Chef's Table

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

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

Gravlax

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

Pork Confit Summer Posole

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

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:

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


2. 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.


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


4. 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

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

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.