage was done. Each time a hurricane is forecast anywhere in our vicinity, the weather people might as well forecast a blizzard for the impact is the same: no business as people panic and scurry to the store for emergency supplies and glue themselves to the television watching the weather just like the rubberneckers at a traffic accident.

We were fortunate to lose only two nights of business. The last hurricane that came through we lost a full week and my heart goes out to those folks down on the coast who have lost a whole lot more than me. Some even lost their entire businesses. So sad; I know how hard they have worked.

Finally, as a per[qk] for our customers, we hold a random drawing randomly to select customers to attend a Mystery Basket dinner at my house. Each guest brings three ingredients. When all are assembled, we have a grand unveiling of the ingredients and we start to cooking, making a menu from all the ingredients. This past Sunday was the latest such dinner and we all had a blast. It's kind of like the Food Network show Chopped, but I've been doing it for more than a decade, long before anyone every dreamed up Chopped.

And, that's about it for this edition. Stay tuned for the 15th when I will have more information about our forthcoming dinner on the 29th with Barrel 27 Winery of Paso Robles, CA.

Mystery Basket Dinner

2011-08-29T09:35:00.043-04:00

This past Sunday we held a Mystery Basket dinner at our house for some of our customers as a way of thanking them for their business. We drew names from all those who had entered at the restaurant and each winner brought three ingredients that were unknown to me. When everyone arrived and had a glass of wine, we unveiled all the ingredients. And here is the sum of what everyone brought; I contributed the hickory bark syrup just for grins.

beets
pom pom mushrooms
bison sausage
Walla Walla onions
haloumi cheese
sweetbreads
garlic
tomatoes
red peppers
barilotti pasta
baby bok choy
pink lady apples
rhubarb
hickory bark syrup
bulgur
puff pastry
pomegranates
Dubliner cheese
Italian sausage

As you can see from this list of ingredients, we had quite a crazy melange of foodstuffs from which to concoct a menu. As we were unveiling the ingredients, I was already triaging the foods in my mind, trying to figure out what went where. The quantities of some foods dictated how we would have to use them. The little block of haloumi wasn't going to go too far.

The bulgur suggested a tabouleh, the puff pastry a pizza, and the barilotti a pasta, naturally. That left the sweetbreads and the haloumi for appetizers. The menu we ended up with was:

Saganaki: Pan-Seared Haloumi with Sautéed Garlic and Lemon Juice. This is a simple dish to make. Slice the haloumi and place in a hot frying pan with a touch of olive oil. Brown on both sides and remove to a plate. Add chopped garlic to the pan and brown slightly. Deglaze with the juice of a lemon and pour over the cheese.

Sweetbreads with Pom Pom Mushrooms and Baby Bok Choy. Sweetbreads are delicious and pretty easy to prepare. I showed everyone how to poach them, then how to remove the membranes and veins. Once they were cooled, we tossed them in seasoned Wondra and seared them well in a skillet. Then we slabbed the pom pom mushrooms and seared them and after that, we wilted the baby bok choy in a good quantity of olive oil and garlic. We arranged all these goodies on a platter and dug in. I had never worked with farmed pom pom mushrooms before, only the wild form that I have known as lion's mane. The mushrooms had a slight crab-like flavor, very mild and subtle. Image courtesy of Mike Hoffmaster.

Tabouleh with Pomegranates, Pink Lady Apples, Beets, and Rhubarb. This was the sleeper dish of the evening and my catch-all for all the red-colored ingredients for which we had no other use and it was the one dish that I cooked myself. I don't think anybody didn't have seconds of this tabouleh: it was that good. I started by cooking the bulgur, some fancy organic long-cooking kind that took a lot of persuasion in the microwave to get cooked, and by roasting the beets in foil in the oven, the single best way to handle beets that I know.

Everyone got a kick out of my beating the hell out of the pomegranate with a wooden spoon to get the seeds out; the whole thing was seeded and ready to eat in 30 seconds. I marinated raw rhubarb in a lot of hickory bark syrup to tame its rampant acidity, then threw it in with the pomegranate seeds, diced apples, and diced beets, to which I added a lot of lemon juice, chopped Italian parsley from my garden, minced garlic, and extra virgin olive oil. I mixed it all and the whole thing turned scarlet and after correcting the seasoning, it was truly delicious.

Do note that rhubarb contains oxalic acid, which in large quantities can be toxic. Most of the oxalic acid is confined to the leaves, which is why they are not eaten. Cooking neutralizes the oxalic acid and many texts suggest to always cook rhubarb, but it can be quite delicious when eaten raw.

Puff Pastry Pizza with Buffalo Sausage, Caramelized Onions, Cherry Tomatoes, and Dubliner Cheese. Everybody was in a pizza kind of mood, so I rolled out the puff pastry on a sheet tray, built a rim around it with a second layer of puff, docked the bottom, and pre-baked it to about half done. Next it got a good layer of caramelized onions, buffalo sausage, halved tiny tomatoes, and a topping of Dubliner cheese for good measure. What's not to like?

Barilotti with Spicy Italian Sausage, Onions, Tomatoes, Red Peppers, and Basil. I'd never seen this cut before, barilotti, little barrels, but I like it. I'm a big fan of short pasta cuts and this reminds me of cavatelli, also a very favorite cut. These little barrels are the perfect shape for a sausage pasta because they have the perfect nooks in which sausage bits can hide. All the ingredients were sautéed in turn with copious amounts of garlic and fresh basil, then tossed with the hot pasta, some pasta cooking water, and a big handful of grated pecorino romano. Awesome!

Candids

Cleaning sweetbreads.*

Chef Mike tackles a mound of onions.*

Jimmy, zesting lemons.*

Was it my imagination or were the women outside kibbitzing while the guys did all the work?*

To be fair, Julie helped EJ a lot and Jen had a broken wrist. What about Ann? She was social directing!*

Grayce, the canine vacuum cleaner.*

And Dewi, the human vacuum cleaner.

The crew.

*Image courtesy of Mike Hoffmaster/Dennis Trimarchi.

2011: August 15th

2011-08-16T01:03:00.011-04:00

Knock, knock, knock on wood! As I start writing this next installment of "As the Block Turns," my twice-monthly update on the restaurant, business continues stronger than hoped for. Thank you restaurant gods!

I'm not sure what is going on, but people are going back out to eat after years of hibernating. Maybe we're starting to feel good about the economy (hmmm, unlikely) or just sick and tired of feeling sick and tired (more likely). Most of the dining seems to be spur of the moment. For example, the past couple of weekends, I have come into the restaurant at my usual 7:30am or so to get deskwork and thinkwork out of the way before employees, customers, and the phone calls, only to see a pretty dismal looking reservation book. Yet by magic, come dinner time, we are crushed!

I'm loving it and not complaining, but it really does make planning a challenge. How much food do I really need to purchase? I purchase my primary proteins days in advance of the weekend, so I really have to use my crystal ball and/or just roll the dice about quantities to order. I just usually go with gut feel that I have developed over the years. And my gut right now says order more than I would normally this time of year, so I am going with it.

Despite the increased business, we continue to ride the roller coaster. The stock market volatility is not helping at all. The first day of this recent downturn, the day that the Dow dropped 400 points, business stopped dead, both that day and the next. Fortunately, business rebounded nicely by the weekend. I am still amazed how external factors over which I have no control impact my business. Some days, I feel like I'm in a rudderless ship and we go in the direction the wind is blowing.

But those days have become fewer this summer and as an example of the recent positive trend, last Friday, the 12th of August, we had 11 tables (more than half the restaurant) seated before 6:00pm. This is totally unprecedented in my experience, for Friday nights don't generally get started until about 7:00pm, once everyone gets home from work. The kitchen was chaos from the moment we opened and then we had a lull during our normally chaotic 7:00-8:00pm hour. Then we turned all the tables again and we had another mad rush from 8:30-9:30pm. I was a hurting puppy when I finally got out of the kitchen to make table visits towards 10pm.

This is all good. Please keep it coming!

This update is a good bit late this month because of the crush of conflicting things that I have just had to do. I've had four special menus to get to clients in the last week, along with a tapas party to plan, our annual Harvest Dinner to plan, a magazine article to write, and pictures to find/take/edit for three different magazines. Look for articles to appear this fall. If this reminds you of "but I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped." then we are on the same page.

I'm sad to report that it has been a spectacularly bad year for tomatoes. Many old heirlooms that we have come to love are not doing well, not ripening well or getting sun-scalded, showing stinkbug and bird damage, having large green cores, and otherwise just not producing well. The hybrid tomatoes are not ripening well either. If it weren't for the tiny varieties, we wouldn't have any tomatoes really worth eating on our menu this summer. And that kills me because I waited for 10 freaking months for tomatoes!

To compensate for that (as if there can really be compensation for lack of tomatoes), cantaloupes and blackberries are amazing this year. To celebrate them, I came up with (what I think is) a killer salad that I call Cantaloupe Carpaccio.

This is a salad of paper thin slices of cantaloupe, honey- and lime-marinated cubes of cantaloupe, blackberry coulis, blackberries, blackberry-marinated fresh mozzarella, and microgreens. The flavors are phenomenal! I count this among the very best dishes I have ever created and like most good ones, I didn't put any active thought into it. I was sitting in my chair around 3am one evening, trying to fall asleep, when the idea just appeared in my brain, seemingly out of nowhere. I sent myself a quick email to the restaurant lest I forget the idea by morning, and the rest is history.

I am generally doing paperwork in my windowless office in the far back of the restaurant most days until lunch gets started, so there are a lot of days when I have no idea what is going on out front. One day last week, I came out to the dining room just before noon to see both an empty dining room and a large truck parked in the alley outside the restaurant, obstructing the street. Looking further down the street, I saw that this was a city work crew and they had barricaded the entire street.

One Block West is in the middle of a landlocked city block on a one-way alley and there is exactly one way into the restaurant and one way out. If the way in is blocked, we have no business. I have had a running battle with the city and utility companies for years not to block the street during business hours. The utility companies are pretty easy to run off. They usually think they can pull a quickie and not file for a street closure permit with the police, so one call to the cops and they have no choice but to leave. Of course, in the hour it takes to get the cops on scene and to convince the utility company that it must leave, the damage to my business is done.

Naturally, the city is exempt from having to pull street closure permits. And equally naturally, they don't give a damn about impact on the local businesses that generate the tax revenue that allows them to operate. Imagine if I ran my business the way that the City of Winchester does. I'd be gone in weeks.

It does no good to abuse the workers: they, like most of us, are just doing what we have to do to put food on the table. But it doesn't hurt to remind them that we are in the same boat: if you can't work, you can't feed your kids; if the road is blocked at lunch, I can't feed mine. They are generally somewhat sympathetic to this approach and will at least call someone in management. And that's what happened this time. The crew that was doing the sewer work was really nice and called in a supervisor within five minutes. And I suggested a compromise in relocating the barricade that would allow them to work and cars to get by enough to get to the restaurant. The supervisor was extremely gracious and moved the barricade and this encounter went fairly positively compared to some in the past.

Just as soon as I had finished talking with the supervisor and arranging the compromise, who should walk into the restaurant for lunch but the new city manager? Poor timing! He was seated at the window table with a perfect view of the obstruction and I'm afraid he got a whole lot more than lunch as I vented my frustration his direction.

One of the key behind the scenes people at any restaurant is the dishwasher. Without a constant stream of clean dishes, no restaurant that does any volume of business could survive. Thus, the dishwasher is critical, as I have been reminded in the past couple of weeks as our normal dishwasher took his kids to the beach for a well-earned summer vacation. We are fortunate to have a really good dishwasher because working with most fill-in dishwashers sucks. The beach week was no fun: our fill-in guy thought that 90% clean is good enough. By the way, the dishwasher is a person. The dish machine is the big metal box that the dishwasher loads and unloads all night long.

And a final tidbit before I wrap up. We were one of the very first restaurants to take reservations on the Internet and so I have seen the Internet reservation trend from the beginning. In the early years, about 10% of our reservations came from the ether. We hit the 50-50 mark early in 2010. And now, nearly 75% of our long-term (tables booked more than 24 hours in advance) come in via the web. Like many restaurants, we accept requests on the web, but a person actually has to look at the request and make sure that we have room in the dining room at the requested hour. Then we contact the requester to either confirm the reservation or to negotiate a different time or date.

We ask the would-be customer whether we should confirm the reservation via phone or email and almost everyone selects email. So we send the email confirming the time and date of the reservation. And here is where it gets a little funny. Recently, we have had a bunch of people calling the restaurant to ask if we booked the request that they submitted over the web. When we say that we sent a confirmation email to them, the response has been, "Oh, I haven't looked at my email yet." Huh?

Finally, the dining room renovation, with the exception of a little painting and redecorating, is complete. Hallelujah! Come see!

Until next month, thanks for reading along!

Honey-Lime Greek Yogurt Panna Cotta with Blackberries

2011-08-13T11:17:00.006-04:00

I have a Chef's Tasting tonight and I developed this recipe for it. I was searching for something small, light, and refreshing enough to serve at the end of a 9-course menu, not an easy feat by any stretch. It takes full advantage of the ultra-delicious blackberries that are in full swing right now.

Panna cotta, which means cooked cream in Italian, seems lighter than most custard desserts such as crème caramel or flan because it is usually made from lower fat dairy products and because it contains no eggs. It is set with gelatin. Panna cotta is really a misnomer: the cream is never cooked; it is merely heated to facilitate melting the gelatin.

Honey-Lime Greek Yogurt Panna Cotta with Blackberries

12 sheets gelatin
2 cups milk
2/3 cup honey
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup sour cream
2 cups Greek yogurt
zest of two limes
16 4-ounce custard molds
blackberries, honey, and lime juice for garnish

I have to say that I love sheet gelatin and I despise powdered gelatin. Once you've seen how easy sheet gelatin is to work with, you'll never go back. I use Gelita Silver; it works every time. If you use powdered gelatin, you'll have to figure out the conversion. I think it is four sheets to the standard gelatin packet.

Cover the gelatin sheets in cold water and let them soften, about ten minutes will do. I never time it because by the time I have everything else assembled, the gelatin is ready to use.

Mix the honey and milk in a pan and warm it. It does not have to be super hot to melt the gelatin. Meanwhile, mix the cream, sour cream, yogurt, and lime zest in a bowl.

Squeeze the excess water out of the gelatin and stir into the warm milk. It should melt immediately. Let the milk cool for a few minutes.

Pour the milk-gelatin mixture into the yogurt mixture and stir well, but try to avoid introducing air bubbles to the mixture.

Spray the custard molds (I use disposable aluminum ones) with pan spray. Fill the molds and transfer to a refrigerator until set, about 4 hours should do.

To serve, run a knife around the edge of the mold and invert on a plate. If this doesn't do the trick, warm the panna cotta in a water bath for a few seconds and it should slide right out. Top with fresh blackberries mixed with honey and a squeeze of lime juice.

2011: August 1st

2011-08-01T23:03:00.020-04:00

And here we go with the August 1st update, the next in the series of twice-monthly posts about the restaurant during 2011.

The primary topic on my mind right now is the heat. Can you believe all these wickedly hot days in July? Each time the forecast is for near 100-degree weather, the result is the same for us: empty dining room. As far as traffic in the dining room goes, we might as well have a blizzard as 100+ temps; the result is identical. Honestly, I don't blame people for wanting to hole up in the air conditioning at home when it gets this nasty out.

While dining out, most people probably never think of the effect of temperature on the restaurant kitchen. Our exhaust fans move a lot of air out of the kitchen and to keep them from totally emptying all the conditioned air out of the dining room, there is another fan blowing outside air back into the kitchen to balance the air flow. This so-called make-up air is whatever temperature it is outside.

While it is wonderful in the winter to have 20-degree make-up air coming into the kitchen, 100-degree make-up air this time of year only means that the ambient temperature in the kitchen is around 110F-120F. This is the time of year when the whole crew sits outside on the deck under the umbrellas in the 100-degree weather to cool off, as perverse as that seems. It was profoundly absurd on Friday the 22nd that we were sitting outside on the deck looking at the thermometer that read 104F and thinking that it was so much cooler outside than in the kitchen.

Currently, I'm spending a lot of time working with and evaluating social media platforms and there are so many out there that it is driving me nuts. I cannot wait for shake-out in that market. It already takes me significant hours a week to stay on top of our web site, this blog, our Facebook page, our TripAdvisor account, our Yelp account, our Urbanspoon account, and our Twitter feed. Now Google wants to play in the market? Hmmm. I'll wait a while to see what happens there. I finally took the plunge and joined Foursquare and to my surprise, we already had a significant number of check-ins by customers. Just another thing to keep an eye on, even though the interface is very clunky and to my mind, not ready for prime time.

On the 21st, we held our July wine dinner (we hold a dinner each month generally on the third Thursday) and this month the theme was garlic, by popular request. We had a great time and I really did enjoy putting together this menu. I believe I made believers out of all those who were skeptical about using garlic in dessert.

Crostini with Goat Cheese, Roasted Garlic, and Chives
Crostini with Cream Cheese and Garlic-Chive Blossom Pesto

Sopa de Ajo with Grilled Garlic Focaccia

Arugula, Garlic & Ricotta “Spanakopita” with Garlic Tzatziki

Lumaconi (Snail Shell Pasta) stuffed with Ricotta, Garlic Butter, Parsley, and Escargots

Garlic-Rubbed Pork Belly with Garlic Fried Rice, Pea Shoots, Pickled Garlic & Pork Goodness Sauce

Éclair with Espresso Black Garlic Pastry Cream, Chocolate Black Garlic
Ganache, and Salt-Roasted Sunflower Seeds

As the summer progresses along, we're finally starting to see more good things at the market and in turn on our menu. On July 26th I felt like I hit the jackpot at the market, scoring the first red peppers, bird egg beans, and dragon tongue beans of the year. The bird eggs we cooked with poblanos, onions, and bacon and they made a nice base for lamb chops. The dragon tongues, which have a deep green bean flavor, ended up bias-cut and sautéed as a side dish for various fishes.

We should have squash blooms on the menu now and should have had them for weeks, yet we do not. There is a blight that causes dramatic wilting and sudden death in curcurbits (squashes, melons, and cucumbers) called Phytophthora blight. It has struck hard at Beth and Gene's to the point where they barely have any squash. Ricottta-stuffed squash blooms are a big part of our Sunday and Monday summer dinners at our house, but we are on our fourth planting of squash this summer with no hope in sight of blooms. Phytopthora has killed every one of our plants before they could reach six inches high. But some good news: Beth sent me an email this morning saying she had picked a paltry two dozen blooms for our menu tomorrow night.

It is a tradition here at the restaurant that we only serve fresh mozzarella when we have adequate supplies of really good tomatoes. To celebrate those amazing tomatoes, we make fresh mozzarella each day at 4pm as long as the tomatoes last. I see a lot of customers skipping right over the Insalata Caprese on the menu, likely because it appears on the menus of way too many restaurants who make it out of season and without regard for the quality of ingredients. With only mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil, and basil for ingredients, there is nowhere to hide. The ingredients must be impeccable and ours are. If you have never had mozzarella still warm from the water bath and oozing whey down your chin, you have missed out on a lot.

Speaking of memorable impeccable ingredients, those of you who frequent the restaurant know that wild mushrooms are a signature of ours; I cannot remember the last time we did not have wild mushrooms in some form on the menu. This spring, we ran morels a lot of different ways, but the one that we ultimately settled on for the duration was morels with strozzapreti pasta, pancetta, local English peas, and a splash of cream. This dish sold like crazy: some nights as much as 50% of the dishes going out were morels.

When morels ended, we rolled into chanterelles. Because of the great sales of the morel dish, I just replaced the morels with chanterelles in the same dish, except that I removed the cream and replaced it with a simple butter sauce. While cream brings out the awesome deep flavor of morels, it doesn't do anything for chanterelles, so why add it?

This new chanterelle dish bombed straight away. We were selling one or two a night, not enough to make it worth buying all those expensive chanterelles. It seems to me that while in this market, morels will move a dish, chanterelles are relatively unknown and don't help move a dish. So a few nights ago, I scrapped the pasta and reformulated the dish as sautéed chanterelles on porcini risotto and immediately it started flying again. I guess the dish needed the familiar risotto to help it sell. This is one of the benefits of changing my menu every day: I have the flexibility to reformulate dishes to help them sell or even delete them altogether or if a dish is selling really well, leave it on the menu as long as I want to.

And what's this strozzapreti I referred to earlier? It's a medium long fairly weighty pasta with an S-shaped cross section, fairly irregular in shape and size. As for the name which means "priest stranglers" in Italian, there are as many stories about its origin as there are people who make the pasta. I like it because it's a neat looking, substantial pasta with good bite. I have always been a big fan of the thicker cuts, leaving the long thin pastas and the fresh pastas to others. Plus I like to serve a cut that most Americans don't readily recognize (hence our standard lunch pasta is gemelli).

The 28th must have been interview day here at One Block West. I had three phone calls from a newspaper reporter, a food blogger, and a food magazine almost back to back. That took an unexpected hour and fifteen minutes out of my day. Still, it always pays to be nice to the media: free advertising is free advertising.

Finally, an update on the renovation. One of the two windows is through from the dining room to the bar and the final coat of drywall mud needs a light sanding before priming and painting: hopefully today or early tomorrow. Then it is on to the final window and the dining room should be complete.

Thanks for reading along and be sure to come back on the 15th to read about our upcoming Harvest Dinner on the 18th.

Chef's Table

2011-07-23T13:25:00.015-04:00

Here are some photos from a Chef's Table dinner back in early July. This menu is a celebration of the new produce that arrived this week: beets, new potatoes, napa cabbage, cavolo nero, cauliflower, pluots, and peaches.

Chłodnik. It's hot, it's beet season, and there are some dill pickles from last season to be used. Time for this lovely Polish take on cold beet soup.

Early Summer Vegetable Plate. It was still too early for peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes—that glorious summer trio—when we did this dinner. So we made do with summer squash and green tomatoes. Here you see a miniature squash cake, a fried green tomato, and pesto goat cheese truffle, all garnished with various little bits from the plants on our deck.

Arctic Char. This dish isn't so much about the char as what the char is sitting on: a smoked bluefish new potato salad. This was an exercise in using the first new potatoes of the year. The char is notable really only for the way that it is cooked: skin side down on the grill until it reaches medium rare. The heat stays on the fatty skin side and yields a very delicate product.

Pork Confit on Kimchee. This dish is all about using the first napa cabbage of the year. I did a quick overnight kimchee pickle on it so that it was still fairly crunchy. We topped it with shreds of our latest batch of pork confit.

Grilled Lamb Loin and Cavolo Nero Packet. How fortunate for us that we got the first delivery of the season of cauliflower and cavolo nero on the same day that we received a new lamb. Here then is a piece of top loin (the New York strip if you will) wrapped in cavolo nero and grilled along with a cauliflower purée, red wine-lamb stock reduction, and chanterelle mushrooms.

Peach, Pluot, and French Toast Napoleon. Peaches and pluots just hit the market the week of this tasting and so it was a no-brainer that they were going to feature in dessert. The napoleon is sitting in a pool of cherry soup, made from the very last of the cherries from this season.

Sweetbreads

2011-07-23T12:11:00.002-04:00

Sweetbreads, pancetta, asparagus, lemon, capers, fresh parsley.

Gravlax

2011-07-23T12:07:00.004-04:00

Gravlax, crispy salmon skin, lightly cured salmon, pickled garlic scapes, cucumber, caperberries, dill, finger lime caviar.

Pork Confit Summer Posole

2011-07-20T14:55:00.008-04:00

Here's a decidedly non-traditional posole that I just made for dinner to use up some leftover pork confit and some fresh corn. Tradition or no, it is delicious.

1 cup duck fat from pork confit
3 large poblano chiles, diced
2 large onions, diced
4 ears corn, shaved, cobs reserved
1/4 cup minced garlic
stems from one bunch cilantro, finely minced
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano
2 bay leaves
1/4 cup ancho chile paste
16 ounces pork confit
1 #10 can hominy
1-1/2 gallons pork stock

Heat the duck fat in a large soup pan (to hold 2-1/2 gallons soup) and add the chiles, onions, corn, corn cobs, garlic, cilantro, cumin, oregano, and bay leaves. Cook over high heat, stirring as necessary, until the onions become translucent. Add the chile paste and stir well. Add the pork confit, hominy, and pork stock. Bring to a simmer and simmer until the vegetables are tender, approximately 30 to 45 minutes. Season to taste. This recipe does not call for salt because pork confit is salty in its own right.

Remove the bay leaves and corn cobs from the soup and discard them. The corn cobs add both flavor and a touch of corn starch to the soup. The starch adds a hint of body.

I like to serve a garnish plate with my posole: fresh cilantro, lime wedges, finely diced white onion, dried oregano, and crushed red pepper flakes.

Pork Confit

This is the classic French curing and preserving technique traditionally used for goose and duck, extended to pork shoulder. The results are so worth the effort.

Two large pork shoulders, about 15 pounds, cut in 3" cubes.
2 cups kosher salt
1 tablespoon ground juniper berries
2 ounces fresh thyme branches
2-3 gallons duck fat, as necessary

In a large non-reactive pan, rub the pork cubes with the salt, juniper, and thyme. Cover and refrigerate for 48 hours. Remove, rinse off the salt and thyme, and drain well. Place in a large braising pan. Melt the duck fat and pour enough over the pork to cover. Place in a slow (200-250F) oven and cook until meltingly tender, 8-12 hours. Remove pork from duck fat and place on sheet trays and chill rapidly. Place the chilled pork in a large metal storage container and pour the reserved duck fat over to seal the pork entirely. Refrigerate.

While pork confit can be used immediately, it is better after it ages for a few weeks. To use, place the metal container on a broiler or in the oven to melt the fat. Remove the amount of confit necessary. Let the fat resolidify over the remaining confit. Add more duck fat if necessary to cover.

2011: July 15th

2011-07-16T00:43:00.012-04:00

It's after dinner service on Friday July 15th and I'm sitting down for a marathon session to jam out this next edition in my ongoing series about the restaurant. Usually I write down little snippets as we go through the two-week period about which I am writing, but not this time. Here goes all stream of consciousness.

Wine corkage fees seem to be the hot topic these days. The two-week period opened with an interview with one of the local newspapers about wine corkage and ended with an interview and photoshoot with the other one this morning. Virginia ABC had heretofore pronounced that it was illegal for customers to bring their own wine into restaurants possessing an ABC license. Personally, I think they were badly misinterpreting the Code of Virginia and that their stance would have never held up under court scrutiny. The Commonwealth has no desire to see its golden goose enmired in litigation that could ultimately slay the goose, though our current governor is all for privatizing ABC (the legislature is not). However, the legislature, finally seeing the light, has reversed that long-held policy effective the first of July and in addition has allowed restaurants to charge a fee to customers wishing to bring in their own wine.

Years ago, before ABC got militant about the corkage issue, we used to let guests bring special bottles to the restaurant. But then they issued us a cease and desist letter threatening revocation of our license and we stopped. Now we can start again, but letting customers bring wine into a restaurant is a double-edged sword for restaurateurs. On the one hand, we want to be accommodating and obliging hosts, but on the other, wine sales greatly subsidize food sales. That is, if everyone brought his own wine to a restaurant, we would have to raise our food prices greatly to bring in the same revenue. And it's not that we are getting rich as an industry; most of us are scraping by on the thinnest of margins.

While I'm not wildly crazy about people bringing in wines, I do have a sincere wish to let people bring in wines that are special to them. If you bought a wine on your honeymoon and now you want to open it for your 10th anniversary, why not? If you have three old vintages of Château Palmer for which you want me to create a tasting menu, why not? If you bought a bottle of cheap Pinot Grigio on closeout and you want to bring it just so that you don't have to pay my price for Pinot Grigio, I have a problem with that.

We will charge a fee to open a customer bottle not only to help defray the lost revenue, but equally as importantly to help with the costs of our stemware. Our crystal stemware is very expensive and a glass lasts about 3-4 weeks in service before it chips or breaks and must be replaced. On top of that we have electrical, water, sewer, and dish chemical costs of washing the glassware and the manual labor of polishing it. Our fee will be determined on a case by case basis, but we do not want to be punitive for customers that really do want to bring a special bottle.

The basic etiquette for bringing a bottle of wine into a restaurant is:

Call ahead to find out what is permitted and what the costs are.

Only request to bring a bottle that is meaningful to you and not something that is close or remotely close to what the restaurant sells.

If possible, restaurants always appreciate if you purchase some wine from them in addition to the wine you bring.

Make sure that you tip your server for wine service.

Where has all the good lunch gone? Customers abandoned us for lunch in the last two weeks and I assume it is the same everywhere. This business slows dramatically anyway after the July 4th holiday and stays down until well after everyone has gotten their post-Labor Day vacations out of their systems. But still, lunch has been unusually slow even for July. Go figure. This business is always a roller coaster.

Surprise! Thursday was our day to get our rectal exam from the health inspector. In the past, this event has been more painful than in recent years: I like our current inspector a lot. She is pleasant, professional, and really seems to see the big picture. Despite this, the inspection still causes a great deal of high blood pressure. When it is all said and done though, it is good to receive affirmation that we are still being good stewards of the public health.

July always signals the beginning of our pickling season. As fruits become ripe, we pickle them for use later in the year. The first pickles this year were spicy green beans. Soon to come will be cucumbers and peaches and I am going to score some okra tomorrow at the market. I'm waiting for cucumbers to start bearing a little more heavily so that we can get a bushel or two at a better price.

The market has finally turned the corner to summer fruits and vegetables in the past couple of weeks. In addition to beans, we have lots of peaches, corn, blackberries, apples, beets, eggplants, broccoli, and cauliflower along with a few green peppers, but no red ones yet. Raspberries are gone until the fall, but plums and pluots are doing fine. No apricots this year; the trees didn't crop.

And finally yesterday, a long-awaited event happened: in the front door came a cooler full of fresh, local rabbits. I have been working on a source for local rabbits for years and finally, the first dozen arrived yesterday and they are beautiful, so much nicer than the ones I had been sourcing. The first six of these rabbits went on the dinner menu tonight (and did not sell). Rabbit is hit or miss. At times it flies off the menu faster than we can keep up with and at other times, it's a dog. Hopefully it will start moving on Saturday night.

Speaking of local meats, we get our lamb locally, a whole lamb roughly every two weeks. One came in Thursday and it's clear we're having issues with the slaughterhouse again. I give them a cut sheet telling them exactly how I want the carcass broken down and it was clear on first inspection that this last lamb wasn't even close. Unless it is for a special occasion, I ask for the saddles (the loin) to be sawn into loin chops (little T-bones). I got a whole saddle. I generally ask for the shoulders to be cut into kebabs and the rest of the forequarters (neck, shanks, breast) to be ground for our terrines and meatballs. I got whole forequarters; there was no offal to be found, and so forth.

This reminds me of the lamb that we received at the beginning of July from a different slaughterhouse and it must have been a crazy looking creature. It had four hind legs, but only two front legs. No heart or liver, but four testicles and 12 tongues. A six-legged, four-balled wonder with 12 tongues and no heart! There's a joke in there somewhere.

As for the ongoing saga of the dining room renovation, things are starting to move along again after a few weeks of progress at a snail's pace. I finally brought to the restaurant all the tools and parts necessary to relocate the electrical circuits that ran where I wanted to put the pass through windows between the dining room and the bar. The first window is nearing completion with the second one partially done. Hopefully they will both be done by the first of August.

I finally got a new camera (and am still taking largely useless photos with it as I learn the ins and outs of modern digital cameras) so you can see some of the dining room progress. In the photo above, you can see the new color scheme: cream on the walls, chocolate on the ceiling and booth backs, and caramel trim. If you're familiar with the restaurant, you'll notice how much lighter it is, how much less heavy it is with the clunky booths gone, and how many more plants there are. In the photo to the right, you can see the new divider screen between the dining room and the front server station.

My day today (now yesterday I realize as I look at the clock) opened at 7:15 am at my desk doing taxes (it is/was the 15th after all). Then, remember the lamb that came in essentially whole? After taxes, I spent three hours in the kitchen this morning breaking down the entire lamb, six rabbits, a beef tenderloin, 10 pounds of sockeye salmon, and 10 pounds of grey tile fish. That was a workout. On top of this, we did a 9-course tasting menu this evening (photos to be published soon) that had me and the guys scrambling all through lunch and this afternoon to bring off. Needless to say, I'm beat now, but that's nothing unusual for a Friday night in the restaurant business.

We just need to get through dinner tomorrow and then we can focus our full attention on the garlic dinner that is coming up next Thursday. That will be a tale for the next edition. I thank you for reading along and I hope to see you in the restaurant soon.

Another Tasting

2011-07-09T15:45:00.002-04:00

I found some photos today while housekeeping. These are from a tasting back in March, the last tasting I was able to photograph before my old Nikon died. For us, this tasting was a chance to play with technique and answer some of those nagging "How do we do this?" kinds of questions. There are a couple of things here worth remembering.

Four Citrus Scallop Seviche. This is a very straightforward scallop napoleon meets seviche dish. In this case, we pickled only the vegetables and then layered them with the seared scallop. The four citrus zests—yuzu, lemon, lime, and orange—combine with the cumin, garlic, cilantro, and ancho paste to yield a complex seviche.

Steelhead Trout. This is a play on an appetizer that we serve at the restaurant from time to time: crispy salmon nuggets in green Thai curry. We have scattered on the plate a green Thai curry sauce, Thai basil leaves, crispy steelhead nuggets, a steelhead skin crisp, gravlax of steelhead, and an excellent salmon roe caviar. I was not happy with this presentation—too sparse—but then we run that risk when we plate novel dishes all the time.

Crab Mango Cocktail. This is the offspring of a mango soup shooter with crab fritter amuse that I wanted to do crossed with the mango cocktail that Travis wanted to do. It ended up as an intermezzo. The mango cocktail comprises mango, coconut milk, lime juice, dark rum, and red Thai curry paste.

Brussels Sprouts with Crispy Duck Confit Threads. This dish was an effort to bring a salad to the menu and was more so an exercise to see what we could do with temperature contrast in the salad dressing. You see blanched brussels sprouts petals and threads of duck confit that we have deep fried to crispy goodness, all tossed in warm duck fat, then surrounded by a granita of watermelon vinegar, locally produced vinegar made from watermelon juice.

Refried Beans. I was looking for a foil for wild mushrooms and I think I found it in refried Sea Island Red Peas. We cooked the red peas with bacon and mirepoix, then puréed them and refried them in duck fat. Garnishes are chives, black trumpet mushrooms, pimentón sauce; and puffed wild rice.

Waldorf Salad. We were looking for a cool, refreshing intermezzo course and came up with this summer roll meets classic Waldorf salad. A thin sheet of cucumber is rolled around a salad of apple and celery julienne, crushed walnuts, and a walnut oil vinaigrette. Garnished with more vinaigrette and candied walnuts.

Lamb and Peppers. This was an exercise in using up lamb. We get frequent deliveries of lambs and are constantly finding ways to use the off cuts: the spareribs, necks, foreshanks, etc. One great way is to braise (red cook) them in Chinese fashion in soy, rice wine, brown sugar, green onions, star anise, cinnamon, garlic, and ginger for hours until the meat is tender. Then we pull the meat and reduce the defatted sauce, mixing them along with sesame seeds and green onions. This is a wonderful accompaniment to a fruity red such as our local Chambourcin or a Paso Robles Syrah.

"Smoked" Duck Noodle Soup. My favorite dish at Thai Winchester is the Roasted Duck Noodle Soup, a pan-Asian pho-like soup. This is my upscale homage to that dish. In the bottom of a soup plate, I put a smear of leek ash paste. Then you see a tradtional pho broth redolent of star anise, cinammon, ginger, and lemongrass in the bottom of the bowl. The broth is highly reduced to concentrate the flavors and then clarified. We rubbed a duck breast with leek ash to simulate its having been smoked, cooked it medium rare and put it over the broth. Then the traditional table salad follows: Thai basil, cilantro, green onions. And finally, we deep fried the rice noodles and placed them over for garnish. We were playing around with leek ash here and it was an OK result, but we would have been better off simply to cold smoke the duck breasts. Live and learn, but still a great dish.

Apple. We decided to play with apples in all their forms and see what ended up on the plate. There is a highly reduced apple cider syrup, apple sauce granita, dried apple, and a ring of apple in the center of which we baked a tiny crème brûlée. Garnishes are a white chocolate-cinnamon-pink salt bark and an appletini—mainly apple cider, Calvados, and bitters, rimmed with cinnamon sugar. I've got to say that baking those crème brûlées was tricky, tricky, tricky.

2011: July 1st

2011-07-01T10:54:00.000-04:00

This is the July 1st edition of my twice-monthly series on what is happening here at One Block West and the next edition in the year-long saga of my restaurant. The prior (June 15th) post is here and you can find the entire series here.

June has proven to be a pretty good month for us, one of the best ever, in terms of sales. This is in stark contrast to April and May, which were some of the worst months ever. This seems to be the new normal: higher highs and lower lows—the roller coaster is not flattening out to the predictability of the mid- and late-2000s. To say the least, it is a challenge a minute in this kind of business environment to staff correctly and produce enough food, without incurring unnecessary labor costs and without wasting food.

I use the terms April, May, and June somewhat loosely. We, like many restaurants, don't do monthly accounting. We have 13 4-week "months" in our year. Because as much as 60% of our weekly revenue occurs on the weekend, it is vital for us to have the same number of weekends in each month, for month-to-month comparisons to be valid. Imagine comparing a June with four weekends to one with five weekends: the revenue run rate could actually be identical but the June with five weekends would appear to be 20% higher than one with four weekends. So when I'm talking about a fantastic June above, I'm really talking about month 6 that ended June 18th. We're already two weeks into our July (month 7) as I write this. A little restaurant trivia for those of you who care.

I just learned yesterday that my produce company is imposing a minimum order amount and this is not very good news for me, which I suspect is why my sales rep was in the restaurant yesterday giving me the bad news in person. Good on him for that. Most people would have hidden behind the anonymity of a telephone call or an email. I appreciate that he took the time to deliver the news in person. He, like all good sales guys, recognizes that my relationship is not with the produce company but with him. He always stands by me and this makes the third company that I have followed him to. Were he to switch horses now as a result of this minimum being imposed by his management, I'd switch too.

By now, I guess most readers know that I get the bulk of my ingredients locally especially in our growing season and I only use the produce company to fill in things when necessary. Who grows lemons in our climate? Nobody and with good reason and yet lemons are vital to a restaurant of our caliber, so we depend on the produce company for them and like ingredients. I can't do without a produce company as much as I'd like to.

Naturally, in the winter, meeting this new minimum order amount will not pose too much of a challenge. But now in the summer, when everything comes locally, I know that it is going to be a royal pain in the ass to meet the minimum. But that said, most companies that deliver have minimums to cover the trucks, drivers, fuel, and insurance, and the produce company has to run their business as they see fit and I will either adapt to it, move to another vendor, or the minimum will backfire. It may cause such grief in their customer base and in their sales force, that the minimum magically and quietly goes away. And, I guarantee nobody was saying a word about a minimum during the worst of the winters of 2009 and 2010; sales reps were begging for orders of any size. Time will tell.

And now a word about a few menu items. Every chef puts dishes on the menu with some expectation about how they are going to sell. There are some dishes that are near and dear to the chef's heart that he puts on just to make a statement about who he is, but in his heart he knows that the dish isn't going to sell. And when customers latch onto that dish and it starts really moving, he's perplexed. And he's equally perplexed when he puts a dish on that he knows is going to move only to find that that dish is DOA for some unfathomable reason.

So many things go into making a dish sell (or not): trendiness of ingredients, perceived comfort level of the dish, familiarity of ingredients, pricing both absolute and relative to the rest of the menu, where the dish is placed on the menu, ease of pronunciation of the dish, and how the dish is described, just to name a few that pop instantly into my mind.

Dishes that sell against all my expectations include our Baby Beet Salad with Candied Walnuts and Goat Cheese and our now infamous Squash Cakes (more on them below). I never expected these dishes to sell well, but they do. Seriously, who eats beets and squash except under duress and more importantly, who pays to eat them? I'm not knocking these dishes by the way; they are terrific. I just never anticipated customers would give them a try. Tuesday night, the first night of the squash cakes on the menu for the summer, they outsold all other dishes.

But this past week, I've had two outright flops. We did a take-off of Vichyssoise (chilled cream of leek and potato soup) flavored with slab bacon and called it Chilled Cream of Leek, Potato and Bacon Soup. It was incredibly delicious, but we couldn't give it away. I'm not sure what the problem was but I think it had to do with the bacon or with the temperature of the soup. We sell plenty of warm leek and potato soup, so go figure.

And then the big crash and burn of the week: Buffalo and Bacon Sliders. It's warm, it's summer, and we're headed into the 4th of July holiday weekend. What better time to have a little fun with some upscale burgers? I made some delicious burgers by grinding bison shoulder and bacon with some other seasonings and shaped them into 2.5-ounce sliders and put them on challah slider buns to make them easy to handle. They were slap-your-mother good! (As the crew can tell you). Despite being the lowest priced main course, they didn't move. So much for bacon making everything better!

If I had to hazard a guess about the sliders, I would say that their failure to sell is a perception problem. We are an upper end fine dining restaurant and we have always had problems selling sandwiches (at one time we had the most killer Cuban sandwich on our lunch menu), burgers, pies, ribs, and other cuisine that people deem lowbrow, no matter how good. But then how do you explain that we sold the living hell out of choucroute garni this past winter? If that big sloppy mess of sauerkraut, Riesling, smoked pork, sausages, and pork belly isn't lowbrow peasant food, I don't know what is. I guess it seems more exotic than bison burgers.

With the uptick in business in early June and prepping for our annual Linden wine dinner on the 23rd, not too much got done on renovating the restaurant. The ceiling is now completely painted a deep chocolate color and looks great. Once I finish cutting the windows from the dining room to the bar and a minor bit of painting, the dining room will be complete. Unfortunately, finishing up the windows involves rerouting four electrical circuits. Fun stuff.

Speaking of the Linden dinner, we've done one every June with Jim Law ever since I can remember. This always popular dinner sold out before we could even formally announce it and long before we even started thinking about a menu. On the 12th after my demo at the Virginia Herb Festival, Ann, Tony and I went down to Linden to taste with Jim. We tasted through maybe a dozen wines to pick the five for the dinner: Rosé '09, Seyval Blanc '09, Chardonnay "Hardscrabble" '06, Petit Verdot '06, and Petit Manseng Late Harvest '07.

These are all good food wines. We went with the '09s because they are a lot more restrained and have much more acid than the '10s from the hottest summer on record. 2006 was a more restrained year and the Chard and PV have great acid, something I always look for in choosing wines for food. That acid is necessary to scour away the palate-dulling fat in foods. And the Petit Manseng, what can I say about that? This is the first time I have tasted since a barrel sample some years ago. Wow! Jim is a huge fan of Jurançon wines and it shows. His bottling is the equal of any I have ever tasted.

I was truly happy to showcase both Petit Verdot and Petit Manseng. I truly believe that those are Virginia's best grapes, red and white respectively. The conventional wisdom is that Cabernet Franc and Viognier hold those slots; I disagree.

For this year's dinner, we decided to change things up and give everyone a glass of rosé as they walked into the restaurant and start passing hors d'oeuvres about fifteen minutes before the dinner started. The plan was to open the doors at 6:30, pass hors d'oeuvres at 6:45, and then I would introduce Jim at 7:00 and disappear to the kitchen to produce the first seated course. That didn't work so well. We had several guests arrive before 6pm and the vast majority of guests were already in the house by 6:30. We hadn't even pulled the corks on the rosé by then! Oh well, flexibility is the name of our game. It all worked out great anyway, even if it didn't go as planned at the outset.

We really worked hard on the Linden menu to make it go smoothly based on lessons learned at May's Glen Manor dinner. You would think by now that I would not devise a menu that would tax us and our kitchen's physical capabilities (you can only cook what you have the equipment to cook), but I did for the Glen Manor dinner. We pulled it off, but it was a stressful night on the kitchen, something I am generally very good at avoiding. So I redoubled my efforts for the Linden dinner and everything went extraordinarily smoothly in the kitchen that evening. Note to self.

And now that the Linden dinner is done, we have leaped full bore into our next wine dinner: our quasi-infamous garlic dinner. For many years, we did a garlic dinner each summer as we are doing this year. But when the economy tanked, the garlic dinner died from want of customer enthusiasm. It's back now and we already have a good book for a dinner that was just announced yesterday after I settled on a menu the night before.

The menu for the garlic dinner is always wide open. So many dishes from so many cuisines contain garlic that there are few limits to what we might serve. And this is a food-focused dinner—that is, we're not pairing food to wine, rather we're pairing wine to a menu—so no limits there either. In the end, we threw a lot of ideas at a sheet of paper and saw what stuck. The crew is excited to be using black garlic in the dessert course, something I have wanted to do ever since tasting the rich brown sugar-molasses profile of black garlic some years ago.

These last two weeks have brought changes at the market and with our growers too. Both black raspberries and blueberries along with very early peaches are finding their way onto our dessert menu. The first of the new crop of apples, both Lodis and Transparents, are here, not that they are much good for anything, but they are fresh and local. With the summer heat, local lettuce and mesclun is way past its prime and is done. But broccoli, Tuscan black kale, cauliflower, cabbages, and Swiss chard are coming on strong.

Also, summer squash and cucumbers are coming full throttle. I'm particularly excited by the summer squash because that means that our insanely good squash cakes are back on the menu as a vegetarian main course. They are one of the best things I have ever cooked and their fans are legion. We grate green and yellow squash and cook it for three hours in heavy cream with garlic and basil, then bind the mix with pecorino romano and bread crumbs, chill it, and form it into cakes which are then pan-fried—a lot of effort, but so worth it.

Cucumbers are coming on strong and we should be able to start putting up pickles next week or so, which is a good thing because we have used all but a gallon or so of the ones we put up last year. Tomatoes are in the market now, but they're coming out of the greenhouse. No thanks. They don't develop flavor unless they are subjected to the stresses of outdoor life and those tomatoes are still some weeks away. I'll wait.

And that's a wrap on this post. Stay tuned for the July 15th edition when I'm sure I'll have more details about the upcoming Garlic Dinner. Thanks for your time.

2011: June 15th

2011-06-15T23:26:00.009-04:00

Hi everyone and welcome to the next post in my twice monthly series about doings at One Block West. The previous edition is here. For those of you wondering why the blog is so text heavy recently, when previously it has been chock full of pictures, the explanation is simple. While on vacation the first of May, my 15-year old Nikon digital took a direct hit of salt spray and that was all she wrote. Money to replace the camera is non-existent, so no pictures.

The first two weeks of June were moderately busy as usual. Historically, the last couple weeks of May and the first weeks of June are pretty good ones for us. Then, June just muddles along with all the high school graduations and comings and goings to the beach keeping traffic down. A big flurry of wedding anniversaries keeps it from being all out slow as is August, but as we head into the fourth of July weekend, business usually enters the summer doldrums phase.

Being now a week away from the start of summer, we can really start to see the shift in the markets. While summer produce such as squash and peppers is still a ways away (and tomatoes are just a dream), moving off the menu now are spring stalwarts strawberries, asparagus, soft shell crabs, and leeks.

I hate to see leeks go, but next winter and spring's leeks are in the ground now and the leeks planted this time last year are harvested. Leeks are a staple in our cooler for mirepoix, the mix of chopped vegetables (onions, carrots, celery, and leeks) that goes into many, many dishes. I am always surprised that more home cooks don't use leeks; I'm not sure what a professional restaurant kitchen would do without them or shallots, which also seem to be non-existent in home kitchens. We're going to have to switch to California leeks for the summer until we get a few locally harvested baby leeks in the fall.

Our big rush of soft shells is done now but we will have a few periodically throughout the summer and into early fall. The first flush happens when the water warms enough for the crabs to come up out of the mud and get on with life. The females start shedding almost immediately so that they can mate: a sook (female) cannot couple with a jimmy (male) when she has a hard shell. After this first big rush of soft shells, the crabs will shed several more times during the summer, giving a few every now and then for the menu, as long as the water stays warm. We can have a few soft shells into October in warm years.

At long last, the sweet cherries are here! We got our first bag of cherries on June the 11th this year. I bought just enough for the crew to snack on and snack on them we did. I love the sweet-tart sugar-acid balance of fresh sweet cherries and there's nothing better to do with them than eat them out of hand. They're a miserable pain to pit, cooking them doesn't improve them, and as I was complaining in the June 1st post, customers won't order them anyway. So, as excited as I am to have cherries in the market, I won't be wasting labor and money on buying them for our menu. That is truly a sad statement if you think about it.

Along with sweet cherries, there are also red raspberries in the market now and by the end of the week, black raspberries and blueberries will join them. Cucumbers and English peas have hit the market, along with a trickle of sugar snaps and snow peas. We're looking forward to peaches in the very near future; certainly before I write again. Beets have moved from a trickle to broad availability in the last two weeks and one of our growers has finally started bringing us cavolo nero (Tuscan black kale) again. Things are looking up!

Renovation of the restaurant has slowed to a crawl, because business has picked up a bit with the nice weather and because I am just coming off a wicked two-day bout with the flu. Sadly, there are no sick days for small business owners; I really could have used a day off. Even with these slowdowns, the ceiling is within about three hours of being painted, which means after all these weeks, it is just about done. And done with painting a drop ceiling is a good thing. There may be nothing worse to paint.

After a couple months of stability on our wine list, we've added a few new wines to the list in the past couple of weeks (and dropped a couple). We are very selective about what we add these days, not really because of the economy (well, yeah, that 500-lb gorilla is always lurking about) but because our list is fairly mature (that is, where we want it to be) and storage is an issue for us.

When we add a wine, it needs to be a good value for what it is, it needs to be well made, and it needs to play well with my food. Some customers complain that California is under-represented on our list. It is and intentionally so. In general, California wines are not good values (real estate is too expensive in many areas) and the grapes get too ripe making wines that fight my food rather than harmonize with it. And we live in Virginia and source our ingredients from Virginia, so our wine list give preference to the best of Virginia.

We've just added an Alexander Valley Cabernet, a Healdsburg Zinfandel, and a couple of Willamette Pinots. If you know your wine regions, you will recognize that these are all cooler climate wines. Cooler climate wines tend to have less alcohol, more restrained fruit, and higher acidity, all of which tend to make for better food wines.

On Sunday the 12th, Tony and I did a 90-minute demonstration at the Virginia Herb Festival at Sunflower Cottage near Front Royal where we cooked Soft Shell Crabs with Cucumber-Yogurt-Dill Salad, Chicken with Prosciutto and Sage, Summer Rolls with Nuoc Cham, Sockeye Salmon with Herb Mayonnaise and Asparagus, and Strawberries with Riesling and Lemon Balm. Hopefully the attendees took away some ideas about how they can incorporate culinary herbs in simple dishes that they can cook. In spite of a tent covering us and in spite of the fact that we work in a blazing hot kitchen all day, it was just miserably hot. When I got home, I weighed four pounds less than when I left. That's a half a gallon of water!

As soon as we were done there, we headed down to Linden Vineyards just east in Linden, VA to meet with Jim Law to select wines for our upcoming wine dinner with him on the 23rd. We chose some really nice wines, a couple of which are not generally available to the public, to feature at the dinner which has been sold out for weeks. These were not the best circumstances under which to taste—I had just been broiled for 90 minutes, hadn't eaten a thing all day, and was daydreaming about a shower! Still, I think we should be able to carry the dinner off pretty well. Jim's wines are so good that we want them to star, so we work hard to make the food play the second fiddle supporting role, to push it into the background. It's slightly different than our usual food-first modus operandi.

Thanks for reading along. I'll return to writing after I take a week-long hiatus to plan and execute the menu for the Linden wine dinner on the 23rd. You'll hear all about that in my July 1st posting. Until then, good eating!

2011: June 1st

2011-06-01T10:32:00.001-04:00

Are you kidding me? It's the first of June already and time for another blog post about the restaurant?!? This post continues the twice-monthly series documenting One Block West Restaurant in 2011. The May 15th post is here.

Rain, rain, rain! It's hard to imagine now that it has been blisteringly hot for a few days that we had so much rain in May that I thought we were all going to turn into ducks. The rain and high gas prices the third week of May had business at a standstill. Once the rain let up and gas came down the week before Memorial Day, we got clobbered with four huge nights out of five. This is the roller coaster nature of the restaurant business, requiring a lot of flexibility on our part to adjust to no business one week and silly amounts of business the next. After nine years at this location, I'm used to it.

In the past two weeks, it has been easy to note the change in seasons: morels which were abundant in early May are suddenly very expensive at the tail end of their local season; soft shell crabs have made their way onto our menu for the first time, now that they have dropped to an affordable level; strawberries and English peas are in the house; and the first King Mackerel of the season has arrived, now that they are migrating.

I bought a gorgeous King Mackerel when they first hit the market because I love mackerel and because I wanted to have some myself. To sell the remainder of the fish after I had my little snack would be a bonus. When it came in, I started showing the guys how to break down a whole mackerel. As soon as I opened the belly, I saw two foot-long roe sacks: what an extraordinary chef bonus! In our kitchen, fish roe never hits the menu: it gets consumed in the kitchen.

Our chef snack that afternoon consisted of roe that we roasted with pancetta, lemon and capers; the head with its luscious cheek meat that we poached in fish fumet; and the fatty belly flaps that I lightly grilled. Outstanding! You cannot pay money for a meal like that. At least for an afternoon, we were kings of the culinary world.

As predicted, we couldn't give this outstanding buttery fish away no matter how hard the servers pushed it. Americans as a rule are highly wary of any oily fish. We finally got a very late table of Spaniards who jumped all over it and bought the majority of this culinary delight.

These folks made a reservation right at our closing time and then showed up forty minutes late, after calling us frequently and telling us they would arrive in five minutes. The dining room was empty for a half an hour before they arrived and we were all ready to go home. Naturally, they sat and talked for 20 minutes before they ordered, took their time passing bowls of mussels around the table, and genuinely enjoyed themselves. After dinner, they sat for forty minutes after their check was on the table. I know that they are accustomed to late dinners in Spain, but this was pushing the limits of our hospitality. If you're ever in a restaurant late night and you look around and see that you are the only table, it's time to go. The restaurant crew will smile and assure you that it's fine to sit there, but know that it is time to go.

Strawberries started about the 20th of the month and came into full swing the last week of May. It has always been a struggle to sell this most glorious of fruits (as well as any fruits). When we ask customers if they want fruit dessert options on the menu, we get a resounding affirmative response. However, and this is a big HOWEVER, they don't order fruit desserts as a rule. They get waylaid by the high sugar and high fat concoctions (can you say "flourless chocolate torte?") on the dessert menu or they perceive fruit desserts as too lowbrow or something that they can do at home (never mind that most will not).

In fact, in berry and fruit season, we take a regular pummeling from amateur restaurant reviewers for doing simple fruit desserts that they "could have done at home for a lot cheaper." In spite of this, I'm still holding true to my conviction to present the best of what is at the market and to not screw it up by doing too much with it. So, if that means the best thing on my dessert card is a bowl of super-ripe, never refrigerated strawberries with splash of cream, so be it! I'll take the lumps for not being creative enough.

Given the predilection of customers to order anything but fruit desserts, I am very pleased that strawberries are selling better this year than ever before. We are selling them in old school shortcakes, where the shortcake is a sweetened biscuit dough, just like my grandmother used to make. In years past, I have used a wonderful polenta cake that I devised, but customers would routinely take me to task, "It's wonderful, but it's not a strawberry shortcake." So this year, it's old fashioned shortcake and it is selling quite briskly compared to prior years.

Last week, we were visited by the French class at the local middle school, the school that my youngest daughter attends, though she isn't in the French class. Working in the restaurant business, I insisted that she learn Spanish, Spanglish being the lingua franca of the restaurant kitchen. Though I speak pretty fluent French, which really helps me with classical dishes, wines, and technical culinary terms, I am hard pressed at times to communicate with all the Latinos on whom I depend every day.

Back to the French class, which came for a three-course lunch of classic bistro food such as terrine maison, coq au vin, lentils and sausages, and crème brûlée. Because of a snafu with the public school system's mail server, I did not find out that they wanted to come on the day of our Glen Manor wine dinner until a couple of days beforehand. At this point, the class had got permission to miss school that day and made all their preparations and I couldn't say no, as much as I wanted to.

So they arrived on a day when we were ultra-busy prepping for our wine dinner, on a day when we had an office party for lunch and a big retirement party, and naturally, it was the day that everybody in town decided that One Block West was the destination for lunch. Thank you everybody! The revenue boost was incredible, but do you think you could have picked a worse time for us? I'm joking naturally. ;)

We had a full crew on early that day because we knew we were going to be busy, but it wasn't enough to handle the at-capacity dining room the way that we are accustomed to. The servers were flying about as fast as humanly possible, trying to balance the needs of all the tables and it did not help to have 25 schoolchildren in the house wanting refill after refill after refill of their sodas.

Coming out of this lunch, the servers had about ten minutes to sit and eat lunch themselves before having to reset the dining room for our wine dinner. And for us in the kitchen, we were behind schedule by a good two hours after having been unexpectedly slammed for lunch. Bottom line, we were all good and exhausted going into our big wine dinner, not a great situation. There was a lot of coffee, Red Bull, and Rock Star being gulped down. We were all a big quivering hypercaffeinated mess come the start of the wine dinner.

And this was on top of a busy week. Tuesday night, quite inexplicably, we did more business—almost all walk-ins—than we did the previous Friday and Saturday combined. The bulk of the crew was already on overtime by Thursday at the start of the wine dinner. I think we carried the wine dinner off with aplomb though and I am very proud of the crew for sucking it up and getting the job done. Topping off the week, Friday and Saturday were huge nights and we were constantly prepping just to stay afloat.

On top of all this, I had a Memorial Day cookout for 20 people at my house on Sunday for which I had to prep on Saturday. By Saturday afternoon, I was so exhausted that I was doing stupid stuff like cutting myself with a knife for the first time in years. At home late Saturday night after closing, I sat down with Ann and had a glass of wine. By the time I was done, I was talking gibberish like I had been drinking for days.

On Memorial Day after a late night Sunday night at our cookout, I got to the restaurant at 5:30 in the morning and worked until 10:30, compressing my usual 8- or 9-hour Monday into five hours, the thought being that I could relax and take Memorial Day easy at the house, maybe get a few chores done. No luck. I slept most of Memorial Day away and am still exhausted today as I write this. It is clear to me that I am no longer 20 years old, or even 30, or even 40. I took a physical beating last week the likes of which I have not felt in years. Even the 20-something line cooks were exhausted. They are not kidding when they say that the restaurant business is a young man's game.

Because we have been so busy recently, between-shift renovations have slowed way down. I finally made up my mind about the size and location of the windows that I wanted to cut in from the dining room into the bar and I actually got one of the two openings cut into the drywall. Naturally, there are five electrical circuits in this opening that I have to reroute. This will have to wait until I have time to get to the hardware store for electrical supplies.

And now for a quick warning to other business owners. After a quiet last few months, the IP relay scammers are back at it. We have gotten several calls this week purportedly from deaf people wanting to purchase weird things such as "200 chicken dinners" despite the fact that we have no such thing on our menu.

The IP relay system, set up pursuant to ADA to give deaf people equal access to telephony, lets a deaf person at a computer converse with a hearing person at a telephone. The "caller" at the computer types in what he wants to say and an operator reads that message to the recipient via telephone. The operator, without interfering in any way, types the verbal responses from the recipient back to the originating caller. It goes back and forth like this until the call is complete.

There are a few things here for a scammer to love. First, the service is essentially anonymous: the IP address of the scammer is known, but those are easy enough to spoof and once the IP address heads overseas, there's no practical way to find and prosecute the scammer. Second, it's F-R-E-E. The FCC pays the relay company (MCI, Sprint, AT&T) to provide this service that is required by law (so there's no incentive on the carriers' part to stop a lucrative service). Yep, international calls to the US from Nigeria are free and we taxpayers foot the bill. Third, the relay through an operator can help disguise that most of the scammers don't speak English worth a damn. And finally, the criminals use our willingness to help the disabled against us.

The scam as it pertains to a restaurant (I have two friends who have fallen prey to this, alas) goes thus. The caller asks for some absurd number of items (200 chicken dinners, 1000 sandwiches, 300 chicken Caesar salads) and is not at all concerned with the price. The caller either provides a stolen credit card number or mails a forged money order.

The scammer can get money out of this in several ways. One is to have the restaurant charge the stolen credit card in advance and then at the last minute, cancel the order requesting a refund not to the stolen card but to a valid card that the scammer owns or a refund by money order. Once the banks find out that the original card was stolen, the restaurant is out the money for both the fraudulent charge and the amount refunded to the criminal.

Another variation is that the scammer will send a bad money order for a large amount more than the charge for the food or will ask the restaurant to add a lot more money to the food charged to the credit card. This extra amount of money is a fee payable to the person that is to pick up and deliver the food. The scammer asks the unwitting restaurant to forward the fee by check or money order to the delivery person, an agent of the scammer. In this way, once the banks wise up, the restaurant is out the amount of the charge or money order and the delivery fee. And if the restaurant has gone to the effort to prep and package the food, all these costs are lost when nobody shows up to claim the food.

I have instructed my staff to either transfer such calls to me or if I am busy to simply say that we cannot fill such an order. If I have time, I will play along until I get the credit card number so that I can report it stolen. If I have a lot of time, I will tell the scammer that the credit card did not authorize and I will keep going in this manner until I get as many credit card numbers as the scammer is willing to divulge.

And while I feel bad for people who have been scammed like this, I feel really, really bad for the relay operators who have to endure this and be on the line while an obvious scam is happening, especially when they have little to no recourse and work for companies that don't care, that just want to get paid.

Finally, we celebrated two 50th wedding anniversaries with two great couples in the last two weeks. They and their families were a lot of fun and we are very gratified that they chose to celebrate with us! Congratulations to them on this amazing accomplishment!

So, it's been a busy latter half of May by and large and I hope that business continues to boom post-Memorial Day. Thanks for reading along and I will be back at the keyboard again on June 15th.

Wine and Vinegar

2011-05-18T10:01:00.003-04:00

I was surfing the web in a spare moment this morning and stumbled upon this old myth (from a very respectable source, alas):

Try to avoid having vinegar in your salad dressing since vinegar destroys the flavor of wine.

In response, I'm just going to ask a few questions:

1. Ever been to France?
2. Do the French eat a salad often at dinner?
3. What do they dress their salads with?
4. What do they drink with their salads?

Don't pay any heed to this old nonsense. Just keep on drinking wine with your dinner.

2011: May 15th

2011-05-15T10:35:00.012-04:00

It's May 15th and that means it's time for another installment of As the Block Turns. Just Kidding. Another installment of my twice monthly series on what is happening at One Block West during the course of 2011. The previous installment is here.

Tuesday May 3rd is a day that we dread every year. Actually, it's not the 3rd so much as it is the first day back after being closed for our annual holiday. Sunday night after flying back into Dulles and all day Monday, I was busy placing orders for every manner of perishable item: produce, wild mushrooms, seafood, and meat.

On Monday, I did a little busy work in the kitchen while taking a break from driving my desk (dealing with the hundreds of emails that came in while we were away, the 10 pounds of mail that got delivered, etc.) just doing some basic set up so that we could hit the kitchen running on Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday the 3rd, I was in the kitchen prepping by 7am and Travis joined me a bit after 8 and Tony got in around 11. In an all out blitz, we finally got lunch set up to go at 12:15. Fortunately, our first table did not arrive until 12:30. After lunch it was an all out marathon to get dinner prepped. Although we opened at 5pm, we were not set until 6pm. And our menu was pretty bare bones that night.

Our annual vacation behind us means that the month of April is now closed and we can look at the results. We got hammered by the weather and gas prices. April was one of the rainiest ever and with gas prices spiking to $4 per gallon, with the exception of a couple of nights, business came to a standstill for us and restaurants all over.

One of the exceptional nights was Saturday May 7th, a night that we look forward to every year. It's trifecta weekend: proms, graduation, and Mother's Day all rolled into one. We were solidly busy from open to close, just the way we like it.

The night went really well for us with the exception of one table. We took a reservation for a late 8-top which subsequently became a later 11-top. A table with 11 people at it represents 20% of my dining room capacity. I always feel very nervous about taking these tables because they take so much of my dining room and historically have such a high no-show rate. And to generalize a bit further, if such a table does show up, it will be with a lot fewer people than the number reserved.

And sure enough, at 6:45 this table called pushing their 8pm reservation back a half an hour to 8:30, at which point I predicted to our front of the house manager that they were going to no-show or cancel. Then they called back to push back another hour to 9:30pm, a half an hour after we usually close. Then they called back to move to Sunday; we're not open on Sundays, not even Mother's Day. Finally they called and cancelled and left us with 20% of the dining room sitting empty. We could have filled those tables with a lot more than 11 people; we turned so many people away that evening.

Thanks to these louts, nobody will be able to book a table here for more than six people without giving us a credit card number. If they cancel within 24 hours or no-show, we're going to charge them. Way to go you idiots, ruining it for everyone!

We opened the seating on our deck on May the 3rd, the first day back after our vacation. So far the weather has not cooperated and very few people have sat outside. Soon though, the deck will be in full swing. It's nice to sit out there in the shade of the umbrellas, surrounded by all our flowers and herbs, in the shade of the large tree in the corner of the deck, and watch the birds flit about everywhere.

Our roses are now in full bud, the native clematis that lines the deck fence is screaming skyward by leaps and bounds, and the mint has exploded: mojito anyone? We skipped the early season pansies in the window boxes and went straight for the hot weather plants that can withstand the brutal conditions of our south-facing window boxes: dracaena, lantana, and portulaca.

The blood sorrel and chervil that we grow in the shade of the deck have overwintered and are now up and we are using them for garnish each day. The chervil has been going into a fabulous carrot risotto. Our chives are in full bloom and they made a fantastic garnish for cream of ramp soup.

On Tuesday the 10th, I found myself at the farmers market and running out of green vegetables, especially for the farmers market slaw that accompanies our crab cakes. I bought the last two bunches of gai lan, Chinese broccoli: it's getting too hot for it. And I bought the last of the cabbages stored over the winter.

The arugula was done last week: again, it's getting too warm for it. We have plenty of asparagus and spinach right now, but other than that, it is slim pickings until the peas come on in a couple of weeks. Eating locally and seasonally forces us to scramble a few weeks of the year and we are at a scrambling point. Good thing that the mesclun is terrific now; I imagine a lot of dishes will be coming with mesclun.

And updating the ongoing saga of renovating the restaurant: the dining room walls and trim are all painted now, with the exception of the back wall that adjoins the bar. The thought there is to open up part of that wall between the dining room and the bar, but I'm still going back and forth in my mind about what exactly to do. It really is one of those things I would like to be comfortable with before I start demolition!

Now that asparagus is in full swing, I am looking forward to strawberries. In fact, I have promised them on the menu for our upcoming wine dinner with Glen Manor Vineyards on the 26th, so they better be ripe by then! Beth is currently estimating berries by the 20th, so I think we'll be in good shape.

Tomorrow afternoon I am off to Arlington to the portfolio tasting of one of our wine distributors. This is always a good opportunity to meet people who are passionate about the wines they make, catch up with friends rarely seen, and refresh my palate. How many opportunities do you get in a year to taste Arneis, Garganega, Vermentino, and Falanghina in one afternoon? After the tasting, we'll hole up somewhere during happy hour to avoid rush hour traffic. How bad can that be?

Until the first of June, thanks for reading along.

2011: May 1st

2011-05-01T10:49:00.019-04:00

This is the May 1st installment of my twice-monthly series documenting a year in the life of my restaurant. The previous installment mentioned that this one would necessarily be late in getting posted for the simple reason that we always close this time of year for vacation. And so it is late, but better late than never.

This two-week period started off in crazy fashion with torrential rain on Saturday, April 16th. I knew just driving to work that the rain would not help our business and sure enough by 9am the phone started ringing. People weren't calling to book tables, just the opposite—they were calling to cancel on account of the rain. On the weekends, we depend on customers driving out from Northern Virginia, DC, and Baltimore and if it is raining, they are likely to stay home. And so it was this particular weekend.

While all this spring rain has not been great for customers, it has been great for two things: asparagus and morels. We have lots and lots of both. Currently we are serving the two together in a cream sauce with pancetta, shallots, thyme, and strozzapretti pasta. The kitchen smells amazing each time we cook one of these dishes. There is something fundamentally awesome about morels and cream!

The renovations of the restaurant are moving along and now we are just starting to paint the dining room, which is the first change that is getting regulars to notice that we really are renovating. Many people have not really noticed the total changeout of the table tops, the reorganization of the dining room, changes in lighting, new window treatments, new plants or any of the more subtle changes. But now the regulars cannot help but notice the dining room going from a vivid scarlet color to a warm tan. All the comments so far are very positive, with the exception of one guy who is not amused that his favorite table lost the bulky bench seats in favor of chairs. So be it. He'll grouse for a minute but it won't stop him from coming in.

Speaking of grousing, amongst all the positive reviews we received this week on the web, we got a pretty miserable one that complained (in part) about the ceiling, which admittedly looks a little like a patchwork quilt as we are replacing old damaged ceiling tiles in preparation for painting the ceiling a rich chocolate color. Obviously, this person did not want to see that the ceiling is in the process of renovation.

But any amateur restaurant review that leads off grousing about portion size and then takes the décor to task without mentioning how the food tastes is all about one thing: price. Our prices are higher than this woman wanted to pay. So rather than just state that, she had to spew venom about everything else. We're used to it by now. We just hope that people stumbling across her review will recognize the comments for what they really are and weigh them against the preponderance of highly positive comments left by others.

We were closed for our annual holiday the last week of the month and it was a scramble just to get ready to go on vacation. A lot of paperwork has to be accelerated or delayed, plants have to be watered more heavily than usual, mail has to be stopped, all our digital media updated, refrigerators have to be cleaned out and unplugged so that they will defrost, and so forth. It's just like going on vacation at your house only on a larger scale.

It's always terribly difficult to manage the menu just before closing for a week. We don't want to waste food by having it spoil while we are away and we don't want to run out during the final dinner service before we leave. So we plan proteins that can be frozen without compromising quality while we are away, or proteins that we can prep little by little as we need them, or proteins that are not terribly expensive. We end up eating a big staff meal before we leave, sending food home with employees, or donating it to another restaurant down the block.

We close on account of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, the celebration of the local apple industry, an industry that is struggling against imports from China. This year was the 84th festival. Although it was a bigger deal in decades past when it drew US Presidents and major celebrities, it is still a big deal with Val Kilmer headlining last year. According to various estimates, attendance is between 200,000 and 400,000 people, all of whom descend on our little town of 24,000 people.

You would think with that many people in town needing to eat that it would be a boon time for the restaurant. So we thought the first couple of years toughing out the festival, but we were sadly wrong. The entire week, we didn't make enough money to cover even a day's expenses.

As you might imagine, logistics are a nightmare with this many people in town. Just getting around is difficult. This coupled with the fact that we are inside the parade route means that vehicles cannot get through the barricades on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, the only nights during the week that we hope to turn a profit. The other nights of the week are unprofitable to breakeven.

Our downtown pedestrian mall is lined with out-of-towners hawking all manner of junk food: fried onions, corn dogs, funnel cakes and the like. And so that food draws droves of people seeking junk food and not high-end dining. Those people that do make it over to our alley a block west off the pedestrian mall are largely tanked on cheap beer, stuffed with fried junk, and seeking a place to use the bathroom. Our restaurant becomes a 2400-square foot public toilet.

Rather than deal with all this, we just close up shop for a week and give everyone a chance for some down time. For my part, I went to St. Martin, the so-called culinary capital of the Caribbean. I've got to say that we produce better food at One Block West than at any of the high-end places at which we dined down there. Poor bastards have everything shipped in from overseas, mainly France. There is no local agriculture. We have it pretty good right here in the lovely Shenandoah Valley!

My big regret in leaving town was missing the barrel tasting at Linden Vineyards. and being unable to provide food to pair with the barrel samples. I just love pairing food with Jim's wine. Oh well, maybe the calendar will line up better next year so that I can make it.

And that's it for the very abbreviated May 1st update. Thanks for reading and I hope you will stay tuned for the May 15th edition.

2011: April 15th

2011-04-15T23:33:00.007-04:00

It's late on the fifteenth as I sit here writing this, the April 15th installment of the twice-monthly series documenting the year 2011 at the restaurant. The previous post was on April 1st. Thanks for reading along.

Happy Tax Day! I just paid my first quarter taxes for 2011 and the balance on what I owe from 2010, how about you? For us self-employed individuals, there is no payroll deduction of taxes, so it always seems to come as a shock to my system when I have to mail that quarterly check to the Feds.

I wish I could report otherwise, but our business like that of most restaurants that I know has been very slow this April as it is every April. Looking at the restaurant business from the outside, you would assume that business would be increasing with the good weather in April, but on the contrary, it is one of the slowest months of the year. At the beginning of the month, the NCAA basketball tournament distracts customers and then taxes distract customers until after they are complete at mid-month. After that, the Apple Blossom Festival hits town and totally kills our business, but more on that in the May 1st installment in a couple of weeks.

At the beginning of the month, we attended the barrel tasting at Glen Manor Vineyards south of Front Royal where our good friends Jeff and Kelly White make outstanding wine. After tasting in barrel, I can confidently say that the 2010s are delicious and easily the best vintage ever in Virginia, way better than the phenomenal 2007 vintage. For those who escaped the May frost in 2010 and set fruit, the drought stress from the hottest summer on record yielded amazing fruit. I am looking forward to 2012 and beyond as these great wines hit the market.

On the way down to Glen Manor, we stopped at Old House Parts in Front Royal and scored three window sashes for a divider screen to separate the server station from the dining room, part of the ongoing renovation of the restaurant. Having restored an old Victorian house in a former life, I have a special fondness for recycled building materials and am happy to incorporate those into the restaurant. All the stuff coming out of the restaurant that is salvageable is going to Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, to help them out. We recycle everything at the restaurant, so why not building materials?

Our specialty goods supplier had its first food show in 10 years and we attended it on the 5th. They carry so many thousands of items in inventory that it is nearly impossible to get a handle on what they do carry. Although it was a huge scramble for me to get the restaurant open, fly down to the show, hurry through, and fly back to the restaurant, it was great to meet a lot of the vendors and not only see, but taste a lot of their wares. If there were no other reason to drive/fly the hour into Springfield, at least I confirmed my suspicions about our brand of chocolate.

Our chocolate company was acquired about a year ago by a big multi-national conglomerate and I have been concerned that the chocolate we have been receiving is a) not the same product it was when we first selected it and b) of decreased quality. Tasting through five different brands of chocolate absolutely confirmed for me that we are switching chocolate brands on the next re-order. My policy of never settling for second best in terms of our raw ingredients has always done well for me. I will always switch to get better quality, as long as I can keep the price at a level where customers can afford it.

I also got samples of a new risotto rice to try. I am excited to blind taste this rice against our current brand. Then I have to find out what the new rice costs, if it proves to be as good as I think it is going to be. I'm almost scared to ask.

Another standout for me at the show was the product line from OLLI Salumeria Americana from Richmond. We are already using their guanciale and based on how good it is, I had very high expectations about their prosciutto which I had never tasted before the show. I was unprepared to be blown away by their prosciutto. Great job guys!

One of the cool things about this business is that from time to time, really interesting people show up at the restaurant unannounced trying to sell us really good stuff. The first of this month, a tiny gentleman in plain dress walked into restaurant and offered me samples of his cheese. Turns out that he is John Esh of Goot Essa in Pennsylvania and his Alpen Käse is excellent. It now features on our cheese list and probably would not have had John not taken the effort to introduce himself and his product to me. Win, win.

Our new menu covers arrived on the 8th, a week ahead of schedule. How nice is it to get something ahead of schedule? If you've been to the restaurant, you have seen our old book-like menu covers with our logo on the front cover. After three ceiling collapses in the past three years, many of them were destroyed by water flooding down from the apartments above. And those that the water didn't destroy were ruined by customers who folded the covers back on themselves, ripping the spine. People who wouldn't dream of destroying their own hardback books by maltreating them apparently had no qualms about destroying our menu covers. At $45 apiece, it ripped at my being each time I would look out into the dining room to see someone else abusing the menus.

Knowing the propensity for customers to abuse our menu covers drove me to get rid of the elegant folding covers in favor of single page cover with the menu on one side and the by-the-glass wine list on the other. They still look great and are way less expensive. The only downside is that customers cannot close their menus to signal us that they are ready to order, not much of a drawback at all. If anything, it will force the servers to pay just a little bit more attention to the customers and their body language and that cannot be bad.

Speaking of bad, right at the first of the month, the back of the restaurant started smelling bad, like there was a dead rat somewhere. We got the landlord involved to check the apartments upstairs and the basement and when he got to the basement, it was full of waste water. We systematically checked all the drain lines and found that the sprayer sink in front of our dish machine was dumping straight into the basement. Special. After a consultation with the plumber, we're getting all the drain lines in the kitchen redone. Life in old buildings: love it, hate it.

On April the 8th, the first morels of the year made their appearance as an appetizer on our nightly menus, heralding the switch from winter to spring mushrooms. The annual parade of local foragers coming in the front door with bags of mushrooms has started! Since last fall, we have been running both hedgehog and black trumpet mushrooms on our nightly menus. In many years, trumpets and hedgehogs end a month before morels start, forcing us to scramble with lesser, but still very good mushrooms, such as yellowfoot chanterelles. By the 12th, we had run through all the black trumpets in the cooler and the morels moved from the appetizer slot to a wild mushroom entrée slot. Morels will be with us for a few weeks before we make the summer transition to fresh porcini and chanterelles.

On the 13th, I taught my final cooking class of the current series. This class was on cooking an Easter Dinner, just in time for the big day next Sunday. I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching these classes and Michelle and I will schedule more later on in the year, but first, I need a little break. Prepping for these classes is very intense and takes me away from restaurant operations for about six hours.

As mentioned in the past several postings in this series, renovation of the restaurant is underway. At the first of the month, our new batch of chairs arrived and we proceeded to rip out some of the bulky booths and replace them with chairs. Just this simple change has really opened up the space. I've been painting, patching walls, and doing little things here and there as I had time.

Yesterday and today, I tackled the first big project, building the divider screen between the front server station and the dining room. The screen is a wooden frame that holds the recycled window sashes that I mentioned earlier. A few hours priming wood, a few hours on the chop saw and with the nail gun, and a couple more hours with paint brush in hand and the deed is done. We're still getting used to the new look, but customers are really making positive comments.

Last posting, I included a copy of our April Fool's menu with the goofy dish names and prices multiplied by 10. Just this evening, I got a confessional note from a would-be customer who cancelled her reservations that evening because she pulled the menu up on her phone on the way to the restaurant and saw the "outrageous" prices not realizing it was a joke. Win some; lose some.

Tonight was the first night of the two-day wine festival here in downtown Winchester, an event that is really pretty good for business. This year, however, it seemed to degenerate into a young people's drunkfest (basically a very large postwork Friday night happy hour) and it didn't do much for our Friday night book compared to years past. Our Saturday book looks great however and it seems that a lot more of our potential clientele are planning to come out from Northern Virginia, weather willing. Given the forecast, mass cancellations will not surprise me. Expecting large crowds, I have a ton of food on hand and I am on pins and needles hoping that we can sell it all. The weather gods seem to be against us.

Finally, next month's installment of this series, the May 1st posting, will be a few days late. I will be in St. Martin on the beach, rum drink in hand, the week before flying back on May 1st. I promise to regale you with the tale of why we close during what should be a very good week for us. Until then, eat, drink, and live well.

2011: April 1st

2011-04-01T15:10:00.004-04:00

Thanks for tuning in to this bi-weekly installment of the series on life at One Block West in the year 2011. This is the April 1st edition and it's been a really busy time since the March 15th edition.

We started off with a South African wine dinner on the 17th followed by a 9-course Chef's Tasting on the 18th. The two back-to-back special menus had us jamming non-stop for three days. By the weekend, I was dead man walking, but was very happy with the way the two dinners came off. The South African dinner was a lot of fun for us. None of the crew has ever been to South Africa, so we were a bit at a loss for menu ideas, but we were able to connect with some chefs in South Africa and with some embassy staffers here in DC to pick their brains for ideas. I had hoped to pilfer ideas by looking at South African high-end restaurant menus on the web, but I found that a frustrating process because their menus look a lot like our nightly menus, except that they are at the end of summer now and featured fresh tomatoes everywhere. Bastards!

The nine-course tasting the following night, Friday, was a huge effort on the part of all the crew. Once you start doing the math—each course had six or seven components—you realize that we cooked a lot of food. I hit the kitchen around 7:30am to make this dinner come off by 6:30pm. This dinner was an exercise in playing with techniques—separating a salad dressing and serving the acid part cold as a granita and the fat component hot—which taught us quite a lot. You never learn anything if you don't push boundaries. Needless to say, I was beat on Saturday morning and had to drag myself to work.

By contrast on the 24th, we did another Chef's Tasting that was seemingly effortless. Because of the way our week went, we did not have time to do any advance planning on the menu, so we started on the morning of the 24th. The late start forced us into a menu that didn't require a lot of advanced prep and that was a good thing. We were able to put on a really elegant menu without killing ourselves. Tastings should run this way every time!

In between these two sets of tasting, the 20th arrived. This is a time of dread for many small businesspeople in Virginia, myself included. Sales tax collected the prior month is due on the 20th. And when we collect sales tax on your dinner, we also collect a local meals tax that goes to our town. This tax is also due on the 20th. While I am at it, I might as well compute and remit the Virginia withholding taxes, which are not due until the 25th, but I like to get all the pain out of the way at one time. Federal withholdings are deposited each pay period by EFT and they actually the easiest of all the taxes to pay. All told, I spend an hour dealing with taxes each 20th. If you could see how my day typically unfolds, you would see that finding an uninterrupted hour to do anything doesn't happen very often.

The renovation of the restaurant continues apace, though that pace is much slower than I would like. At the current pace, it looks to me like we'll be at it for another two months, but we have made great progress already and already it looks like a different restaurant. Over the past two weeks, we have patched a lot of walls in preparation for painting, ordered chargers for the tables, put new candle holders on the tables, installed a new sound system, hung new window treatments, and finally, we have started painting. What a huge difference paint makes!

As part of the renovation, I had thought to try to find a piece of sculpture to hang on the back wall, as a focal point for guests as they enter the restaurant. I had heard some good things about a local artist who had just done a show at a local gallery and who had recently participated in a local charity event. Given the hours that I work, going to galleries and charity events is not an option, so I haven't seen this guys' work. I called the gallery and got his phone number and arranged for him to come look at the space where I wanted the sculpture installed. I was amused by the conversation, a perfect example of salesmanship gone wrong, which ran thus:

Him: "What are you looking for?"

Me: "A found-art, three-dimensional sculpture for this space, something that will be a focal point and that says 'food and drink.'"

Him: "What about animals or fish?" Me: "No, wine bottles, old silverware, old cookware, something that says food and drink."

Him: "What about a crab?" Me: "Do you have a portfolio I can look at? I've never seen your work before and I'd like to see that you are the right guy for the job."

Him: "No, I didn't bring it with me. Besides, each piece is different and yours will be different too."

Me: "Is it on-line? We can go take a look at it now."

Him: "No, it's not on-line. How much do you want to spend?"

Me: "I've never bought a sculpture before so I have no idea what it will cost. What's a ballpark range?"

Him: "It depends on what you want."

Me: "OK, so how do we proceed from here?"

Him: "If you provide me a sketch of what you want, I can build it."

Can you imagine me saying to my tasting customers, "If you write out a menu for me, I will cook it for you."? Nuts. This guy lost the job from the get-go. What artist trying to get a commission arrives without a portfolio? Seriously.

Alsoover the past couple of weeks, I'm working on a web site update. Our site is very tired and old-fashioned and like a lot of old sites, has grown by accretion. It's time to go back to the drawing board and simplify. Rather than do it all myself this time (the current site looks like a DIY hack), I have engaged a designer friend to put together the basic site from a design that we did a couple of years back. I will still handle all the content. Looking forward, I believe this means that this blog will no longer be hosted on blogger, but will become part and parcel of the restaurant web site. Stay tuned.

I mentioned back in January that I had an interview with a writer for the National Culinary Review about kale. The article was just published; writer Laura Taxel did a fine job talking about the underutilized kales.

More signs of spring are everywhere. We had a glorious two-week run of rockfish when it was both plentiful and cheap, direct from the Chesapeake. But within two weeks, all the local fishermen had exhausted their tags and the price jumped from $7 to $10 and now $15 per pound. Our microgreens guy has returned after turning off the heat in his greenhouse for the winter. Cabbages that overwintered are looking gorgeous now at the farmers market. New items at the market: microradishes, arugula, wild watercress. Things are looking up, but morels are still not in yet. I cannot wait for them any longer. I want my morels!

Finally, given that it is April Fools' Day. I want to leave you with a copy of tonight's dinner menu. I have no idea how customers will react. I am sure that most will chuckle a bit and I am equally sure that I will piss someone off.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Appetizers

Greens, Egg, and Ham $80
Frisée with Crispy Prosciutto and Bacon Lardons Topped with a Poached Egg

A Clockwork Orange $80
Mediterranean Salad of Oranges, Almonds, Feta, and Microgreens

Monster Mâche $80
Mâche, Hazelnut, and Goat Cheese Salad

Scalloped Potatoes* $100
Prosciutto-Wrapped Sea Scallops on Potato-Bacon Chowder

Shrimpy Sausage $80
Shrimp and Chorizo Skewer; Pimentón Sauce; Roasted Red Pepper Salad

On a Roll $80
White Bean, Sun-Dried Tomato & Pesto Bruschetta; Herb Oil; Shaved Pecorino

There’s a Hare in my Soup $80
Cream of Rabbit Soup with Local Vegetables

Mussel Bound $90
Baked Gratin of Prince Edward Island Mussels, White Sauce, Chorizo, and Roasted Red Peppers

Leaning Tower of Pizza $100
Napoleon of Mini Flatbreads with Caramelized Onions, House-Cured Duck Confit and Gorgonzola

How Boaring! $90
House-Made Terrine of Wild Boar Flavored with Cranberries and Porcini Mushrooms

Entrées

Pasta la Vista $250
Black Trumpet and Hedgehog Mushrooms with Pancetta, Wide Egg Noodles, Spinach, and Cream

Where’s the Beef? $200
Bread, Sautéed Shiitakes, and Roasted Poblanos Set in a Savory Sweet Potato Custard

Crabbie Patties $260
Jumbo Lump Crab Cakes; Farmers Market Slaw

Half-Baked Tuna* $420
Yellowfin Tuna Served Medium Rare; Herb and Caper Bud Sauce; Red Russian Kale

Roe, Roe, Roe Your Boat* $260
Roasted Shad Roe; Rapini; Lemon, Bacon, and Caper Sauce

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish $240
Red Snapper with Smoked Bluefish Cream; Local Chinese Broccoli

Yam on the Lam $220
Local Lamb and Vegetables in Gravy Topped with Sweet Potato Purée and Baked

You Jerk! $220
Jamaican-Style Jerked Oxtail on Creamy Polenta

Fowl Play: Holy Mole! $200
Chicken in Classic Peanut Mole (Mole de Cacahuate); Rice and Beans

Minuet Steak* $330
Filet Mignon; Local Chinese Broccoli; Roasted Fingerling Potatoes; Stout-Bacon Sauce

Until next time, when I hope I can speak glowingly of this years' morel crop.

Lobster Recipes

2011-03-31T09:42:00.040-04:00

Here are the recipes that I promised the students of my recent cooking class.

Determining Gender of a Lobster

We started the class by examining a male and a female side by side. The tail of the male is comparatively more narrow than that of the female: the sides of the female's tail flare out at almost a 45-degree angle while the sides of the male's tail are nearly vertical. The female uses the extra room under her tail to carry her eggs. Flipping the lobsters over, it is easy to check the set of swimmerets closest to the abdomen. Hers are soft and feathery, his are stiff and shell-like. I leave the obvious analogies to the reader, not that half the class didn't start spouting them out for everyone to hear.

Females are desirable for their roe which turns from deep forest green to bright red on cooking. This roe is great for coloring sauces, mayonnaises, and so forth. Females are a lot rarer than males in the market for the simple reason that we throw most females back to continue furthering the lobster population.

Cooking Lobsters

I prefer to steam lobsters in a large, covered pot with a small amount of water. Chickens and pound-and-a-quarters will take about 8 minutes of steam. Ten minutes for a pound-and-a-half lobster and about 14 minutes for a two-pounder. It's generally OK if the lobster is slightly undercooked. In almost all cases, you are going to rewarm it and finish cooking it that way. Once out of the steam, the lobster should go into an ice water bath to stop it from cooking.

If you want to cut up the lobster and cook it, say by grilling or by doing a shell-on sauté, I would still steam the lobsters about four minutes to kill them and then cut them up.

Breaking Down a Lobster

Once the lobster is cooked and chilled, pull the tail off. Stick a fork, tines curved toward the top of the tail shell, into the tail meat and lever it out in a single piece using the fork. Separate the two large claws from the abdomen. Separate the large pincher and crusher claws from the "knuckles," the two joints that attach the claws to the abdomen. Twist the movable part of the pincher and crusher claws from side-to-side and remove. Using the back of a thin-bladed knife, whack the back of the claws and with a twisting motion, open the shell with the back of your knife. Pull out the meat. Check the center of the claw meat for a piece of cartilage. Using a pair of kitchen shears, open the knuckles and pull out the meat. Continue by pulling off the swimmer legs for the stock pot and open the abdomen and clean out the sand sack and the green tomalley (which clouds stock). At this point, you have a pile of shells, the tail meat, the four pieces of knuckle meat, and the meat from the two claws.

Lobster Stock

Shells from 4 lobsters
2 carrots, cut in large pieces
2 stalks celery, cut in large pieces
1 onion, cut in large pieces
green leaves of 1 leek, cut in large pieces
1 bouquet garni of parsley stems and thyme
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 gallon water or fish fumet

Heat your oven to very hot, 450F. Add all ingredients save the water to a large roasting pan and roast in the oven, turning every few minutes, until the shells and vegetables are well roasted. Remove the shells and vegetables to a stock pot. Deglaze the roasting pan with a little water or stock and pour into the stock pot. Add the remaining water or stock. Simmer for an hour or until the stock is reduced by half. Strain. Yields two quarts.

Lobster Bisque

I use rice instead of flour to thicken the bisque. I like the flavor better and it makes the soup friendly for those with gluten sensitivity, always a prime consideration in the restaurant business.

1 quart lobster stock
2 ounces Cognac
1/2 cup rice
2 cups heavy cream
salt and white pepper to taste

Bring the lobster stock and Cognac to a rolling simmer and add the rice. Cook until the rice is done and the lobster stock reduced by a quarter. Transfer to a blender and blend until the rice is smooth. Return to the heat, add the cream, rewarm, and season to taste. Yield, about 5 cups.

Mango Vanilla Dressing

This is the dressing for the lobster and mango salad below.

1 mango, peeled and sliced
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
Zest of 1 lime
Juice of half a lime (to taste)
2 tablespoons brown sugar (to taste)
Seeds of half a vanilla bean
3/4 cup vegetable oil

Blend mango with vinegar until well puréed. Add lime zest, lime juice, brown sugar, vanilla bean and blend to mix. With blender running at high speed, drizzle in the vegetable oil. Adjust seasonings to taste. Yields 3 cups.

Lobster and Mango Salad

This is a really simple salad that we serve in a ring mold.

1 cup lobster meat, diced
1 cup mango, diced
1 tablespoon capers
1/2 stalk celery, in small dice
1/2 cup mango vanilla dressing (above)
salt and pepper, to taste

Mix all ingredients. Add dressing as necessary to bind the salad and season to taste. Plate using a ring mold and garnish with baby greens.

Lobster Cakes

1 pound lobster meat, diced
1 stalk celery, finely diced
1 tablespoon Italian parsley, minced
2 teaspoons tarragon, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch white pepper
1/2 cup (or more) panko
1/2 cup (or more) mayonnaise

Mix all ingredients well. If too wet to form into cakes, add more panko. If too dry, add a little more mayo. Let stand 20 minutes. Form into four cakes. Fry in a skillet on both sides. Yields four 4-ounce cakes.

Lobster Américaine

Here is my version of the French classic. Lobster Américaine is generally served with rice.

olive oil
1/2 medium onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 leek, cleaned and chopped
shells of two lobsters
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 shallots, in fine dice
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 ounces Cognac
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup diced tomatoes
2 stalks tarragon
1 bay leaf
1 quart lobster stock
reserved meat from two lobsters
2 tablespoons sweet butter

On high flame, film a large sautoir with olive oil and add the onion, carrot, celery, leek, and lobster shells. Cook on high heat, stirring frequently, 6-8 minutes or until the vegetables are nicely browned. Clear away a spot on the bottom of the pan and add the tomato paste. Let the tomato paste caramelize for a couple of minutes, then add the garlic, and shallots and cook until the garlic is fragrant.

Deglaze the pan with the Cognac and white wine, scraping up all the bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the tomatoes, herbs, and lobster stock. Simmer for 20 minutes. Pass through a strainer and reserve the stock. Return to a small pan on medium flame. Reduce to about one and a half cups of liquid, add the lobster meat to rewarm, and swirl in the butter off the flame. Season to taste and serve immediately.

Bobotie

2011-03-18T08:39:00.013-04:00

If South Africa has a national dish, it might well be bobotie, a ground (mince) meat pie, subtly flavored and topped with an egg custard as you see below.

Many diners at our South African wine dinner last evening requested the recipe for my bobotie and so here is the basic idea. Two things to remember: we made at least 10 times the following recipe and while I wrote a basic formula to cook by, in the end, we adjusted the seasoning to our liking by taste and not by formula. Of course, that is true for every dish we make and should be no surprise to anyone who cooks.

Bobotie

vegetable oil
1 medium red onion, diced
1 tablespoon garlic, minced
1 tablespoon ginger, minced
1/2 pound ground veal
1/2 pound ground lamb
1 tart apple (we used Yorks), peeled and diced
2 ounces hearty French bread in small pieces, soaked in heavy cream
2 tablespoons Madras-style curry powder
1 teaspoon coriander, ground
1 teaspoon cumin, ground
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, roughly ground
1/2 teaspoon allspice, ground
1/4 cup golden raisins (sultanas)
1/4 cup dried apricots, diced
1/4 cup slivered almonds, toasted
zest and juice of one lemon
1 egg
2 bay leaves

for topping:

1 cup heavy cream
2 eggs

Heat your oven to medium, about 350F. Meanwhile, heat a large skillet on high flame and film it with vegetable oil. Sauté the onions until just starting to brown around the edges, three to four minutes. Reserve the onions in a large mixing bowl. Next, sweat the garlic and ginger for a couple of minutes and reserve to the mixing bowl. Add the ground meats to the pan, breaking it up thoroughly. When browned, drain off the fat, and add the meat to the mixing bowl.

Squeeze any excess cream from the bread and add the bread along with the apple, spices, almonds, and dried fruit to the meat and onions. Taste for seasoning and adjust as necessary. Add the egg and mix very well.

Pack the meat mixture into a well oiled small casserole dish and tuck the bay leaves into the top of the meat. Bake until firm and set, about 40-45 minutes, then remove the bay. Mix the egg and heavy cream and pour on top of the meat mixture. You may need more egg and cream mixture to cover the meat depending on the size of your casserole. Return to the oven and bake until golden and puffed. Let cool for at least 45 minutes so that you can slice it for serving.

2011: March 15th

2011-03-15T17:00:00.012-04:00

Running. Running. Constantly running. That's what it feels like right now. Since the last post in this twice-monthly series about the restaurant in 2011, it seems as though I have been running constantly. The three big time sinks right now are largely self-inflicted: teaching cooking classes, renovating the restaurant, and hosting special dinners.

My cooking classes are in full swing now and that takes a huge chunk out of the day on which I teach. Right now, I'm doing a class about every week to ten days and that is about all I can manage. So far in this series, I've taught one class on root vegetables coupled with a knife skills seminar and another on lobsters. In Sunday's lobster class, I showed students how to tell males from females (important if you want the roe to color sauces etc.), how to cook and break down lobsters, how to make basic lobster salads, lobster cakes, and then we did a traditional américaine. I love teaching these classes and being able to work closely with students, but the extra work load is tough to manage.

Meanwhile, the renovation of the restaurant is occupying a lot of my time. In the past two weeks, we have chosen new colors for the walls and ceiling and that is driving a lot of other changes: table linens, candle holders, window treatments, menu covers, and so forth. Ann and I attended an industry tradeshow over in Maryland last week where we got a lot of good ideas and were able to purchase some of the things that we needed to complete the renovation. These purchases will all arrive over the next few weeks.

Already we have reconfigured a few tables and moved some things around. We are liking the changes especially in that we have a lot more flexibility in the dining room now to seat larger parties. And the tables have new white linens in place of the old burgundy ones. This coupled with the removal of the ponderous old window treatments has really brightened the dining room.

Lots more changes are underway including a new sound system which I will install as soon as I have a spare couple of hours. Frankly, with the dinners we have this week, I don't see the sound system getting installed until we close on Sunday. And we started prepping walls for painting today. There are going to be a painful few days when our walls look like they have the measles from the spackling before the paint goes on. We're attacking it section by section. So yeah, things will look a little funky for a while, but ultimately, they're going to look great.

In many ways dealing with all the details of this renovation is similar to the chaos of opening a new restaurant, albeit without the major buildout issues and with a functional kitchen in place.

Finally, special dinners are taking the rest of my time. We've ranged the gamut from a private party for 60 on the 28th to Thursday's wine dinner featuring wines and food from South Africa to a couple of 9-course Chef's Tastings and the usual 6-course Thursday night Chef's Table. That's a lot of special menus to oversee and it is keeping me busy. And it is really forcing me to be creative. I don't like to repeat dishes for tastings and I don't like to put dishes on the tasting menus that are available in the main dining room.

Signs of spring are all around now. Besides a few beautiful days in the 60s (and the odd snow shower), bulbs, mint, and chives are all making their push for the sky. Shad roe has made its usual vernal appearance on our menu and rockfish (striped bass) are running in the Chesapeake, bringing prices way down. And of course Daylight Savings Time is upon us. That means that more and more people will start to come out to dinner because it is light later and that translates to a longer day for me. It's the normal seasonal flow of things and I'm used to it in general, but each year, it takes a few days to getting used to working a longer day.

And that's about it for the first two weeks of March. Tune in at the first of April to see what progress we have made in renovating the restaurant and what's new on our menus.

Chef's Table

2011-03-11T08:37:00.022-05:00

Here are more photos from a recent Chef's Table. We had some fun with these dishes. As always, they are a result of collaboration among the cooks and me. In creating these menus, everyone throws in ideas and we see what sticks. Usually some hybrids happen and for the better.

Cucumber Summer Roll. We were kicking around amuse ideas and somehow got onto summer rolls when Tony offered the idea of using cucumber instead of rice paper. I ultimately changed this course from an Asian-inspired one to a more European-flavored one, to bring it in line with the rest of the menu. Inside the roll is cucumber, carrot, parsley stems, and court bouillon-poached shrimp bound with a mayonnaise flavored with lemon zest, dill, and capers. Crunchy with big flavor, yet very refreshing, everything a good amuse should be.

Rockfish. We've been on a fish-in-broth kick for a few tasting menus now (because we love the idea of half soup, half entrée) and so we came quite naturally to rockfish (the local name for striped bass, this from the Chesapeake Bay) with wild mushrooms and a Surry sausage jus. Sometime in the middle of the night before the tasting, I hit me to put the fish on a base of parsnip crème caramel to add some sweetness and richness to the dish. (Don't ask me why I decided this or even how, I don't have a clue. Like most of my food ideas, it just appeared in my brain). The caramel is very dark so it is not very sweet and there is no sugar in the custard. The flavors worked very well and I think the guests were intrigued with the it-looks-like-dessert-but-its-a-fish-dish aspect.

Breakfast. This is just the kind of dish that tickles a lot of chefs and brings out the kid in us. Who doesn't love breakfast for dinner? We've had a version of this dish on the dinner menu for about a week and apparently our customers don't love breakfast for dinner! It seems de rigueur in these parts to order a salad before dinner rather than something that we have put our creative energy into. Sigh. You see down on the plate a pimentón sauce and Virginia maple syrup (yes, we make damn fine maple syrup in Virginia too) and on top of that a napoleon of parsnip latkes and grilled rounds of Alan Benton's country sausage, all topped with a poached quail egg and a dribble of hollandaise: Eggs Benedict gone miniature.

Nest Egg. This dish is the merger of two other ideas, one a Carolina Gold and Sea Island red pea hoppin' john risotto and the other a polenta ball stuffed with oxtail ragù. We ended up stuffing the oxtail into the risotto and forming it into eggs, serving it on a nest of chiffonaded romaine, a nod to the Lenten season. I'm sure this must have been fun to eat, cracking through the crisp panko crust to get at the silky risotto and the liquid ragù.

Shepherd's Pie. What to do with a lamb saddle? Answering that question is how we arrived at this dish. I think it was Tony's idea to stuff it with all the mirepoix and seasoning that we usually put into shepherd's pie. While we were reinterpreting the classic, we decided to put the mash (in this case, parsnip and celery root) on the bottom, down on the plate, to hold the rounds of lamb loin roulade. I boned the saddle such that the tenderloin and the top loin (both sides of the T-bone) were intact and rolled it so that the top loin wrapped the tenderloin, the rare part you see in the center. Quite successful. Travis' stuffing was dynamite.

Apricot Tart. Bad Ed! Bad Chef! This dessert was way too big for a tasting. But I really couldn't help myself. The tart crust is shortbread, heavy on cornstarch so that it is light and crisp. This is topped with lemon curd, light on sugar so that it remains tart, and moistened dried apricots. In the background, you see a phyllo cup with vanilla bean ice cream. Crème anglaise over everything. Too much! I promise I will try harder to come up with smaller dessert courses in the future (not really!).

Root Vegetable Recipes

2011-03-05T14:58:00.029-05:00

One Block West is a seasonal restaurant and so our menu changes daily in response to what we find at the market and what our growers bring us. And what we get in the winter is root vegetables, lots and lots of root vegetables. And so we have become quite skilled at incorporating them into our menu, even into desserts such as Parsnip Crème Brûlée and Almond, Cranberry, and Sweet Potato Florentines. In wanting to pass along my love for root vegetables, I chose that as the topic for my first class of my new series of cooking classes. Here then are the recipes from my recent Root Vegetables class. I hope that you find them useful. If something is unclear, feel free to post a comment or send me a direct email and I will clarify it.

Céleri Rémoulade. This is my take on the French classic. Often in France, cooks grind the celery root with a Mouli, which gives a very soft and flaccid feel to the dish. I prefer to julienne the celery root which gives it a lot more texture. This salad is best prepared several hours ahead of time or even the day before to give the celery root a chance to soften. I love this slaw as a garnish for pulled pork. I love the mustardy quality of this dressing; feel free to modify to your taste.

2 pounds celery root, peeled and julienned
1 egg yolk
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Make the dressing by whisking the egg, lemon juice, vinegar, mustard, and salt together. Slowly drizzle in the olive oil while whisking, making a loose mayonnaise. Add the celery root and toss well. Adjust to taste. You could certainly add some fresh herbs to this for both color and flavor.

Parsnip Latkes. We make so many latkes at the restaurant. They make great bases on which to display other foods and more importantly, who doesn't love a good latke? Parsnips are our favorite right now, but we make latkes from almost all root vegetables including potatoes, carrots, celery root, and sweet potatoes. Hint: if you're using sweet potatoes, use a lower flame. The sugar in the potatoes wants to burn before the latke is cooked.

4 large parsnips
1/2 small onion
2 tablespoons minced parsley
2 tablespoons flour
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch black pepper
canola oil

Peel the parsnips and grate them using the coarse side of a box grater into a large bowl. Unlike potatoes, you do not need to squeeze the water out of the parsnips. Grate the onion into the bowl. Add the parsley, flour, egg, salt, and pepper. Mix well. Heat a sauté pan over medium high heat and film with oil. Drop a bit of the parsnip mixture into your pan and flatten into a pancake. A heaping tablespoon yields silver dollar size latkes; three tablespoons yields a 4-inch latke. Cook until golden brown on the bottom and flip. Finish cooking and remove to paper toweling. Sprinkle with kosher salt. Eat one and congratulate yourself on a job well done!

Turnip Bacon Purée. I don't understand why people frown on turnips so much. They're sweet and they're excellent anywhere from raw to puréed. I developed this dish as a silky accompaniment to roast heirloom pork. The sweetness of the turnips and the smokiness of the slab bacon meld deliciously with pork.

4 ounces slab bacon, in small dice
1 pound small turnips, peeled and diced
2 tablespoons heavy cream, optional
salt and pepper

Start cooking the diced bacon in a small sauce pan over medium flame to render some bacon grease, but do not cook the bacon through. Turn up the flame and add the turnips. Brown the turnips slightly. Then cover with water, reduce the flame to medium, and cook until the turnips are soft. Transfer to the food processor and purée. Add heavy cream if you like for richness (I did not do this in the class as I am lactose intolerant) and season to taste.

Fennel Orange Salad. I figure a lot of people have seen fennel in the grocery store and have no clue what to do with it. I wanted to show how friendly and easy this vegetable is. This salad combines oranges, fennel, roasted olives, and a touch of feta cheese.

1 large fennel bulb, julienned
2 tablespoons fennel greens, finely sliced
zest of one orange
3 seedless oranges, sectioned
1/2 cup roasted olives (recipe follows)
1/4 cup feta cheese crumbles
2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients in a bowl. Season to taste. I covered how to section citrus fruit some years ago. See this post if you are unfamiliar with how to do it.

Roasted Olives

1/2 cup mixed olives, pitted
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 pinch red pepper flakes
4-5 fresh rosemary needles, minced
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 pinch black pepper

Toss all ingredients and place on a sheet tray. Heat in a hot oven (400F) until sizzling, about 10 minutes. You can also do this on the stove top over a low flame (which is what I did in the class).

Bourbon Flambéed Sweet Potato Hash. This is a quick and fun take on hash that is wonderful with game and it sure wouldn't be bad for Thanksgiving either.

4 ounces slab bacon, diced
1 medium sweet potato, about a pound, diced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 ounce bourbon
1/2 cup sweetened dried cranberries
1/2 cup toasted pecans
salt and pepper to taste

Heat a sauté pan over high heat and add the bacon and sweet potatoes. Cook 2-3 minutes, stirring to keep from sticking. Add the onions and cook until translucent 2-3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook another minute. Add the bourbon and let it burn off. Check a sweet potato for doneness. If it needs to cook a bit more, add a couple tablespoons of water to the pan to help the sweet potatoe steam. When the sweet potatoes are done, add the cranberries and pecans, mix well and season to taste.

Seyval Blanc

2011-03-04T08:31:00.005-05:00

Note: this is an article that I have migrated from oneblockwest.com. It was orginally published in March 2008. I have updated it slightly.

Call it the Rodney Dangerfield of wine grapes. Although one of the most successfully grown grape varieties in the Eastern US, Ontario, and the UK today, Seyval Blanc is a grape that commands little respect, even among wine cognoscenti. Part of the issue is that it is a hybrid grape, a cross between an Old World wine grape (Vitis vinifera) and a native American grape (V. labrusca). V. labrusca rarely makes good wine and its hybrids are held in contempt by a large part of the wine growing and consuming world. Moreover, because it contains non-vinifera genes, Seyval Blanc does not meet the European Union standards for "quality wine" and therefore cannot be marketed in Europe proper.

Ironically, the grape came from Europe. French hybridizer Seyve-Villard (Bertille Seyve and Victor Villard) produced the Seyval cross in the early 20th century from hybrids Seibel 5656 and Seibel 4986, also known as Rayon d'Or. The most successful of Seyve-Villard's hybrids, Seyval Blanc is officially known as Seyve-Villard 5276. Many such hybrids were produced in response to the outbreak in Europe of an American pest, phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, a root louse), in an effort to create resistant vines by crossing resistant American grapes with so called noble or Old World grapes.

Despite the issues with the EU, the grape is gaining a growing following especially in colder, shorter growing season areas because it buds early, grows vigorously, ripens early, yields large clusters of medium-sized green berries, and is fairly resistant to low temperatures and to disease. Seyval Blanc produces wines of good acidity and in more northern climates, such as Ontario and the UK, the wines are crisp and exhibit hints of grapefruit. Some have likened these wines to those of Chablis. In our warmer climate here in Virginia, where the grapes can ripen longer, the wines are often fuller and a bit softer, and better to my taste.

Seyval is not without its challenges, however. For the grower, if the grapes are not extremely ripe, the acidity can get out of hand producing nearly undrinkable wine. And, its vigorous nature requires growers to remove canopy (to focus the plant on producing fruit rather than leaves and to allow the sun to reach and ripen the fruit) and to remove fruit in the vineyard (to help concentrate flavor in the remaining fruit). And care is needed to pick the grapes at maximum ripeness, but before they begin to rot, which is Seyval's habit.

Making wine from Seyval requires care as well. Seyval is not successful if fermented with the skins on, so the juice must be separated from the skins before fermentation. To preserve the fruity components, it helps to ferment the wine slowly at cool temperatures. Once the wine is fermented, the clear wine must be taken off the sediment (a process called racking) or the wine can develop undesirable flavors and odors. Although some producers age their wines in oak, I find that a wine that has seen nothing but stainless steel to be much more desirable.

With care, Seyval gives a finished wine that is crisp and dry with firm acidity, and hints of green apple, grapefruit, grass, hay, and sometimes honeydew melon. Think Sauvignon Blanc. The wine is generally light in body, moving to a medium body in warmer climates, with a greenish cast, sometimes going to a straw color.

Wines with higher acidity are very good food matches as the acidity both cleanses and refreshes the palate. Seyval Blanc is no exception: it works with the same foods as Gavi, Sancerre, Albariño, and crisp classic Sauvignon Blanc (not a tropical New Zealand one). While I often pair our local Linden Seyval with white fish, shellfish, and appetizers, it seems to be the one wine that I constantly recommend with our crab cakes.

I hope that you will try a Seyval in the near future, both to experience something new and to taste what could prove to be one of the most promising wines that we make in Virginia.

2011: March 1st

2011-03-01T23:27:00.017-05:00

Thanks for reading along in my journey to record what happens during a year at my restaurant. I post on the first and fifteenth of the month and you can find the entire series using the 2011 tag. This is the post for the period from February 16th to March 1st, 2011.

Spring is definitely coming and I am really excited! I can tell because it is no longer dark when we open for dinner at 5pm and the sun is riding higher in our south-facing windows as it makes its trip from left to right across the dining room. And I can tell because Beth has supplied us with the first gai lan (Chinese broccoli) and rapini of the year. I cannot tell you how refreshing it is, after having worked with little other than root vegetables—no matter how delicious—all winter, to finally, finally, finally have something beautiful and green to work with. And out on the deck, our chives and Sweet Williams are up, teasing us with memories of the beautiful blossoms that went onto our plates last year. I posted a photo of the chives earlier today, so excited was I to finally see some tangible evidence of spring.

Yet another sign of spring is that Yellow Perch are starting their spawning runs from the Chesapeake Bay up into the creeks. We put the perch on the menu this weekend and because they are so small, we had to serve them headed and gutted, on the backbone. Customers in general hate the idea of bones in fish and so the perch haven't sold well. It's a shame really because not only are these little local fish very tasty, but they have better flavor and texture when cooked on the bone. The local fishery seems to be well managed and to help keep it that way, I always insist on getting the whole fish with their tags to ensure that they have been legally harvested. No harvest tag, no buy.

After having our worst month ever in the history of the restaurant in January, business was up significantly over last year in February, probably as a result of the unseasonably warm and nice weather and lack of snow. It really is quite amazing how much impact weather has on this business.

After talking about the need for revamping the lunch menu for at least the last couple of updates, we finally got around to it. We killed one pasta dish because it was not selling. Although it was a staff favorite, customers did not order it. We have two hypotheses, the first being that it had a red sauce and customers go to Italian restaurants if they want red sauce. The second hypothesis is that it was just too healthy in comparison to the other pastas that are loaded with cream. Although customers say they want to eat healthy, we can see from our sales numbers that they gravitate to the less healthy dishes, given a choice.

But bottom line, who knows why this pasta didn't sell? In this business, you get used to it. Things that you expect to sell do not, and dishes you think will be sleepers sometimes take off. Still, we like to do the post mortem on failed dishes to help us understand where our menu needs to go.

And we reformulated two dishes in this menu revision. We have had a Grilled Portabella Sandwich on the menu for years, and although its devotees rave about how much they like it, it never has sold well enough to justify its place on the menu. We are guessing that the word "sandwich" is the deal killer. There are at least ten sandwich shops within two blocks of the restaurant and customers likely do not come here for sandwiches. So all the things that used to go into a sandwich—grilled portabellas, roasted red pepper, sun-dried tomatoes, red onions, arugula, and goat cheese—now go into a salad.

The other dish we revised was our fish tacos, which are loved by everyone who orders them. And even though we do sell a lot, we noticed that nobody was eating the corn tortillas on which we served the fish: we, and I suspect most restaurants, check what goes into the trash cans. So we did an informal dining room survey. Half say they don't like corn tortillas and half say that tacos are too messy to eat. So, we have reformulated the dish as a fish taco salad in which the tortillas are cut into strips and deep fried. That should eliminate both objections. Time will tell.

Now that the spring cleaning is done on the menu, we are working on both the wine list and the dining room. It is wine portfolio tasting season for the next 8-10 weeks. All our distributors will be holding big tastings so that we restaurants can gather ideas for our winelists. Most restaurants refurbish their wine lists to bring on summer patio wines in the May time frame and we're no exception. I know of 8 of these tastings over the next few weeks and I will probably attend four or five. Other vendors do the same thing. This time of year there are numerous kitchenware, tabletop, and food shows, all competing for our time. Although they can be a pain to attend, they are valuable events at which to see new ideas.

And speaking of new ideas, the dining room is getting a makeover. It has already started, in fact, with a bit of reorganization and removal of clutter. Although the changes are already very noticeable, they are nothing compared to what the end result will be in a few months. We will make the changes as we go, without closing. The dining room is already less ponderous and a good bit lighter in feeling. It really is amazing what just a few small tweaks can do. The current decor is about five years old; it is high time for a change. I'm really looking forward to the makeover. It will feel like a totally different restaurant.

My cooking classes start tomorrow and I am looking forward to teaching them. I relish any excuse to get out of the restaurant (the classes are being held in a friend's catering kitchen) and I love to work with people on cooking. More news on the classes in my next post on the 15th. Until then, thanks once again for reading along.

Harbinger

2011-03-01T15:13:00.004-05:00

From the flower pot on our deck, the first chives of the season, a fitting photo for the first day of March.

Wellness Festival Recipes

2011-02-26T17:04:00.022-05:00

Today, I was invited to give a demonstration of some healthy recipes at the Community Wellness Festival. My talk/demo today hit the same three points that I made last year when I cooked at the festival: 1. Include more fresh/raw vegetables in your diet. 2. Make smart ingredient choices without sacrificing flavor and texture. 3. Get most of your protein from beans, legumes, and fish.

First up was a raw salad of fennel and oranges: healthy for you, tasty, and very crunchy. Second was a hash of sweet potatoes with dried cranberries and pecans, showcasing the carotenes and potassium of sweet potatoes, along with the goodness of fruit and nuts. Finally was a salsa, bright and tasty, that I incorporated into a bean salad with Sea Island red peas and that I put into a whole wheat wrap with pan-roasted catfish, for a tasty and healthy take on a fish taco.

Fennel Orange Salad. I figure a lot of people have seen fennel in the grocery store and have no clue what to do with it. I wanted to show how friendly and easy this vegetable is. This salad combines oranges, fennel, roasted olives, and a touch of feta cheese.

1 large fennel bulb, julienned
2 tablespoons fennel greens, finely sliced
zest of one orange
3 seedless oranges, sectioned
1/2 cup roasted olives (recipe follows)
1/4 cup feta cheese crumbles
2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients in a bowl. Season to taste. I covered how to section citrus fruit some years ago. See this post if you are unfamiliar with how to do it.

Roasted Olives

1/2 cup mixed olives, pitted
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 pinch red pepper flakes
4-5 fresh rosemary needles, minced
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 pinch black pepper

Toss all ingredients and place on a sheet tray. Heat in a hot oven (400F) until sizzling, about 10 minutes.

Bourbon Flambéed Sweet Potato Hash. This is a quick and fun take on hash. I often make this with slab bacon at the restaurant, but omitted the bacon given the health-oriented nature of today's presentation. Sweet potatoes are fairly nutrient dense and are a reasonable choice instead of standard potatoes, but they do have a fairly high glycemic index.

1 medium sweet potato, about a pound, diced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 ounce bourbon
1/2 cup sweetened dried cranberries
1/2 cup toasted pecans
salt and pepper to taste

Heat a saute pan over high heat and add the sweet potatoes. Cook 2-3 minutes, stirring to keep from sticking. Add the onions and cook until translucent 2-3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook another minute. Add the bourbon and let it burn off. Check a sweet potato for doneness. If it needs to cook a bit more, add a couple tablespoons of water to the pan to help the sweet potatoe steam. When the sweet potatoes are done, add the cranberries and pecans, mix well and season to taste.

Basic Grape Tomato Salsa. I introduced this because every seems to love salsa and despite it being simple to make, nobody seems to make it at home, relying instead on terrible store-bought salsa. I also wanted to highlight salsa as a great means of introducing flavor and texture to dishes, without adding calories.

1 pint grape tomatoes, halved
1/2 small red onion, finely diced
3 green onions, sliced
2 tablespoons minced cilantro
2 garlic cloves, minced
juice of one lime to taste
1 small hot pepper in fine dice to taste
salt to taste

Mix the tomatoes, onions, cilantro and garlic. Add lime juice, hot pepper and salt to taste.

For ideas of what to do with salsa, I cooked a small catfish filet and put it in a whole wheat wrap with lettuce, cilantro, and salsa for a quick and healthy take on a fish taco. And I mixed salsa with cooked beans, in this case, Sea Island red peas, a heritage pea from Georgia (see photo below). You can use any canned or cooked bean for a quick bean salad.

Stock Clarification Techniques

2011-02-25T08:39:00.002-05:00

I like to try out new techniques in the kitchen every once in a while to see how they might be useful in my repertoire. Cooking is a continual process of learning for me; if I’m not learning, why am I in the kitchen? Among the new techniques that I have tried is a method for clarifying stocks into consommés. I conducted a small series of experiments over the last year to compare the new technique to the standard technique.

Because my grounding is solidly classical, I have heretofore made my consommés using a protein fining technique, adding raw egg whites or raw chicken breast to cold stock and gently heating it. As the raw protein coagulates (cooks), it traps the impurities from the stock and with reasonable care, a clear consommé emerges after filtering the “raft” of solid protein from the liquid.

Some years ago, I learned of a technique called ice filtration (or gelatin clarification) via the famous British chef Heston Blumenthal. I doubt that he invented the technique, but he is certainly responsible for bringing it to my attention and that of chefs all over the world. The technique involves letting a stock gel (either from naturally occurring gelatin or by adding more gelatin), then freezing the gel, and then letting the gel melt very slowly such that the clear liquid separates from the gelatin matrix which holds the impurities in suspension. There is no doubt that this technique is high on cool factor; it is really quite amazing to see it in action.

Both techniques achieve the desired result of a clear liquid, but there are some significant procedural differences and clearly perceptible differences in the resulting consommé.

First the technical differences. The ice filtration technique takes almost no effort on the part of the cook, a clear win for the novel technique. But the process of chilling the stock, freezing it, and letting it thaw at refrigerator temperatures takes seemingly forever, a minimum of 48 hours for a reasonable amount of consommé. And getting the frozen stock to thaw in a reasonable amount of time involves freezing it in thin sheets; this takes a lot of both refrigerator and freezer space, space that many restaurants may not have. That’s two wins for the standard technique to one for the new technique.

Now for the qualitative factors. The ice filtration technique appears to clarify the stock slightly better than the standard method based on my observation in the kitchen. Done correctly, ice filtration gives crystal clear consommé every time; sometimes it is necessary to clarify a stock a second time using the standard technique. That’s two wins apiece, a draw so far.

My experiments concluded by tasting consommés made from the same stock using the two techniques, side-by-side and blind. The ice filtration consommé has a water-like body: all the gelatin is gone from the final product. The standard consommé has a weight to it, a silkiness that the gelatin imparts, not unlike the body that glycerin gives a wine made from ripe grapes. And I find that the ice filtration consommé tastes weaker than the standard consommé. It may be that the gelatin increases my perception of flavor; in any case, I clearly prefer the standard consommé over the ice filtration consommé every time during blind tasting. On my score card, that’s four wins for the old method to two for the new. Your mileage may vary.

Chef's Tasting

2011-02-19T09:56:00.045-05:00

We just did a tasting for Phil and Deirdre Armstrong of Harvest Thyme Herb Farm in Staunton, VA, suppliers of herbs and vegetables to fine restaurants in the Staunton and Charlottesville area, as well as fellow bloggers. We wish we lived closer together so that we could work together.

Gravlax of Brook Trout. I'm a sucker for all kinds of cured and smoked fish, so when I got a delivery of way too many brookies, I decided to do a traditional salmon cure on some of them, hence the appropriation of the term gravlax. Garnishes are caperberries, dilled sour cream, red ribbon (aka blood) sorrel from the flats growing in our kitchen, and chervil which overwintered outside on the deck. I especially like the deep red color that the overwintered chervil takes on.

The crispy brown bits are parsnip crisps, something that we arrived at serendipitously. I love to serve smoked fish with latkes and we have been doing a lot of parnsip latkes lately. The night before the tasting, one of the cooks made a latke that was too big to fit onto the komatsuna garnish that I had already laid out on a plate, so I had him cut the latke down with a round cutter. That left all the crispy edge bits on the cutting board for chef snackies. The crispy edge bits were so good that we decided to do all crispy bits for the tasting.

Guinea Breast. We had a couple of guinea breasts laying around with no other use in mind, so we did a little ghetto sous vide on them and served them in a bowl of Surry sausage jus, with blanched Kentucky Wonder bean sprouts. Who knew you could eat baby bean plants? I sure as hell didn't think of it until Billie Clifton of Sunflower Cottage, our local microgreen supplier, brought some in a couple weeks back. To answer your question, they taste just like green beans. Go figure.

Porcini Carolina Gold Risotto with Wild Mushrooms, Guanciale, and Sage. We just had to do a wild mushroom course because we have wild mushrooms coming out of our ears now. It's been a great winter season for both black trumpets and hedgehogs. This is a really simple risotto of Anson Mills Carolina Gold rice, dried porcini, fresh sage from my home garden, and spectacular guanciale from La Quercia in Iowa. This is the last of my supply from La Quercia but even as good as it is, I'm looking forward to trying the guanciale from the home team in Manakin, VA, Olli Salumeria Americana. How cool is it to have two great suppliers of guanciale?

Garnishes are black trumpet mushrooms, hedgehog mushrooms, prosciutto crsips, fresh sage, and a cheese crisp made from porcini powder and pecorino Sardo. What you don't see in the photo is the barely poached quail egg beneath the robe of risotto. I love this trick. The egg yolk really enriches the risotto.

Pork Confit with Polenta Poblano Spoonbread and Salsa Verde. Ordinarily we don't do tomatillos out of season, but they were already in house from a very specific tasting that we did last weekend. I like to think of this dish as something you would get if your Southern grandma were of Mexican descent. It combines Southern classics spoonbread and fried green tomatoes with poblanos and salsa verde. And the crispy pork confit evokes carnitas, but the flavor is different because we used some orange zest and cognac in seasoning the pork before we cured it.

So what you see on the plate from left to right is a swoosh of salsa verde (poblanos, onions, tomatillos, cilantro, garlic), a fried green tomatillo, crispy pork confit threads, pimentón sauce (the orange sauce), and a cube of pork confit sitting on top of the spoonbread (leftover polenta, roasted poblano purée, cream, and eggs).

Bestilla of Border Springs Lamb. We get lambs in on a regular basis and tend to use the primary cuts (racks, loin chops, and legs) first. Then we end up with a lot of tiny foreshanks and necks in freezer after several months. That's when I get to braising, because braising is my favorite cooking technique and the neck and shank meat is the best meat on the lamb. This time, Craig's wonderful lamb ended up in a classic Moroccan tagine, a stew redolent of spices. I have made hundreds of tagines in my career and this was one of the best; I'm really honing in on just about the perfect spicing to showcase the lamb without overwhelming it. After braising, the lamb gets separated from the vegetables and the sauce. The lamb gets pulled and mixed back with the vegetables and the defatted and reduced sauce.

I wanted to showcase this beautiful pulled lamb, so I came pretty quickly to a classic bestilla. Rather than scramble eggs into the filling in the classic manner, I packed the pastries with lamb and buried a raw quail egg in the center, which then baked into a solid egg in the oven. We generally accompany our lamb tagine with chizu, a spicy carrot slaw. I wanted to use the chizu as a sauce and so we made a vinaigrette of it like we do with kimchee à la David Chang of Momofuku. Because of the high water content in the carrots, we had to use a touch of xanthan to bind the water and keep the vinaigrette from bleeding. The other sauce is a mixture of ras al hanout (an Arab spice mix) and Greek yogurt.

The salad garnish we called a winter salad. It consists of everything green that we could find, dressed with a preserved lemon vinaigrette. From what I remember, the salad contains brussels sprouts petals, tiny broccoli leaves, micro arugula, micro bulls blood beets, and chervil.

White Chocolate Goat Cheese Cheesecake with Sweet Potato, Almond, and Cranberry Florentine. I wanted to use sweet potatoes in the dessert course and it struck me to substitute them for the candied orange peel in a classic florentine, a crunchy cookie containing nuts and candied fruit glued together with honey, cream, and sugar. Florentines are often coated or drizzled with chocolate. We coated ours entirely with white chocolate and then used the Florentine as a crust for a white chocolate and goat cheese cheesecake. I've made hundreds if not thousands of cheesecakes in my life, but never with goat cheese, although that seems a pretty obvious thing to do. I enjoyed the goat cheese flavor; it reminded me of a panna cotta made with yogurt in which the acidity of the cheese/yogurt plays off the sugar to give a well balanced end result. Garnish is a drizzle of blueberry crème anglaise.

2011: February 15th

2011-02-15T08:14:00.014-05:00

As I sit here writing this, I am extremely tired and physically sore from all the cooking that we did over the long Valentine’s Day weekend, which culminated in outstanding fashion with two full turns of the dining room last evening. Turns indicate how many times a table has been seated. Two turns means that we seated every table twice last night, an excellent thing. Had Valentine’s Day been a weekend night, we might have reseated some late tables for a third time. But as it was a Monday night, we only had lukewarm enthusiasm for our tables at 8pm and later. Can’t say that I blame people for that; we all had to work this morning.

As hard as last night was on the staff and me, Saturday night was far worse. Valentine’s Day is well scripted and flows quickly but naturally for us from long years of experience. The tables are seated at regular intervals (we set the times the tables will be seated for Valentine’s Day) and divided into two separate seatings so that the traffic, while intense, is spread out at manageable levels for the service staff and for the kitchen. Last night, we did two full turns of the restaurant spread out over five hours.

But by contrast, this past Saturday was a free-for-all. Customers reserved tables willy nilly and so we had the same number of customers on Saturday night as we did for Valentine’s Day, only we jammed that into about 3 and a half hours. Apparently it was like this at most restaurants on Saturday night. Every chef that I have spoken to about Saturday night has used the same word to describe it, “Brutal.” Brutal though it was, these kinds of nights are what we live for in this business. We love to be busy and we love to be challenged and we love knowing that we can still deliver the goods even when seemingly all hell is breaking lose.

The kitchen on one of these busy nights is a mad house. It is bright, it is noisy, it is hot, and it is frantically busy. The dish machine is roaring and filling the kitchen with steam—I don’t have a luxury kitchen with a separate dish pit; the dish line is right behind the plating counter which is right behind the hot line: seven feet separate the line cooks from the dish machine and its belches of steam. The radio is blaring, but none of us hear it. The exhaust fan on the hood makes it nearly impossible to hear when you are under it, so we are yelling to be heard. The expediter—the person in charge of calling tickets, pacing the line, and picking up food—stands 8 feet from the end of the plating counter which is another 10 feet from the farthest line cook and is yelling to be heard all the way down the line.

The heat in the kitchen, while not nearly so bad as in the summer, was unusually high because of the abnormally warm weather we have been having. To make up for the air that the exhaust fan is venting from the kitchen, a separate fan blows outside air back in. We’ve been used to air temps below freezing during dinner; to have 50-something degree air coming back into the kitchen in February made it seem a bit summerlike. But it definitely was not like in the summer when the 90-degree makeup air is the coolest thing in the kitchen. No, far from it. But that’s a tale for the summer and we’ll get to it soon enough.

And busy! It was crazy! The dishwasher is running racks of dishes as fast as he can to keep the dish table clear so that the servers and assistants have room to dump more dirty dishes. And so we have enough china, silverware, and glassware to handle all these people. In doing two full turns of the dining room, we used some of the dishes five and six times. The servers and assistants are nearly running through the kitchen dropping checks, picking up food, telling the expediter when they need the next course of food for a particular table. And the cooks, we’re multitasking like we invented multitasking, although the servers are likely out-multitasking us for we get to stand in one place, while they have to be seemingly everywhere at once.

At one point during last night’s service, the kitchen had about a five-minute break between seatings—and I feel bad for the servers here because there are no breaks in the front of the house. I took advantage of this to go out the kitchen door into the server station to get my first glass of cold water in two hours. Unless you are in the business, you cannot imagine the abrupt transition from the kitchen to the dining room.

The heat, the belching steam, the blinding fluorescent lights, the yelling cooks, the blaring radio, the screaming exhaust fan, and the chaos of everyone working at breakneck speed just stops dead the second you walk out the kitchen door. The contrast is such that you might have well been dropped on another planet. The dining room is dimly lit, comfortable, and quiet! You hear the soothing sounds of the guitarist strumming away, ice tinkling in glasses, and people chatting and laughing. And the servers are walking as if they had all the time in the world.

To understand that we are at war behind the kitchen door and that our customers a few feet away are oblivious to it is to understand the great performance that we and all restaurants put on each and every service.

As I was finishing the last posting at the first of the month, I learned that a long-time customer and supporter of the restaurant had passed away. Doug Adams died the first of the month. Doug sent back more food than any other customer in the history of the restaurant! He wanted things just so and if they were not just so, back the food came. He was in earlier years prone to try foods that he had never had before—softshell crabs come to mind—and if he didn’t like that food, back it came. But we loved him anyway. He was a good man, a good friend to a vast number of people, a great supporter of the restaurant, a prominent man in our community and we will miss him. Doug, wherever you are, don’t order the softshells!

We also did a couple of tastings in the last two weeks, the most intricate of which was a 9-course tasting on Saturday night before the Super Bowl. We took our cue from the time of the year and themed the dinner “Super Bowl Foods.” We drew up a list of commonly served foods at Super Bowl parties and then worked out how we could pun each one or alter it in some totally unexpected way. We had a blast and the customers loved the dinner. An example course is the Buffalo Winngs for which I boned out a turkey wing, stuffed it with braised bison short rib, and formed it into a classic galantine which we browned and served sliced with a highly reduced turkey glace.

One final example is the dish you see in the photo, the dish that we called Popcorn Shrimp. The customer who booked the dinner told me that his wife loves blackened scallops. We wanted a way to serve her scallops that would both fit in with our theme and a way that we could sneak the scallops onto the menu under her radar. We cut very large scallops into shrimp shapes, attached a shrimp tail, and hid the scallop under tempura batter. We served this with a bit of a spicy sauce made from our house-made Cajun spice mix and a bowl of delightful Cajun-spiced popcorn. As fun as this scallop was to do and to eat, I think the popcorn upstaged it. It was really good!

Last Monday, in preparation for launching our cooking classes, Michelle and I did a photoshoot and interview with the Winchester Star, the article to be published later this week. And then Tuesday, I spoke at Career Day for the 8th graders at my youngest daughter’s school. These two extracurricular events outside the restaurant were enough to get me behind schedule heading into the psycho-busy Valentine’s weekend. It was heads down after that trying to get back on track. The worst day of the week was probably Thursday when we received truck after truck after truck after truck all day long, just to get enough food, drink, and supplies in house to get through the weekend.

In the midst of all this, we finished testing applicants to replace Chris, who leaves at the end of the month. After interviewing candidates, we bring them into the kitchen to work with us for a few hours. We can’t tell everything in that short period but we can assess basic knife skills, general kitchen knowledge, cleanliness, attention to detail, and speed. After testing five candidates, we narrowed the choice to two and started checking references on both of them. And I finally hired Travis, a relatively inexperienced young man with workable skills, but with a seemingly insatiable appetite for the food business and creativity. It is always that self-drive and sheer passion in creating great things with food that separate one candidate from the pack. Travis will now train with Chris for the remainder of Chris’ stay with us.

I had a bit of a scare last week. On Thursday right before Valentine's Day, my seafood sales rep informed me that my delivery on the 13th would be the last for his company—they decided to close the doors on their Northern Virginia operation. I thought that this was going to leave me in a real bind for the next week at least until I could formulate a backup strategy. But it’s nothing new. This is the third seafood company in seven years to go out of business on me. In a bizarre kind of way, I guess you could say that I am used to it. Fortunately, my sales rep moved to another seafood company and convinced management there to start serving the high end restaurants in this part of the world.

In closing, signs of spring are there if you look for them. Yesterday I took full advantage of the gorgeous and unseasonable weather to prune the roses at the restaurant. They never went fully dormant this year and a couple were sending out leaf buds. I wanted to prune them to retard their growth in case the weather turns severely cold over the next few weeks. I don't want any cold damage. These roses are old friends by now and I had to make some hard cuts this year, removing (by plan) some of the old canes that have supplied such beautiful blooms in the past so that there is room for the newer canes to come on and supply us with blooms for the next few years.

In addition to bud break on my roses, we are getting fresh broccoli, arugula, spinach, and rapini from local growers. And hopefully with the longer days and warmer weather, the Chinese broccoli, gai lan, will be here next week. Also the first shad roe hit the market this week though I won't buy any for a couple of weeks until the price moderates. And my mushroom guy says the first crop of morels from California should be harvested around March 1st. So until then, thanks again for reading along.