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Hello everyone!

There is a phenomenon in the restaurant business called the "signature dish." People call up a restaurant they've never been to before and ask: "What is is your signature dish?" and if they meet with confused silence, they follow with: "I mean, what is your house specialty?"

It's an innocent and honest question. It's simply a stumbling way for a new guest to get a bead on an unfamiliar restaurant. The thing a restaurant brags about tends to define them, be it a Big Mac or a 52- ounce ribeye or a fried shrimp sandwich.

The answer can be as varied as Franz Sacher's sachertorte or the Hotel Tatin's tarte tatin, or Barry and Susan Wine's beggar's purse at the Quilted Giraffe or more recently, Gordon Ramsey and his cappuccino of white beans and grated truffles or Daniel Boulud's crisp paupiettes of sea bass in Barolo sauce. Thomas Keller of the French Laundry and Per Se did it a really smart way. He turned a simple (but impossible-for-mortals-to-make) amuse bouche into a signature item. The cornet, an ice cream cone-shaped pastry filled with salmon tartare and caviar, gets the question of "signature" out of the way before anyone orders a thing, leaving Keller a clean palette for invention for every other course of his many-splendored menus.

Woe to those restaurateurs who cannot answer the "house specialty"
question succinctly. A chef will be asked by the media, by advertising outlets and by guide book "reviewers" to sum up his cuisine in two dishes or less. This question deviled Sophie for decades, until the twilight of her career when she realized that she was so comfortable with a few appetizers, entrees and desserts that she'd been making for 30 years that she didn't really need to change them. It suited her guests, who could look forward to seeing a much- loved dish again and again, and it suited Sophie at that point in her career, because it gave her a constant base of dishes to prepare on a regular basis. That being established, she could add a new invention when she felt like it, or draw from a list of established favorites if that better suited her mood.

For Paul, who has spent a lifetime in the restaurant but less than a decade with free reign over the stoves, the equation is a little different. Every day for him is like being a gourmand who hasn't had the chance to entertain for ages. He goes to the market and wants to buy everything that looks good. Then he wants to make everything that's been brewing in his fevered imagination. The result is a dinner party for four where 10 different dishes are offered. The next night the guests come back for more, and there are 10 new dishes.
It's very exciting, but it's a little hard to establish continuity.
It's why Chez Sophie's dinner menu changes nearly every day. Paul doesn't like to repeat himself.

So what is Paul's specialty of the house? Even Cheryl, who has been attacking this question on her husband's behalf for nearly a decade professionally and more than two decades personally, can't answer this question with less than a 45-word family history. The problem
is: "Menu changes daily based on the availability of fresh ingredients and the inspiration of the chef." That's not an easy formula to promote in a brochure or a website. Paul's cuisine is ever- evolving. (Or, more cynically, he's too attention-deficit-disordered to commit to any one dish long enough for it to get famous.) No one expects Charlie Trotter to make the same dish over and over, but it does make it hard to figure out how to market moving-target cuisine.
"Can't you just keep one thing on the menu long enough for it to get really popular? What about the veal chop with mango and Chinese black vinegar? What about the way you did pheasant with port and cream for a few consecutive weeks last April? People went crazy for those.
Can't we keep them around long enough to market them?"

Paul has an incredible amount of respect and love for his mother and for those dishes that she created or adapted to make her own over the course of her career. When he took the stoves after her death, he continued to do many of her "signature dishes" so faithfully that many longtime customers did not realize she was no longer in the kitchen. But seven years after her death, he has quietly and creatively reinvented the menu again and again in ways that his mother never dreamed of. (We suspect that if she had lived longer, Sophie would have enjoyed eating and debating her son's inventions.)

Sophie's duck with apricot and green peppercorns was undeniably brilliant, but in the last year, Paul has offered more than a dozen different duck breast preparations, many of them truly stunning. Few have remained on the menu for more than a few weeks, no matter how extraordinary they were or how much the customers begged for an encore. Been there, done that.

Cheryl has gone along quietly with most of this invention, with one real exception. She constantly kvetches, bitches, moans and whines that for the past few months, Paul has refused to do his mother's veal scallopine cooked in cream and lemon, or as his mother called it, escalopes de veau à la crème. This is a ridiculously simple, but divine creation in which veal cutlets are pounded silly, breaded, sautéed, then simmered in heavy cream and fresh lemon juice until you could chew them without dentures. It is rich beyond measure and yet tart, light and yet hearty, rich and yet refreshing. People who last ate it 30 years ago will come to town dreaming of it and nothing else. Waiters intercept the veal scallopine sauté pans on the way to the dishwasher, eager to sop a piece of bread in the residual sauce.

It is universally appealing, with a few rare exceptions: it doesn't sell very well to people who don't eat "food with faces" or who don't eat "baby" animals on principle. It's not a dish for the lactose intolerant, because the veal must be cooked in the cream and cannot be prepared "sauce on side." It's much loved by, but not particularly good for, people who have been advised to monitor and limit their cholesterol intake. It is adored by almost all children except for the teenager three years ago who was led to believe that veal Parmesan is the only veal dish that exists and was therefore shocked and dismayed when the veal with cream and lemon showed up with cream on it.

No matter how many weeks or months it has been since Paul last pounded the veal, people come in regularly, bat their eyelashes alluringly and flirt with the waiter to see if they can access what they imagine is a "secret stock" of veal scallopine that we might be holding in reserve for special people.

Paul has done many things over the last 21 years to make his wife happy, but this week he's really sacrificing: he's not only putting Sophie's veal scallopine back on the menu, he's making it the Pink Plate Special. This means a lot of boring meat pounding for our dear chef, but we suspect it means making a lot of customers (who may have feared that Paul had given up on his mother's "specialty"
indefinitely) happy again.

The Pink Plate is a weekly prix fixe special we offer on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The Pink Plate is a $32 per person three-course special, including your choice of soup or salad, the featured entree, two selections from our cheese board or one of a couple of featured desserts and coffee, tea or espresso.

We've started booking Valentine's Day, Thursday Feb. 14, and we thought we'd give you a brief outline of what we have planned. We'll be offering an elegant, five-course, $75 per person prix fixe menu, replete with oysters, chocolate, foie gras and all of the other most romantic foods in the world.

Skidmore graduation weekend has also started to book heavily. We'll
be offering an elegant, four-course, $70 per person prix fixe menu,
and will be serving the Friday of Skidmore Graduation weekend from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. by reservation. On the Saturday, we will extend brunch to 3:30 pm. and start serving the prix fixe dinner at 5:30.

The brunch menu this Saturday and Sunday will feature orange-herb roasted Cornish game hen ($15); spinach. mushroom and Gruyère cheesecake with mixed greens ($14); moules frites ($14) and mixed greens with oven-roasted fingerling potatoes ($16). Appetizer specials include a crabcake with lemon caper mayonnaise ($16); a salad of mixed baby greens tossed in a red wine vinaigrette ($7); escargots de Bourgogne ($11) and soup of the day ($8).

The brunch specials run from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. The complete menu,
offered from 7 to 2 p.m., includes a Continental assortment of
muffins, pastries, fruit, yogurt, frittata etcetera for $9;
omelettes ($10 to $12); pancakes du jour ($10); the All in One, which includes 2 eggs any style, homefries, toast and sausage or bacon ($10); waffles with sweet cream butter and local maple syrup ($10); and Irish steel-cut oatmeal ($8).

Our artist-in-residence, jazz pianist Cole Broderick, plays the baby grand piano from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday Cole also plays the baby grand Tuesday and Friday night (barring special events that preclude live music.) Cole, who won a Billboard Critic's Choice Award for his 4-CD set of jazz compositions: "Seasons in Saratoga,"
recently released his seventh CD "Chez Sophie Jazz." This is the first time he's recorded with a vocalist. (The singer is Cheryl Clark, co-owner of Chez Sophie, wife of Chef Paul, mother of the adorable Nico and Léo.) Some of the cuts of the CD can be heard at http://www.chezsophie.com/.
Copies are for sale for $16 at Chez Sophie and through Cole's secure PayPal-friendly website at http://www.colebroderick.com/sound-7.htm
We can also mail-order the CD's for an additional $4 shipping and handling.

Tasting menus
Chef's Choice seven-course tasting menu available each night. The
menus are designed based on the best and most creative dishes Chef Paul K. Parker is serving each evening. We will pair wines for you at an additional charge or you can order from our extensive wine list.
Cost: $80 to $200 per person for seven courses, plus tax and tip.
Everyone at the table must partake in the tasting menu.
If you're feeling less impromptu, you can call ahead to arrange a
special tasting menu with the number of courses and wine pairings
designed to suit your capacity, dietary restrictions and budget.
Tasting menus arranged in advance will be printed on commemorative vellum scrolls personalized with the name of the host or the reason for the event.
Cost: Depends on the number of courses and the wines selected; available for two to 75 guests. Call Cheryl to make arrangements at
518.583.3538

The Pink Plate Special
offered Monday, January 21, Tuesday, January 22, Wednesday, January
23 and Thursday, January 24

$32 per person
includes your choice of soup or salad, a special entree, selected desserts or a cheese course and coffee, tea or espresso.

This week's special entree:
escallope de veau à la crème
(veal scallopine cooked in cream and lemon)

Notes on Nico and Léo:
Cheryl was looking something up in the newsletter archive the other and stumbled across a harrowing account of a day with Nico in his 37th month in which he made all manner of menace, from dumping out a 2-pound container of roasted peanuts to banging a baguette against a mirror to biting the erasers off a case of pencils to covering his infant sister's head with a blanket.

She remembers thinking, at least Léo, who will be two on Saturday, hasn't gotten to that stage yet.

That very night, she put the two children in their respective beds, and came downstairs with a book and waited for Paul to come home.
Naturally, she fell asleep on the couch. Paul came in a couple of hours later, found his wife and children asleep on the couch, and decided not to wake them. Cheryl awoke in the early dawn, sat up, and discovered something that felt strangely like lightweight playbox sand under her palm as she pushed herself upright. She stood, and her bare feet encountered the same substance. Then she staggered over to the light and was perplexed to see that the couch, the floor, the walls and even her hair were covered in some sort of brown grime.
Then she spied Léo, who looked like a little brown monkey from head to toe. The sleeping toddler was clutching a nearly empty container of rich, chocolatey Ovaltine. Apparently, she had awakened, come downstairs and quietly tried to make cocoa milk in Mommy's hair. Nico was relatively clean, so Cheryl brushed him off and carried him sleeping to his parents' bed, then pushed the part of the sectional couch on which Léo was sleeping into a corner and tried to silently remove every trace of chocolate from the living room and herself before the children and dogs awoke and tracked it every where.

When Nico did awake, the first words out of his mouth, before his eyes were even open, were: "Léo poured cocoa powder all over the living room."
"I saw that," Mom said calmly. "Did you try to stop her?"
"No," he mumbled. Then his eyes flew open as he sussed his error.
"Did you help her?" Mommy prodded. Sorting out the possible ways in which this could be a trick question, Nico whispered, "Nooooooo."

The two of them are twin terrors these days. The furnace malfunctioned Wednesday night and Cheryl came home early to deal with the repair. Nico suddenly developed a fascination for the fireplace and wanted it to roar merrily rather than emit a nice warm glow. As Cheryl spoke to the repairman, Nico interrupted repeatedly to ask her to add another log to the fire. She distractedly told him the fire was fine, it didn't need another log. Then he pulled on her shirt and
said: "Léo just put a bunch of paper into the fireplace, and now it has a really good flame." Cheryl dropped everything to sit both children down and admonish them sternly not to touch the fireplace.
"Can I just add one more log?" Nico wheedled. "Not until you're 13.
When you're 13 you can add another log to the fireplace."

She went back to sign something for the repairman, then returned her attention to the children, who were sitting calmly on the couch where she'd left them, delightedly watching a pyre of burning children's books blaze on the grate. "Who did that!" Mom shrieked.
"I did," Nico replied honestly.
"I told both of you never to touch the fireplace," Mom growled.
"You said I couldn't put a log on it until I was older, and I didn't," the four-year-old reasoned. "But it really needed something."

The Parker family
at Chez Sophie
518.583.3538

Chez Sophie was founded in 1969 by sculptor Joseph Parker and his French-born wife, the late Sophie. The business moved to a vintage stainless steel diner in Malta Ridge, New York, in 1995. It is owned today by Sophie and Joseph's son, Paul Parker, and his wife, Cheryl Clark. In June of 2006, they moved the restaurant into their current location in The Saratoga Hotel on Broadway..

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P.S. Each month we draw a name at random from our database of customers and send them a $50 gift certificate to Chez Sophie. If you would like to be added to this promotions database, which is owned by Chez Sophie, please send us an email with your name, address, telephone number, birthday and anniversary. People on the list will also receive a gift certificate by mail or email for a free glass of champagne or dessert on their birthdays or anniversaries. (You only need to enter once to be eligible every month.) If you think you are on the list but have not received gift certificates on your special holidays, please contact us with an updated email address. We find that many of the email addresses we have collected over the past few years are no longer valid.

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