Archives

Hello, Everyone:

Cheryl stepped into the courtyard Monday night and pinched a floret off the top of a massive bush of basil, added a few lavender flowers, crushed them in her hands and rubbed the oil all over her face. She stood in the moonlight, wondering how long it would be before the first frost destroyed these massive, tender plants that have been flourishing in the shelter of the glass-walled enclosure, and thought, we'd better start trimming back all these herbs and using them.

The next morning, she walked into the restaurant with the children, glanced into the sunlit courtyard and noted that someone, the landscaper, most likely, had laid out dozens of maroon and yellow mums. "Wonderful," Cheryl thought. "Someone is actually thinking ahead without Paul and I telling them to." She proceeded to start answering her phone messages, and suddenly stopped in mid-dial.

"Wait a second! Where are they putting those mums?" So she ventured out and realized that every last herb had been dug up.

"Nice mums," she ventured gently. "Where are all the herbs?"

The landscaper, dripping with sweat and grimy, looked up at the constricted visage of the restaurateur. "I, uh dug them out with the root balls intact," she said. "I noticed you'd put in a lot of them.
I'll winter them over in my greenhouse and bring them back next spring."

"Okay," Cheryl said, started to turn back inside. "Wait a second.
Basil isn't perennial. Did you throw it out?"

It turns out all the herbs were safe in the back of her truck. So Cheryl grabbed the garde manger, Sabrina Guttridge, and a couple of pairs of scissors and did a little pick-up truck harvesting. We were rather amazed at the armloads of basil and lavender and other herbs we carried back to the kitchen. The long and the short of it is, Sabrina's already made enough lavender ice cream to last at least a week and we have fresh basil oil and pesto to get us through the late stages of autumn.

To herald the first stages of fall, the installers are scheduled to come Monday to fire up the double sided fireplace in our dining room for the first time Monday. We're not sure exactly what time they'll show up, but it seems like a good Monday excuse for a toast if anyone wants to peer into the inaugural flames around the cannonball-shaped logs.

This weekend, we'll also be serving salmon, seared after being coated with horseradish breadcrumbs and beef oxtails braised in red wine with handmade tagliatelle noodles.

Oxtail stew very likely originated during the French Revolution, when the slaughterhouses sent hides to the tanneries without cleaning them, leaving the tails on. A thrifty French noble asked for a tail, which was given him gratis. Soon, the soup he made became popular, and the tanneries started charging for pieces of tail. (A tradition maintained to this day throughout Paris and indeed most of France.,)

As the name indicates, the soup was originally made from the tail of an ox, but was later made from beef and veal tails. The marrow in the bones makes the meat extremely flavorful.

The dish was probably brought to England by French refugees from the "terror." Versions of it appear in every country where cattle are raised for meat or hide.

So often we serve our lamb chops, with their intense reduction of red and lamb stock, and people look at them without tasting and ask for mint jelly. We don't stock mint jelly. There was a jar that got left in the basement of the old restaurant, a pale green supermarket-brand jar of some mint-like substance, that never got thrown out when we renovated in 1995 because Sophie abhorred waste. We moved our real supplies around this tiny green jar for nigh onto 8 years, even after Sophie's death, reluctant to throw it out and adamantly unwilling to serve it.

The inevitable happened. A new waiter, helpfully unloading deliveries, noticed the jar of jelly. A few days later, a customer asked for mint jelly, and the waiter helpfully ran downstairs, grabbed the holy jar, unsealed it and spooned the gelatinous green goo into a ramekin. It was nearly consumed before Paul and Cheryl found out about this transgression of style, and there was really nothing to be done about it, by then.

It's not that mint is evil. Mint and lamb is a classic pairing in many cultures - England, Italy, France, Morocco, and so on.

"The reason for mint jelly with lamb goes back to when they served mutton, which is a really strongly flavored meat," Chef Paul said.
"Real English mint jelly, the good stuff, tended to be a potent, spicy condiment, which is what you need to balance a strong meat.

"What remains of that, the stuff you get in the supermarket, is pretty watered down. It's overly sweet, it has no pepper, it has no spice, but people got used to green jelly and lamb, at least in America, even when the lamb was mild. It's a 50s thing."

The Pink Plate Special this week will be a half rack of lamb with Paul's answer to mint jelly, a spicy, vinegary sauce of fresh mint, honey and white wine vinegar. It should be perfect with Alsatian wine.

We've set the dates for our first wine dinners of the season, and the theme might come as a surprise to anyone who thinks we'd never serve anything but French wine.

We'll be doing a special tasting dinner with Warm Lake Estates, a Niagara Escarpment winery we've become particularly fond of. This dinner will kick off our official addition of New York State wines to our list. It's something we've been wanting to do for more than a year, because it doesn't make sense for us to devote so much energy to serving local produce and completely ignore New York State grape growers.

Warm Lake's winemaker, Michael VonHeckler, only makes three wines, an estate wine, a secondary wine and a dessert wine. The estate wine is made by blending separately vinified pinot noir grapes made from four distinct sections of Warm Lake's 45-acre vineyard.

On November 8 and 9th, we will have the opportunity to taste all four of those cask samples, as well as the resulting estate wine and secondary wine, and finish with the dessert wine. This should give a wonderful chance to explore the concept of terroir and how slight differences in climate can have a dramatic effect on the flavor achieved from grapes. Paul will make a five-course menu to complement the wines.
Further details on the menu and pricing will be available in next week's newsletter.
http://www.warmlakeestate.com/

Our resident musical genius, Cole Broderick, has started showing up all nights of the week to play our beautiful baby grand piano. He's supposed to play on Tuesdays and Friday nights and Sunday brunch, but occasionally the crowds during those meals has been small, and he really likes to play. So now we're given to understand that he'll show up nearly every night, and if there are enough people in the restaurant, he'll stay and play the night.

Cheryl is getting very excited about the kids Halloween party on Tuesday, October 31. The other night she constructed a costume for Nico (court jester seems appropriate, ne c'est pas?) and ordered a bunch of glow in the dark skeletons and cobwebs for the courtyard, as well as majorly cool items for the goody bags. Her Mom is even talking about flying up from Arkansas for the festivities. The idea is that there are very few places to take kids on Halloween, especially if it falls on a school night. We took Nico trick or treating last year and barely ran into any other kids, so we assume everyone was at the mall begging for candy from the store employees.
We decided to use the upper dining room for a kids party, with games, magic tricks, crafts, prizes for the best costumes and a little kiddy buffet. The parents can come and have dinner in the lower dining room while the kids party and pop upstairs at will to enjoy the fun.

Notes on Nico and Léo:
"Killer Nico!" our son shouts. We look through the partition between the office and the nursery and note that he's taken a pile of innocent, snap-together colorful blocks and constructed a credible sub machine gun.
"Tat Tat Tat Tat," he shrieks. His Mommy looks on, stone-faced, wondering where he got this particular innovation from. He doesn't yet go to pre-school and most of his companions are younger girls.
"He's built a weapon, Paul," Cheryl tells her husband.
"Wow, cool," Paul responds.
"It's not really cool, Paul," Cheryl notes dryly.
"You're such a girl," her husband taunts.

Our night floor manager, Scott, who for a time was also Nico's au pair, was trying to be helpful. Nico kept taking off his shoes and running out of the nursery into a back corridor of the hotel behind our restaurant. Aside from the fact that banquet servers and room service attendants frequently sail up that corridor pushing gueridons at high speed, there could be things a small boy doesn't really want on his feet there, in spite of frequent cleanings.

So Scott told Nico that if he goes into the corridor without his shoes, the hall monster would eat his toes. We discovered this when we tried to make Nico sit in the doorway for a time-out after he knocked his sister over. He protested bitterly that he was going to be eaten by the "the monster." We're still not sure if he actually believes in the toe-eating hall monster or if he was just using that story to evade his time-out.

We hope to see you soon!

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..

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.

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 would like to sign up to receive weekly Chez Sophie updates,
please let us know your email address!