Vegan Feast

Some weeks ago, shortly after announcing that she had gone vegan, Yael invited us to dinner. Although I cook my share of creative vegan meals at the restaurant, I don't really get the whole vegan thing. I enjoy hard cheeses and pork way too much for that, though otherwise I could be very comfortably a vegetarian. Still, I have no problem eating vegan especially when the food is made by such a gifted cook as Yael! After you look these pictures, you will see the vast effort that she underwent to put on this dinner (and the resulting food for an army)!

Very soon after we arrived at their place out in the county just northwest of Winchester, we were ushered into the dining room with the table set thus:

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I did have to give Yael a little grief about the beautifully set table. If the meal is vegan, why is the table set with steak knives? ;)

Oregano, Zinnias, Thyme, and Sage Decorated the Table

Hummus and Salad with Sesame-Sunflower Seed Pita

Spaghetti with Carrot and Zucchini Ribbons

Asparagus Tips Wrapped in Grated Parsnips Rolled in Beet Slices

Dolmades!

Eggplant

Spinach in Pastry

Mushroom Cigarettes

I loved everything! My favorite dish of the day would have been the eggplant, though with its filling of ground cashew nuts, it was too rich for me to eat much of it. And the beet dish has my chef brain working overtime.

Honeymoon: The Painted Lady, Newberg OR

Thursday May 2, Newberg OR

After a morning tasting wine and a killer lunch at Nick's Italian Café in McMinnville, we spent the afternoon at the B&B where I got in a nice long and much needed nap before we headed down the hill once again into downtown Newberg where we ate at the restaurant that is by most accounts the top-rated one in the Willamette Valley, The Painted Lady. Chef Paul Bachand from Recipe had booked our table for us the night before and The Painted Lady texted me to confirm early in the day on Thursday and I let them know that I was a visiting fine dining chef and I just wanted them to cook for us.


Clean, Spare Dining Room

So when we arrived at the lovingly restored but very tiny Victorian wood-frame house situated on a corner lot behind a white picket fence and were seated in the very nicely appointed, but not over the top, dining room, it was no surprise that food just started coming out of the kitchen. Other tables seated near us were just getting going as well and they were getting the menus and the spiel from the service staff and I could see some of them wondering why we were getting different treatment. All it takes is a phone call.

Before we get into the food, a few comments about the restaurant and the staff. Once the sun set, the dining room was too dark for me to see most of what I was eating and the older I get the more light I seem to need. I don't mind dim lights, but when I have to use my cellphone to illuminate a plate to see the fantastic artwork on it, I call that too dark. I'm not faulting the restaurant on this choice, because that's how they have chosen to do things. I choose differently in my own restaurant. And you will see from the limited number and poor quality of photos how dark it was. I didn't bother to take any photos knowing they wouldn't be any good anyway.

The service was impeccable. I can remember exactly once in the whole 3-1/2 hours we dined at The Painted Lady that an empty wine glass stayed on the table for a minute longer than it should have (according to their service model; me, I could not care less if that glass stays there all night as long as it doesn't get in my way) and that's when every server on the floor was putting plates down at an 8-top nearby. Impeccable. New glassware and a totally new set of silverware with each course and everything about the service was silky smooth and polished.

The service was impersonal. We tried to crack through the starched reserve of some of the servers and we did elicit a smile or two from time to time, but they work from the model that they are servers, they do what you need, and they don't interact any more than necessary with the guests. This is a very old school European model that many of the very high end restaurants in the US aspire to and at The Painted Lady, they succeed very well.

But that's not what I want! I want personality and character from the staff and something that tells me that they are having fun at what they do. I want a server that comes to the table and exclaims, "This dish is freaking awesome; you are so going to love it!" I want to see pride without arrogance on the faces of the service staff, pride that comes from knowing that they are serving an amazing product and providing a unique experience. The service at The Painted Lady was not robotic, but it wasn't charismatic either.

The wines selected for our food were impeccable as well. I really appreciated the selection and variety of local wines that were paired with our dinner. As a chef who pairs wines with each dish on his menu, I can say to The Painted Lady, "Job very well done!" Thank you for introducing me to Walter Scott wines from Eola-Amity Hills, a tiny producer of exceptional wines.

And finally about the food. I sit here at the keyboard and I can tick off several dishes that got my chef juices flowing during the course of our stay in Oregon: the nettle gnocchi and the radishes at Thistle, the potato-nettle pizza at Nick's, and the laap at Pok Pok (to be discussed later in this series). But there was no one memorable dish for me at The Painted Lady. To be sure, I remember the scallop in the scallop crudo for being so sweet and fresh and I remember Ann's chocolate dessert for being so over the top, but the food didn't leave any lasting impression other than it was very high quality and very well presented.

This probably says more about me than it says about the restaurant and Chef Allen Routt, who spent a few minutes with us after dinner, when I learned that he is no stranger to this part of the world, having cooked a stint on the line at the Inn at Little Washington and also having worked for the late Jean-Louis Palladin. This says that I like more direct dishes that are mainly ingredient-driven and perhaps more rustic as a result than I like impeccably executed dishes that are more chef- and technique-driven.

Amuses: Fava Hummus on Papadum, Gougères, and ???

Chef's Trio: Salmon Tartare, Breaded Quail Egg; Goat Mousse on Cheese Straw

Oysters and Lardons

Crabmeat, Caviar, Delicious Curried Soup

Nettle Ravioli, Parsnip Puree, Summer Truffles

I'm a chef and I use truffles all the time. They rarely excite me.

Scallop Crudo, Avocado, Crispy Salmon Skin, Dashi Sphere

This dish got Ann to asking about the dashi sphere but spherification and reverse spherification techniques are not dinnertime conversation for anyone save super nerdy chefs. I played with all this some years ago, but it's just not me or my thing; however, this was probably the dish that I liked best.

Mini Margarita Slushie Intermezzo

You can see from the light of the votive in the intermezzo photo that it is just too dark in the dining room to take pictures. This votive was all the light we had! It's a pity because there are a lot more beautifully presented dishes that you can't see.

Missing are a ling cod dish, a salmon dish (that salmon was super well cooked), a foie gras course (foie doesn't impress me unless you bring out a terrine of it, a loaf of crusty bread, some great wine, and we all sit around getting fat, dumb, and happy!), a beef tenderloin (excellent flavor) dish, a venison dish, a small cheese course, and Ann's chocolate fantasy that was too big for four people. I wish you could have seen the amount of labor that went into that one dish. Chocolate is not my thing, but my hat is off to the person that conceived of and plated that dish.

Palio, Leesburg

Woot! Ann's birthday finally coincided with a day off for me and we planned to go out to dinner, not just a casual dinner, but a really nice celebratory dinner. My day off is Monday and that is a terrible night to go out as many restaurants, like mine, are closed on a very slow night. Winchester on a Monday night is slim pickings for a birthday dinner and so we started to look farther afield. We finally decided on Palio in Leesburg because we had not been there and they have a reasonable reputation, a reasonable wine list, and some friends have said that it was good.

Before making the drive over, I had a peek at their wine list on line. Wine is a big deal for us, if you hadn't already guessed that. After looking at the list, I started to get a bit nervous about the choice. There were so many typos in the names of the wines that I wondered if they might show that lack of focus and detail orientation in their food. The meal would tell.

We arrived not too long after they opened on a dark, dreary, cold, drizzling evening looking for warmth and a good meal. The downstairs room in which we were seated was really well decorated and a beautiful space, but it was frigid and I could see when the server approached the table, she was cold too. On her own initiative, she got something done about the temperature without us having to ask, always a plus.

She seemed to be well trained and spoke at least reasonably knowledgeably about the long list of dinner specials, almost as many secondi specials as there were secondi on the menu. Six or seven specials is just too many for most diners to get their arms around.

I didn't see anyone who might have had any familiarity with the wine list and I didn't feel like our server was the one to help me pick the right bottle, something a little off the beaten track. Certainly, anyone can go in and order a Barolo, Brunello, Super Tuscan, or Amarone on price and get a pretty good wine. Me, I'm always looking for something different, that obscure bottle that somebody fell in love with enough to give it a (long) shot on the list. I never got the feeling from looking at the bare bones wine list (no descriptions at all) that anybody fell in love with anything. It just seemed to be an impersonal list of wines. And the markups were pretty aggressive. Several of the wines are also on my list, so I know what they paid for them. I'm not knocking the markups, but if you're going to do it, the money ought in part to be going to pay for someone to manage the list, correct the typos, and be available to assist customers in choosing a wine. And it ought to go to purchasing good stemware, more about which later.

I chose a Rosso Piceno from the Santa Barbara winery (in the Marche), the "Maschio da Monte" from 2007. I had no way of knowing from the wine list that this wine was awarded Tre Bicchieri by Gambero Rosso magazine, their highest award. I tend to trust this magazine a lot more than most American wine rags. I was expecting more Sangiovese and less Montepulciano but this bottling was deep purple and 100% Montepulciano. I didn't realize that DOC Rosso Piceno could be all Montepulciano. I liked the funky nose followed by a very intensely plummy wine with some acidity and pleasant tannins. I made a great choice!

While I was plowing through the wine list, we had a glass of so-so house-pour Prosecco which Ann noted right off is not the quality of what we are used to drinking. In all fairness, it was only $8 a glass and wasn't offensive. What was offensive was drinking our Rosso from clunkers of glasses, quoting Ann, "I feel like I'm drinking out of a tankard." Details matter and if you're charging top dollar for your wine and I'm drinking a good bottle, I want a good glass. It doesn't have to be expensive, just good. Good glasses start at $3.50 each wholesale. Show me a restaurant that cannot make the $100 investment in a case of good glasses. It says to me that details don't matter.

Starving, Ann ordered two antipasti while I was deciding between the Rosso Piceno and a Langhe Rosso. She ordered a bowl of mussels (with a couple of clams) and speck-wrapped scallops on parsnip purée. Underwhelming is pretty much the word on the appetizers. The mussels, styled Cozze e Vongole alla Napolitana, were tiny and the broth was OK but nothing memorable. Tiny mussels are not the restaurant's fault, but serving them is. I'm having problems right now with mussel quality at my own restaurant. My choice is not to serve them. Palio chose differently.

On the other hand, the scallops were memorable for being pretty much terrible; we ate one of them and let the busser take the other away. The whole scallop dish was a wreck. The parsnip purée was so gritty and crudely executed as to be off-putting. The scallops were way overdone and my sense is that they were cooked before service and held hot. The garnish was a lemon slice and a sprinkling of paprika. Really? Thank you for bringing back terrible memories from the '60s of frozen fish cutlets topped with lemon slices and paprika. Barf! How about some micro-mustard greens for a sharp contrast? Or a couple of sautéed chanterelles for an earthy contrast to the sweet parsnips and sweet scallops?

Let's talk about details. A runner brought us bread long after our antipasti were on the table. I'm OK with the timing miscue; I don't expect the A-Team to be working on Monday night. But the bread was cold. That's not what I expect of a top-level restaurant. And the grissini were tough as though they were overworked. Not sure if the grissini were made in house or bought in; in either case, the quality isn't there. It's the details such as this that separate the good from the great.

After the antipasti debacle, we tried a couple of pasta primi, mainly because the secondi just did not sound worth ordering. I couldn't feel any creativity in the standard secondi at all and hearing the server's spiel of four different secondi specials served with roasted potatoes didn't speak to me of a creative kitchen. Ann wanted to try the lobster ravioli special, but I resisted and she relented without me having to say out loud that after the kitchen butchered the two seafood antipasti, I wasn't going to tempt fate yet again.

We ordered tagliatelle and cavatelli and I have got to say that our pasta was really well made and well cooked. Bravo! I especially loved the cavatelli, a labor-intensive cut that is not to be found on very many menus. The Cavatelli alla Pugliese was listed on the menu as ricotta cavatelli, lightly spicy lamb sausage, rapini, and shaved Parmesan cheese. While the pasta itself was remarkably good, I wasn't expecting a mild red meat sauce and given the ingredient list, I was expecting more excitement from this sauce. It was good and workmanlike and I enjoyed it, but I wasn't thrilled by it.

The Bolognese sauce on the tagliatelle caused me pause though: it was just a glorified ground meat and tomato sauce that any red sauce Italian joint could have done. As Ann said a bit dispiritedly, "It isn't your pork ragù." Bolognese sauce is one of the great culinary contributions of northern Italy: shredded meat with a touch of cream cooked so long that the sauce caramelizes and becomes something so much larger than the sum of its ingredients. There was nothing wrong with the sauce really; it was tasty, but my objection is to calling it a Bolognese. My expectations were set by the name and those expectations were not met.

The pasta portions were very large, much more generous than I expected and slightly oversauced to my taste. I would have preferred a smaller portion with less sauce as a primo to leave me room for another primo or a secondo or even dessert.

Without any heart for dessert, we decided to pack it in and head home for a nightcap.

I so want to love this beautiful place and the deft touch on the pasta gives me hope. But the devil is in the details and the details are currently tripping up this restaurant. Lest you think we spent our whole evening nit-picking the restaurant, we did not. We had a wonderful time celebrating Ann's birthday, enjoying an adult evening out, and spent the majority of our time talking about our Christmas menu when we are going to do the Seven Fishes.

Pros: beautiful place, professional and unobtrusive service, excellent hand-made pasta.

Cons: lack of focus on details, horrid stemware, middle of the road food.

Note: I am being much harder on Palio than I might be on other restaurants that we have visited. If they want to play at a price point that is higher than that of my restaurant, they have to play by the tough standards that I hold for my own restaurant.