Cafe Manson
A New Café Manson
by Adrianne Young on 02/02/12
It started with Risotto.
Erik and I have been talking about our menu and we started talking about risotto. Risotto is the mob boss of starch – you can’t walk away from risotto – you are either in or you’re in for a mess.
Ever since the Kumquat Gremolata Protocol of 2010 (KGP of 2010), we have made sure that our menu items are able to be prepared on a large scale without scraping one’s knuckles against a grater and cursing all that is precious and fussy in the culinary world.
The conversation about risotto turned into a conversation about Café Manson. What we love to do, the food that we love to serve, we serve in the winter. That’s when we can make fussy dishes and maintain our control over quality.
Risotto wants the attention of one person from start to finish and it wants to be served when, exactly when, it is ready.
Basically, risotto is a fussy, precious thing we can only serve in small quantities. Thus breaking the KGP of 2010.
Our desire in moving to Lake Chelan has never been to just be a restaurant, our desire was and is to be a larger part of our agricultural community. To create a life.
After 3 years of “gentleman gardening” we have started Lake Chelan Farm – a real farm. Though we have hired Renae Haug, a real farmer, to run the farm and lead garden clinics, we too will be up with the roosters sowing, weeding and watering.
We’ve also started a packaged food company, Inland Empire Eats, to supply Chelan Valley’s shops and wineries with healthy, locally produced snack food.
Yet, the restaurant is an infant that will not sleep through the night. Do we have the energy for risotto – good risotto – in conjunction with the farm and the packaged food company?
If we want to do what we do, which is to grow, serve and sell the best that we can, well, we have to pare down. So we are going to focus Café Manson’s service to three days a week. Even, and especially, in the summer.
Café Manson will be open for dinner Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Fridays are our fun day. On some Fridays, we will be serving an impromptu dinner. Dinner may even include Risotto garnished with Kumquat Gremolata. KGP be damned.
We want Fridays to exemplify what we love to do and therefore we have no idea when they’ll happen. We will send you and email with a head’s up if you have signed up for the dinner list.
February is the last month (hopefully ever) that Café Manson will be open 5-days a week.
Starting March 3rd, Café Manson will be a new restaurant.
Why we don’t use Foodie in Polite company
by Adrianne Young on 12/19/11
In the history of language, there have been nouns and adjectives that started out meaning one thing and ended up with poor connotation. Politburo, Bourgeois – the jury is still out on hoi poloi.
This happens to all words that describe a class of people – the class becomes boorish, falls out of fashion or mutates into something completely opposite of what it had intended to be.
Most people, if they are lucky enough, eat food. There is nothing special about food.
Indeed, there is not a food on the planet that doesn’t go from something you’d put in your mouth to something you want to flush down the toilet.
What is special is the experience around food. Breaking bread with someone is the truest experience you can have while clothed and in public.
Being a “foodie” means that one person can have a better experience at a table than another. That one person knows more about food than another and therefore deserves better food. That’s dead wrong.
A child making pork dumplings with her family is not a “foodie”. A man being offered gursha isn’t a “foodie”. Eating sushi properly – without slathering your rice in wasabi and soy sauce isn’t being a “foodie” (by-the-by please do not do such a thing in front of a man who studied for 8-years the art of making rice.)
Eating food, eating it well and with people that you love shouldn’t put you above anyone else. The act of eating and enjoying food doesn’t warrant a term. It. Just. Doesn’t.
“Foodie” means “fetishist”. Fetishists are collectors and categorizers. From our end, what’s the point in serving a meal to a person who compares it to a meal we didn’t make?
Where’s the enjoyment of the present?
So, I ask you all, dear family, friends and customers, please, please, please stop using the word “Foodie”. Take the word out of circulation. Let it be part of the flashback shows on VH1.
Savor being mortal. Eat. Drink. Enjoy.
An open letter in repsonse to George Faison telling me how to run our business
by Adrianne Young on 10/26/11
Dear George Faison, (and Mark Bittman and Eaters everywhere),
If you have not read the letter I am responding to:
http://markbittman.com/a-letter-that-all-chefs-and-anyone-who-eats-n#more
Today after putting garden away, ordering wine and setting appointments for this coming week, my husband and I went out to McNeil Canyon with a gallon of gas to meet our beef guy.
It’s a 20-mile drive from where we live and we weren’t meeting our beef guy just for his beef, we had to bring him gas. He’d run out of gas. We run out of beef. We have a restaurant in a remote area of the country and we try to use the local stuff as much as possible.
Our beef guy generally has one “critter” processed a quarter. It’s an animal that’s been grass-fed, handled with individual attention and adored from the moment its little hooves hit the soil. We appreciate that. We can go to the supermarket and get beef, but we like to get it from the beef guy.
Since we’d pay the same at the super market or though a
major distributor or to the beef guy… we go to the beef guy. He runs out of
beef often. We don’t put beef on the menu unless we have his. This has a major
effect on our business. No beef? No beef eaters= less money.
We can get whole chickens that are free-range and organically grown for 14 bucks a bird. We then have to break them down, sanitize the kitchen, cook the part of the bird we want to serve that week and store the parts we don’t. Needless to say, we only do this when free-range chicken is what we are specifically asked to serve.
Providing hormone free, well maintained animal product is doable for 3-months a year. After that, prices go up or our sources just don’t have any product.
So George, what would you have us do? Not be in business?
Stop serving meat? We are in America, not New York. We live next to orchards,
we serve the salt of the earth and we are proud to be part of this community – we can't charge our neighbors $28 for four pork ribs.
We are not fancy but my husband is a graduate from the CIA and has been in the
restaurant business for nearly 30-years. He makes fancy–looking comfort food made from locally-sourced vegetables. Still, we can't charge more than 24 an entree. The price ceiling across America is much lower than you'd think.
Your solution of raising our prices and serving smaller
portions is laughable. So is your thesis that we, the chefs, decide what America eats. Nor is it for you, as a vendor, to decide how we do our business.
It is for you, a diner, to decide with your wallet.
Want us to serve better-raised food? I'd be happy to. Come out here and pay 38 bucks for a chicken breast and do it 17-times a night 5-days a week. Bring 10 of your friends, please.
Also, if you could field the complaints about our portion sizes being too small, we'd appreciate it.
If diners want better product on the plate, I am
happy to get it onto the plate. It costs money, money that they don't want to pay.
We work hard. So do you.
Chicken, no matter how well prepared, isn’t worth 38 hard-earned bucks. We’d be
laughed out of town.We like this town.
Don’t put the onus on us for a broken system, we’re part of the market, not the sole purchasers who drive the market. You have the opportunity to provide the product you believe in and provide it exclusively. You have not elected to do so. Why should we?
Will you take a smaller cut on your hormone free product? Why not charge more for the industry, hormonal stuff?
But, that would be telling you how to run your business and, frankly, that's rude.
While I agree with you in the fact that we as a country need to serve better-raised food (we've started our own vegetable farm, after all), I don't see the idea becoming a reality. Not until locally produced, well-raised animals are our only option or at least the cheapest one. That part is up to you.
Regards,
Adrianne Dow Young & Erik Brett Cannella
Café Manson
