The Restaurant Guys

Thanksgiving at Stage Left

Seating from 2 - 7 PM $59 per person

Children 12 and Under Pay Their Age!

[email protected] or 732-828-4444

Thursday 27 November - Our regular a la carte menu is available as well as a traditional Thanksgiving Menu

All dinner guests will receive the fixings for a late night turkey sandwich to take home. Dine with us in the main dining room, or if you wish a little privacy, inquire about booking one of our private dining rooms.

First

Butternut Squash Soup with Chestnut Herb Salad
or
Endive and Arugula Salad, Blue Cheese, Candied Walnuts and Grapes
or
Roasted Beets, Goat Cheese Mousse, Toasted Pumpkinseeds, Lemon Vinaigrette
or
Seared Day Boat Scallops, Red Curry Sous Vide Pork Belly
Thai Basil-Infused Pineapple Garlic, Ginger, Red Curry Puree

Main Course

Local Turkey with Chestnut Stuffing
Sweet Potato Puree
Garlic Mashed Yukon Gold Potatoes
Roasted Parsnips, Carrots and Brussels Sprouts
Cranberry Sauce with Orange Zest and Applejack
or
Butternut Squash Gnocchi
Lemon Thyme Brown Butter and Pecans
Roasted Parsnips, Carrots and Brussels Sprouts
Cranberry Sauce with Orange Zest and Applejack

Dessert

Mixed Berry Gratin
or
Pear and Cranberry Bread Pudding
or
Cherry Compote and Dulce de Leche, Vanilla Ice Cream
or
Baked Caramel Apple Streusel
or
Molten Valrhona Chocolate Cake

$59 per person plus tax and service
A la carte menu also available

The Spirits Project: Balvenie Tun 1509

Making the experience of super-luxury spirits crazily affordable and accessible!
Read more about the Spirits project.

• Suggested retail price: $389
  
• This Thursday at 6:30 p.m., we're pouring a one-ounce pour for $11
  

Balvenie had great success with their Tun 1401 series. The initial bottles are now selling for 5 times what they were when I first poured the first batch of 1401 for you just a few years ago. You’re welcome. Well, David Stewart has decided to discontinue the Tun 1401 and in its place launched Tun 1509. The first batch of which I present to you Thursday.

A tun is basically a large wooden vessel meant for marrying several casks of whiskey in a small batch before further blending or bottling. Barrel-aging of whisky is not a science. It is informed by science, but it remains a craft. Oak whisky barrels are still made by hand, not machine, ever. Different barrels of whisky mature differently, due to the differences in the barrels, where each barrel is stored and other magical things that we don’t completely understand. Elves?

The master blender’s job is to select different barrels from throughout the stock that will come together to complement each other and make a complete and complex whisky. These different whisky need time to come together and marry. They do that in a tun. Demand for Tun 1401 was so great that David Stewart decided to have a new tun built, which would accommodate a larger selection of barrels.

This eagerly awaited first batch from tun 1509 involved 42 top quality casks from the distillery: seven European oak sherry butts and 35 traditional American Oak casks. The original Tun 1401 was about 10 casks and the blends were much closer to 50/50 European vs American wood. I am eager to see the differences. We will open one bottle at precisely 6:30. When it's gone, it's gone.

Next Week in The Spirits Project
Balvenie 25 Year!

Halloween at Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi

Come visit the Green Fairy on the Eve of All Hallows

At the Cocktail Bar at Catherine Lombardi, all Absinthes and Absinthe Cocktails are half-price.

Hallowine

In the dining rooms, dinner guests are welcome to play our own version of Trick-or-Treat. We challenge you to a little blind tasting, AKA Bobbing for Wine:

1. Pick a price range, then tell us what color and body of wine you like and and what you're having for dinner.
2. We will select an excellent bottle from our cellar and pour it for you blind.
3. If you can correctly state the 1) Region, 2)Grape Variety and 3) get within 5 years of the vintage, we will send you home with another bottle of the same or equal value - Your Choice.

October 31 only - Boo!

La Petraia Could Be Yours for Only €5.5 Million

Long-time readers of this email may know that Mark and my favorite estate in all of Tuscany is the remarkable La Petraia. Just outside Radda (right next to Dario Cecchini's wonderful butchery and restaurant in Panzano, where where Mario and Armandino Batali learned how to butcher), the 400 year old farmhouse, is located at the top of the highest hill in the Chianti Classico district. From the ancient terraced vineyards and olive groves you can see Sienna and Florence is just over the horizon. Above the fields of lavender, there are hundreds of acres of undisturbed forest on the property, where you can find truffles and wild boar. A gushing spring on the property provides some of the finest water I have ever tasted/bathed in. There are orchards filled with original Tuscan varieties once thought to be extinct, vegetable gardens and greenhouses and beehives as well as chicken coops and cinghiale pigs. There are four rooms to rent out if you like, a commercial kitchen where Susan turned out Michelin-worthy food to the 6 tables in the lovely dining room. Listen to an excellent on-site radio interview Mark and I did here.

They have secured approvals to construct a new cantina (600 sq meters) as well as a stone structure for animals and to restore an existing outbuilding. These approvals are almost impossible to get here, and it took them 8 years to get them. The property also holds an agriturismo license, which is also hard to get.

All this can be yours for €5.5 Million. Find out more of the technical specs here. If you're interested in making a big change in your life, and have a few million dollars laying around, email me and I'll put you in touch with our friend Susan Grant. If you do wind up purchasing the property, you have to invite Mark and me over for dinner.

Fall Cocktails Now at Catherine Lombardi

When we change our cocktail list seasonally, some old classics reappear but the most exciting part is when new cocktails come online. We've been hard at work making the delicious happen. Above are just some of our new creations for the fall. From left to right, we have:

Back Row: El Presidente (a kind of rum Manhattan), Manzanilla (Two Tequilas, Apple Brandy and Chammomile), Plum Cobble (A sort of cobble with no ice: Vodka, Americano, Plum, Grapefruit and Cinnamon)

Middle Row: Black Opal #2 (Tequila, Guinness Stout, Cinnamon and Port), William's Fizz (Sort of a Ramos Fizz but The Essence of Refreshing Pear)

Front Row: Scobeyville Sorcerer (House-Aged Apple Pommeau, Strega and Nutmeg) , Apple of My Rye (Rye, Allspice Liqueur, Honeycrisp Apple Shrub, Lemon and Bitters)

The Spirits Project: Glenfiddich 26 Year "Excellence" Speyside Malt

Making the experience of super-luxury spirits crazily affordable and accessible!
Read more about the Spirits project.

• Suggested retail price: $549
  
• This Thursday at 6:30 p.m., we're pouring a one-ounce pour for $17
  

The first whisky of this age released by the Lion of Speyside: The Glenfiddich distillery. The "Excellence 26 Year Old" is a special release that was matured exclusively in American oak bourbon barrels from the Kelvin Cooperage in Kentucky. The American white oak provides notes of vanilla and spice alongside a classic Glenfiddich profile. It quite literally arrived in NJ just yesterday. We're very excited to pour it tonight.

We will open one bottle at precisely 6:30. When it's gone, it's gone.

David Stewart - Coming to Lunch on November 18

Our Balvenie 50 Project is getting quite a bit of attention around the world. The folks at Balvenie are pretty psyched as well.

In fact, David Stewart, Balvenie's Master Distiller and a legend in the whisky business, will pay us a visit on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 18. Mark and I are going prepare a simple lunch and relish the opportunity to sit at table with one of the top whisky experts in the world.

We're inviting anyone who purchased an ounce of the 50-year to come as our guest and join in the conversation. So if you're contemplating buying in on the project, whether for yourself or as a gift, please consider doing so before November 18 so we can invite you to this very special private luncheon.

For more information on any of this, don't hesitate to give us a call at 732-828-4444.

The Spirits Project: Crown Royal XR

Making the experience of super-luxury spirits crazily affordable and accessible!
Read more about the Spirits project.

• Suggested retail price: $149
  
• This Thursday at 6:30 p.m., we're pouring a one-ounce pour for $6
  

Canadian whisky suffers from a middling reputation. When I was a young bartender, I was taught that Canadian whisky is made of rye. Well, no. Canadian whisky is perhaps the lightest style of whisky produced. It's a multi-grain spirit, leaning heavily toward corn. Good Canadian whisky does contain some rye for flavor, but it's nothing that could ever be called a rye in the US.

Information is fairly scant on the Crown Royal XR (Extra Rare). The Crown Royal people market this as containing a percentage of the last batch of their now-shuttered LaSalle Distillery in Montreal. They say the whisky from the LaSalle distillery had a unique richness, which they attribute to the water around the island. This prompts the question, why then, did they shutter it. Today, all of Crown Royal's production is at the distillery in Gimli, Manitoba. They also say there is extra aged whisky in this bottle, but there's no age statement on the bottle and there's no specific information published.

So why did we select this particular bottle for The Spirits Project? It's because there is no reason great whisky cannot be made in Canada. Crown Royal certainly has the resources to do so. Let's give them a shot and see how they stack up. Thursday Evening, we will open one bottle at precisely 6:30. When it's gone, it's gone.

Thursday Evening, we will open one bottle at precisely 6:30. When it's gone, it's gone.

The Distillery at The Crumlin Road Jail - Belfast

I'm just recently back from yet another excursion to The Emerald Isle. I had the most extraordinary time. I was lucky enough to see the men’s final hurling match at a sold out Croke Park (capacity 86,000). Courtesy of an old friend, I got to sample ghost whiskies in historic bars from distilleries long-closed. I was delighted to find one of our cocktail inventions on a Belfast cocktail menu. The Belfast Cocktail, is on the menu at the wonderful Hudson Bar on Gresham Street. I met Marty Walsh, the Mayor of Boston. I hung out at The Residence of The U.S. Consul General to Northern Ireland, Greg Burton. I even met and got a selfie with Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland.

But the most exciting thing I did was to tour The Crumlin Road Jail. This medium size jail was stuffed to four times capacity at the height of Northern Ireland's Troubles (1960s-1990s). I am happy to report that it is bereft of prisoners and being turned to a much happier purpose. Local Belfast businessman Peter Lavery is turning it into Belfast’s first distillery in generations. I'll tell you the story of the extraordinary Peter Lavery another time.

Peter was kind enough to meet me and show me around himself and explain the whole project to me in-depth. I promise you, this is the most exciting distillery being built right now anywhere in the world. Parts of the jail will be preserved for historical tours. Part of the jail will be a functioning distillery with 3 state-of-the-art medium-size, high quality stills running at all times.

This is no micro-distillery we’re talking about. This is the real deal - full size. Building a brown liquor distillery from scratch is an enormously expensive plan. It will take more than a year to build. All three stills will produce full time. One still will split its time producing Poitín (un-aged and available for sale immediately) and laying down stocks for a Three-Year Grain Whiskey. This won’t be available for sale until three years after the stills start cooking.

The other two stills will work full-time producing whiskey to be laid down for Peter’s Seven-Year Pot-Stilled Irish Whiskey. By the time Peter is able to sell a single bottle of the flagship whiskey, it will be about ten years from now. By that time, he will be sitting on more than £35,000,000 of liquid stock waiting for bottling and I’ll be pushing sixty. In all that time, Peter will have created 30-60 jobs in Belfast, made his community better and turned a memory of something very painful into a cause for celebration.

I have nothing to sell you from telling this story. I just thought it was important and you would like it. If you go to Belfast (and you should), please ask me about where to go and what to do there.

The Spirits Project: Rittenhouse Very Rare 25-Year-Old Single Barrel Rye

Making the experience of super-luxury spirits crazily affordable and accessible!
Read more about the Spirits project.

• Suggested retail price: $750
  
• This Thursday at 6:30 p.m., we're pouring a one-ounce pour for $19
  

Excerpts from Jack Bettridge's wonderful 2009 article in Cigar Afficionado:

"Rye enthusiasts are once again asked to take the bad with the good as Heaven Hill releases the next installment of its super-aged Rittenhouse Very Rare Single-Barrel Straight Rye Whisky in October. The new issue offers the unusual opportunity to drink 25-year-old rye, but it's the last chance. The 3,000 bottles that will be issued represent the end of the successful one-off brand extensions, which included a 21- and 23-year-old within the past three years.

"The Rittenhouse Very Rare collection was a result of serendipity. The original lot of 95 barrels was intended for a private-label customer of Heaven Hill Distillery. The company was aging the whiskey for the customer, which failed to call for it until it was far beyond the intended age. When the rye neared the unusual age of 21 years, Heaven Hill approached the whiskey's owner and offered to buy it back. In 2006, it released the Rittenhouse Very Rare 21-Year-Old Straight Rye Whisky.

"Parker Beam, the Heaven Hill master distiller, says that the whiskey was able to age so long because of its location on the first floor of Rickhouse 00, where the temperatures are lower than on higher floors. Still the rye produced has been extremely spicy. The 100-proof whiskey is released without chill filtering, a process which is used to keep organic residue from clouding... is also a single-barrel whiskey, meaning that it is not the product of mixing several barrels, which is typically done to achieve consistency.

"The taste of the 25-year-old whiskey is predictably full-bodied, although the extra two years aging over the 23-year-old has not caused it to become overly woody or tannic as might be the expectation. It may even have mellowed somewhat after the two previous releases, which were spice bombs."

Thursday Evening, we will open one bottle at precisely 6:30. When it's gone, it's gone.

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