SOPHIE PARKER

Wednesday, February 28, 2001- Times Union

The Heart did Cooking in Sophie's Kitchen

By STEVE BARNES, Arts Editor
Sophie Parker, who passed away Tuesday morning at her home in Hadley after a yearlong battle with cancer, was never one for culinary faddishness. She spent three decades turning out unfussy, perfect meals that both pleased customers and inspired fellow chefs. For her influence on other culinary professionals and her championing of simple French cuisine, Parker could be considered the Julia Child of the Capital Region.

She treated her traditional ingredients-escargot, pate, beef, fish and fowl-with care and let their basic flavors dominate. Parker's talents cultivated patrons so dedicated that they wouldn't let her take certain dishes off the menu. Duck with apricot-peppercorn sauce, for instance, has been constant and mostly unchanged at Chez Sophie since the mid-1970s.

"Every plate that went out of her kitchen was impeccable," said Gustav Ericson, who first met Parker 20 years ago when he was the pastry chef at Sperry's Restaurant in Saratoga Springs and worked with her most recently at Chez Sophie in the late 1990s. "She had such a profound knowledge of food, and a love and respect for her customers," he said.

"Everything about the restaurant was superb-the service, the ambience, but most especially the food," said Nancy Ayers of Albany, a longtime and frequent Chez Sophie patron.

Born in 1927 in Billy-Montigny, a small town in northwest France, near Belgium, she had French parents, a Polish grandmother and a whole family of cooks who raised farm animals and grew herbs and vegetables.

Twenty years later in Paris, during a long elevator ride up from a Metro station, she met an American, Joseph Parker, who was studying art in Paris on the G.I. bill. They married in 1949, and a few years after moved to Astoria, Queens, where Joseph Parker set up a studio as a commercial artist.

During the late '50s and early '60s, Sophie Parker was a wife, a mother to two young children and a top fencer. At one point she was an Olympic contender, ranked seventh in the country.

Though she cooked regularly at home for her husband's clients, she had no professional training. When the couple escaped upstate to the small Saratoga County village of Hadley, in 1969, they bought a house with a former eatery next door and decided to open a restaurant. Figuring she needed some idea of how to run the place, Sophie did a six-week stint at a friend's restaurant in Westchester County before opening Chez Sophie Bistro in May 1969.

The name remained the same although the restaurant, then open only during the summer, had several locations as the decades passed: in Hadley until 1976; on Caroline Street in Saratoga Springs for the next 10 years; back to Hadley for a few years; and another season in Saratoga in '92. The present location, in a restored diner on Route 9 in Malta Ridge, just south of Northway Exit 13, has been open year-round since July 14 -- Bastille Day-in 1995.

Parker knew the silver diner was the site for the next incarnation of Chez Sophie because, she told her family, "When I drive past, it winks at me.' "

Parker dominated the Chez Sophie kitchen for years, turning out up to 100 meals nightly with only a sole assistant. She was meticulous about everything, from how her raw ingredients were prepared by her purveyors to how the copper pans should be polished.

"She demanded number-one quality. Her standards were so strict you almost couldn't believe it," said Ralph DeSantis, owner of Cousins Fish Market in Albany, who supplied Chez Sophie for more than 20 years and was the recipient of an annual batch of Parker's Christmas cookies.

"Everything had to be the biggest and the best," said another supplier, John Fusco, owner and president of Edelweiss Veal Co. in Albany. He cited the veal chops he cut for Chez Sophie, which Parker specified be 20 ounces-two-thirds larger than most Edelweiss sells.

"She wanted it all extremely perfect," Fusco said. "She had the cleanest restaurant kitchen I've ever seen."

Chez Sophie was heralded regionally as a treasure until 1998, when its reputation spread to a much larger audience after a 2,200-word story about the restaurant appeared in the food section of The New York Times.

William Grimes, now the paper's chief dining critic, first chanced upon Chez Sophie years before but hadn't been able to find it again; the restaurant had vanished, like a culinary Brigadoon.

When he rediscovered it in 1998, he wrote that Chez Sophie was "the neighborhood bistro that every Manhattanite dreams of" and that it served "the kind of deceptively simple food that ... makes life worth living."

Chez Sophie was packed for months afterward with downstate and out-of-state diners, some of whom, calling to make dining reservations, also asked the Chez Sophie staff to find them hotel accommodations nearby so they could return several nights in a row.

Since she was diagnosed with cancer early last year, Parker worked only occasionally, coming in some mornings to make stocks and sauces. But Parker's culinary sensibilities and traditions were so strong that most diners thought Sophie herself was grilling their quail with currant sauce and whipping the meringues for their vacherin dessert.

"People are still saying, 'Sophie hasn't lost her touch,' " said her son, Paul Parker, who manages Chez Sophie, buys the wine and food and waits tables.

Husband Joseph Parker is the restaurant's host, resident raconteur and artist, given to chatting with frequent patrons and introducing newcomers to his sketchbook of whimsical drawings.

Since Parker's illness began, the Chez Sophie kitchen has been managed by chef Mark Trietley, now in his third year at the restaurant.

"She cooked from her heart rather than her head," said Trietley, whose nickname for Parker was mere de cuisine, or "mother of cuisine."

"Her legacy is something the rest of us carry with us," said. "It's something we're proud to uphold."