Let’s be real. Dining out is always a treat. You don’t have to clean up afterwards, and if you’re like me, the menu at almost ANY restaurant is going to surpass what’s going on in my own kitchen. However, if you’re a diner who appreciates experiencing the mind of chef who is executing dishes that are inspired by the season, an “aha” moment, or a desire to experiment, a Chef’s Tasting is the way to take dining to the next level.
It was with this in mind, that I attended Chef Carlos Baez’ monthly Chef’s Table Tasting Dinner, held on the last Thursday of every month at The Spread’s Greenwich location.
This just in…A star studded team of Industry veterans will be bringing new life to Gabriele’s Restaurant in Greenwich CT. The Church Street staple will be undergoing a redesign in early 2020 that will bring a new concept and cuisine to downtown Greenwich.
The partners on the venture include Stephen Lewandowski of Harlan Restaurant Group and Dana Cifone, the current head of operations, and formerly of Starr Restaurants, The One Group NYC, and Douro of Greenwich.
Stephen will be working with his longtime colleague and friend Drew Nieporent of Myriad Restaurant Group best known for Nobu, Tribeca Grill, and Bâtard, who will be acting as an advisor throughout the project.
The first step in making an unexpected discovery is getting lost. Investigating the strengthening links between farming and brewing in Connecticut has led me down unfamiliar paths, both in terms of knowledge, and the kinds where I am worried about either running out of gas on country roads or stepping in something. The first piece in this series focused on a brewery that's also a farm, and my plan for this next piece was to show a farm growing hops for use in brewing. I picked a day, began at a farm stand, and found a brewery.
This is part two in Growing CTbeer, a look at how the rise of craft beer is affecting agriculture in the Constitution State, and how breweries and farms are working hand in hand to create and restore the growth of Connecticut beer.
The story of this brewery begins with a common occurrence: college drinking.
It was 2010 and Carlisle Schaeffer and Sam Wagner were new students at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. The famous institution of higher education was founded by Matthew Vassar, who made his fortune as a brewer, so it seemed fitting that the new students were bonding over drinking and making craft beer as home-brewers, even if they were underage.
Schaeffer had previously had to hide jugs of fermenting brews from his parents in his closet at home. At Vassar, he ultimately converted his dorm-room kitchen into a lab for new brewing ideas. Wagner had learned the basics of home-brewing from his dad when he was 15 and was eager to expand on that knowledge.
“Pretty quickly into our relationship, we started joking about starting a brewery one day,” Schaeffer recalls. “Eventually, we just took that joke a little too seriously.”
The result is Little House Brewing Co., a charming, destination-worthy brewery that opened last year in Chester, in a building built in the 1800s that would do Matthew Vassar proud.
If you were fortunate enough to try Geoff Lazlo’s food at Mill Street Bar & Table—or at The Whelk and LeFarm prior to that—you know to expect fresh, seasonal food from the restaurant chef turned private chef and caterer. With his latest endeavor, Geoff Lazlo Food, he’s popping up at venues all over Fairfield County and beyond. These days you’ll catch Lazlo flashing his skills at places that practice and preach sustainability like Mike’s Organic Delivery, The Hickories, Millstone Farm, and he even returned to cook at one of Gramercy Tavern’s 25th anniversary alumni nights where he was a sous chef for four years.
Beer, as I've said so many times on this site, is food. Beer is a farm you can drink. It's an agricultural product that comes to us from fields of grain and leafy green hop yards, even down to the yeast brewers culture and grow from the skins of fruit in orchards. The massive proliferation of breweries in Connecticut - many of them less than five years old - means a huge uptick in the need for all these natural products. I wanted to take a look at how the rise of craft beer is affecting the state of agriculture in the Constitution State, and how breweries and farms are working hand in hand to create and restore the growth of Connecticut beer. This will be an ongoing series as summer days get shorter and we approach harvest time, but I thought the best way to start would be with a place that brings agriculture and beer together, and I started with at Fox Farm Brewery.
The LBD. The Little Black Dress. It’s the item in a gal’s closet that never disappoints. It fits, it’s classy, not too overstated, but makes the fresh statement, “I’ve arrived.”
Well, guess who has arrived in Greenwich? The LBT. Little Beet Table. It too is classy, not too overstated, and undeniably fresh.
Following its successful predecessors in New York and Chicago, and under the esteemed direction of chef and culinary director Matt Aita (Rouge Tomate, Daniel, Jean Georges), Little Beet Table is amping up what it means to offer fresh, wholesome delicious food. From brunch to lunch and dinner, to cocktails and snacks, LBT puts a real twist on traditional sweet and savory bites and does it all gluten-free. As one of the first exclusively gluten-free restaurants around, Little Beet Table is on top of their game when it comes to unearthing tasty, healthy alternatives for the gluten-based dishes most of us crave, but some of us can’t or shouldn't have.
Exclusivity when dining out has a way of making us feel special. The smaller, the better. It’s like being part of a special club. It’s cool knowing that at that very moment, in a space half the size of a normal living room, that you and 20 people are the only ones that get to take part in an intimate dinner.
Most often the problem is that “exclusive” equates to “EXPENSIVE.”
That brings us to Greenwich! Wait, before you think this is going to be some $150 per person affair, you’re so very wrong.
What if I told you that there’s a great four-course tasting menu offered on the first Friday and Saturday of every month for $65?
If eating out is your thing, I bet you’d be intrigued. What am I saying? It’s Fairfield County, of course eating out is your thing.
Would it be crazier if I mentioned that it goes down at a luxury lifestyle boutique store? And that it’s BYOB? Bet you didn’t see those swerves coming.
K Dong is beaming. Not because his newly minted MIKU Sushi Restaurant in Greenwich has just opened to strong word-of-mouth and packed houses. Nope, his delighted smile is the result of a diner’s one-word reaction to the Tuna Tartare:
“Ethereal.”
That diner is me and I am quite impressed… as well as surprised. In most restaurants, TT has become a boring culinary meme — over sauced, over spiced, and overworked. K Dong’s version is totally understated. Garnished with micro greens, the crimson slices crown a mound of vividly green avocado, which sits on a gossamer of Yuzu and a whisper of wasabi. Rather than overwhelming the delicate flesh, like so many tartares, the sauce and spice enhance the pristine flavor of the Bluefin. Yep, this dish is, indeed, “Ethereal.”
Downtown Cos Cob will be a lot sweeter with the much-anticipated grand opening of Chocoylatte Gourmet on Monday, July 8. The desserts & coffee shoppe, located at 121 E. Putnam Avenue will open its doors to the public with a ribbon-cutting ceremony beginning at 11am.
Chocoylatte Gourmet will offer an array of handmade freshly baked desserts, cookies, pastries and assorted fine chocolates made with the finest ingredients available in the market. Every treat will be prepared from scratch, every day and handcrafted on-site. For those with dietary sensitivities, the desserts & coffee shoppe will also offer gluten-free and lactose-free goodies, and promises to maintain the same high-quality ingredients baked with thoughtfulness and care. Guests will also enjoy recipes containing less sugar, no trans fats, non-GMO ingredients, no preservatives, no chemicals, no artificial preservatives, no artificial sweeteners, and no artificial flavors.
Bear’s Restaurant Group, which includes Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ in Windsor, Hartford, and South Windsor, and Blind Pig Pizza in Hartford, today announced the official opening of its in-house brewery. This past week, in partnership with Black Hog Brewing Co., the on-site brewery debuted its first five beers brewed in-house and will now be offering them for consumption on-site or to-go in 32-ounce crowlers.
Pair these new brews with Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ favorites, smoked in the Kansas-City style that McDonald enjoyed growing up in Kansas City, Missouri. Some of these tasty morsels include: Baby Back Ribs, Pulled Pork, Pulled Chicken, Kielbasa, Turkey, Texas Sausage, Brisket and Burnt Ends served as a Sandwich, Entrée or Combo Plate.
Tony Capasso has developed quite the reputation earning himself quite the following. After spending nearly 20 years at Valbella! and Gabriele’s Italian Steakhouse, the veteran Maître d’ now has a steak place of his own at the JHouse, a boutique hotel in Greenwich. Tony is warm, affable and charming. He has a special way with his customers as he circles around to each table offering quick yet challenging trivia questions for all to answer. His eyes twinkle. His smile is infectious.
We love celebrating local CT entrepreneurs. Connecticut Magazine gives a shout out to this trailblazing woman who’s shaking up the primarily male dominated craft brewing industry. We also hear that Rhythm beer will be available at Chef Chris Scott’s highly anticipated Birdman Juke Joint in Bridgeport.
Craft beer needs more diversity. The realization hit New Haven’s Alisa Bowens-Mercado five years ago while she was at a beer festival. She didn’t mean diversity in terms of more women and minority ownership of breweries; not yet anyhow. Back then she was thinking about diversity of flavor.
At that festival, every beer she tried was either too hoppy or too sour for her taste. She felt the craft industry needed more approachable options for drinkers like her.
“I want to make a beer that, when I go to a beer festival, that I can drink,” she told her husband.
Four years later Rhythm Brewing Co. was born and Bowens-Mercado, owner of Alisa’s House of Salsa, a dance studio in New Haven, became Connecticut’s first female African-American brewer. This month, as she celebrates Rhythm Brewing’s one-year anniversary, the company’s flagship product, Rhythm Unfiltered Lager, is available at more than 200 locations across the state. Bowens-Mercado is also getting ready to start distributing it in the Bahamas.
Back in 2015 I was invited to a new Chinese restaurant concept in Westchester by veteran restaurateur Jody Pennette. Skeptical as to how this type of cuisine could be different and better, I went. What I experienced was indeed that and more. Chinese food, I soon learned, could be delicious, even healthful, sticking to simple flavors and using organic ingredients while placing these dishes in the middle of a dynamic and upscale setting.
Fast forward and I am invited to Greenwich to check out Pennette’s latest Chinese food adventure. Once again he pushes the envelope with another, though similar, take on this ethnic fare, bringing us LuLu Chinese with its lighter brighter versions.
Over the past few years, Hapa Food Truck and chef/owner Chris Gonzalez have gained quite the following. I’m guilty of following up a few weightlifting sessions at Crunch Gym with a Hapa Burger or tacos when Gonzalez parked his trucked at the Priceline building. So, yes, I’m a fan just as much as all of you are. But every winter, Hapa goes into hibernation, leaving many of us yearning for warmer weather and his Filipino-Hawaiian inspired food.
Well, friends, you don’t have to wait for spring and tracking Hapa down just got a whole lot easier. Gonzalez now has a physical Hapa location in Mamaroneck’s new microbrewery, Decadent Ales inside of the popular craft beer store, Half Time.
I love taking people to the tasting room at Two Roads for the first time and showing them all the history you can touch in the place. Feel how the wooden floor is worn down here? This is where decades of workers had to walk to get between the machines of the factory. Look and you can see some of the machines they built and used, just off from the giant mash tuns which rise up through the floor behind the glass. The wooden floor they cut out for the tuns got chopped into pucks and laid down as the bar surface we're leaning on now. Cool, right? The building next door, Two Roads' 25,000 square foot, $15 million dollar expansion, Area Two, is brand new - but it already has plenty of stories to tell.
Area Two will open to the public on Monday, March 11. The new facility is a short walk across the hop yard from the mothership brewery, on the same side of the street. The focus of Area Two is the production of wild, sour, and spontaneously fermented beers.
Pull back the hour hand on the clock of geologic time and the land in what was once New Haven begins to fill in. The sandstone rises up, glaciers come and go again in reverse, and the scenery levels off. The view across the water isn't Long Island - the glaciers pulled that land back with them - it's what will become Morocco. Now spin the clock forward again. The continents drift - ice, then not ice again - and the land erodes away until something seems to rise up again: the traprock scarp we know as East Rock. There's a lot of history here, and the newest bit to crop up is East Rock Brewing Company.
Years of drinking bland and commonplace cups of coffee began to take a toll on Connecticut natives and founders of RISE Brewing Co., Hudson Gaines-Ross, Grant Gyesky, Jarrett McGovern, and Justin Weinstein. In 2014, they decided to take matters in their own hands by hitting the drawing board in their New York City apartments. Bean after bean, one roast and cold-brewing method after another, they finally created a cold brew coffee, making them the founders of RISE Brewing Company. Traversing the concrete jungle with their product, they asked experienced mixologists if it was the real deal. One day, in a Brooklyn café, the espresso machine broke; RISE cold brew came to the rescue, and was a hit amongst the customers. The product became available for purchase in July of 2017.
It’s a known fact that Italians love their pasta. It’s also a known fact that they eat it regularly and yet it seems to be something we have become fearful of. As I sit down to write this I remember a popular commercial from my youth. In the North End of Boston, a dark haired Italian woman leans out of her window and beckons her son to come home. “Anthony!” she shouted, and he came running home – but only on Wednesdays, for Wednesday was Prince Spaghetti Day! Today fad diets implore us to eat gluten-free, dairy-free, grain-free, carb-free, fat-free, etc. Enter Il Pastaficio, handmade pasta, in Cos Cob. Within weeks of opening locals have been rethinking and enjoying this Italian favorite. The reason is simple – as simple as their ingredients.
Il Pastaficio is unique in its offering of pastas made from natural and antique grains that are rich on minerals, salts and vitamins. This pasta, as a result, is lighter, easier to digest and has a lower glycemic level than the glutinous versions we’ve come to know. Their pastas are made from organic legume flours (such as chickpea) rich in protein and completely additive-free. As a result, Pastaficio pastas are easier to digest.
