The Restaurant Guys

NJ Monthly Magazine Readers' Choice Poll

The results are in:

• Catherine Lombardi was named Best Italian Restaurant and
• Stage Left was named for Best Burger.

While you knew that all along, we're grateful you helped us spread the word.

Thank you!

Star Ledger and NJ Monthly Say Nice Things

This week, I would like to start out by offering our sincere thanks to the critics at NJ Monthly Magazine, who picked Stage Left among the Top 5 American Restaurants in The Garden State. I don't mind telling you, we agree!

We also would like to send some love to Vicki Hyman, intrepid food reporter for The Star Ledger, for her excellent piece on NJ Tomatoes, where our History of The Tomato in Seven Courses got more than a passing mention. This year is the best tomato crop we've seen. Come try that menu in Stage Left while tomatoes last.

Make a reservation.

Food Arts Magazine: Vinifying Cocktails

by Christy Canterbury / March 2013
Read the original article at FoodArts.com 

At New Jersey’s Catherine Lombardi restaurant, when it comes to selecting wines to enhance cocktails, the quality, style, and variety are just as important as when pairing wine with food.

Why do people choose to adulterate fine wines, beers, and spirits? For variety’s sake. It’s the very spice of life.” So concludes the opening paragraph of Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology. It’s also very likely that the world’s first cocktails were rigged up from poor quality wine (and beer) and “improved,” aka masked, with additives.

Throughout the centuries, wine has played an integral role in cocktail culture. Brandies like Cognac, Armagnac, and Pisco are derived from wine. Champagne adds finishing flourishes, and still table wines swim in punch bowls and float as garnishes. Fortified wines, like Port, Sherry, and Madeira, figure prominently, and to craft properly two of the world’s most famous cocktails, the Martini and the Manhattan, the aromatized wine vermouth is obligatory. Really, it’s nothing new. Hippocrates may have been one of the first to make flavored wine, rather for medicine than tipple, as we know it.

Francis Schott, co-owner of Catherine Lombardi (a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence recipient since 2005) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and his head bartender, Chris Stanley, are deeply familiar with the history of wine in cocktails. Schott begins by mentioning that Richard “Cicero” Cook’s Oxford Night Caps, printed around 1827, notes that a Bishop cocktail, which uses red wine or ruby-style Port, appears in print as early as 1447 in the expense records of the institution that would become Oxford. Punches, which featured wine in the bowls of aristocrats in addition to the booze of sailors, became vogue in the 1600s. At the end of that century through 1860, American colonists popularized flips, in which they often used fortified wines. During this time the sangaree, which morphed into sangria in the 1960s, appeared in 1774. With a few centuries of such drinking traditions well established, the word “cocktail” first appeared in print in 1806, according to Dale DeGroff in The Craft of the Cocktail.

Today’s booming cocktail culture pulls inspirations from old trends, many of which use wine. However, successfully using wine in cocktails isn’t necessarily obvious or easy. First, there is the question of the wine’s intended effect. Wine can stretch a cocktail, provide acid, pop aromatics, add sweetness, or do several of these things at once. Schott states that the biggest challenge is the body. Bubbly can finish a cocktail beautifully, and fortified wines stand up easily. However, spirits and bitters effortlessly overwhelm still table wine’s texture and flavor. One method of overcoming this is to float a still wine on top of the cocktail.

“For wine to have integrity in cocktails, it has to be a cocktail where the wine matters,” declared Schott. He went on to explain that good bartenders design recipes based on brands rather than wine or spirit categories: “Gin is not gin! Plymouth is Plymouth, and Beefeater is Beefeater. Plymouth is more elegant, floral, and pretty,” Schott elaborated. “Beefeater is more foursquare, peppery, and structured. Dolcetto is red wine, and so is Nebbiolo. But, they are not interchangeable!”

This point was illustrated as the duo prepared two variations on a Regent’s Punch to elucidate. Regent’s Punch is finished with sparkling wine, an ingredient often haphazardly substituted. Alongside each version, a pony glass of the bubbly used was served. From color to texture to flavor, clear differences emerged between the drink topped with Doyard Champagne Vendémiaire Premier Cru Brut NV versus the other with Varichon & Clerc Privilège NV. Both are Blanc de Blancs, but the Champagne is 100 percent Chardonnay, while the crémant is a blend of Chardonnay with other varieties. The biggest dissimilarity is the different winemaking. The Champagne’s primary fermentation occurs in oak barriques (rather than tanks), and the wine rests on its second fermentation lees for four years. These two wines add body and flavor, which surfaced in the cocktail. Each was tasty, but they clearly differed in style and price tag.

Still wines pose even more of a challenge. White wines in particular are tricky because, while those used in cocktails tend to be fragrant and lighter bodied, they can easily become lost in the fuller-bodied, spirit-driven whole of the prepared drink. Stanley mentioned that his European Holiday cocktail required tinkering with a whole line-up of Rieslings to perfectly blend in the white wine with the other flavors and to find just the right amount of balancing residual sugar and acidity.

When it comes to still red wine, the float is king. The feasibility of floating wine depends on the specific gravity of the rest of the drink. The wine must be lighter, to sit on top. (As an aside, Schott shared a great trick for floats. Rather than pouring the wine over the back of a bar spoon—the commonly taught way, slowly pour the liquid into the bowl of the spoon positioned on the surface of the drink. This “arrests the wine’s vertical motion” and creates a “crisp line that allows the float to remain on top of the drink like the head of a well-drawn pint,” says Schott.)

In another wine-to-cocktail tailoring experiment, Schott and Stanley sampled five different reds floated on Cosmopolitan Delights, a concoction of Hennessy Cognac, Orange Curaçao, lemon juice, orgeat, and red wine. The Hilberg-Pasquero Vareij, a light aromatic blend of Brachetto and Barbera, popped the aromatics, but its tannins proved too wimpy to properly structure the drink. By contrast, a Barbaresco hammered the drink with tannins. A California Petite Sirah imparted heaviness and an unpleasant cherry Cold-Eeze flavor. A Veneto Merlot introduced capsicum aromas. At last, it was the Schiavenza Dolcetto d’Alba 2009 that provided the perfect combination of brightened aromatics, mild tannins, and acidic lift. All but the Barbaresco were drinkable, but only the Dolcetto was truly excellent.

Where wine and liquor really come together is in one of the oldest wine cocktails: the punch. In the early 1700s, when aristocrats copied the punch from sailors, they rendered them effete by adding wine. Weightier punches use fortified wines, as in Admiral Russell’s Excess Punch. Lighter ones, like the Fourth Regent’s Punch, use Champagne.

Punches are stable and designed to remain delicious as their ice melt incorporates. (An ice block resting in a punch keeps it cool as it is enjoyed.) Punches’ alcohols vary, but they average 20 percent rather than most cocktails’ 40 percent. Schott mentioned that many establishments new to punch don’t immediately grasp that it must continue to taste good as it stands. “You can’t just scale up any cocktail and put it in a punch bowl. It will either taste too strong at the outset or too weak 20 minutes later.” Schott also advises that, since Champagne punches do not retain their bubbles long, adding more bubbly refreshes them. “A great punch is a living, evolving thing!”

Several other cocktail categories incorporate wine. Resembling punches are cups. When they were invented, cups were an iced beverage resembling punch, using whatever wine was on hand (usually something produced nearby), and were served from a pitcher. There are also flips. Historically, these were warm drinks compounded with eggs, sugar, and spice. In modern parlance, the term is often applied to any drink shaken with a whole egg. There are also cobblers and tikis, which both use ice (always in cobblers and most of the time in tikis) and come in wildly imaginative variations.

Interestingly, cocktailians embrace wine, yet many wine imbibers—even adventurous ones—approach spirits with caution. Schott suggested a few concoctions to encouraging crossover imbibing. One of them, the Negroni Sbagliato, Schott called “a gateway cocktail for wine drinkers.” Translated as “Botched Negroni,” Prosecco replaces the gin typically mixed with red vermouth and Campari. The resulting alcohol is substantially lower, yet the intense aromatics remain.

Of course, a fine list of creative and delicious cocktails often doesn’t sell itself. In a restaurant, rather than a cocktail bar, the sales approach is especially important. Punches, served in beautiful decorative bowls placed on the diners’ table, are popular at Catherine Lombardi. Schott teaches his staff to quickly assess a table upon their first approach and to “utter in the first breath the suggestion of a punch bowl.” Like a magnum, delivering a punch bowl provides a show in the dining room. Performance effects aside, a punch bowl provides the first beverage or two to a table of four or six, quickly setting the table in a festive mood and reallieving the server of frequent rechecks on drinks early on as the party settles into the evening. Better yet, if the bar is buzzing, a bartender’s drink-making and paperwork time for a few rounds has been reduced by at least half when a punch bowl goes out.

With a cocktail list as extensive as the one at Catherine Lombardi, training takes on even greater importance. Schott handles this by inviting his staff members to enjoy a drink at the bar each night after their shifts. Staff must change into street clothes, and they are welcome to stay for a second drink, offered at a discount. The critical point is that the beverages offered are exclusively from Catherine Lombardi’s specialty cocktail list. Effectively, Schott builds his cocktail lessons into this opportunity to enjoy the restaurant’s front-of-the-house experience as a guest.

While Stanley mentioned that wine cocktails receive little explicit demand per se because people often are not aware of their beverages’ components, Schott sees bartenders making more wine-driven cocktails to deliver great flavor without the elevated alcohol. Besides offering diversity, this strategy may allow a customer to enjoy an extra beverage, and it may allow a bartender to inconspicuously slow down an overly enthusiastic consumer or satisfy a guest who wants to enjoy cocktails while going easy on the alcohol.

Whether wine stretches, sweetens, acidifies, fragrances, or flourishes a cocktail, bartenders and imbibers can enjoy a seemingly infinite list of explorations. The key to success is taking the extra time—and the money—to tailor cocktails to the best wines.

Find the drinks recipes below:

• Fourth Regent’s Punch
• Cosmopolitan Delight
• Admiral Russell’s Excess Punch
• The Belfast Cocktail

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A Toast to the Cocktail

The Star Ledger's Inside Jersey (at nj.com) just wrote a great article about us.  Click on the title to link to the original article.

A Toast to the Cocktail

by TJ Foderaro

When Bristol-Myers Squibb booked a dinner at Elements in Princeton to celebrate a product launch, the planners asked bar manager Jamie Dodge to come up with a special cocktail to set the mood. They wanted a “drink that would please the masses, both men and women, and that was reddish in color with orangish accents — the colors of the medication logo,” Dodge recalls.

After a little research and experimentation, Dodge settled on a punch — a blend of rums, amaretto, Campari, pineapple juice, lime and other ingredients. He called it Eliquis Punch, after the new drug. “Everyone in the group was very pleased,” says Dodge, 25. “I batched out about two-thirds of a gallon to start with and had to make another two-thirds of a gallon.”

Only a few years ago, it would have been unheard of for a sophisticated restaurant such as Elements (where an appetizer can set you set back $25) to feature a punch. Cosmopolitans? Sure. Mojitos? Maybe. But punch? Wasn’t that something your grandparents served around the holidays?

The fact that young bartenders such as Dodge are experimenting with punch — perhaps the world’s oldest mixed drink — shows how far cutting-edge mixologists are willing to go in their quest to rediscover classic cocktails.

The drink menu at the Strip House in Livingston features a half-dozen classics, such as the Aviator and the Sidecar. At Catherine Lombardi in New Brunswick, the cocktail menu reads like a history textbook, with sections titled “Gilded Age Cocktails (1860-1890)” and “Classic Age Cocktails (1890-1930).”

The recently opened Moonshine Modern Supper Club in Millburn evokes the golden age of the American bar, pre-piña colada. Co-owner Joe San Philip, who developed the concept, pays homage to classics such as Bees Knees (circa “New York 1920,” the menu notes) and Chicago Fizz (whose froth derives from egg whites and club soda — just like the old days).

In researching drink recipes, San Philip developed a respect for 19th- and early 20th-century bartenders who were able to work wonders with limited fresh and local ingredients. “It’s easy to mix with all the flavored vodkas,” he says. “But the original mixologists faced all kinds of challenges.”

Few New Jersey restaurateurs are as dedicated to the cause as Mark Pascal and Francis Schott, co-owners of Catherine Lombardi. They hosted their first “cocktail dinner “ — pairing each course with a cocktail — back in 1993, when wine dinners were still a novelty.

Today, the bar at Catherine Lombardi is a veritable shrine to “craft” cocktails. Pascal and Schott go out of their way to source exotic ingredients, such as crème de violette and a liquor made from allspice. One shelf is cluttered with strange-looking bottles, many capped with eyedroppers.

“This one is orange-flower water,” Schott explains. “This is lavender water, and this is absinthe. Oh, and this is toasted pumpkin seed oil. I also have 10 types of bitters.
“Americans invented the cocktail,” Schott says. “But we sort of lost our legacy.”

What happened?

“No. 1 — Prohibition,” explains Schott, who has consulted countless old bar manuals and leading modern-day mixologists in his quest for authenticity. Although Prohibition failed to keep Americans from drinking, it put the country’s best bartenders out of business. Many of them, Schott says, fled to Europe.

By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the country was deep in the Great Depression. Then came World War II. By the 1950s, Americans had begun their love affair with processed foods and artificial ingredients. And the counter-culture of the 1960s looked upon cocktails as retrograde. “It was your grandfather’s drink,” Schott says.

The low point, in Schott’s mind, was the 1970s, when the idea of a fancy cocktail was cheap rum and frozen strawberries pulverized in a blender and topped with canned whipped cream.

The turning point came in the late 1980s, when a visionary bartender named Dale DeGroff insisted on using only top-shelf spirits, fresh-squeezed juices and other traditional ingredients at the Rainbow Room in New York. Schott credits DeGroff with single-handedly inspiring the renaissance in American cocktails. “Dale DeGroff changed the world,” he says.

Certainly, Schott counts himself as a disciple. The Catherine Lombardi drink menu includes not one but two versions of the Aviation Cocktail — one from a bartenders’ manual published in the early years of aviation, the other from a cocktail book that came out 20 years later.

“There are two versions of the same cocktail, both on the menu,” says Schott. “Having both allows people to participate in the history of the American cocktail.”

Here’s the original Aviation cocktail, as re-created by Schott:
2 ounces gin (preferably Plymouth)
1/2 ounce Maraschino liqueur (Luxardo)
1/2 ounce lemon juice
1/4 ounce crème de violette
Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Serve without garnish.
New Jersey bartenders, such as Jamie Dodge of Elements, above, and Joe San Philip of Moonshine, facing page, have embraced pre-Prohibition era cocktail culture.

Rutgers Magazine

We are featured in this month's issue of Rutgers Magazine!  Thank you to David Major for writing such a nice article about us.

Read the article here!

Rutgers Magazine Profiles the Restaurant Guys (Part 5 of 5)

Radio Days

Late in 2004, a producer approached the restaurateurs with the idea of parlaying their knowledge and experience into a radio show. First, could they come up with 31 ideas for 31 shows? In no time, they dreamed up 90. The two men insisted, however, on a format that would allow them to develop meaningful content. For seven years now, they have been the hosts of The Restaurant Guys: Food, Wine, and the Finer Things in Life, a weekly half-hour show now broadcast nationally on Wednesdays through the Heritage Radio Network (an archive of podcasts is available through restaurantguysradio.com). After an opening segment of banter between themselves, the two men interview an authority in the culinary and wine and spirits world, be it Ruth Reichl, formerly of Gourmet magazine and the New York Times, or John Mariani, of Esquire magazine. “In the early years, it was always amusing,” says Pascal, who says the Restaurant Guys reaches 100,000 listeners a month. “At the beginning of the program, a guest who hadn’t heard of the show would come on the air, believing it was just another interview. By the time of the break, we had made a friend. The guest really had a fun time with us.”

And that’s what Pascal and Schott have always strived for: having fun while presenting seriously good food, wine, and service. It has worked for 20 years, with no signs of abating as they continue to expand the frontier of fine food. “My favorite part of the job is greeting people,” says Pascal. “I like being on the floor when the engine is running smoothly: everybody is getting what they need; you are making 120 people in each restaurant happy; your staff is making good money; and people are spending money because they want to. It’s just a nice way to make a living. It really is.” •

View the original article at Rutgers Magazine online

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Rutgers Magazine Profiles the Restaurant Guys (Part 4 of 5)

The "Contextualizers"

Pascal and Schott see their main roles as being curators of fine food, wine, and spirits, and they are passionate about sharing with patrons the things that they are discovering all the time. Not unlike a museum curator revealing the significance of a painting that would otherwise not be fully appreciated, each man goes table to table to “contextualize,” as they put it. They revel in explaining the significance of what they are eating: where it came from, how it was grown and prepared, why it is unique, the ingredients used. To celebrate the history of tomatoes, they once had a seven-course dinner of them.

And most nights, it seems, they are handed a new script to work from. Because of New Brunswick’s growing popularity as an evening destination, and because of the proximity of companies such as Johnson & Johnson, the luxury Heldrich hotel (occupying the site of that former welfare hotel), and the three theaters, Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi have an ever-changing mix of customers. “If the Chieftains are playing at the State Theatre, there might be a big Irish contingent in the house,” says Schott, “or a bunch of international business executives staying at the Heldrich will drop in on another night. There is always a different feel in the room, and different perceptions about food and wine. So, I want to have these conversations with people. I want to give you something that will make you say, ‘Oh, my god. Amazing!’”

Clockwise, from top left: this cheese plate, typically served with a red or a fortified wine, features cheeses from a range of countries and milk sources: Saenkanter, an aged Gouda from Holland; Humboldt Fog from California, and Barely Buzzed from Utah. The mesclun salad, which changes frequently, usually comes with a vinaigrette dressing and fruit such as grapes or grilled plums. The Wagyu flatiron steak, from the Wagyu cow that is coveted for its even marbling and tenderness, is seared rare, sectioned, and served on a 500-degree Himalayan salt brick that cooks each piece to the customer’s liking. The sashimi-style tuna and pressed foie gras dish was recently featured during a private wine dinner at Stage Left.

Constantly on the prowl for information and inspiration, the two men are big readers of books about cooking and food. They frequently speak before members of the restaurant industry and the public, produce a weekly enewsletter for their subscribers, and attend tastings to sample and document assiduously, along with sommelier Alexandra Sauter, between 3,500 to 5,000 wines each year in order to keep their constant inventory of 900 wines invigorated. They host special wine and Champagne dinners, private parties, and a designated night, called the Spirits Project, when guests can sample a valuable, rare spirit unavailable to the public and sold at cost. An acknowledgement of the renaissance in the popularity of cocktails, the night allows Pascal and Schott to share the findings of their sophisticated palates and their knowledge of all manner of spirits. You could call it the Antiques Roadshow of Spirits.

When time permits, they dine at the best restaurants. And, these two former McDonald’s and Burger King aficionados (fussy about their food even in high school, they always special ordered their cheeseburgers to get them just right) will drop in on low- and medium-brow eateries, too, just to see what’s going on out there. “When I go to a fine restaurant, I am looking for inspiration,” says Pascal. “It might be the lighting or a cool ingredient in a dish or the way something is presented. I want to bring these ideas to our chef, J.R. Belt. I want to get him excited, too, and it doesn’t take much.”

Acquainted with the network of suppliers, restaurateurs, and other players in the high-end restaurant industry, they call on their contacts, and vice versa, to find out what’s new. They got a chuckle recently when the New York Times proclaimed that the top Spanish ham, made from the black-footed Ibérico pig, had just arrived in the United States. Pascal and Schott have been serving it for three years, having tracked down the right Spanish supplier—a testament to their sleuth work, restless curiosity, and smart buying. “A guiding principle for us is that it has to be interesting every day,” says Schott. “So, we are constantly changing things in the restaurant: new cheeses, new entrées, great cocktails we have discovered. Having cutting-edge food is so important to us.”

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Rutgers Magazine Profiles the Restaurant Guys (Part 3 of 5)

Dinner Will Be Served

It’s 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and the staff for the two restaurants have convened upstairs in Catherine Lombardi to have the daily staff dinner, “the family meal,” according to Schott. All the tables in the large dining room have been set. It is quiet, except for the sound of buckets of ice cascading into the bar sink nearby and the faint hum of a vacuum running downstairs. With only a half hour to go before service commences, members of the staff look up attentively in the direction of Pascal and Schott, who are standing amid the tables. Schott calls this part of the evening “getting ready for takeoff,” and no two evenings are ever the same. There are already a lot of reservations on the books, and it’s going to be a busy night. The team is short a few servers, so compensatory logistics are outlined. There are a few other things to keep in mind, too. A party of 10—state legislators up from Trenton—will be dining upstairs tonight. The wine library in Stage Left, a cozy room lined with bookshelves and racks of wine, needs another table set for the private party coming in at 7:30. We’re going to need to pay attention, the men remind them. After answering a few questions, they make one last sweep of the restaurants, bars, and kitchens before adjourning to their shared basement office. At some point, usually around 6:30, they will split up, with each going to one of the restaurants to begin the evening of greeting guests at their tables, making introductions to the food and wine, and ensuring that everything goes well. “We have never had so many moving parts,” says Schott. “There is a lot to keep track of.”

All members of the waitstaff at Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi go through an arduous training program before becoming full-fledged servers. “The sheer quantity of young intelligent people in the area—many from Rutgers—gives us a treasure trove of people from whom to choose,” says Mark Pascal.

Because of its unforgiving pace and the myriad demands of serving food to the public (not to mention fine cuisine), restaurant life is notorious for burning out its players, from owners right on down the line. For Pascal and Schott, stress or fatigue has never been an issue. “I love this business,” says Pascal. “It’s not a source of angst. It’s a pleasure.” Even when the restaurants are very busy, which is frequently, and an urgent call for help rings their office phones, they react to the urgency with aplomb, pulling on their suit jackets as they head off to douse “the hot spots” in the dining rooms. These are small considerations in the scheme of things, given how much satisfaction and inspiration the two derive from pleasing people.

And that’s the first point that Pascal, who is primarily responsible for hiring staff, makes to job seekers. Many of them are current or former students at Rutgers who will go through a rigorous training program before they are allowed to so much as look at a table of guests. “I tell them, ‘One, you have to be very personable and enjoy making people happy,’” he says. “‘Two, you have to be reasonably intelligent. Three, you have to be hardworking because it is a hard, physical job. And, four, you have to have the desire to be the best at this. If your only reward is money, it won’t be good enough—and you won’t be good enough. You have to take intrinsic satisfaction from making people happy and being really good at your job.’”

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Rutgers Magazine Profiles the Restaurant Guys (Part 2 of 5)

Partners in the Sublime

Mark Pascal, seated, and Francis Schott have a repartee that matches the appeal of the food and service in their restaurants. They are pictured in the wine library, a dining room lined with bookshelves and racks of wine that is always in high demand among patrons of Stage Left.

To understand the secret to the restaurants’ success, before you even sit down to the food and wine to be carried away to another world, you need to go no further than to appreciate Pascal’s and Schott’s personalities, their personal and professional relationship with each other, and with others, and the philosophy that governs their approach to fine dining. These things inform every last detail of Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi, from the preparation of the butter-poached gulf shrimp to the proper folding of the last cloth napkin.

For starts, their differences, they say, are their strengths. Pascal is a pack rat; Schott loathes clutter. One is married with four children; the other has a girlfriend in Manhattan. Pascal is full of big ideas; Schott fusses over the details of them. One is a numbers guy, a logistics savant; the other is a marketing wiz, with a bent for the written word. When they are in each other’s company, their repartee is infectious, engulfing everybody in the room. Each knows what the other is thinking before he thinks it, and they tease each other with little mercy. A day isn’t right if they haven’t had a bunch of laughs between them. And Pascal and Schott might be the only executives who have rare, unopened bottles of wine and spirits arrayed on their office desks.

But, running through their relationship is a deep tributary of mutual respect formed through years of working together, an admiration of the other’s talents, and a fealty to their code of conduct. “I’d say we share a sense of fairness, honesty, and loyalty,” says Schott. “Our trust in each other is complete. And we want an atmosphere of mutual respect, of clear communication, in all our relationships. We strive to create that every day among our 65 employees. That’s the environment we want, from the dishwasher to the last purveyor whom we do business with.”

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Rutgers Magazine Profiles the Restaurant Guys (Part 1 of 5)

Mark Pascal, left, and Francis Schott met over food as freshmen while living on the Livingston Campus in Rutgers. They are still sharing food and ideas.

When Francis Schott transferred to Rutgers during his sophomore year in 1986, he was still holding down a full-time job as a night manager of the ShopRite in Hillsborough, New Jersey. At the end of his shift, as the clock struck midnight, he would head out to his car with baguettes and fine cheeses, procured for close to nothing, and drive to his dorm room in the South Tower on the Livingston Campus in Piscataway. On one of his first nights at Rutgers, Schott met another student on the third floor, Mark Pascal, a big, popular guy in the dorm. Schott asked Pascal, who was clearly impressed with the bounty, to join him for a bite. He happily consented. “After meeting over bread, cheese, and beer,” says Schott, “we were friends immediately.”

Today, more than two decades later, they are still convening in friendship over food and drink. The two men are the owners of, and the artisans behind, Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi, two New Brunswick restaurants at the apex of fine dining in New Jersey, with reputations reaching far beyond the state’s borders. On the cusp of celebrating the 20th anniversary of their first restaurant, Stage Left, Pascal RC’88 and Schott RC’88 were recently anointed the “New Jersey Restaurateurs of the Year” by the New Jersey Restaurant Association, a designation that in essence acknowledges a career of work. For those who have known these guys all along, Pascal and Schott have been culinary trailblazers from the beginning.

Yet, a career in food wasn’t part of the original plan—far from it. Soon after graduating from Rutgers, Pascal took a job as a statistician for Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Schott was heading off to Seton Hall Law School. Within days, they dumped their career plans, preferring to work side by side as bartenders at the Frog and the Peach restaurant in New Brunswick, chatting up the patrons. Smitten with restaurant life, they soon came up with the brilliant idea of opening their own place. It would be a wine bar with a limited menu that would accentuate their knowledge of spirits and wine. Underwritten by Lou Riveiro, who remains a business partner, they signed a lease to occupy a shoe box-sized space in a modest two-story storefront at the corner of George Street and Livingston Avenue. In May of 1992, Pascal and Schott opened the doors to Stage Left Restaurant (named for its proximity to the State Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, and George Street Playhouse) in a neighborhood that wasn’t exactly inviting back then. “This area of town was still on the frontier,” says Pascal. “Across the street was a welfare hotel, that kind of thing. But we liked the edginess of it. We were 26 years old. Edginess was OK.”

Soon enough, so was business. The two men quickly developed a reputation within elite restaurant circles for the quality of their wine, food, and service. Initially, the pre- and post-theater crowds were their mainstay, providing them with a crash course in the necessity of prompt service. Within 10 years, as their reputation grew, Pascal and Schott had bought the building and began annexing spaces within it to expand Stage Left, dining room by dining room. They continued embellishing its appointments to complement the revered quality of its contemporary American cuisine. Six years ago, they opened their second restaurant, located above Stage Left, the lush Catherine Lombardi, named after Pascal’s grandmother whose own home cooking inspires the Italian-American fare served there. These days, with a 120-seat dining capacity in each restaurant, Pascal and Schott have the elbow room to do what they do best. And it is considerable.

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