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Andrew Chalk Report: Celebrity Chef Soiree Last Night at Charlie Palmer at the Joule in Dallas

Scott Romano does a much better job of describing them in this video than I could. Excuse the poor technical quality – it was shot under battlefield conditions.

Last night celebrity chef Charlie Palmer was in town week to meet with his staff, chat with his public, and throw a little tasting party for area chefs. I spotted Dean Fearing, Kent Rathbun, Sharon Hage, and time love sampling appetizers at the bar long after the customers had cleared. Executive chef Scott Romano set out a spread that included peppered filet mignon with Armagnac sauce, pepper-seared mahi mahi, bacon-wrapped quail legs, shrimp mousse lobster corn dogs (lobster corn dogs?), and more. However, for me, the most exciting food was the large selection of charcuterie and salumi made in-house. Dishers, these samples were not contrived to please our local chefs, the food is currently on both the bar and restaurant menu.

DISCLAIMER: This event was provided by the restaurant and I was not anonymous. However, I personally took out a mortgage on my house to cover the valet parking charges.–Andrew Chalk

Tei-An at One Arts Plaza in Dallas: The Buttstory

From the ever-curious mind of SideDish reporter, Andrew Chalk:

Recent reports and videos on the making of soba noodles omitted the most curious fixture at Tei-An. No, not the rooftop patio (at least, as yet), the doors to the bathroom stalls. You step into a cubicle that appears to have a glass panel in the door. So much for privacy! However, when you close the door, the glass panel turns opaque–at least, from the inside. I assumed (hoped) the effect was two way, and (thankfully) no crowd gathered outside. This is a talk-inspiring design feature for a restaurant

I first heard of this type of glass being used in the changing rooms at high-end clothing stores. Apparently, it is made with a Piezoelectric crystal formed on the sheet. I wonder what happens when the electricity fails?

Houston Critic Robb Walsh Is No Longer Anonymous

File this one under controversy: Houston Press restaurant critic Robb Walsh has decided that being anonymous is no longer on his priority list. Says Walsh:

The fact is, my job is changing. I was hired as a newspaper restaurant critic and feature writer. Today I am, first and foremost, a blogger. It’s a little ludicrous to try and maintain your anonymity while you are photographing your plate. And sometimes you need to identify yourself to get a interview. The time has come to adjust to fit my new job description.

Read all about it here.

Making Soba Noodles at Tei-An at One Arts Plaza in Dallas

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Last week Andrew “Baby Face” Chalk attended the soba noodle making session held at Tei-An. The event was a big deal— Akila Inouye, Master Chef of Tsukiji Soba Academy in Tokyo, visited Tei-An restaurant at One Arts Plaza to give a demonstration of the technique of making soba noodles. Inouye’s brief U.S. tour only included New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Why Dallas? Tei-An owner Teiichi Sakurai is a student of the master. Here for your viewing enjoyment is Soba Noodles: The Movie.

New Videos Encourage Diners to Dine Out and Save the Economy

A couple of days ago I posted this video that encourages you to dine out and save the economy. Today, Mark (Maguire’s, Maximo) Maguire, president of the Texas Restaurant Association sends you this video.

Kim McPherson on the 2009 Texas Wine Grape Harvest

Alfonso Cevola has a short video of nice guy and wine maker, Kim McPherson.

50 Incredible Lectures for the Ultimate Foodie

A nice lady named Amber Johnson sends you this link to 50 Incredible Lectures for the Ultimate Foodie. I’ve spent the last 90 minutes dipping into the video library and I could spend the rest of the day curled up on the couch watching them all. So far I’ve scanned “Craig Claiborne and the Invention of Food Journalism,” “Food Writing Forum: Eat, Memory,” and Ferran Adria: A Day at elBulli”. Bookmark the site and save it for a rainy day.

Slocum Street Style: Let’s Party!

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours driving around the Design District, or Lower Oak Lawn if you will. It’s already a groovy area but the plans for the future are really exciting. The Lionstone Group and PegasusAblon have formed a partnership to develop the  Dallas Design District which  includes both the Dallas Design Center and The Decorative Center. Plans include multifamily residences, a dozen restaurants, and retail establishments. No chains allowed only local businesses. (Restaurateur Shannon Wynne has already started construction on The Moth and Al Biernat has been spotted shopping real estate.) I am seriously considering moving there.

Anywhoo, I bring this up because D Home and Slocum Street Antiques and Design Association have teamed up and they are throwing a big shindig on Thursday, October 8 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Jim “Savor Dallas” White has lined up eight restaurants to serve food. (Fedora Restaurant and Lounge, The Grill on the Alley, Go Fish Ocean Club, Hibashi Teppan Grill & Sushi Bar, Jorge’s, The Kitchen Table at Sheraton Hotel Dallas, Lavendou Bistro Provencal, and Paciugo Gelato.) The event is free and benefits the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS. If you’re really nice, I’ll show you my potential new digs at The Alexan on Oak Lawn.

Samar by Stephan Pyles in Dallas: VIP Grand Opening Party

Samar’s creators paid huge attention to design. The following video is a tour of the restaurant with Stephan Pyles. (Pardon the sound; the place was packed.)

We sent Andrew Chalk to cover the semi-soft opening of Samar by Stephan Pyles. Here is his report. You want chandeliers? Stephan Pyles bought some chandeliers for Samar. Go Andrew:

Samar by Stephan Pyles held its invite-only preview party on Saturday and, judging by the turnout, reservations to this new eatery are going to be hard to get. (The official opening day is still TBD but planned for “early October.”)

Saturday, close to 1,000 of Stephan’s closest friends piled into the restaurant, the patio, and a specially rented spillover area. Despite the crowd, the staff coped with the rush like a well-oiled machine. Even the periodic guest-dropping-a-glass-in-a-crowded-bar problem was immediately met with a staffer who cordoned off the area while another cleaned it clean up. The kitchen and wait staff dispatched appetizers with that frictionless regularity which makes you wonder if the servers aren’t on roller skates.

The centerpiece of any restaurant is the food. Pyles installed Vijay Sadhu, formerly of Bukhara Grille and Clay Pit, as head chef because he wanted Indian cuisine to be one of the inspirations at Samar.The other influences on the menu come from Spain and the area loosely defined as the Eastern Mediterranean (mainly Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey). Here is chef Sadhu describing some of the appetizers.

Chef Sadhu showed the crowd his ambitious stuff—all of the food was prepared perfectly. As he showed at his earlier positions, Vijay Sadhu is an expert and combining flavors and bringing them out in his dishes. Here is a short list of what was served: Red Lentiles Kofte (Turkish), Kebbeh with Golden beets tzatziki sauce, Chicken kebab stuffed with spiced gound lamb served with Spice tomato jam and crispy okra, Saffron Paneer tikka with spiced vermicelli and cumin scented asparagus, Chocolate Samosa with rose jam, and Papadam cones stuffed with Mung sprouts

Guests were offered either a specially created martini that apparently involved pomegranate juice (and had a fruity approachability that made it deceptively easy to imbibe) or one of a number of respectable wines.This food, by the way, is wine-friendly.

Outside, the patio was put to good use. Belly dancers entertained the crowd that, coincidentally, became progressively less and less reserved.

Hookah pipes were available to complete one’s sense transportation from the corner of Ross and Olive to some exotic country.

Chalk Talk: The Dallas Wine Trail. Full Report and Extensive Tasting Notes

Welcome to our first edition of Chalk Talk featuring Andrew Chalk. Andrew is a food and wine loving SideDish reader who has taken time out of his busy schedule to send in extensive reports of his experiences around Dallas. Last weekend, he hit the Dallas Wine Trail. Below are his recollections of the day-long event followed by his totally geeky, but insightful, tasting notes. And now, here’s Andrew:

Want to visit the wine country but out of NetJets units? Or don’t want to bear the cost of getting the G50 out of mothballs in the Arizona desert? Easy. Tour the wine country in Dallas where there are now four commercial wineries that have banded together in a joint promotion called the Dallas Wine Trail. The idea is that you travel from one winery to the other, taste three wines at each, talk to the winemakers, and tour the winemaking facilities. For $39 you get the tasting, light food at each location, a souvenir glass and a bottle of one of the wineries wines to take home.

First stop was throbbing downtown Lakewood to visit Times Ten Cellars. This winery sells almost entirely California wine. However, a new development is the coming on stream of their own Texas vineyard “Cathedral Mountain Vineyard” in Alpine Texas (that is so far away it’s closer to Chihuahua than Dallas). It is planted to what appears to be a risk-aversion strategy: Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc reflect Bordeaux. Syrah and Grenache reflect the Rhone region of France and Tempranillo reflects Spain. We tasted the first vintage from Central Mountain Vineyard which includes all of these grapes (see tasting notes below the jump). The food consisted of sandwich rolls filled with either tuna salad or ham. Pretty tasty.

Next stop was at Calais Winery in the neutron bomb test zone known as Deep Ellum. This is the newest of the four wineries on the tour having been formed by Frenchman Benjamin Calais, with exquisite timing, just prior to the economic crash of 2008. To date, all of their wines have been made with California fruit shipped under dry ice for fermentation and aged at their winery in Dallas. However, change is afoot. On the day of the tour, he and his wife had got back barely 24 hours earlier from Newsom Vineyards in Plains, West Texas having spent 48 hours, virtually without sleep, hand picking and crushing fruit left on the vines after mechanical harvesting was completed. Newsom Vineyards is the source of most of the top-ranked Tempranillo wines from the state and Calais and his wife had to go through this hand-picking ordeal because there is a queue of some 50 wineries ahead of him for the fruit. He told me how he had planned to make a Rosé like the Tempranillo Rosados from Spain but gave up when he saw the color of Texas fruit immediately after crushing. The pigmentation was so dark he realized he would be making an inky red monster whatever his best-laid plans. The food match was Scardello’s cheeses although I had to leave before any serious sampling so I just grabbed a slice of the Empire Bakery bread.

The third stop was FUQUA Winery. This winery is focused mainly on California fruit and all three wines we tasted were majority California wine. The food here was the most varied of anywhere on the tour. Rex’s Fresh Seafood provided shrimp paste on crackers that tasted truly shrimpy but unfortunately had some chili’s in that made them incompatible with the wine. Kathleen’s Sky Diner (neé Kathleen’s Art Café) provided half a dozen toppings for bruschetta, an organic meat producer from Oklahoma provided succulent mouth-sized portions of various cuts of beef and Paula Lambert, representing her own firm, Mozzarella Company, served six cheeses including three very worthy chevres.

The final stop was Inwood Estate Vineyards. Here the emphasis is certainly not on ambience. Inwood Estate Vineyards produces wine exclusively from Texas fruit. The winery has a separate label, xxx, for its non-Texas wines. For the tour, they pulled out all the stops, serving their latest flagship offerings of Tempranillo-Cabernet blends, Tempranillo and the limited release ‘Magellan’, a blend of the five Bordeaux varieties and Tempranillo.

Perhaps it was a cult following, perhaps just because it was later in the day, but Inwood Estates was packed. The food had suffered. Maybe it had started as a hors d’oeuvres plate but by now it resembled a grainy movie of 1945 Dresden, with red specks. I passed.
The next Dallas Wine Trail will be publicized here on SideDish. I highly recommend it if you can take part.

Until then, jump for my geeky tasting notes. (more…)

2009 Texas Sommelier Conference: Eroica From Ste. Michelle

Recently at the 2009 TexSom Conference at Las Colinas, Andrew Chalk shot this short video on Eroica, a interesting Riesling produced by Chateau Ste. Michelle in Washington State. Chateau Ste. Michelle has been a pioneer in Riesling production in the U.S. In this short clip, Andrew has an informative chinwag with Joel Butler, the winery’s director of education.

2009 Texas Sommelier Conference: Stewart Cellars

Andrew Chalk, bless his wine-lovin’ heart, sends this video on Napa Valley’s  Stewart Cellars. We tasted this exquisite wine at the Texas Sommelier Conference grand tasting. The winemaker is Paul Hobbs.

Texas Sommelier Conference: Fisher Vineyards

Andrew Chalk is a wine-loving maniac. I asked him to help me cover last weekend’s activities and he did a fine job. He is still reporting! Here is a quick video he produced on an interesting Chardonnay made by Fisher Vineyards (Napa Valley), one of the 100 wines poured at the grand tasting. Note: special cameo appearance.

Video Interview: Christof Syre, Executive Chef Four Seasons Resort & Club

There were many wines and wine heroes acknowledged at the recent 2009 Texas Sommelier Conference but one chef needs to be recognized as the guy who cooked for them all and did a brilliant job. Our gallant roving reporter, Andrew Chalk, caught up with Christof Syre, execuchef for the Chef Four Seasons Resort & Club in Las Colinas, and the twosome talked about what it takes to put together a menu for a room full of certified sommeliers and people with other certifiable distinctions. Chef, you had me at oven-dried peaches and risotto. Go, Andrew.

2009 Texas Sommelier Conference in Dallas

This morning we talked a lot about wine lists and managing beverage programs. One of the panelists, Joe Spellman, had some interesting things to say about wine by the glass and the current “fetish with half bottles” on wine lists. I attempted to shoot an award-winning video. Instead, I got a poor sound quality video clip of a really nice, smart wine guy making some good points. So, put on your headphones. You know where to put the cork.

Wonderful Weekend of Significant Wine Events in Dallas

There are two  significant wine conferences taking place in Dallas this weekend.The GO TEXAN Drinklocalwine.com event starts tonight with a dinner at Le Cordon Bleu Institute of Culinary Arts. On Saturday the all-day conference will feature seminars focusing on trends in Texas wine, the distinctive grapes that Texans are using to make those wines, and how consumers can work to get more regional wines in stores and restaurants. The final event of the day will be a Texas Twitter Taste-off, moderated by Russ Kane of Vintage Texas. Participants will taste some 40 Texas wines and blog or Twitter about them. Their votes will pick the conference’s favorite wines. I’ll be one of those Twittering fools (DSideDish). BTW, the event is sold out.

On Sunday, the fifth annual Texas Sommelier Conference (TexSom) kicks off at the Four Seasons in Las Colinas. The two-day event includes lectures and tastings with the nation’s preeminent wine experts. There are five classes on Sunday, August 16 (some tickets still available) and a grand tasting on Monday evening, August 17th.  A separate set of courses, designed exclusively for the trade and media, will take place on Monday. While the courses are conducted, a competition for Texas’ Best Sommelier runs behind the scenes. On Monday evening, the conference concludes with a Grand Tasting(a few tickets available), where wine professionals and the public come together to taste world-class wines and witness the drama and celebration surrounding the naming of Texas’ Best Sommelier 2009.  Last year’s winner is Scott Barber of Dallas’ Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek.  He dominated 24 other competitors and won the coveted title after a rigorous three-part examination involving wine tasting, service and theory. Once again, I will be a Twittering and blogging fool.

Oak Cliff Cellars Inaugural Tasting At Lavendou In Dallas

Andrew Chalk is one of the Dishers who participated in the SideDish Hits the Southwest Food Service Expo at the end of June. He turned in a series of videos that featured some of the unusual items such as coffee made from civet (cat) poop and chocolate-covered crickets he uncovered at the Expo.  It turns out that AC, not this AC, is an ace when it comes to wine. He knows a lot about it and his life is one ceaseless search for the fine wine. Last night he attended Oak Cliff Cellars inaugural tasting at Lavendou in North Dallas. He files this report:

Jim Richardson is a brave man. In the face of the worst recession since The Flintstones and manifest oversupply in the wine industry, the man has opened a winery in California. And while most wineries are named after romantic place names, cute critters, or the founder, he decided to name his after where he hails from in Dallas. Hence, Oak Cliff Cellars was born. You don’t borrow from a bank for this sort of thing and “JR” (as he goes by) is not too big to fail, so that rules out the taxpayer. Rather, you invest your own money, and maybe that of some close investors who you beat in a card game. In the time-honored tradition of start-ups you rent space in the premises of a larger, more established, producer and hire an experienced consulting winemaker. After selecting and fermenting grapes, you spend 18 months dealing with problems while your precious fist vintage ages. Eventually, the miracle of oak-aging and a newfound belief in prayer brings everything together and you show your new baby to the world.

That is what JR did on Wednesday night at Lavendou. Big jammy jump here. (more…)

Lisa Garza Gets A TV Show On CBS?

Two of my Deep Goats in the food biz are telling me that the ink in drying on a deal between Next Food Network Star runner-up Lisa Garza and CBS. My niece is going to her cooking camp next month. Perhaps she’ll get the poop on the scoop. Way to go, Lisa.

Watch This Video If You Hate Your Eyes

Headline and story by Tim Rogers on FrontBurner. I just watched it for the first time. Yummers? That is another word that HAS GOT TO GO.

Kiepersol Winery In East Texas Celebrates The Opening Of Bushman’s Winery And Celebration Center

Friday, I told you about Kiepersol Winery in Bullard, Texas and  the lovely wines they make. Today, I offer a short video of a real East Texas gala: a few minutes of Asleep at the Wheel performing at the opening night party for Kiepersol’s new venue, Bushman’s Winery and Celebration Center. The evening was a showcase for Texas Wines—reps from Fall Creek, Grape Creek, Landon, Llano Estacado, Messina Hof, Red Road, Wichita Falls Winery, and the funny boys from Los Pinos were all there and pouring samples.  If you can spot me doing the Texas Two-Step on the video you will win dinner for two at any restaurant in town. Just tell me what color pants I’m wearing.

Mid-Afternoon Commercial Break

Tip of the toque to DB for this little clip.

Southwest Food Expo: Celebrity Chef Smack-down

Chef Tre Wilcox and Chef Rory Schepisi

Yesterday, Tre “Top Chef” Wilcox faced Rory “Next Food Network Star” Schepisi in a cooking contest at the Southwest Food Expo. InsideCorner’s Evan Grant was a celebrity judge. The video is here. I will tell the story in pictures. (Click on Evan’s badge below.)

Southwest Foodservice Expo Celebrity Chef Smack-down

Southwest Foodservice Expo: Disher Video Reports

Wow. Disher Andrew Chalk took his job at the Expo seriously. He just turned in video clips of the oddest finds at the show. Put on your earplugs and enjoy. (You know where to put the cork.) Great stuff, Andrew.

First up: Coffee made from civet cat poop.

Second: The cutlery eating machine.

Third: Food so good you can’t eat it.

Fourth: Making rum in Austin. Texas. Yes, Austin, Texas. Good stuff.

Finally: The talk of the Expo: Chocolate covered crickets. Yes, bugs.

Southwest Foodservice Expo Report: Aphrodite Divine Confections

Yesterday, I met Charles. He is at the Expo promoting Aphrodite Divine Confections in Garland. In this video he talks about being Santa at Collin Creek Mall, the “little factory in Garland”, what he does with his gloved finger and peanut butter, and his religious experience with a scone. Enter at your own risk.

Jacksonville Tomato Festival: Tomato Eating Contest, Kids Division

No words needed.