Friday, December 30, 2011.
The Snowboarders. Writing Two Paragraphs. The Gourmet Room Isn't.
Last year at this time everybody in my family but me was here at The Homestead. The ground was covered with snow, and snowboarding was the big deal for Jude and Mary Leigh. This year, the temperatures are in the fifties by day, and not a patch of snow anywhere. However, the resort was making its own snow, and the gang was itching to get to the slopes. Which they did, all morning.
They left me behind, where I was happy to be. I started the day with a standard hotel breakfast buffet in the main dining room, then moved to a spot in the well-named Grand Hall and began the special project I planned for the many hours I thought I would have to fill. I have an idea for a novel, of which I wrote about a hundred pages a couple of years ago. That's too long ago for the characters, themes and plot to be sharp in my mind. No matter--I know I'll rework it deeply, anyway.
In the four hours I spent drinking coffee and pounding away, I rejiggered about five pages to my satisfaction, reacquainting myself with these fictional friends of mine. I began page six with a long paragraph describing peculiar activities at the end of the St. Charles streetcar line. That's when the flashlight came on. My enthusiasm for the project leapt. I have The Idea.
That's when Jude and the Marys found me. They said that snowboarding was a blast, and they were now ready for lunch.
We took that meal in a building called the Casino, for exactly the same reason that the Casino in City Park here is called that. Different, archaic meaning of the word in both cases, since neither Casino was ever a gambling house. The Homestead's Casino is fronted by an ice-skating rink. Inside the building is a bar, a shop, and a dining room with good views to the hills.
Lunch here is sandwiches, salads, a few platters, and pizza. We ordered the latter for the table. The entree special was pasta with green beans, chicken and bacon in an Alfredo sauce--pretty good. Mary Ann had the Italian sandwich (like a muffuletta on French bread without the olive salad), Jude had a Caesar with shrimp, and Mary Leigh a hamburger. They were so exhilarated by the snowboarding that I think they could have eaten a pile of hay and enjoyed it.
Now it was afternoon tea time. Mary Ann was enjoying the fact that the whole resort was filled with other families, their members' ages ranging from tots to nonagenerians. They were all treating this big old place as if they lived there year-round. MA especially enjoyed watching the little kids rolling around in front of the Christmas tree, beating each other up and laughing.
The Homestead is a holiday tradition for some families going back generations. One group of about forty--hosted by the family patriarch who started coming here when he was a kid--comes here every four years.
Mary Ann talked to a lot of these people. One couple she met on the slopes concurred with our assessment of the eats. "The Homestead food is horrible," they said, then went down a list of restaurants in the immediate vicinity with better eats. Mary Ann had some names and numbers, and thought we might consider trying one of them.
Before we looked up any of those, the manager of the 1766 Grille interrupted my nap with the news that we had reached the top of the waiting list for cancellations, and we could come in for dinner at sevenish. Fabulous!
Or so we thought. We studied the menu for the 1766 Grille a few days ago online. It looked unadventurous but appealing, especially to the unadventuresome eaters among us. Mary Ann was particularly interested in the place, because we would spend enough money there allegedly for my benefit to offset the other expenses that were occurring.
Indeed, The Homestead seems to charge extra for everything. For example, if there were a free cup of coffee to be had anywhere in the facility, I never found it. Nobody would tell me how much it cost to go snowboarding.
We arrived early for the pre-dinner cocktail--another sop Mary Ann was sure to afford me every night. The bar fronting the 1766 Grille was the most handsome drinkery in the resort. Very comfortable. Its walls were decorated with paintings of all the U.S. Presidents who had stayed at The Homestead, starting with Washington and Jefferson and ending with Bill Clinton.
While enjoying a very good Negroni, I tested my knowledge of presidential history. Some tough ones up there: James K.Polk, for example. I got him, but couldn't remember Franklin Pierce. The one between Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover didn't look at all like Coolidge, so I got up to see who it was. By gosh, it was Coolidge! But this painting of him looked more like George "Goober" Lindsey. Other paintings seemed like caricatures--Jimmy Carter's, for one. Mary Ann thought Reagan's wasn't grand enough, but that figures.
The appointed time for dinner arrived, and in we went. The 1766 Grille was smaller than I expected, which explained why it was so hard to get a reservation. It reminded me of The Point, the gourmet dining room on the Carnival Conquest. It had a bright open kitchen, which I didn't think went well with the dark wood paneling and low lighting.
The 1766's main shtick is tableside preparation, something which has all but disappeared from the restaurants of America outside of bananas Foster and the occasional Caesar salad.
I started with steak tartare atop gaufrette potatoes. They prepared it tableside, but using aioli--mayonnaise—as an ingredient. Pretty bad. Mary Ann started with a vol-au-vent of foraged mushrooms in a sherry cream sauce. Astonishing! The mushrooms had no flavor whatsoever, a condition she and I wondered about for a long time. The luckiest person at the table was Jude, who had a pair of good crab cakes.
If anyone ever listened to the family expert on dining elegantly, we could have saved a lot of grief in the salad course. The 1766 does both the Caesar and the spinach salads tableside. It made no sense to have both of them going on at the same time. We had both of them going on at the same time. On top of that, Mary Ann got it into her head that The Grille Tossed Salad was not the sort of thing that could stand in for an entree. Something about eating too much for the past few days. The waiter kept saying, "It's only a small tossed salad." He ultimately got the idea that what she wanted was this lettuce-and-tomato salad, followed by another one. Which was what she got.
The big excitement in the entree course was Jude and Mary Leigh's Chateaubriand for two. Of course, it was attended to tableside. Not merely with a simmering sauce in a pan, but actual flames blasting away. The point of this eluded me--the thing had been roasted to doneness in the kitchen--but it made for a good photograph. And the kiddos said it was very enjoyable.
Better still was a half-duck with red cabbage, bok choy (another cabbage?) and a broiled tomato. The sauce was a reduction of red wine, duck jus, and cherries--a classic, well prepared.
We had two desserts, or four—depending on how you look at it. Jude had baked Alaska, flamed at the table, burning the fluting of the meringue. Although it's common, I never thought flames on this dessert was a very good idea. In front of me were three different custards. Creme brulee (the best), lavender creme caramel, and chocolate--the latter with a flake of edible gold on the top.
Even accounting for all the tableside service and the grandness of the meal, this dinner took a long time to serve, with periods of inattention between courses. It didn't help that nobody was drinking wine except me. That's not enough to order a bottle. Jude was still drinking beer.
I can't say it was an unenjoyable evening. And it must be said that my point of comparison is New Orleans--not a fair comparison with Appalachia, even at the resort level. But this dinner confirmed that food is not the strong suit at The Homestead. The check managed to stay below $250, which was a relief.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
