Wooing the wine bibbers with bold, new beers

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 16, 1996 by Gary Regan

Those of you who remember the days w hen movie star Dudley Moore was teamed up with comedian Peter Cook will, no doubt, remember their sketch about The Frog and The Peach restaurant. Cooke, playing the restaurant owner, would ask, "Where can a young couple go these days for a decent frog and a good, ripe peach? In the sketch the restaurant was not a success. But in New Brunswick, NJ., when Betsy Alger and James Black opened The Frog and The Peach restaurant in 1983, they were determined not to make the same mistakes as Cooke. "Neither Frog a la Peche nor Peche a la Frog are on our current menu general manager Colin Arnell says, smiling, "but we are happy to report that our first beer-tasting dinner went very well indeed."

Beer dinners -- a different beer with each course -- are becoming fairly commonplace these days. What differentiates Arnell's event, though, is the fact that The Frog and The Peach is far more of a wine-oriented restaurant, and until Aug. 20 all of the specialty dinner events there had been centered around wines. "It seemed like a natural progression," Arnell says. "We hold 10 specialty tasting dinners annually, and after experimenting with many different wine concepts, we decided it was time to present a dinner for our beer drinking customers."

Arnell teamed up with Dan Cohen, vice president of Hoffman Imports, Milburn, NJ., to select the beers and then brought in chef Vincent Barcelona, who devised a menu to complement the bottlings. That concept can result in a very profitable evening for the restaurateur, and many beer distributors will go out of their way to help promote their products, providing their own resident expert or even hiring a well-known beer aficionado to help guide the guests through the dinner. "I get to highlight some of my products," Cohen says, "and the restaurant offers their customers a memorable evening. The most important object of a beer-tasting dinner, however, is that the customers have fun. After all, we are in a dining room, not a classroom." Wise words, indeed.

Education, though, is a key ingredient to a successful tasting event, and although Cohen relies on his admitted thespian desires to keep the diners entertained, he also comes armed with a magnum of knowledge about the subject at hand. "Although beer lovers are certainly more sophisticated these days, I think there are still many people who don't know the difference between an ale and a lager," observes Cohen, "whereas most people could de scribe, say, a Chardonnay without batting an eye."

So what does it take to throw a beer-tasting dinner at a restaurant that offers just 18 beers yet boasts a wine list of more than 130 bottlings? It takes a desire to keep all of the restaurant's clientele happy, a manager who isn't afraid to try something a little different, a speaker who is both knowledgeable and entertaining, and a chef willing to prepare dishes that marry well with the chosen beers. There was no sign of "shepherd's pie with brown ale" at The Frog and The Peach's beer dinner; Barcelona prepared such dishes as saffron potato gnocchi with lobster mushrooms and white truffle oil, served with Duvel Golden Ale. My, my.

Will The Frog and The Peach offer more beer-tasting events in the future? "Absolutely," Arnell says. "A few of our wine lovers attended the dinner and loved it, and on the day after the event, a regular customer, just returning from vacation, popped in and mentioned how disappointed he was to have missed it."

The whole point is that restaurateurs of the "supremely white tablecloth" brigade shouldn't be afraid to experiment with beers, and we hope that sometime in the near future some neighborhood taverns specializing in beers perhaps will offer dinners that include some courses to be accompanied by beers and others with wine. Wouldn't that be an interesting concept?