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We know that many of you have come to expect vaguely humorous horror stories whenever we do big holiday weekends. But after Easter brunch, we can say firmly and with certainty exactly how we are going to do Mother's Day Brunch on May 11. We might actually be getting the hang of volume with grace, although we fear feeling too self-confident lest we fall on our collective posterior.
We have a resistance to doing buffet-style service because Chez Sophie specializes in food cooked to order. But last Sunday's customers were so thrilled with what we offered them they tipped extravagantly and even took the time to write us thank you notes.
(That's a little bit different from the big brunch weekends last year, where towards the end we managed to run out of food or steam and disappoint a few guests.) This year we served 180 customers between breakfast and dinner, and they were happy, and it seemed easy, once all the extensive planning was done.
So, on Sunday May 11, we will offer a Mother's Day brunch buffet-style brunch with a made-to-order omelette station, as well as a raw bar, a waffle station, a salad and vegetable station, desserts, and a carving station (for Easter we did Elihu Farm leg of lamb, baked cured ham and stuffed veal loin roulade. Specifics of May's extravaganza to be announced.)
We will be requiring a credit card to confirm the reservations, with a 24-hour no-penalty cancellation grace period. (After that, it's a $10 per head penalty.)
Admission is $35 for adults and $18 for children under 12, exclusive of beverage, tax and gratuity. A service charge of 20 percent will be applied to parties of 6 or more. We will begin seating at 10:30 a.m. and accept reservations each half hour until 3 p.m. Breakfast will be served from 7 to 9:30 a.m. and dinner seatings will begin at 5:30 p.m. with our normal à la carte dinner menu.
Pink Plate Special
"It's totally un-French, but how about vegetarian chili?" Chef Paul asked his wife Thursday night. "We can serve it on top of cabbage and make it really fun. Just tell them I'm in the mood for it."
The Pink Plate Special is a weekly prix fixe special we offer on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The Pink Plate Special 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.
From our Kitchen
Chef Paul and souschef Dan Felder are working on a few new recipes for this week. They plan to take Moulard duck breasts and serve them with a sauce made from fresh Chinese black plums served with a duck confit and braised cabbage, wrapped moo shu-style with a scallion crèpe. Paul is a big fan of Moulard duck, which we can get from a wonderful farm in Canada, but we sometimes have problems with customers when we use this meat in Sophie's classic duck breast with apricot and green peppercorn sauce. Moulard is a cross between Pekin and Muscovy duck, with a deep red, almost beef-like texture, and it stays red even if you overcook it. This causes the occasional diner to send it back to the kitchen over and over because they don't like rare meat and can't be persuaded that the meat won't turn grey even when you cook it to a shameful degree. Once we've toasted it beyond recognition (over our own quite eloquent protests) people complain that the bird is tough.
So in spite of Paul's liking for the wild taste and texture of Moulard, we most frequently use free-range Pekin duck from Jurgielewicz Duck Farm on Long Island. This is a high-quality tender, tasty duck that almost never produces misunderstandings.
By the by, all you Atkins Diet fans, duck is extremely high in protein, as well as B vitamins and a number of minerals, such as zinc, phosphorus, magnesium and iron.
We're getting Tasmanian sea trout and roasting it with thyme, and serving it with grapes, shallots and wild rice, with roasted, diced watermelon radish and haricot verts. It's kind of like sole Veronique without the sole or heavy cream.
We're planning a tasting menu this week for a couple requesting a number of special things, including a homemade pasta course. Souschef Dan is playing with two kinds of lasagna, made from dehydrated oyster mushrooms and dehydrated spinach with he plans to layer with a house-made mascarpone and a fresh mushroom ragout.
Once you start dehydrating, it's hard to stop. A lot of things are entering the dehydrator and coming out as powders added to foods, for garnish and aroma.
Dan has made powders from asparagus, carrots, ginger and carrots, and fennel.
"You grind the raw vegetables, dehydrate them and grind them again, and it gives you that oven-roasted flavor," Felder said. "It's a good way to use the pulp left over from juicing carrots and other vegetable for emulsions. And it's pretty."
Weekend Jazz Brunch
The brunch menu this Saturday and Sunday will feature herb-roasted Cornish game hen with artichoke hearts and lemon ($15); shrimp and scallop fra diavolo over saffron fettucine ($17); cider-glazed salmon filet with coconut rice ($17) and pan-seared New York strip steak with gorgonzola sauce and 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); Rhode Island Littleneck clams steamed in white wine ($13) 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).
Cole in the House
Cole plays the baby grand piano from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday during brunch and on Tuesday and Friday night (barring special events that preclude live music.) He also comes in on nights he is not normally scheduled, such as Thursdays and Saturday nights, if he feels like it. 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/.
We can also mail-order the CD's for an additional $4 shipping and handling.
Skidmore/Albany Law Graduation
Skidmore graduation weekend is booking heavily. We'll be offering an elegant, four-course, $70 per person prix fixe menu, and will be serving dinner the Friday (May 16) of Skidmore Graduation weekend from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. by reservation. On Saturday, May 17, we will extend brunch to 3:30 pm. and start serving the prix fixe dinner at 5:30. We've also taken lunch reservations until 2:15 p.m. on Friday, May 16, to accommodate people driving up from graduation ceremonies at the Albany Law School Graduation and several other local schools.
Artist in residence Joseph C. Parker
We were relieved and delighted when Joseph popped in this week in the middle of the afternoon to consider changing the sculptures in the display case in our entry foyer. We've been quite worried about him after he took a header down the stairs in his house. He played down his injuries, but he actually blacked his face up fairly badly and had to have his scalp stapled five times. When we saw him yesterday he was looking much better, and you'd hardly know that he had been injured. Joseph wants to install a new table top exhibit built around larger pieces than the ones in the current "Expressions of Love," which features tiny sculptures that he created to be gifts for his late first wife, Sophie, over the 52 years of their marriage.
Cheryl is loathe to see the small ones go because there has been a fair amount of interest from our guests in having castings made to offer as romantic gifts, but she understands Joseph's need to keep things lively. It should take him about a week to remove the Expressions of Love exhibit, so if you haven't seen it yet, you still have a chance before he takes it up to his gallery in Hadley.
Tasting menus
The Chef's Choice seven-course tasting menu is 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 or more 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, March 31, Tuesday, April 1, Wednesday, April 2, and Thursday, April 3
$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:
vegetarian chili with pigeon peas served on cabbage
Notes on Nico and Léo:
Two-year-old Léo climbed into bed with her Papa this morning and tucked her head under his arm as he slept. His cellphone, which he was using as an alarm clock, began to spew some horrific calliope-like wake up music. Paul opened a bleary eye to find his daughter's beatific visage inches from his own. "I hear music," she declared joyfully. "I dancing!"
Léo has recently come of an age where she actually gets punished for her misdeeds, much to her older brother's amusement. They were reading on the couch the other night and Léo kept hitting her brother, who was being very nice and not hitting her back. After two warnings from Mom, Léo persisted and was sent upstairs to her room for a "time out." After a couple of minutes, Mom called out that Léo could return to the couch. "I can come down?" she queried in her chirpy little baby voice. A second later, Nico and Cheryl heard something that sounded like a sack of potatoes being pitched down the stairs. They both bolted up from the couch just in time to see Léo emerge head first over the bottom treads.
Léo can be a bit of a hypochondriac, so Mom usually adopts a pretty blasé mien to minimize the drama. But this was a big scary fall that dented the child's forehead and scraped a little dime-sized burn onto her shoulder and frankly, scared her mother. Clutching her damaged infant to her breast, Cheryl ran to the kitchen, grabbed an ice pack and a flashlight and began inspecting her child for signs of damage or concussion. Léo, who had been too startled to holler much when she fell, was now thoroughly terrified by her mother's unusual antics and began to wail. "Léo went head over heels," Nico observed with a note of awe. Léo gasped between sobs: "My ...heels ...went in... my ...head."
Faithful newsletter readers may remember that we discovered last week that 5-year-old Nico has "spontaneously" learned to draw representative objects, and we worried that we had boxed in the poor boy's perception of art by our own lack of talent and failure to make sure he spends enough time with his Grandpa, who is an amazing painter and sculptor. (Grandpa Joseph does, after all, play with sharp pieces of metal and welding machines for fun, and having a rugrat under foot while he's doing it is not highly advisable.) Nico restored our faith in the unfettered imagination Tuesday night when he ran into the kitchen and announced: "I've been drawing Léo!" Since his first representational project was a self portrait in crayon, Mom thought it was great that he was branching out artistically.
"Did you use crayons?" Mom asked.
"No," Nico replied. "This one was Magic Marker. But don't worry, I didn't get it into her eyes."
(It took two days to scrub the ink off, although remnants of it persist. The little scrape on her shoulder is hot pink, and her belly button may be blue for at least another week.)
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 is owned today by Sophie and Joseph's son, Paul Parker, and his wife, Cheryl Clark. It moved to The Saratoga at 534 Broadway in Saratoga Springs in June 2006.
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Each month, Nico draws a name at random from our database of customers and we send them a $50 gift certificate to Chez Sophie. If you would like to be added to this promotions database, which is owned and used exclusively 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 email for a free glass of bubbles 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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