Some of our New Menu

Here are some of our new dishes. We have been trying to streamline our prep in the a.m. but that means the guys at night will have to pick it up. I'd tried to keep everything simple and in doing that sometimes it ends up more complex. For the spring and summer months we will be operating with one less sous chef and one less cook at night unless we have some business. It will be a challenge and we will have to come up with some creative solutions. This menu has a little more cross utilization of products to help us out down the road. Hopefully by fall we will have some extra revenue so we can turn it up and make some more intense platings and finishing touches for the expo. This will do for now, there are still another 5 or 6 changes that have been made but we have not photographed yet but here you go.



Above is our new plate up for the chilled maine lobster. We took the avocado and scooped it directly in the cryovac bag, added a touch of lime and salt then compressed. Rolled it out with a rolling pin and then froze it. The fluid gel to the right is a liquid green olive tapenade set with agar then pureed, avocado crema below the lobster in the shell. Behind the lobster is the whipped lime where we used xanthan and versawhip, lime juice, salt, simple syrup and water. There will also be some pistachio powder, not shown here, off one of the corners of the avocado bar. So you will get all green components with different flavor profiles but they all work together. The only thing is we need to make the avo bar a little thinner so it doesn't have to temper as long, we want to be somewhere around 4-5 minutes of tempering so you can build the rest of the plate, have the server pick it up and deliver it defrosted.




Here is our vadouvan crab and melon salad. Diced melons that have been spiced up with some siracha, pickled watermelon rind, and arugula. The vadouvan aioli on the crab balances out the spicy melons. Very simple, light, good spices, and a quick plate up. We had something similar a couple years ago but it had a Vietnamese influence of green curry, fish sauce and coconut that our former chef Ed put on and it was good so here is my version.



This is our low country shrimp, white cheddar hominy, pickled okra, smoked bacon butter. We are getting some really good stone ground organic grits, the shrimp have a house made bbq rub, we make a little salad from pickled okra and cherry tomato and then a butter sauce mounted with a compound bacon butter that we make from Neuske's applewood smoked bacon.




Here is our softshell entree, cherry pepper polenta, corn silk, organic seasonal veg, popcorn shoots. Again simple, just good flavors. The cherry pepper polenta is good, we used some of the juice to finish it.




This one is my baby. Suckling pig head to tail, confit leg, grilled loin, sous vide belly, glass noodles, slaw, reverse egg drop soup. We are breaking down the whole animal so we are going to have tons of extras for charcuterie projects seeing as we only get about 6-8 portions per pig with them being as small as they are but the flavor is much better and texture as well. So we sous vide the belly, press it and sear to get the skin crispy, the leg is confit and warmed with miso broth, grated ginger, and shitakes. The loin has a black garlic and mustard marinade that turned out great. Here is the recipe
Hot Mustard and Black Garlic marinade
1.5c soy
.5c sesame oil
7.5c grapeseed oil
2 tbsp microplaned ginger
2 jars Mr. Mustard, hot
2 heads worth black garlic cloves
1.5c rock candy syrup
I build the whole mix right in the blender and puree until the oil emulsifies. marinade pork for 24 hoursseason well with sal t and pepper then grill.

The glass noodles are below the nappa slaw. Then we arrange the quail egg. We cut the shell and separate the yolk from the white, oil the intact yolk slightly and put back in the cleaned shell. The servers put the plate down in front of you and remove the shell via chop sticks(I love giving them challenging service steps) to a side plate to reveal the yolk. They then pour in miso consomme to cover the bottom of the bowl. The guest breaks the yolk and mixes it into the hot broth.





The last one I have a picture of is our Heritage Half Chicken, it's a carolina poulet rouge that we halve and de-bone, then we cook between blazing cast iron pans. It gets supper crispy skin and stay nice and moist. Their is some english pea puree under the chicken, macaire potato in the middle, the sauteed morels, english peas and mushroom puree to bind it and keep it on top of the macaire. Then we top everything with chicken jus then a parm and pea tendril salad.