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"They were so tempting that as I started to dress for the evening, I grabbed a handful to take into the shower. With the water running over me, I bit into these luscious berries and the flood of juice was like an internal shower of goodness. On comparing notes with my friends I found that through some incredible piece of ESP they had done exactly the same thing. It’s rather amusing to contemplate three people all standing in their showers and munching gooseberries."
James Beard, 1975

Chef Paul scored some of these luscious and unheralded berries at the Saratoga Farmers' Market Wednesday. This tiny, tart fruit has been called gooseberry since the 15th century, probably because it was the favored fruit for making a preserve to serve with goose. In the middle ages, some areas called it 'Feaberry' or 'feverberry' probably because of its reputation for having cooling properties.

The plant was commercially important in England and northern France during the Middle Ages, with shipments of plants from France to England as early as the 13th century. A decline began in the late 18th century as the industrial revolution progressed, and laborers moved out of the rural areas into factory cities.

This year's hot, humid weather (following a bitterly cold winter) has made for a bumper crop of gooseberries. Paul plans to make them into warm tarts with custard and his mother's nut crust recipe. This is an experiment, a new invention, which means of course, that if it doesn't work, we won't have them.

For the lexicologists among us, some other names for gooseberries:
Czech: Angrest; Danish: Stikkelsbaer; Dutch: Kruisbes; Finnish:
Karviais-marjat; Flemish: Stekelbes (Kroesels, Knoesels, Haarbes)
Français: Groseille à maquereau; Groseilliers epineux (Groseille verte, Groseille tambours, Groseille croque-poux; German:
Stachelbeere; Hungarian and Slovenian: Egres; Italian: Uva spina;
Norwegian: Stikkelsbär; Polish: Agrest; Portugeuse: Uva do norte;
Romanian: Agrisa; Spanish: Uva espina or Grosella espinosa; Swedish:
Krüsbar; Turkish: Büyürtlen.

Cold poached lobster will be on the menu this week, with a lobster vinaigrette and a colorful collection of fresh, marinated and poached vegetables and fruits. This refreshing dish is heaven with Condrieu, a rare, fantastically rich and expensive white wine from the Northern Rhône. Condrieu almost became extinct. Back in 1965, there was a measly 8 hectares of vines left in the appellation, which sits at the top end of the northern Rhône region, some 10 kilometers south of the town of Vienne. Thanks to the increasing popularity of Viognier (the only grape permitted in this exclusive appellation,) production increased to 108 hectares in 1995.
We happen to have five bottles of Francois Villard's Condrieu Les Terasses du Palat 2000, which Paul refers to as the "ultimate anti- Chardonnay from one of my anti-heroes." It has good acidity and flavors of apricot and honeysuckle, good ripeness, and a full body.
($93.)

The guys will be making crab cakes. Unlike many crab cakes, ours our made mostly of crab, with dry sea scallops as a binder. The sauces will probably be a horseradish mayonnaise and a fines herbes mayonnaise.

We're offering veal kidneys flambéed in cognac, finished with cream, a dish that Paul does exceptionally well, according to our offal- loving customers.
Paul is also planning to make Carbonnade à la Flammande starting Friday using Kobé-style top round. It is a Belgian dish, beef braised in Belgian beer with onions. The meat is a breed called Wagyu, imported from Kobe, Japan, and raised in Australia (in America as
well.) Under traditional methods, the cattle are massaged with sake and fed a special diet that includes a plentiful amount of beer.

He's also planning a tuna dish for this weekend with a Provençal vinaigrette with farmer's market baby orange tomatoes, red peppers and capers.

We will be serving buffalo mozzarella as an appetizer this week.
That's mozzarella made from buffalo milk, not cheese made in Buffalo, N.Y. It's actually imported from Italy made at Cilento Bufala Farms.
We'll be doing it in the classic summer way, with beautiful fresh tomatoes, olive oil, fresh herbs, freshly ground pepper and a sprinkle of cracked sea salt.

For those who have never seen a pizza before, mozzarella is a mild, fresh white cheese. It's made by the pasta pilata process, whereby the curd is dipped into hot whey, then stretched and kneaded to the desired consistency. At one time, mozzarella was made only from the milk of water buffaloes, but today the majority is made from cow's milk. Mozzarella di bufalo is the most prized of the fresh mozzarellas, which a slightly sour tang offset by a creamy, milky bite. Buffalo mozzarella is produced almost exclusively in Campania and Sicily and has been protected under DOP status since June 1996.

Someone asked us the other day why we call a tasting menu a tasting menu, and it got us to thinking about it.

It's because it's a lot of small courses - little tastes, right? So we started looking at tasting menus from other restaurants, and realized that there are many, varied creatures using the moniker "tasting menu".

We offered our first tasting menus in response to requests from New York and Boston-based patrons. Since our menu changes every day based on Paul's whims and the availability of cool stuff from our farmers and suppliers, we didn't have a standard, fixed-option fixed-price menu. We asked our patrons what they liked and didn't like, and created a special menu for them. In one case, a couple wanted to pull up five or six special wines from their cellar from the year they were married (forty years ago) and asked us to design the perfect meal to complement each course.

We interpret a tasting menu as a unique shared experience designed for each group's collective tastes, a once-in-a-lifetime event that will never be replicated. That clearly is not the way many restaurants do it.

At the famous 21 Club (where a seven-course tasting menu is $450) the chef offers as many as five choices per course and the sommelier picks wines to go with each course. This means that a party of four could have completely different meals at the same sitting. That's fine and good, because it gives everybody the chance to taste everyone else's food, but at the same time, it stops people from having a coherent shared experience with good wine pairings.

At Hemingway's Restaurant in Vermont there is a fixed, nightly four- course wine tasting menu with smaller portions of food and wine than would normally be served for $85 a person. This is a little closer to the "shared experience" but it's also the same tasting menu for one and all every night. We had a couple who enjoyed five tasting menus with us in less than two weeks this month and every menu was completely different.

At Le Bernadin, an 8-course tasting menu is $155 per person or $295 with wine pairings. The courses follow a set pattern of tuna, caviar, escolar, lobster, salmon, codfish, custard and fruit. Charlie Trotter's offers only tasting menus, three a day, at a fixed price of
$115 to $175 per person plus $85 per person for wine pairings. Aqua in San Francisco offers a fixed six-course tasting menu for $85 with additional charges for wine pairings by the sommelier, but also offers a 7-course chef's menu - left to the chef's inspiration - for $95. This is much more like what we do at Chez Sophie.

So we thought maybe we should call ours a chef's menu - until we looked at what other restaurants call chef's menus. At Jonathans at Peiranos in Ventura, a Chef's Menu is list of courses selected by the chef, priced à la carte, with three choices per course. It would run you about $88 for a four-course meal (before wine.)

Our patrons who like the way we do tasting menus say they enjoy coming in and not having to decide what to order - the chef has already designed a meal for their tastes with the courses and wines in an order that Paul and Cheryl feel best display the flavors and textures. It also prompts people to try things they wouldn't normally order. (Cheryl is a big fan of this. A few years ago she and Paul spent nine days eating their way through Paris. On the last day, she ordered cauliflower bisque with truffles, something she would never have tried normally and only asked for because she'd gotten food poisoning two days before, was still feeling a little shaky and white food seemed safe. It turned out to be the best thing either of them ate on the entire trip.)

After we design the menu, we print keepsake copies of it on pretty paper tied with ribbon, personalized with your name and the date. You can either follow along so you know what is coming, or unroll the scroll at the end of the meal to see our descriptions of the foods and wines you enjoyed.

To plan a Chez Sophie tasting menu, you tell us beforehand the price range you'd like us to keep the menu within, how much you can comfortably eat and drink at one sitting and any dietary restrictions or preferences you or the people in your party have. We then design a unique menu to accommodate the needs and desires of you and your guests. The basic price is $75 per person for five courses with wine pairings, but we're thrilled to design a 10- or 12-course meal with fabulous wines for you if your constitution and budget permit.

Just for fun, to see a samples of tasting menus we found at other restaurants, visit these links:
http://www.21club.com/web/onyc/onyc_c4b3_wine_cellar.jsp
http://www.hemingwaysrestaurant.com/wines.shtml
http://www.231ellsworth.com/htm/tasting.htm
http://www.miseonline.com/tasting.html
http://www.aqua-sf.com/aqua/dinner_seasonaltasting.htm
http://www.jonathansatpeiranos.com/chefsmenu.html
http://www.le-bernardin.com/menu_tasting.html

We have put our summer seating times in effect, which means that we will not accept reservations at 7 p.m. or 7:30. To ensure that all of our guests in both seatings have a leisurely amount of time to dine, our seating times are 5, 5:30, 6, 6:30, 8, 8:30, 9 and 9:30 and later with advance arrangements.

Thank you Metroland for naming Chez Sophie the Best French Restaurant in the Capital Region Thursday. Thanks also to the Wine Spectator for giving us their Award of Excellence in this month's issue.

Notes on Nico:
A friend, whose children are older than our two-and-a-half-year-old Nicholas, recently advised us that we needed to give Nico his own bed soon so he wouldn't feel evicted from his crib when the new baby arrives this winter. We took her words to heart and found a bed that looks like a big red racecar. Nico, who is nuts for toy cars, adores this bed. For the past two days, he has asked to go up to his room immediately upon arriving home to play with his red racecar. We don't think he totally understands that it's a bed, however. After spending an hour or so watching him load stuffed animals into the toybox under the hood, we inform him that it's time to turn out the lights and go to sleep. He looks shocked and surprised and wails that he wants to come into Mommy and Daddy's bed. (He hasn't asked where the crib went
yet.) We've managed to get him unconscious both nights by hanging out on the bed with him singing and telling stories (you can't do THAT in a crib) so we figure this is going to work out okay.

The funny thing is, he hasn't figured out yet that if he can climb into this bed by himself, he can climb out by himself, too. He still calls out to be removed from the bed when he wakes up in the morning.
We count this as a temporary blessing.

Hope To See You Soon!
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.

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