Sweet meads and savory dishes a perfect pairing at Captain Cook

Down the Hatch

[ With Dawnell Smith ]

Published: April 5th, 2007 07:25 AM
Last Modified: April 5th, 2007 05:52 PM

I conduct beer and wine dinners at home all the time. It's a piece of cake, really: Pull out the leftover macaroni and cheese (spaghetti and meatballs for you uptown folks), douse the pile with cracked pepper and crack open whatever's left from the last round of beer or wine.

Waste not, want not.

But I don't ask anyone to pay $60 to $70 for these meals; I don't ask anyone to endure them at all.

The Hotel Captain Cook does, so putting on a mead dinner presents a different set of challenges for the staff. For one thing, people expect a little more than some grub and something to wash it down; for another, die-hard Cook customers have to get over the fear of fermented honey beverages shaped by experiences with nasty concoctions made by coldhearted commercial outfits or distant relatives.

So in the name of good journalism, I imbedded myself at the Captain Cook two Mondays in a row to find out how they do it. Oh, the hardship!

Keith Saunders, a food and beverage guy at the Cook, heard about local Celestial Meads a few months ago and jumped at the chance to get its products at the Cook.

Doing a mead dinner made sense, so he secured bottles of every mead in stock from Celestial's owner, Michael Kiker, then sat down with Katrina Mazack, the assistant food and beverage manager for the Cook, to pare the selections down to six.

"First we decide what to pour, and the chef then tastes them and comes up with dishes to go with them," Saunders said. "We make some suggestions, and he goes from there."

This time, Saunders and Mazack tried the mead with various cheeses and sourdough bread and came up with six picks, jotting notes about how each tastes with smoky cheese, soft cheese, sour bread, etc.

Reth Leones, the chef de cuisine, read the notes and tasted the meads before coming up with a dish for each variety. He has been doing these food pairings for a year and a half but finds each one challenging in its own way. This time, the general sweetness of most meads made it important for him to seek out contrasts or compatibility to distinguish the flavors.

For the Sweet Tupelo Honey Mead, Leones roused up a gorgonzola and tomato pastry with chutney and balsamic syrup, engaging the mead with a tangy, savory contrast that won raves at the table.

The Sourwood Honey Mead presented the most difficult problem because of its earthy, grassy, woodsy characteristics, so Leones decided to complement its flavors with a cream of wild mushroom soup. The pairing works, but Leones gets stressed before each event.

"Whenever I do this, I'm really nervous that people might not like it," he said.

Yet people always love Leones' food, Mazack said.

"We have regular guests who come to all of these things, and they say the meals are only getting better and better."

In the end, she made a few suggestions, mostly about portion control and ingredient costs. He and she work with a budget. This time, it's a little tighter since she priced the meal a bit lower than most wine dinners, mostly because people don't know a lot about meads.

But these meads aren't cheap, and neither is the food. (The mead dinner on April 24 will cost patrons $60.) But a dish can make the difference between an ordinary mead experience and a memorable one.

So, yes, I've tried recipes for five-cheese macaroni with scallions, but my kids reject them wholeheartedly. I'll stick to my low-labor, highly cheesy meals and leave the sublime ones to real chefs like Leones.

And, honestly, sometimes I'm happy just washing it down.