Artic Char, cured and smoked...

I had an Artic Char.  We cured and smoked it, sliced it thin and wrapped it around a yogurt-honey bavarois.  The char was garnished with saffron threads, pickled mustard seeds, fleur de sel, LOTS of lemon balm, sunflower seeds, and a crispy smoked black currant puree.  The froth is lemon balm puree and skim milk.

Sardines...

Maybe it's because of the time I worked in Italy or the labor of love that is required to butcher and clean these fish but I absolutely love sardines!!!  I think the best way to eat them is just a simple cure or pickle; this time we decided to cure them with salt, sugar, fennel pollen.  They were served with fresh cannelloni beans that were smoked with hickory and rosemary, reserved some of the smoked beans and made an encapsulated sphere of smoked bean cream; crispy bread tuiles, shaved VA crab apples, and a crab apple juice "sponge".  The beans and shaved crab apples were dressed in tarragon oil.  The juice "sponge" was treated with versawhip(a soy based substitute for egg whites created for meringue use) and xantham gum. 

official mortadella dish

Mortadella made of guinea hen legs, livers, a little pork butt, fat back, pistachios, spices, wrapped in guinea hen skin; served with a roasted eggplant tile, tonnato, pistachio oil whipped and set with pistachios and xantham gum; salad of pickled potatoes.

Meat-pouch-adella...

We had a bunch of Guinea Hen Legs left over so it was decided to make mortadella. We recently used all of the bung casings for other various cured and cooked farces so made two large mortadella's with the hen skin being the casing but still had a lot of farce left over so, decided to bag it and poach it, I thought the shape looked like a purse which amused me.  The other two mortadella that were wrapped in skin came out much better; the food saver doesn't quite have enough strength to remove all the small holes that can appear when making mortadella, hand rolling in plastic wrap or using the sausage stuffer is the way to go.  Regardless, it's a funny looking piece of meat.

Softshell Crab, Cardomom Yogurt, Marinated Fava Bean with mint, Sweetened Cucumber Juice spuma

Terres Major of Beef, Green Garlic, Royal Trumpet Mushrooms confit'd in Beef Fat, Artichokes, Tomato-Marrow Sauce

House Made Breads!

Two of the types of bread we make in house, top is a whole wheat sourdough with Fleur de Sel, the other a "no knead" recipe thanks to Jim Lahey from New York.

Red Snapper Escabeche marinated in Harissa, Zucchini Yogurt, Smoked Salt Cured Egg Yolk, Puffed Wild Rice, Caraway

plated by sous chef Erik "Badass" Morgan