A few days ago, one of our customers thanked us for “keeping your menu the same” for so many years. I in turn thanked him for the compliment, and then asked him if he’d by any chance tried our etouffee. Turns out he’d never heard of it. After setting him straight, he got very excited and insisted on bringing his wife with him to the restaurant on Friday (etouffee day) to share this “new” dish with her.
My reason for sharing this anecdote is merely to point out that while we’ve earned a loyal following over the past 26 years with comfort food classics that folks have made a part of their lives, we’ve done anything but keep our menu static.
Case in point: take our menu specials from last week. In a three-day period they ranged from the familiar (chicken tetrazzini) to the more exotic: Hummus Sandwich, Pork Chili Verde, and Jamaican Chicken Dinner.
By way of taking a little culinary excursion, let’s take a closer look at how these last three items made it into our menu, shall we?
Hummus is one of those foods that in the years since we first opened our doors has gone from being esoteric to darn near a pub food standard. My first experience with hummus goes back to my upbringing in the Philippines, where I was introduced to it by our Moslem friends. The Philippines has a long history of Arab influence that continues to this day, and that influence extends to the cuisine of the islands. Our manager, Anna, brought us the recipe that we use, and we put a bit of a Mediterranean twist on it by using kalamata olives and lots of garlic. The sliced cucumbers on the sandwich compliment these flavors quite nicely.
In our travels throughout Mexico, Jeff and I have encountered a number of different chili verde recipes, and we’ve borrowed from the ones we liked best. Our chili verde requires a two-day process to create. One the first day we sauté pork that we buy locally from Snake River Farms, then chop it up. On the second day we cook two kinds of chilis and some tomatillo to prepare the sauce that the pork simmers in. On the third day we rest. Just kidding. We never rest.
Our Jamaican Chicken Dinner with Bob Marley Sauce was inspired by an apple/almond stuffed chicken that we buy from one of our suppliers. Boned chicken thighs are wrapped around apple/almond stuffing, and in searching for an appropriate sauce to serve with it we decided that Jamaican jerk sauce would be just the ticket. While the Caribbean offers up a number of versions of jerk sauce, the common flavor denominator seems to be allspice. Rather than using chicken stock for the liquid, we use marsala – which explains the nod to Jamaica’s favorite son, the dreadlock king of reggae. We serve this dish with rice and greens, which would most likely be how you would enjoy it in Trenchtown, mon.
So, while we have every intention of keeping those tried and true comfort food classics coming your way, you should also expect that our love of travel and mania for cookbooks is going to continue to influence our menu with the comfort food traditions of other cultures as well as our own. After all, man cannot live by Yankee pot roast alone…although we suspect that burgundy mushroom gravy is a life essential.