Chef's Tasting

Here's a quick synopsis of a menu that we had fun with.


Three Citrus Shrimp Seviche with Chipotle-Lime Cancha

Three Citrus Shrimp Seviche with Chipotle-Lime Cancha. With this dish, we are trying to will spring here. Unfortunately, it's still cold and not quite seviche weather, but a guy can dream, right? Shrimp, three colors of sweet peppers, celery, red onions, green onions, and cilantro, spiced with chipotle, garlic, and cumin, along with the zest and juice of Meyer lemons, blood oranges, and limes. The blood oranges and Meyer lemons don't have enough acidity to make me happy, so we ended up with about three times as much lime juice to get the acidity where it needs to be. The cancha is a toasted dried corn from Peru tossed in a chipotle-lime zest butter; it supplies great texture to the seviche.

Bánh Mì, Our Favorite Sandwich

Bánh Mì. I'm not kidding when I say we love these sandwiches. Thank you Vietnam for one of our most favorite chef snacks of all time! We most often make bánh mì when I have lots of meat scraps from butchering and I get in the mood to make some sausage. This sausage I made from pork belly, pork rack trimmings and cap, rabbit hearts, and rabbit livers. The seasonings are kaffir lime, fish sauce, black pepper, lots of garlic, and red chile flakes. Garnishes are a tangy slaw, nước chắm, slabs of pickling cucumber, carrot threads, and cilantro.

Allspice-Smoked Pork Terrine; "Pickle and Mustard"

Allspice-Smoked Pork Terrine; "Pickle and Mustard". Let me just say up front that I don't like this presentation at all, but we had 60 seconds to get it on the plate, photographed, and on its way to the dining room. There are two cubes of pork terrine that we skewered and smoked over allspice berries, just to see what the hell would happen. We knew the terrine would really take the smoke because it is high in pork liver content and the fat in the liver really binds the smoke. The flavor of the smoke starts a bit herbaceous (infer from that what you will) and finishes a touch floral. There was definitely a hint of je n'sais quoi. The "pickle and mustard" is a bit of a pun in that we almost always serve charcuterie with whole grain mustard and cornichons, but this time, with a pickled mustard plant.

Balsamic-Braised Merino Lamb Spareribs; Risotto Milanese; Fave

Balsamic-Braised Merino Lamb Spareribs; Risotto Milanese; Fave. We're playing with a new high altitude (above the cloud line) Merino lamb from New Zealand and putting it through the paces to see what it is best suited for. Here the spareribs are braised with balsamic vinegar, chilled, and grilled and plated atop a risotto milanese and topped with fresh fava beans. This new lamb is very silky in texture, very fine grained, and very mild.

Carrot-Ginger-Polenta Tatin with Sambuca Crème Anglaise

Carrot-Ginger-Polenta Tatin with Sambuca Crème Anglaise. Dessert is not something that a bunch of line cooks really thinks about, gives a damn about, or even, really wants to eat. So, we end up with more savory desserts without a whole lot of sugar. Somehow, Tarte Tatin popped up during menu discussions only to be followed by "we don't have any fruit" and my reminding the guys that there are lots of vegetables we can treat as fruits for this purpose. Carrots popped up, and then ginger to bring a freshness to the cake, then polenta to give it some mouthfeel, and finally Sambuca as a complementary flavor. The result: customers and cooks alike loved it.

Vegetarian Wine Dinner

Each August, we hold our annual Harvest Dinner to celebrate the hard work of Beth and Gene Nowak at Mayfair Farm. Beth and Gene supply the vast majority of produce to the restaurant and this is our way of saying "Thank you!" for all that they do for us and for our community. The dinner is made, as much as is feasible, exclusively from products from their farm. And because they produce no meat, the dinner is vegetarian.

This year, our dinner was almost entirely vegan although that wasn't a criterion in designing the menu. It was an artifact of our taking a tour through Asia with our dishes. This was our seventh Harvest Dinner and after working with the same vegetables and fruits each August with the same American/Western European mindset, we needed to do something entirely different. And so we embarked on a tour of Asia.



Melon Soup with Lumpia

Filipino Melon Soup with Lumpia. The soup is made from cantaloupe and cucumber and seasoned with a few aromatics and a touch of chile. The lumpia are filled with a mixture of red and green cabbage, onions, green onions, and carrots seasoned with soy sauce.



Vegetable Satay with Peanut Sauce

Vegetable Satay with Peanut Sauce. We marinated strips of eggplants, yellow squash, and green squash in soy sauce and garlic, then grilled them. When cool, we threaded them on skewers in the manner of satay. The plate is finished with a peanut sauce (natural peanut butter, hot water, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sambal oelek, palm sugar, and a lot of lime juice to balance).

Building the Eggplant Bánh Mì

Eggplant Bánh Mì

Grilled Eggplant Bánh Mì. We decided since we were doing tasting portions for a crowd to build our bánh mì on grilled focaccia for ease of handling. The large eggplants were sliced; marinated in a slurry of kaffir lime, Thai basil, cilantro, ginger, and garlic; then grilled. We have developed our own style of dressing bánh mì: we first brush the bread with the same slurry that we marinated the eggplant in and then we drizzle the bread with a sweet and spicy chile sauce that we make in house. The layers are pretty traditional: cucumbers, lots of cilantro, and carrots. We don't pickle our carrots in any way.



Soba

Soba. One of the beautiful things that we got from Beth was a haul of cheese pimientos, red peppers so called because pre-annato they were used to color orange cheese. Another was some really pretty broccoli. For some reason, they both triggered visions of soba in my head. So here we have buckwheat noodles, green onions, peanuts, broccoli, cheese pimientos, and white sesame seeds in a dressing of rice vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and sesame oil.

Green Vegetable Curry on Thai Fried Rice Cake

Green Thai Curry. Curries are never beautiful dishes, but they are so fragrant and so delicious. We made a classic Thai fried rice by first frying a shallot-cilantro-Thai basil paste in oil and then frying the vegetables and rice. Then we added egg to the cool fried rice and made rice cakes from that, cakes that we subsequently re-fried. On top is a curry of a eggplant, squash, the broccoli stems from making the soba, yellow peppers, and cherry tomatoes. The curry paste we made very heavy on kaffir lime both for color and for fragrance. We finished the curry with huge handfuls of cilantro and Thai basil leaves. The tricky part of this dish, because it is vegetarian, was getting the flavor just right without the use of fish sauce.

Plum Clafoutis

Plum Clafoutis. This is another in a series of experiments in making gluten- and dairy-free desserts. To give our clafoutis an Asian feel, we made it with rice flour and coconut milk. Quite delicious if I do say so myself and really wonderful when paired with an Orvieto Amabile.