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Hello, Everyone:

The Pink Plate Special comes back from summer vacation Monday. Paul has decided to make fresh pasta (stuffed with duck) and serve it with arugula sautéed with olive oil, garlic, raisins and pignoli nuts.

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, plus coffee, tea or espresso.

We came to a weird mental crossroads in our evolution into the new Chez Sophie Thursday. Several conventions of rather down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth types are visiting the hotel this week, and were appalled to learn that the only bar in the hotel does not pour Miller Lite, Coors Lite or Budweiser. (We do pour about 39 beers, three on tap, but the lightest among them is Stella Artois, to which we fondly refer as the "Budweiser of Belgium.") After a civic minded member of one of the convention delegations brought the error of our ways to our attention, a member of the hotel sales staff popped by and politely asked if we might consider indulging the predilections of the hotel guests by stocking some mass-produced beer under the counter, for just a short time.

This was a hard one for us, because Paul and Cheryl have a natural inclination to try to make people feel comfortable, to accommodate their dietary needs and go the extra mile. But this beer thing is a slippery slope. First it's badly made, massed produced beer, then it's, we don't know, chicken fingers.

Say for a few days we do become the hotel hot spot for 50 or 60 beer drinking conventioneers. Say we actually make bunch of money selling swill that we wouldn't drink ourselves. Maybe the conventioneers will be lovely and fun. Maybe they'll be loud and unpleasant. Say our dinner guests find our dining room to be overbearing and rowdy because we've encouraged people to frequent our bar who aren't interested in our food or our ambience. Maybe our dinner guests won't come back. Maybe the conventioneers will be gone in a few days.

Paul and Cheryl mulled these possibilities for a few hours and then ran into the manager of the hotel, a lovely man who from the day he met us, advocated having mass-produced beers available to the hotel guests. He wants them to be happy. Paul gingerly ran through our reservations, loathe to be difficult, but feeling increasingly queasy about compromising the standards we've set as the entity known as Chez Sophie.

To our surprise, the hotel manager told him that a few months ago he would have tried to persuade us to put Bud on tap. But now that he's spent the summer watching what we do, and understands that dinner is the core of our business, and understands what it is we bring to the hotel, he thinks we should just do what we're comfortable with.

Paul was relieved, because he was unenthusiastically borderline about refusing such a simple request. He didn't yet know that his wife had turned the corner on the issue of accommodation after having her bottom pinched by one of the conventioneers as she was brushing up the lobby outside the restaurant doors with a broom. After she took his paw off her rear and handed it back to him rather forcefully and with a vicious flourish, he apologized, explaining that he thought she was a hotel employee. Apparently on his planet, it's appropriate to insult women as long as they work for hotels.
Cheryl informed him that if he continued such behavior towards any member of the hotel staff (who are, by the way, not her employees,) she would do everything in her power to make sure not only that he was ejected from his room, but banned from any decent hotel within a 30-mile radius.

Meanwhile, Cheryl sat down at the end of the bar to start writing the newsletter, and ended up parked next to a conventioneer whose wife had gone to bed and who was terribly bored. He began a monologue, unhampered by the fact that Cheryl was steadily pecking away at a keyboard while he soliliquized. Apparently, he'd had the terrible misfortune to have been forced to walk two blocks to the Stadium Cafe on a cool, late summer Saratoga night, because the hotel had made the unforgiveable mistake of getting rid of the nice little restaurant and bar that used to be where Chez Sophie is today.

"My guys just wanted to see the game," he said. "I'll give you some advice. Have your fine French restaurant, but open a small sports bar right next to it. Nothing big. Forget the pool table. Just have two or three televisions. I'll tell you something. My rear end doesn't move that far. If you had that here, my wife and I would eat somewhere else, park ourselves in that bar and we'd be happy for the rest of the night. You could make a lot of money."

It's food for thought. A lot like chicken fingers.

We think we may have finally found a formula for breakfast that will make the people who are expecting something very special and Chez Sophie-like as happy as those people who just want a coffee and muffin. All summer long, we have served an $18 prix fixe breakfast on weekdays that included coffee, fresh-squeezed orange or grapefruit juice, aqua fresca, a Continental table loaded with pastries and yogurt and fresh fruit and quiches and Danish-style open sandwiches and any hot dish from the kitchen. (Children under 12 ate for their age plus $1.)

This was an incredibly generous, elegant spread, but irritated the people who thought they just wanted coffee and a scrambled egg white.
Last Saturday, when Cheryl was serving as the morning manager on duty, she got so dispirited after turning the first 20 dabblers away because they didn't want a real breakfast that she just changed the rules and started letting people order à la carte. Of course, once they were seated, the à la carters to a person spent more then $18.
As of this week, the menu is à la carte again, something Paul had been working on for a while anyway. We apologize to those who loved the anything-you-want-for- $18 approach, but at least it will stop the arm wrestling at the doorway. The Continental buffet is as beautiful as ever for a mere $9, but juice and coffee are extra.

Entrees from the kitchen range from corned beef has with eggs and toast for $12, omelettes from $10 to $12 depending on what you add to them, waffles with sweet cream butter and local maple syrup for $10, steel cut oatmeal for $8, eggs, homefries, bacon or sausage and toast for $12, and pancakes with bacon or sausage for $10.

We served about 50 people a fabulous dinner Thursday night to benefit the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Palm Bay Imports generously donated case after case of beautiful wine for the event and Paul cooked his heart out. Cole Broderick serenaded the guests on our baby grand piano.

Bradley Cohen, an enthusiastic small importer who fell in love with the wines of the Rousillon came to help out and brought and opened more of the bottles of the 1977 and 1998 Domaine de la Coume du Roy Maury than 45 people could drink after eight other wines, so if you're visiting us for dinner this weekend, mention it and we'll give you a taste (as long as it lasts). Consider it an Internet special.
This is a stunning wine, full of the scents of candied fruits, torrefaction and cocoa, composed of black, white and gray Grenache.

Paul will also be serving at the Grand Tasting for the Saratoga Food and Wine Festival on the SPAC grounds on Saturday. He's handing out cassoulet blanc, a white stew involving andouille sausage, duck, veal shoulder, pork shoulder, herbs, white beans, garlic and sundried tomatoes added toward the end. This is the only event left in the SPAC festival that is not completely sold out, probably because it can accommodate several thousand people. For information on tickets and times, visit http://www.spac.org/spac-calendar/spac-event-calendar-view-detail.asp?varEventID=26

Cheryl saw an early display of Halloween candy in the supermarket and reflected on the fact that very few people seem to take their kids trick-or-treating door-to-door anymore. It's not a great night for restaurants either, because parents seem obliged to take their costumed kids from store to store in the mall begging for candy. So we had a thought: why not have a Halloween party at Chez Sophie?
We'll set the kids up in the upper dining room by the lounge with snacks and games, give prizes away for the best costumes, and meanwhile, the Mommies and Daddies can take two steps down to the lower dining room, sit by the fireplace and have a real meal. We can decorate the courtyard with jack-o-lanterns and glow-in-the dark ghouls, and everybody's happy, right?

The party will start at 5 p.m. and go to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 31. One of our customers has volunteered to do magic tricks.
Admission for children will be $5 per kid, which includes snacks, games and prizes. This could turn out to be a pretty big thing, so if you want to have dinner while your kids have fun, you should probably reserve a table on the lower level.

Composer Cole Broderick plays cool jazz on the baby grand in our lounge on Tuesdays and Fridays and during Sunday brunch, as well as during parties and special events. Cole is not only a talented native son, but has also received a "Critic’s Choice" citation from Billboard Magazine for his four CD set "Seasons of Saratoga." His newest solo CD, "In a Dream" was recently released.

Notes on Nico and Léo: Léo, who is only 7 months old, is frighteningly mobile. She is crawling and standing on her own, and doing other things that make her parents hair stand on end. The other day, Cheryl left Léo on a padded quilt on the living room floor and went into the kitchen to get her a bottle. When she came back a few minutes later the baby was gone. She could hear her cooing happily, so she knew it couldn't be that bad, so she began to search the floor around the couch. No where. Then she looked in Nico's toy basket, and found the little mountain goat had climbed in and was scaling a Himalayan construction of stuffed animals and toy trucks and was teetering precariously about two and half feet above the ground.
Being a second time Mom, Cheryl didn't scream or lunge, but simply collected the little climber off the top of the pile, deposited her back on the quilt and began to dismantle Mount Toybox.

Papa took her to the pediatrician for a routine checkup Wednesday morning and found that she'd hit 16 pounds, which is really only about average for a girl her age in the United States. It just seems big to us because Nico was only 13 pounds when he began to walk at 9 months.

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.)

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