Merry Christmas - and a happy new menu!

Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 21, 1992

Offering special menus has become a routine method of generating business. Winemaker's dinners, festivals to feature particular ingredients like game, tomatoes or wild mushrooms and, above all, holidays are vehicles of designing a limited menu, charging a special price and controlling costs while interesting customers in some new feature.

This time of year is rife with such occasions. There are even Hanukkah celebrations with potato pancakes (latkes) at Embarko and Avenue Grill in San Francisco.

At Christmas and New Year's Eve, as at Thanksgiving, it's a time when tradition often takes over. And for that reason, the plush dining rooms in hotels are often in demand.

This year Christmas and New Year's Eve menus range from the innovative to the expected. Many feature luxury touches like foie gras, lobster, truffles and caviar.

One of the more unusual series of holiday menus is being inaugurated this year at the Meadowood Resort in St. Helena, Calif., in the Napa Valley. Billed as Christmas Around the World, the resort will feature 12 nights of menus with varying regional or national themes presented by guest chefs. The idea of 12 nights is also seasonal even though the dates, from Dec. 11 through 22, only anticipate the actual 12-day celebration that runs from Christmas on the 25th to Epiphany on Jan. 6.

Among the chefs are Stephan Pyles of Routh Street Cafe in Dallas, preparing a Southwestern Christmas, John Halligan of Halcyon in the Rhiga Royal in New York with an English feast, Angel Stoyanof of Stoyanof's in San Francisco, doing a Greek dinner, and Jose Andres from Eldorado Petit in New York, creating a Spanish Christmas menu.

There are some clever seasonal dishes like English-inspired partridge with pear chutney encased in a holiday wreath for an "around the world" Christmas prepared by Wendy Brodie of Rancho San Carlos in Carmel Valley to kick off the series.

The focus of most of the menus is less holiday-oriented than this one. For example, Chef Christopher Majer of Splendido in San Francisco is doing a contemporary Mediterranean celebration that includes sauteed scallops with roast wild mushrooms in leek and chive vinaigrette, roast rack of lamb with white bean and garlic flan and a napoleon of pear and St. Andre cheese with walnut and caramel sauce.

Christmas dinner in the 210 Restaurant at the Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia is liberally prepared with lobster in a bisque, foie gras in ravioli with smoked sweetbreads, game dishes like pheasant and venison and caviar is the sauce for pan-roasted Alaskan halibut made with late harvest riesling. On the Christmas menu at the more informal Treetops restaurant there is a Yankee pot roast served with eggnog mashed potatoes.

The Maidstone Arms restaurant and inn in East Hampton, N.Y., is now run by Gordon Campbell-Gray, and he has created holiday menus that reflect his native Scotland. For example, on New Year's Eve the dinner will feature Scottish salmon, haggis and Scottish-style Angus beef. The classic Christmas menu will conclude with plum pudding. The inn also will offer a special menu for Boxing Day, Dec. 26, a gift-giving holiday in England and Scotland.

At the Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach, Calif., an elegant Italian menu will be served in the Bay Club. Those who are inclined to dine only on fish and seafood in the traditional Italian fashion can start with mixed greens and scallops, whole-wheat pasta with savoy cabbage, striped bass and zabaglione with strawberries. Venison is another main dish option.

The Edwardian Room at The Plaza hotel in Manhattan has the most lavish celebratory menu in the hotel. Christmas can start with a warm pheasant tart with truffles, consomme with a foie gras profiterole or a mousseline of sole and scallop, and a ragout of shellfish. Main dishes include turkey with chestnut stuffing and tournedos of beef with marrow with a Yule log among the deserts.

New Year's Eve at $285 begins with oyster soup, then foie gras with truffles, red-wine granite, main courses like turbot with champagne or tournedos Rossini, followed by salad with goat cheese millefeuille and frozen nougat in blood orange coulis.

At L'Espadon, the Michelin two-star restaurant in the Ritz in Paris, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are extremely tradition-bound, with truffles, foie gras, oysters, caviar, lobster, turkey and buche de Noel. For New Year's Eve guests dine on osetra caviar with blini, cream of pheasant soup, lobster braised in Chartreuse, filet of lamb with foie gras, salad with champagne vinegar and black truffles, and, finally, chocolate cake with carmel and rum sauce. This dinner is priced at a tidy 2,300 francs, about $450, exclusive of wines. But it does include service.

In comparison, a holiday menu at Commander's Palace in New Orleans includes Louisiana caviar or foie gras and duck confit pie, pork chops with truffle sauce, pompano with Champagne sauce and oysters or pheasant with boudin sausage all for a mere $36. But it only runs through Dec. 23.