FEATURES
Season Extending the
For this sweet and sour eggplant with tofu and pickled bean
sprouts, Chris Rendell pickles the fried eggplant in a soy gastric
(water, sugar, Japanese rice wine vinegar and soy) with shiitake
and dried cloud ear mushrooms, and uses a chilled solution to
pickle the bean sprouts, which maintains their crunch.
When growers and chefs collaborate, all-year-round
sourcing and preserving is the result.
By Jan Greenberg
Double Crown
The National Culinary Review | January 2011
ON A BLUSTERY evening in
late October 2010, Brian Kaywork,
executive chef at the Rhinecliff
Hotel, Rhinecliff, N.Y., stood under a
heated tent overlooking the Hudson
River holding a microphone. “This
dinner is not meant to show off my
culinary prowess,” he said to the crowd
assembled at long linen-clad tables. “It’s
about honoring the farms we buy from.
It’s about recognizing the intense effort
to get this food on the table.”
The Culinary Institute of America-trained
chef passed up a job offer from the luxury
Florida Keys resort Little Palm Island to
settle in the northern reaches of the Hudson
River Valley, where winters are long and
spring comes late. He now heads up the
kitchen at the Rhinecliff Hotel, a 200-year-
old newly renovated former railroad hotel
located on the banks of the Hudson River.
and cook as seasonally as the realities of
running a restaurant this size would allow,”
Kaywork says.
“I wanted to be in a place where I could
have regular contact with my growers,
WORKING TOGETHER
“Local” and “fresh” are the buzzwords
of today, with a slew of new cookbooks
emphasizing seasonal ingredients. But
like many chefs who were the forerunners
of the ubiquitous locovore movement,
Kaywork is now trying to discover ways to
extend the season.
