BR wrote:Chef Paul,
As long as we have your attention, perhaps you can tell us a little about the changes which have occurred since Labor Day or thereabouts. What have you changed about the menu? Have you changed the focus of the restaurant at all? I notice you are currently carrying about 17 appetizers and 10 main courses on the dinner menu - is that more/less than before the changes? How many are carryovers?
And I'd be curious about whether there are any particular dishes (dinner/brunch) that you believe are must haves. Thanks,
BR
Thanks for that question, I appreciate it.
As I've said in a round-about way in a previous post, we've learned that the more familiar a food is, the more likely people are to compare it to some very personal history, and it's very difficult to stack up a chicken fried steak against one's grandma's especially if I've never had it as a reference. Even then, it's impossible to customize such items when we are serving nearly 1000 meals a week during busy seasons. The one exception we found is mac & cheese, because there are now so many versions of it people expect it to be unique in a good restaurant. We even get people trashing our grits as "supermarket instant crap" when we buy strictly organic, true hominy grits from Carolina Gourdseed White Corn, an 17th century heirloom corn that was always grown for grits. Our grits are grown, nixtamalized, dried, and ground fresh for us by Anson Mills in Columbia, SC. Still, people love trashing them. If they don't taste like the ones they had at home, disappointment is inevitable. Still, our gumbo gets overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) great feedback after we have made some changes to the recipe. I think this is because most people don't make it at home, and if you eat it out in restaurants, it's different everywhere. Not to mention, if you make gumbo often at home, you know how difficult it is to make it come out exactly the same every time. Gumbo is part science, part art, and part alchemy. Making ten or mare gallons of it every week for two years, I still find it kind of mystical.
So, we have really fought expectations in a way we never anticipated. This put us in a new direction: We've learned (actually are still learning) which "traditional" dishes are well-received and don't dash people's expectations when they don't taste like mom's. gumbo is safe. Jambalaya at lunch is safe. Grits are safe, only because we know they are the best available anywhere, and screw anyone who doesn't like them. If someone wants grits prepared without dairy or cheese, we do that happily, but we simply don't care if people don't like them. Anson Mills is the best, period.
Chicken Fried Steak had to go. It's been reinvented and inverted, so no-one can compare it to their family's or their favorite Waffle Steak. We bread and deep fry the mashed potatoes in a chop so it actually looks like a chicken fried steak. Cut into it? Mashed Potatoes! People have fun with that one. Also, we are able to grill and temp a steak. A lot of people freaked out when they were served a bloody fried steak, but we use top-quality beef and had trouble making peace with well done. When someone asked for it well done, well, grass fed beef doesn't eat well when cooked well. This is a dish I'd love to hear thought on - we serve it with a red wine jus (50 lbs of bones and two bottles of wine down to two quarts.)
Shrimp and grits will be recreated in a similar vein at some point here, we are working on it. Crab cakes have been fine, people love them. Cornbread's another tough one, every family has their own, but we're sticking to it for now. In the deep south, it's all white corn, as is ours (Three Sisters Garden!) but they make it without any sugar. We found we have to use a little to satisfy Midwestern palates, but it's not so sweet that the folks from Biloxi can't enjoy it.
Mostly, we are getting away from the very personal foods where it is difficult to satisfy people's cravings. I just can't make everyone's gramma's food. So, we don't make anything people might try to compare to Grandma's, except the handful of things that from some reason have gone safe, like crab cakes and Jambalaya. When we do a dish like fried steak, it will be reinvented so that it is familiar, hopefully amusing, and safe from unfavorable comparisons to memories.
Lunch has been left very traditional, as has been brunch. People are less adventurous at those times, and our brunch particularly, in spite of intermittent execution problems, has gone extremely well. There, we continue to work on execution daily. Eggs New Orleans is the tried and true crowd pleaser, but don't skip the mushroom & leek omelet with Prairie Fruit Farm Chevre. Look for buckwheat pancakes soon with antebellum rustic aromatic buckwheat flour. Seriously the best milled product I have ever worked with. People also love the omelet Lafourche, and you can opt for Fried green tomatoes on your eggs benedict. People love the SC-style pulled pork, but be warned the sauce is tart! If we are offering a special with hominy in it, get it. It's nixtamilized in house from Three Sisters Garden corn, and unlike any hominy you have had - sweet, flowery & fragrant, and chewy, but in a good way.
Business has been good enough, although like everyone else these days, we'd like it to be better. Still, after a very hard winter economically, we are doing well enough now that we are doing a lot of things we've wanted to do for a long time - we're offering more finfish and oysters (not usually just one like we used to,) shipping fresh hearts of palm in direct, moving into a strictly local farmstead cheese program, making our own head cheese, abundant morels, chanterelles, and maitakes in season, we had pawpaws for the first time a few weeks ago, etc. Our cooking at dinner is definitely becoming more interesting. Within the next couple of months, we will begin producing our own andouille and boudin, so I will definitely let you know when that is happening. Planning is in the final stages.
Must-trys:
*The sugar-cane cured pork belly with Johnny cakes and house plum ketchup has been a huge hit.
*As have the frog legs with market mushroom and Creole Meuniere
*Crab Cakes with Remoulde and Sweet Corn Relish - our remoulade includes house pickles, house worcestershire, and house mayo. rich! They are made with regular lump though, so don't expect the jumbo. We'd have to sell them for twenty bucks!
*Sweet-tea Brined Niman ranch Pork Chop, baked bean puree, sweet potato hash - this will change soon with the seasons, but this has been a super hit
*The Niman Ranch Strips often come in graded prime, so you can ask your server, and occasionally get a prime New York strip for twenty four bucks
*If there is a pasta special, get it
*ditto with red snapper or pompano. We have hooked up with the Shareholder's Alliance and are one of only a few restaurants in Chicago serving sustainably fished snapper and pompano endorsed by the Ocean Concervancy and NRDC. It's not cheap, but it's the right thing to do for the ocean, and it's AWESOME!
*desserts are uniformly pretty sweet these days
*there are more, these are the ones coming to mind right now.
Lastly, folks have looked at us as a more upscale choice than we really wanted initially, but we've had to embrace it, since we are not interested in cheapening our product to lower prices. Thus, we've dressed up the dining room a bit.