|
Archives
Hello, everyone
We have a major announcement, one that makes us both ecstatically happy and a little sad at the same time. We were joined this week by Mark Graham, the fabulous chef who has partnered with Paul and other great chefs of Saratoga over the past few years in the Saratoga 4x4 and who helped us with Paul's James Beard dinner in New York City. (And Paul helped Mark when he had his own debut at the James Beard House a few months later.) Aside from being a beautiful, creative, high-energy, talented, lovely man whom we have loved for a long time, he has a very respectable resumé. In California, he worked under Gary Danko at Viognier and Wolfgang Puck at Spago's.
In 1999, Mark was thinking of leaving Los Angeles to raise a family on the East Coast, where he and his wife Mary grew up. Mary's family lived in Clifton Park, so he researched restaurants in the Capital Region and came straight to Chez Sophie. Sophie instantly fell in love with him, but already had a sous chef. There was no place in our operation for someone of Mark's caliber.
"When I came here, my intention was to stop here first and move to Boston where my family is from, but inspired by Sophie, we decided to stay in the Capital Region," Mark said.
He became head chef at a new restaurant, the very elegant downtown Saratoga Wine Bar, and produced fabulous cuisine there for 5 years, building both his experience and reputation throughout the East Coast. Last year, he left the Wine Bar to start his own restaurant. As we can attest from personal experience, starting a restaurant, even with history and reputation behind you, is very hard. Real estate and funding issues derailed the project.
We frankly lusted after him, but couldn't afford to add him to our already stellar staff in the middle of low season. He cheffed at The Lodge this summer until it shut down for the winter and then took jobs at several local restaurants that weren't a perfect fit. Then something unexpected happened, and here's the bittersweet part. Paul's wonderful, creative, loyal souschef, Mark Lawrence, who has been with us for seven years, decided he needed a change of pace. Sort of. He decided he wanted to go back to the diner building we moved out of June, where he had been so happy. We sold it in December to a man named Mike Bauer, who plans to open a restaurant this spring called "Bloomers - An American Bistro." Mike hired Dominic Colose to be head chef. Dominic had his own restaurant and later worked with us at Chez Sophie as a garde manger as a temporary step before going on to several other ventures as head chef and co-owner. Notably, he opened the Laughing Duck Pasta Co. on Beekman Street, and Gotcha's, a few doors down. Mark Lawrence will be his souschef. We will miss him terribly, but are comforted by the thought that we still live next door to the diner and can walk across the back lawn to the diner to say "Hi!" whenever we want. We wish Mike, Mark, Dominick and the rest of their staff the best of luck.
Meanwhile, Paul and Mark have been working together for three days and they are having a blast. Cheryl keeps having to come into the kitchen and say "Shhhhhhhhhh!" They have cookbooks spread out all over the place and are coming up with great food.
A reporter asked Cheryl Wednesday whether Mark's entry into our kitchen would have an effect on the menu. Cheryl, being a smartass, said: "Well, I put his name on it yesterday." But seriously folks. There are chefs who are control freaks, who are very regimented in their recipes and who want the people in their kitchens to do only what they are told to do, with no argument. There are chefs who discourage input. And then there's Paul.
Paul does his best work when he has vibrant, smart, people of similar talent and experience at hand to discuss and play with. He loved Mark Lawrence dearly, but after 7 years, they had shared a lot of their ideas already. He and Mark Graham have a world of silly food experiments in front of them. We are very happy and will have a lot of cool new food to serve and talk about in the coming months.
We have a weekly staff meeting on Saturdays to discuss issues that affect the entire operation and try to work out problems or clarify food and service issues. One of the things we mentioned this week was the actual definition of meat temperatures such as rare or medium. The reason for this is that even though we've been in business for 38 years and some of our people have been with us for hundreds of moons, we still get waiters walking in the kitchen asking for "somewhere between rare and medium" or "Medium rare but leaning towards rare," or worse yet, "rare, but not red, and hot all the way through."
We think the common terms "rare," "medium rare," medium," etc. are standard the world over, but have gotten muddied in people's minds because so many cooks abuse their meat. When you ask us for rare lamb or steak, you get one that is red and cold in the center. Medium rare is red, but warm. Medium is warm and pink in the center. Medium well is barely pink. And well done is gray.
We agree that many meats - especially red meats - are better if they are cooked less, but that's not true for all meats. Rare veal is extremely hard to chew, and we cringe when people insist on their veal chops being rare, because we know they probably won't enjoy them. A veal chop is at its best at medium, but if it is cooked to well done, it becomes dry. (Also, because veal is a pale, white meat, it will never "look" rare no matter how lightly it is cooked.) Likewise, a rare duck will look red in the center, but a medium rare duck will look tan. Rare pork also won't look red, because it is a white meat. Pork is better medium rare to medium. It gets more moist and tender after it passes rare, but again, it dries out if you cook it to medium well. Pork should be neither rare nor overcooked. Many people in this country grew up with tough, overcooked pork because of the fear of trichinosis. Safer handling methods have been credited with reducing the reported cases in the United States of this infection to 12 cases per year on average from 1991 to 1999. The number of cases has decreased because of legislation prohibiting the feeding of raw meat garbage to hogs, increased commercial and home freezing of pork, and the public awareness of the danger of eating raw or undercooked pork products. Today, one of the primary causes of trichinosis in America is the consumption of raw or undercooked wild game meats.
Paul and Mark came up with a spectacular preparation for monkfish "Saigon - style" which will continue through this weekend as long as we can get fresh monkfish. They seared it and finished it in the oven with Szechuan peppercorns and are serving it in a pork broth with julienned vegetables, Chinese dried sausage and mushrooms.
We're also doing guinea hen with a beautiful combination of mustard seed and papaya, steamed and baked in Chinese clay pots.
As of the moment we are writing this, we have about 160 reservations for our first ever Easter Sunday brunch, which we're thrilled about, because we decided on our format fairly late in the game and haven't done much advertising. We have about 50 seats still open at various times between 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. We're offering a prix fixe brunch from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. For $30 a person, you get your choice of soup or salad, your choice of desserts, and your choice of any of the following entrees: ham smoked over Ceylonese cinnamon; spring braised lamb shanks; rabbit stew; salmon poached with a chervil beurre blanc; poussin (young chicken) roasted with a madeira and mushroom sauce; vegetable napoleon, Belgian waffles, pancakes, or omelettes. Children under 12 eat for $15. We will begin serving an à la carte dinner menu with a number of special options starting at 5:30 p.m. Breakfast will be served from 7 to 9:30. Reservation are recommended.
Paul's leap from the calf's liver cliff last week turned into one of the most popular Pink Plate Specials we've done in months, so he's sticking to his offal pattern. The Pink Plate Special next week will be steak and kidney pie, which seemed to Paul to be appropriately dinerish, English comfort food. Mostly it's because he's getting these beautiful veal kidneys and steak and kidney pie popped into his head.
"I thought I could do something really fun with it."
Pie may currently be the ultimate expression of the marriage of steak and kidneys, but it was not the first. The tradition of hot pies is relatively ancient, with street hawkers flinging pies in recorded history in the 15th century and in probable fact centuries earlier. The specific combination of steak and kidneys doesn't seem to appear in literature until about 1900, but it was clear that crusty puddings were being made by rendering the suet from kidneys and then tossing the dessicated kidneys into the mush at least a century earlier.
According to Traditional Foods Of Britain, by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown, the "precise combination of steak and kidney… does not seem to be mentioned until early in the 1900s [although] there were beef pies." In 1884 the beef pie is cited in that classic of French decadent literature, A Rebours by J-K Huysmans. Des Esseintes, Huysmans' hero, referred to "hearty English women … making violent assaults on a beef steak pie", which contained hot meat cooked in mushroom sauce under a crust.
Kidneys came late to the frame, and started being added in the 1900s, it seems, partly to bulk out the more pricey beef and partly to add oomph to the flavour and variety to the texture.
The Pink Plate is a weekly prix fixe special we offer on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. For $30 per person, you get 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.
Live Piano Jazz
Jazz pianist Cole Broderick plays the baby grand Tuesday through Friday night, and during Sunday brunch from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
(barring special events that preclude live music.)
Cost: No cover charge
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 or you can order from our extensive wine list.
Cost: $75 per person, 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: $50 to $200, depending on the number of courses and the wines selected; available for two to 75 guests. Call Cheryl to make arrangements 518.583.3538
The Pink Plate Special
offered Monday, April 9, Tuesday, April 10, Wednesday, April 11, and Thursday, April 12.
$30 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:
steak and kidney pie
Paul took the children home Wednesday night and was concerned to find his wife's wedding ring in baby Léo's mouth. He retrieved it, and then tried to find the engagement ring, which he assumed had been sitting with the wedding ring on a side table somewhere. He finally did find it. It was also in her mouth, only further back.
Nico and Léo were playing with a flashlight in the nursery and it stopped working. He showed it to our server Thomas, who was in the adjoining office, and Thomas diagnosed the problem as battery failure. Our ever economical bookkeeper Donna, who was getting a little annoyed with the mysterious way the lights kept going out, chimed in: "And we don't have anymore batteries."
"Well do you have anymore flashlights?" Nico said.
We were driving and Nico suddenly yelled, "Stop!" Coincidentally, we had just reached a stop sign, so we stopped. Nico was thrilled. "Go, Mommy!" he commanded happily. We did. Then it got a little out of hand and Mommy had to explain that we couldn't just stop in the middle of the street because it would cause an accident. She explained traffic lights and stop signs, and by the time she was finished, we had reached a series of traffic signs. Nico called out stop and go correctly several times, then got distracted. Mom tried to keep it going: "Simon says, go!"
"Mommy, you know we're not supposed to play games in the car," he said maturely.
Our little pitcher Nico showed how big his ears are in a crowded supermarket aisle. Lured by several boxes of junk food decorated with Shrek or some floppy bunny, he was getting an incessant explanation from his mother about why we don't buy junk food and how we make food from scratch because then we can be sure that it's nutritious. Nico walked past a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese and said: "Mommy, is that for kids whose Mommies don't know any better?"
Cheryl burst out laughing as every mother in the aisle turned to stare at Nico. "Uh, that's one way to look at it," Cheryl muttered
"Mommy, you know you're not supposed to laugh in the supermarket."
Paul, Cheryl & Joseph
at chez sophie bistro
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, and is open year-round
for dinner. It is owned today by Sophie and Joseph's son, Paul
Parker, and his wife, Cheryl Clark.
If
at any time you would like to be removed from our weekly email
list (or receive less frequent postings about wine dinners or
special events) please let us know by return email. We hope you
enjoy our news.
If
you would like to sign up to receive weekly chez sophie updates,
please let us know your email address!
|
