Menu testing

It's that time of year to start thinking about our fall menu. We'll be picking up some dishes with heartier earthy tones for the upcoming season. We brought in some Four Story Hill Farm Cote de Boeuf. It has been dry aged for 28 days and has become one of my favorites pieces of meat.



We did a traditional bordelaise and a carrot caraway puree that came out really nice. The veg will change with whatever we have in house on top of a couple of staples that will always be on the plate(shrooms, turnip, eg..) Thinking about some carrot noodles as well to drape over and around the veg.



Part of being in the hotel environment everything has to be tested, documented, costed, and ran as a special to see what kind of feedback we get from our guests. When we get our dishes together then we do a tasting for f&b key players, exec chef and exec sous of the hotel, everything gets ran by Todd and he throws in what he wants. If everything is good then we go for a big change at once, if not we re-tool and look at problem dishes individually. Once everyone is happy with the pricing, the look, and the taste we schedule staff meetings for training. We'll go over all the products being used, their origin, what's special about them, any allergy concerns and substitutions for the FOH and BOH. Then we prep and put it into motion. It's a long process, of course we are always tweaking dishes and changing little things but the initial revamp is massive. This is the time of year where I wish I was at an independent restaurant, change everything all the time, tell the servers at pre-shift what is going on and the cooks will get a list of what they have to do that day and figure it out. Would be nice.

Pick a Peck

It's not everyday you come back from a week off and there are 2 hotel pans full of all kinds of peppers waiting for you. Then I went into our mise en place cooler to find some already pickling. Those little purple peppers will put you down, but for the most part the others have good heat and not over the top.



What to do with a ridiculous amount of peppers but make rellenos. Rock shrimp rellenos, black bean risotto...



Can't go wrong with that. The meticulous peeling, de-seeding, and stuffing brings me back to Flagstaff,Az when I was working at a little mexican joint back in the day. Perfect bar food, now I need a cerveza.

jamon, melon, cherry

The hotel owners were in tonight with some friends so we put together this little taste. Iberico ham, "melons under less pressure than normal"**, port and balsamic pickled cherry, whipped watermelon, mint blossom, radish green, and miel d'Acacia vin.




Simple, and can't really go wrong with a sliver of the iconic spanish ham on just about anything.

**Note, Dave Arnold dislikes the term compressed in relation to vac sealing. So what do we call it? Melons that were at some point in time under their normal atmospheric pressure? I see his reasoning, he understands the process and why call it that if it is not that at the time it is served. Do we have to call it anything? I see why chefs call it that with the action of the bag in the vac machine but how do we reverse this widely used misconception? Is there is a better way of describing it to our guests in a way they will understand.

Beet 1/3 Bras

Some awesome product from last nights chef table entered the bluezoo today. Pretty much a tour de chef's garden. Here we took some nice baby beets, 25 different herbs and blossoms, truffle fluid gel, shaved truffle, and topped with a fleur de sel, meyer lemon, acacia honey, and J.leBlanc evo vinaigrette.







Our salad has only 1/3 the amount of components Michel Bras' famed Gargouillou salad contains.

VIP

We did the chefs table tonight in our garde manger kitchen and cooler. When we do something like this Chef Rob, Arnaud, Dan, myself, Bogdon, and Shimo handle the food. This was chef Rob's menu and a sick one at that. We all get our lists and produce our parts of the dishes and bring it together. this is the second installation of the chefs table and it works out pretty well and have had good feedback so far.
First the guests arrive in the lobby, are greeted, then walked through the blue light lit back of the house to get to the gm cooler where overcoats await the guests.



We turned the gm cooler into an ice bar where the guests get some nice cocktails with lots of vodka options to start them off.



in the same cooler was an ice carving setup for oysters, mignonettes, and various cold and frozen apps all



after 20 minutes in the cooler the guests move on to the kitchen where there places are marked by personalized cutting boards.



The kitchen is set and the decor is neatly arranged food stufs



Amuse
sous vide squab, cherry jus, brunoise consomme, micro tarragon



1st
summer melon, tomato sorbet(frix air), baby leek, meyer lemon







2nd
scallop and clam, clam butter, clam air, red pepper noodle, baby squash, 10 summer blosssoms



the clam is on a rong of red pepper gelee that is also filled woth the clam and cornichon butter



3rd
iberico wrapped wsb, chanterelle, radish, roe, lobster bouillon
This was a cool technique, we wrapped the fish in iberico, seasoned, then twisted them up in the foil. Then sear in a dry pan in the foil and finish in the oven. I have to admit that this is the first time I've ever seared foil but chef said this is classic TK.



You can see the fish does look seared and the iberico has melted onto the fish. I had to temp the fish out because with this preparation. I couldn't get a good read on it, the fish stays super soft and moist.



lobster bouillon was finished at the table



4th
four story hills dry aged cote de boeuf, grandma cib's gnocchi, peas and carrots, bordelaise glazed sweetbreads. I'll put four story dry aged up against Kobe any day of the week.



there is truffle fluid gel, pea tendril puree, truffle vin(manni evo), and also sauced the beef tableside.



It was a great dinner. It's good to know you work for someone that everytime you cook together you know your going to learn something. It may not be agar clarification or reverse spherification but some serious solid food that can stand up to some of the best restaurants in the country. The butter, the manni olive oil, the vinegars, the peppercorns, the herbs, proteins, veg, all procured from the best. It's nice to work with these products especially during a period where you don't get to see them that often.

Gotcha!

Being where we are it's sometimes a challenge to do new and interesting things and have them be accepted by the masses. Of course creative menu writing helps, being a little vague in the description area can help us do what we want to do. In my eyes that's what I want as a diner. I don't want your paragraph long description of a dish, surprise me. It doesn't always work for everyone though. Right now we are flooded with families on vacation. If we want to survive we have to adapt to our clientele and their needs or wants. We run a lot more pasta\italian based dishes and scaled back family style menu on top of our a la carte to get the extra business that wouldn't have come through the door.
I recently read a post from Shola about his experience at Corton and listening to Drew Neiport saying, "the cream rises to the top", referring to all these restaurants offering cheaper menus to get people in the door will slowly sink to the bottom and how the ones holding their ground and don't give up on their ideals or style of food just because the economy sucks will rise to the top. I agree to an extent. If I was talking about NY then yes. Orlando isn't NY or even close to being any kind of culinary mecca so we have to take what we can get at the moment.
That being said, If we have to do basic, simple food for the masses then we have to slide these new techniques into our dishes where we can. Here is an example with some mozzarella orbs that we put in the pasta.



Looks like mozz until they stick their fork in it and all that rich mozz fondue seeps out. That's the "Gotcha!"



Sometimes I will argue the necessity of a technique, does it make the food better? In this case it does, when the mozz orb breaks and mixes into the sauce it enriches the dish.



By no means are we reinventing the wheel with but at least these little things keep us going in a time of split plate, separate checks, mac'n'cheese, 2 for 1, free glass of wine, $24.99 three course meal awesome time that we are in.

Flavors of Merguez

Still playing around with the charcuterie. We are learning a lot every time we do these cured items from fat content, flavor profile, the morphing of the flavor form start to 2 or 3 or 8 months down the road. Even the process in itself, trying to make it more efficient each time. This is a semi-dry lamb sausage we stuffed the other day. We made a harissa paste, mixed it with the ground lamb, cure 1 and bactoferm frm-2.



We ferment for 2 days at 85F, 80% humidity for the bactoferm to drop the ph to 5.0.



Now we will hang for 18 days at 55-60F before it goes into cold storage. We cooked a piece off and it has the characteristic spicy merguez taste but not as oily. This may just be the result of the recipe being a little different from a normal merguez which is not intended for aging.
So after today this will go in the meat locker and we'll check back in a couple weeks to see where we're at.

Side note, flavors of merguez could be a pretty cool dish on it's own.