Category Archives: Side Order

Weekend Getaways for Food Geeks

TRAVEL

Whether you want to develop your knife skills or eat (and drink) really, really well, these three destinations will allow you to do it free of distraction.

We all travel for food anymore, whether it’s driving past the local grocery stores to hit an out-of-the-way Whole Foods or night market-hopping in Thailand for a week. It all counts. In fact, the term “culinary tourism” was dropped in 2012 in favor of “food tourism” because it was deemed too elitist. Regardless of what it’s called, business is booming. And it’s believed to be only in its infancy, in large part because of the money that’s being generated—tourists are spending, on average, 25 percent of their travel budgets on food and drink, according to the World Food Travel Association—and now invested to entice us to blow even more. Not to mention, food is the linchpin of local culture. Always has been. Only our interest in it is new. So, in the spirit of savoring every experience, near and far, gourmet and grassroots, we’re offering up three weekend getaways, all within driving distance, that cater to the serious eater (and cook, if you’re game) in each of us. Yeah, they tip more toward indulgence, but we figured you’ve got a handle on filling up your weekends at home with farmers markets and trending brunch spots.

—Scott Edwards

The Farm Cooking School | Stockton, New Jersey
Driving time from Philadelphia: About an hour

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Ian Knauer, rounding up dinner. Top: Knauer and Shelly Wiseman.

This is farm-to-table cooking as preached by the guy who wrote the book on it. Literally. Ian Knauer, the school’s founder, is the author of the revered cookbook, The Farm—Rustic Recipes for a Year of Incredible Cooking. It was while writing that book that he discovered the small, artisanal towns along the Delaware River in central Bucks and Hunterdon counties. Shortly after it was published, he rented a small stone house on a grass-fed cattle farm and spent the winter renovating it. Come the spring, he invited Shelley Wiseman, a colleague from his days at Gourmet magazine, to join him, and together they opened the school. Serious as their credentials are, the classes and dinners they stage year-round cater as much to excited eaters as ambitious home chefs. Last fall, they hosted their first weekend-long program. (There are three Airbnb apartments on the farm, including a one-bedroom over the school’s kitchen.) Knauer and Wiseman led a “Best Dishes to Bring to a Party” class. That night, they brought their guests (and their dishes) to a potluck dinner at a nearby farm. This summer, they’re planning to repeat such a weekend about every six weeks. thefarmcookingschool.com

 

Ocean House | Watch Hill, Rhode Island
Driving time from Philadelphia: About 4 hours

Tastings, tutorials and custom-crafted dinners are all covered at the inn’s new culinary center.

The already-culinary-minded resort—there’s a food forager on staff—opened a 3,000-square foot Center for Wine and Culinary Arts last fall. The wide-plank walls and flooring and exposed posts and beams are from an early 19th-century Connecticut tobacco barn, but a demo kitchen tricked out entirely with Gaggenau appliances is straight out of the future. The aforementioned forager, Paul McComiskey, along with the chefs from the Ocean House and its sister resort, the Weekapaug Inn, lead a daily roster of complimentary tutorials that delve into local sourcing—Ocean House is perched along Rhode Island’s craggy coastline, so that includes seafood, too—and cooking technique. There’s a fee-based monthly series of interactive classes for those who like to dirty their hands as much as fill their stomachs. The center’s also home to Ocean House’s 8,000-bottle wine collection, spread between two cellars. Jonathan Feiler, the resort’s director of wine education, partners with McComiskey to design bespoke wine dinners. That’s about as of-the-moment as a menu gets. oceanhouseri.com

 

Inn at Windmill Lane | Amagansett, New York
Driving time from Philadelphia: About 3½ hours

The real indulging at Windmill Lane comes in private.

Plans are in the works to stage a second round of Wine Harvest Weekends this fall, where the inn collaborates with neighboring vineyards Channing Daughters and Wölffer Estate to offer in-depth tours, tastings and a dinner. But the VIP access runs year-round. The inn’s concierge will book the personalized tours, arrange a car service to get you to and from and even send you on your way with a basket lunch. After drinking wine all afternoon—tasting wine, we mean—it’s going to be too tempting to resist settling into your exceptionally cozy confines for the night, especially once you’ve got a fire roaring. The inn’s thought that part through, too. The in-room iPad is loaded Incentient, a digital concierge service that enables you to order takeout from an impressive selection of local restaurants—Meeting House, Fresno, East Hampton Grill, among others. Your dinner will be delivered to the inn’s kitchen, where it’ll be plated on china and then brought to your suite. You land the best seats in the house, and you didn’t even have to slip the hostess a twenty. Or put your pants back on. innatwindmilllane.com

Photos courtesy (from the top): The Farm Cooking School / Guy Ambrosino (2), Ocean House, Inn at Windmill Lane.

It Took a Village

DINING OUT

Fire burned the Sergeantsville Inn down to its 300-year-old shell one night last winter. A community rebuilt it in nine months. And overnight, normalcy settled back in, inside the restaurant and out.
By Scott Edwards  ·  Photography by Josh DeHonney

 

Much of the wood throughout was salvaged from the building and donated by neighbors. Top: The inn, 11 months after the fire. Below , Lisa and Joe Clyde, home at last.

As a cold dawn filled the sky on March 9, 2015, the last wisps of smoke from a fast-moving fire were doused. Sometime after the Sergeantsville Inn closed for the night, an electrical fire broke out in the waiters’ station adjacent to the bar. The response would run to four alarms, drawing 18 companies from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Come the morning, all that remained standing of the 18th-century building were the fieldstone walls and a room at the western end that once served as the ice house for the Central New Jersey village, which sits perched atop a hill, about a 10-minute drive north of New Hope. The fire spared the room entirely.
The inn, which was bought in 1999 by Joe Clyde, who’s also the executive chef, had an especially loyal following. (Including me and my wife. We moved to Sergeantsville a little more than two years before the fire, and we were gravitating there more and more.) Within days of the fire, a “Save the Inn” Facebook page went up, and it would evoke nearly 4,800 likes. Joe says he and his wife, Lisa, who manages the front of the restaurant, knew “probably the next day, after the shock wore off” that they’d rebuild. The actual reconstruction, led by Barna Building Contractors, based the next town over, in Stockton, was as swift and sure. Over the next nine months, the building was hollowed out and then pieced back together.
Amid the December holidays, the Sergeantsville Inn reopened gradually, looking different, of course, but surprisingly the same in more ways. Mik Barna, the builder, salvaged every part of the building that he could. The attic floorboards that weren’t burned were pulled up, replaced with plywood and repurposed throughout the restaurant. And when Barna fell short, the neighbors covered the gaps, donating wood from their old barns. Another offered up a fallen black walnut tree, from which the new bar was crafted. When I meet with the Clydes at the restaurant in the last days of December, it’s covered in a temporary, white Formica countertop that’s filled with short, supportive messages scrolled in a rainbow of Sharpie ink.
Joe seized the chance to upgrade the kitchen. He describes the former space as “a cave with ovens.” He stands less than six feet tall, but he always wore a baseball hat to keep from scraping his head on the ceiling. An excavator dug two feet down to add some height. The walk-in refrigerators were also moved outside.

They’re hidden, for the most part, by a modest deck that’ll hold a few tables come the spring. Central air and heat were added. Little could be done about the unfavorable footprint, but Joe, at least, bought himself and his crew some breathing room and climate control. Not that anyone seemed all that fazed by the way things were. Most of the staff—cooks, waiters, bartenders—have been by his side for at least a decade. And every one of them returned. Nearby restaurants offered to employ them until the inn reopened.
Upstairs, the tavern, once a rather cozy room in its own right, now opens to the roofline. A second-floor apartment that Joe used occasionally was converted to another, three-wall seating area—about 70 seats were added altogether—that extends halfway over the tavern, creating a loft-like space.
     When I ask Lisa and Joe if anything meaningful couldn’t be saved or replaced, they pause. Grateful as they are to have their restaurant (and everyone in it) back, they’re humble, soft-spoken people. Routine is what they know best, and the last several months were profoundly disorienting. Joe looks across the table, says, “My father’s wedding ring.” It was lost shortly before his father died. Joe found it, kept it in the second-floor apartment. During the demolition, they gave the crew an idea of where it could be, not really expecting it to be there. It was gone, they knew. But then the builder’s son, Mik Barna Jr., turned up with it. So, no, nothing meaningful was lost.

Sergeantsville Inn, 601 Rosemont Ringoes Road, Sergeantsville, NJ; sergeantsvilleinn.com.

Stirring the Pot

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KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL

On the eve of another highly anticipated Winter Festival Chili Cook-off, we turn to longtime-featured chef Bob Kascik for an assist with our own.

By Mike Madaio

Is there anything more enticing than a cushy couch, a roaring fire and a “Ray Donovan” binge session on a dead-of-winter Sunday afternoon? For hundreds, the last several years, the answer is yes: craft beer and a bottomless bowl of pro-made chili. And they’re just the ones lucky enough to get their hands on tickets.

The Lambertville, New Jersey-New Hope Winter Festival is a week loaded with concerts, tastings, walking tours and ice sculpting staged throughout the neighboring river towns during what is otherwise one of the bleakest stretches of the year. (January 23 through Jan. 31, this year.) But its most-inspired event (and most-popular draw) is saved for last (and the indoors): an increasingly competitive chili cook-off that pits several local chefs against each other.

On the eve of this year’s edition, the 19th, we visited the kitchen of bitter Bob’s BBQ + Comfort Food,  in New Hope, to ask its owner-chef, and longtime cook-off participant, Bob Kascik for some pro tips that would translate to our own chili.

Much like snowflakes, no two are alike, but there are universal treatments, like the use of peppers. Kascik uses five kinds: habanero, scotch bonnet, jalapeno, Thai and chipotle. Why five? Because he also uses five kinds of meat—pork, brisket, chicken, turkey and sausage—and he likes the symmetry. His first year in business, Kascik was over-ordering, and, out of necessity, he started developing recipes around the leftovers, from which his Double Nickel Chili eventually emerged.

The nuance comes not necessarily from the variety of meats—not just, at least—but from their preparation. “It’s the burnt ends, the stuff that’s been cooking in its own juices for hours, refining its flavor,” says Kascik, whose demeanor is the very opposite of bitter. The nickname, apparently, was doled out during a game of Uno, and it stuck. “And the blend of peppers allows for a really nice heat, not just up front but in the back of your throat, a warm glow that levels out and blends with the smokiness of the barbeque.”

Tried and true as the formula seems, Kascik is vulnerable, just like the rest of us, to chili’s pull to riff, even with bragging rights on the line at the cook-off. “It’s such a great day to hang out with other chefs, people from the community, have a few beers,” he says. “And as long as I’m doing it, I might as well try to be innovative, put out some new ideas.”

And therein lies the lure for both the maker and the eater: the potential for revelation. The base and the appearance may be relatively standard, but there’s a broad spectrum of flavor lurking within that thick, chunky, orange-red stew.

“People tend to get hung up on heat levels, but you can always add heat at the end. It’s far more important to achieve a balance of flavors and get the texture right,” Kascik says. “Once you get that down, you can start to innovate with lots of things you have around your own kitchen.”

The 19th annual Lambertville-New Hope Winter Festival Chili Cook-off,  Jan. 31, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., Triumph Brewing Company, New Hope.

Photos by Matthew J. Rhein

The Summer of Self-Sufficiency

THE ENDORSEMENT

Not that we have anything against local farmers, but you could get away with leaning on them a little less.

As you scroll through seed catalogues by a crackling fire, daydreaming about your backyard garden at the height of summer—cucumbers as big as a forearm, so many snap peas, jalapenos that seem to absorb every degree of the sun’s heat—consider making this the year you finally go for it. Over the last few summers, you’ve become increasingly self-sufficient. Hell, last year you grew more veggies than your fridge and kitchen counter could hold. Yet most Saturday mornings, you still found yourself standing over the $5-carton of eggs at the farmers market wondering if you could pull it off. Of course you can. Chickens are about as low-maintenance as pets get. (Mind you, we’re talking about two or three here, four tops.) And with this stylish, nearly seven-foot-tall cedar coop from Williams-Sonoma ($1,500; $150 for delivery and assembly),  it’s really as simple as flipping open the drop-down door and plucking your eggs. A not-insignificant feature: Both the chicken and egg doors lock. Finding out that a fox reached your breakfast first is not something that you can unsee. You’re not a farmer, after all. You’re just harvesting your own eggs. Simple as that. —Scott Edwards

Photo courtesy Williams-Sonoma

And Now For Something Completely Different

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A young chef introduced himself last summer by way of some of the most original food you’re going to find along the Delaware.

By Scott Edwards

Graham Miller’s summer-long experiment confirmed a truth he only just began to embrace: He’s a damn good chef.

The 26-year-old grew up in the kitchen. His parents, both chefs, own The Bridge Café, a modest spot with a scratch-made menu and picturesque views of downtown Frenchtown, New Jersey. “They’d always said I would make a great chef,” says Miller, whose warm eyes and easy smile betray his shyness. “I was really picky as a child. I didn’t like mustard. I could always, like, find out if my dad put a little mustard in something. I just had a really good knack for taste.”

But when you’re 20, encouragement can be misread as a directive, and a natural ability can feel toxic. For a few years, Miller consciously avoided cooking, only to realize that it was his ticket out, not his anchor. At the end of 2012, he moved across the country to Napa Valley and enrolled in the CIA. “I just felt like I needed to reach out and do something different, take a challenge, basically,” Miller says. Read: He needed to know, once and for all, if he could cut it as a chef.

Photo credit: Josh DeHonney

Miller returned to his parents’ kitchen this summer, but on his terms. A few nights a week, he ran a pop-up restaurant there called .  His menus were small but ambitious. And every two weeks, he scrapped them and started fresh. Most were inspired by a region—Southeast Asia, Mexico, New England—but every dish was an original iteration, sometimes mildly so (a fairly pure lobster roll), other times quite brazenly (the banh mi burrito).

“I make the food as I would want to eat it, really,” Miller says. “I could make it the authentic way, the traditional way and plate it up real fancy. I know how to do all that. I just have this mentality where I prefer a casual environment over an uptight, white-tablecloth environment. I’m a simple guy.”

Familiar or not, as the summer wore on, the 16 seats filled up faster on Platform nights. Miller’s plan is to re-launch the pop-up at the first sign of spring, a target that feels painfully far away at the moment. And this time there won’t be any parameters. Now that he’s finally gotten out of his own way, it’s time to start mining what’s shown the potential to be a brilliant imagination.