Vegan parisian gnocchi with butternut puree, confit delicata squash, and sage breadcrumb
It looks the time has come, sort of. I'm finally out of the private club life, in a hopefully temporary job. I can't give all the details yet, except to say that hopefully within 7 months, i will be opening a new spot, with my old chef. It is very scary, an it has me rethinking, maybe overthinking a lot of things.
I've spent the past couple days looking at reviews in the paper for local places, all places i worked at to figure out one important thing: what did people like about this place? also wanted to know what they did'nt like what needed to be better, what they absolutely hated. When you open a restaurant you only get one first impression. And what i realized was what people loved was daring, unexpected, and delicious things- Serving a chinese style duck with italian duck leg meatballs. Making an indian palak tikka and serving it with a french morel cream sauce, coating Dorade in chinese potato starch, frying it, serving it with tourneed French vegetables and a seemingly chinese sweet and sour broth made with French ingredients- beurre noisette, vinegar made of Banyuls wine, and mushroom stock
proposed menu
it'll be strange, because it'll be a restaurant where vegan and non-vegan food are gonna be sharing almost equal space. As much stuff as we'll be making nnon-vegan, i'll be making vegan versions of. There won't be any a la carte. Hopefully we'll even stop doing prix fixe and only do tasting menu. It's obviously not my dream of a fully vegan place, but it's something. It gets me out of the tyrrany of working for others and the stress of being managed, and gives us both creative freedom finally. That's the benefit of ownership.The plan for the past couple months has been simple, we've been doing this nice food in this club up in the sky for almost nobody, so now we're gonna simply do the same food for the public. No need to recipe test or develop menus or anything, because we have 3 years of seasonal menus already done.
amuse bouche and chilled tomato soup from 2 years ago
But now, I have thoughts about what to do and how to do it. Now, the food we've been doing is good. It's pretty, well thought out, and super seasonal. We use a lot of really great products and cool techniques. BUT, and it's a huge but- The confines of a private club forced us to be very safe. Our food isn't terribly daring or risky. Over at the club, any risks or cool or super modern things we tried generally weren't well received. We served poussin on the menu once and guests returned t because they didn't know it's not supposed to be white. Guests complained that their mozzarella was too soft- it was burrata. Dishes with foamed sauced got sent back because they thought the sauce was curdled.
The guests there were more fans of turkey clubs and hot tomato soup than say, fried squash blossoms and chilled tomato soup-yes, the chilled tomato soup in the photo above came off the menu, because guests did'nt understand the concept of a cold gazpacho in the summer.
So we walked the line of cool and as nice as we could, but not necessarily what we wanted to do or were capable of. And now, being able to do what we want, i wonder if we should do more. Take more risks. If maybe i personally need to be less wedded to strictness of concept and just do whatever i like, as long as it's good.
squash mille-feuille, basically a take on pumpkin pie- rejected by corporate for being too weird
I look at dishes we did and i ask myself, could i have done this different? is there something I wanted to do but told myself "you cant do that here" ? Our ravioli was simply a sage butter sauce, but, we could do more. I'm going to make it with cardamom and thai basil and and add some rice vinegar for acid. The mushroom risotto is good- but maybe it'll be better with some pickled chanterelles mixed in. We were making a vadouvan curry foam with it, but maybe we should make our own vadouvan- toast and grind our own spices for it.
Many direct ideas we couldn't do there, i'd like to try out-The strawberry-basil cheesecake and spiced peach tart, many of our ambuse bouche like ceviches, celery soda, and beet pastrami.
it's treading a fine line- the food has to be interesting enough that people desperately want it, but needs to be delicious enough that people desperately want to eat it again. It has to be innovative without being off putting. It has to be fancy and precise without being precious. There needs to be something familiar without it being boring and old-hat.
Strawberry basil cheesecake with thai basil ice cream
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