Archive for April, 2010

  • 29 Apr

    bsharp

    Posted by
    Brandon Sharp


    Category

    under pressure

    0

    On a few recent nights we have had mistakes–unforced errors–in the kitchen during relatively slow services, and it’s conventional culinary wisdom that a lot of cooks work better when their backs are against the wall.  When the intensity diminishes and the cook has plenty of time to plate a medium-rare steak and a shortrib, the mind wanders, the rhythm is lost, the steak is suddenly overcooked, and the guest has to wait an extra fifteen minutes in a half-full dining room.  The application of pressure can help everyone in the kitchen to maintain focus.

    The literal translation of “sous vide”, UNDER PRESSURE means a lot of different things in the professional kitchen.  The first definition I could find is

    “the force applied to a unit area of surface”

    Okay, correct for scientific apps and for sous vide cooking, but I had to scroll down to definition #6 to find

    “urgent claim or demand”

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 21 Apr

    bsharp

    Posted by
    Brandon Sharp


    Category

    May flowers, I hope

    0


    April has been a rainy month here in Calistoga, especially on the weekends; we had to perform an emergency weather intervention for a wedding of 160 guests two weeks ago.  The growth spurts of our plants and produce have therefore been stop-and-go, but in addition to the fava beans over at Fisher Vineyards, we have a little kitchen garden out back of solbar where we have just put in the next season’s herbs, as well as tomatoes and melons.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 19 Apr

    bsharp

    Posted by
    Brandon Sharp


    Category

    meataballas

    0

    The culinary planets aligned tonight for me to make boules des viandes, and I use that phrase because it seems that the French have no fancy name for or tradition of meatballs, unlike the cultures that surround them (Spain, Italy, Denmark, Hungary).  Hrmph.  What do the French do with ground beef?  Saucissons, hachis parmentier, et crepinettes, I reckon.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 13 Apr

    bsharp

    Posted by
    Brandon Sharp


    Category

    solbar garden update!

    0

    They look like blue lake beans because Ryder picked them so young, but they are in fact the first baby fava beans from our garden at Fisher Vineyards, fresh this morning.  We put them on the lounge menu at solbar tonight, tempura-fried with ponzu sauce.  Tomorrow they’ll make their way on the dinner menu when we roast them in a saute pan and serve them with seared diver scallops, arrabiatta vinaigrette, persillade, and pine-nut butter.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 12 Apr

    bsharp

    Posted by
    Brandon Sharp


    Category

    grape expectations

    0

    My professional experience with wine is limited, but the solbar Sommelier, Bradley Wasserman, and I have been working on a new format for our wine list since September 2009.  With the help of Solage Calistoga GM Richard Hill, we finally rolled it out two weeks ago. The challenge was to create a format and a style that matched my approach to food and how I write the dining room menus, dessert menus, and cocktail menus–and maintaining, all the while, an intelligible, logical, comprehensible document.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 07 Apr

    bsharp

    Posted by
    Brandon Sharp


    Category

    sprung

    0

    A few new menu items . . . Ryder is working on a new dinner entree with pozzi farms leg of lamb, garlic-fennel lamb sausage, white bean puree and white bean dauphine, pepperonata, and artichoke-mint vierge. We tasted it last night, and it’s BANGING. Everything you could want in a spring lamb dish without a heavy reduction sauce, without “baby spring vegetables”, without, in fact, much you might expect at all.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 05 Apr

    jalmond

    Posted by
    Jacqi Almond


    Category

    100 Best Bay Area Restaruants – April 2010

    0

    “Cooking great food in a resort where the kitchen prepares breakfast, lunch and dinner is a challenge, but Brandon sharp has defied the odds.”

    - Michael Bauer, SF Chronicle, Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants, 2010

  • 03 Apr

    bsharp

    Posted by
    Brandon Sharp


    Category

    the great wide open

    0

    At the front of the kitchen, behind the expediter’s station and facing the hot line, is a 60″ dry-erase board, only a couple inches smaller than Ryder’s new flat-screen. (To its right in the above picture are the clipboards with BEOs [banquet event orders] and above them the clipboards with daily order sheets–meat, fish, produce, dairy, etc. The fish clipboard is the one that’s broken in half [whether over an angry sous chef's own knee or the head of a prep cook, no one will say] and the order sheets cut to fit.)  This reassuringly low-tech piece of equipment has uses that I haven’t realized in previous kitchens.

    » Read the rest of the entry..