October 29, 2001 Great Food is Where You Find It

This is my thirtieth year as a restaurant reviewer and I can summarize my experience simply by saying, “Great food is where you find it”.

Also, I think everyone will agree that the early discovery of a new restaurant serving great food is a peak dining experience. 

What is Great food?  Great food is the use of the best ingredients available in a creative or classically correct preparation that combines those ingredients into a dish that excites one’s palate when one tastes the dish.

My experience tells me that everybody knows when their palate has been excited.  When your response to the first taste of a dish of food is, “This tastes and looks Great!”.  It is that simple.  Everyone seems to be hard wired to respond to food that excites their palate.

The function of a Restaurant Reviewer is to find restaurants that can repeatedly and reliably prepare food that excites the palate and, hopefully, to explain how and why that excitement of the palate does or does not occur.

Usually we associate great food with restaurants that have built a reputation over years of successful operation, that typically are very expensive, because they must pay their chefs a lot of money to compensate for the years of sweating in restaurant kitchens to develop the skills that make them great, plus the best ingredients always cost lots of money. 

For example, Prime beef is always four or five times more expensive than Good beef and fresh fish is always more expensive than frozen fish.  Most people can taste those differences and the palate responds to those differences.

But it is rare to find a restaurant that combines best ingredients and perfected culinary skills in preparing exquisitely exciting food that dazzles the palate on a consistent basis.

It is even rarer to find a restaurant the can or will do that at a reasonable price.

Perhaps that is the reason why many of the world’s great chefs have set up their own restaurants in their home towns.  It seems to allow them to keep in touch with the ingredients and roots from which their creativity sprang.  A great example is the world famous Michelin three star Restaurant Arzak in San Sebastian, Spain; run by one of the world’s great chefs, Juan Mari Arzak, which is located in the building which has been his family’s restaurant since 1897 and he is the third generation to run the restaurant, but Arzak charges $238.00 for its tasting menu before wine.     

Although it is rare to find Great Food at a small restaurant that does not charge excessively expensive prices, I believe I have found one in Los Lunas.  It is the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery.

The Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery is the manifestation of the vision of Suzette Lindemuth and Ann Sesler to bring world class cuisine to Los Lunas.  Suzette Lindemuth is the owner and entrepreneurial force behind the Center for Ageless Living, a six acre multi-purpose campus in Los Lunas.  Ann Sesler is the Executive Chef, who has over forty years of experience as a chef and is a native of Los Lunas and who is the creative force in the kitchen pushing the food envelope.  The third member of the team is Carol Wood, the Assistant to the Executive Chef and chief baker and creative force behind many of the splendid pastries, breads and cakes that are served in the Bistro and sold in the Bakery, who is also a native of Los Lunas.

This team of three has worked together for years.  First to develop competent food service for the assisted living facility at the Center; then, when the Center opened its day spa in 2006, they developed a spa menu featuring soups, salads, sandwiches and desserts featuring fresh vegetables and herbs from the Center’s expanded gardens and opened a take out restaurant that featured a variety of roasted chickens, fresh baked breads and desserts and salads focusing again on the ingredients from the Center’s gardens.  The Center built the current small enclosed twenty seat restaurant in 2011 and beginning in August 2011, when it obtained its beer and wine license, began offering specialty menus featuring a different cuisine each quarter. 

The specialty menu is served Thursday through Saturday evenings from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.       

Spain was featured in August and September 2011, French bistro cuisine and wines are being featured during October, November and December, 2011 and during January through March 2012, the Bistro will feature German cuisine, beer and wine. 

A recent French specialty meal started with a complimentary appetizer of a thick, creamy pumpkin, green chile and potato soup served in an interesting slope-sided shot glass.  The spicy bite of the green chile was complemented by the slight sweetness of the pumpkin and the smoothness of the creamy soup and chunks of potato.  The soup set the tone for the evening’s meal and introduced the restaurant’s food vision: the perfect blend of fresh seasonal ingredients presented within the context of a traditional country recipe employing the sophisticated preparation of a classic French Cuisine potage.  To further set the tone for the meal, the soup was served on a plate labeled “Paris” with an image of the Eiffel Tower on it.  

We were eating lightly, so we chose to split an order of Cassoulet from the French specialty menu served with a fresh green salad ($14.95).  The salad contained an assortment of fresh lettuces, including some from the Center’s garden and strips of fresh carrot and red onion doused with an exciting Greek Vinaigrette dressing that was thinner in consistency that the usual prepared Greek salad dressing and had a more pleasant taste, not as dramatically dominated by the salty cheesy feta flavor. It seemed that a small amount of feta had been processed into the dressing ingredients to homogenize the cheese into a flavor component. When I asked Ann why the dressing was so thin, she said that she added Tio Pepe Cream Sherry to the ingredients.  What a nice surprise.  I have rarely had a lighter, more flavorful vinaigrette.

The Cassoulet, Southwestern France’s version of Boston baked beans, arrived in a low square bowl; a soft but firm stew of beans and meats garnished with a crust of crisp bread crumbs. Julia Child says that there are so many local variations of Cassoulet that there can not be any exact recipe. We all have our “Ratatouille” memory of Cassoulet.  Mine is of a looser, lumpier dish with chunks of a variety of meats.  When I mentioned this to Ann, she said that she cooked her recipe the way she remembered and learned it.   When I told Ann that my memory was of a looser version, she said that she still had some of the cooking medium that she had made into a bean soup that she could give us to add to the dish.  Soon a small bowl of thick soup with beans and threads of onion flavored with meat stock appeared from the kitchen.  When I added the Cassoulet the Bean Soup it loosened up the consistency of the Cassoulet to that which I remembered without detracting from the dish’s flavor.  I drank a glass of Domaine Depeuble Beaujolais that was smooth but with great character imported by Kermit Lynch and provided by the wine pros at Bacchus Distributing ($7.50).

The dish was served with sticks of fresh bread that had been toasted and dapped with olive oil and garnished with herbs and served with a small bowl of herbed olive oil.

As we finished the Cassoulet, I noticed a large cream puff inside the glass pastry display in the restaurant and asked for one.  I was brought one of the largest and most beautiful cream puffs I have ever seen.  A towering crown of puff pastry, the deep cavity of which was filled with vanilla custard and the outside ornamented with drizzles of chocolate ganache (a sauce made with Bittersweet chocolate and whipped cream).  I experienced another “Ratatouille” moment as I dug into the mass of pastry and cream and light chocolate sauce; a feeling of weightless, floating toward Heaven on a Paris plate ($3.50).

I do not know of any other restaurant where you can experience such great food for such a cheap price as at the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery.  Do yourself a big favor and go for dinner on a Thursday through Saturday evening for a meal that should be rich in memories. Hopefully some day you will be able to tell your friends and family, that you were one of the first to eat at one of the great restaurants of New Mexico.

I still carry in my mind a crystal clear recollection of the first dish of veal marsala I ate at Frenchy’s “La Dona Luz” in Taos in the 1950’s, when I was around seven years old,.  On a good night the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery’s food is that memorable, in my opinion.         

A disclosure.  Suzette Lindemuth I and I have been life partners for fifteen years, so I have been an indirect observer and participant in the evolution of the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery at the Center for Ageless Living.  You can read more of our cooking and food experiences at “www.eatingwithbobandsuzette.blogspot.com”.