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!
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
2011: June 1st
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Wine and Vinegar
I was surfing the web in a spare moment this morning and stumbled upon this old myth (from a very respectable source, alas):
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.
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.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
2011: May 15th
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.
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.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
2011: May 1st
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.
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.
Friday, April 15, 2011
2011: April 15th
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.
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.
Friday, April 1, 2011
2011: April 1st
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.
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.
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