Gearing up for Denver Restaurant Week 2011

If you're not from around here, or you are but you don't like any restaurants other than Generous Servings, you might not know about Denver Restaurant Week.  It's actually two weeks, during which participating restaurants offer multi-course meals for the "mile-high price" of $52.80 per couple.  Before we go any farther, can I just mention that it's annoying to price a meal per couple?  But $26.40 per person just doesn't roll off the tongue.

Last year Après had been open for only a week when Restaurant Week rolled around, and we were way too disorganized to participate, but we decided we'd do it this year.  It starts tomorrow, and we're all getting a little anxious about how it's going to go.  A lot of other chefs say that it's a nightmare: the customers are "bargain hunting" and so they don't get any extra stuff and they leave bad tips, people get upset when they can't get in, the staff gets exhausted, restaurants poach servers from each other to try to meet the demand, service and quality slip, and by the end of the two weeks half your staff has quit.  Great.  But if you don't participate, you don't have any business, because all the customers are taking advantage of the great deals around town.

So here's hoping that it's fun and we make a lot of new friends.  We've stocked up on everything we can, and we're all psyched up for a big push.  Three hundred and one restaurants are participating this year, so maybe we won't all be very busy.  Supposedly this is the largest Restaurant Week in the country (other cities, like New York and Boston, also have similar events), but I happen to know that 11 of our 301 restaurants are the local Outback Steakhouse locations, so I'm not sure we can count those.

Today I went to the Restaurant Week kick-off press conference.  It was the first press conference I've ever been to, and I have to say I was underwhelmed with the quality of the speeches.  Afterwards they took a picture of a bunch of participating chefs with the mayor.  Check out this picture and see if you notice anything strange (other than the giant wine glass the mayor is holding):

Yes, there are 40 chefs here, and two of them are women (I'm at near the middle, wearing the only blue chef's coat).  When they were organizing us for the picture they called us "gentlemen".  Excuse me.  That means dining at Après, during Restaurant Week or any other time, puts you on the moral high ground as a supporter of gender equality.  Give us a call and make a reservation.  And I know that if you're reading this, you already know this, but please tip well.  Just because we offered you a deal doesn't mean the servers should suffer.  Jill and I are taking ourselves out to two great restaurants that we normally couldn't afford, so maybe we'll see you out there!

Quick, what's the first thing you think of when I say "kumquat"?

You know what a kumquat is, right?  It looks like a miniature orange (although it's not technically a citrus fruit).  Americans' average consumption of kumquats is 0.2 per year.  I made up that number, and it's probably high, but I am really bringing up the average.  In Après we use them in a sauce for our chocolate torte, and although we have served the torte with many other delicious sauces (most recently a pomegranate-clove sauce, which was great), my favorite accompaniment is the original kumquat sauce that I invented right around this time last year, when Après first opened (in fact, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary, and we're having a Dessert Wine Tasting to celebrate!).

So when they show up in grocery stores, I buy a whole lot of kumquats: at least a few dozen every week.  I've discovered that buying kumquats is a great conversation starter.  Every time someone sees me putting them in a bag, he or she says, "Now what do you do with those things, anyway?"  And although I am always interested in talking about food, and I really do know what to do with kumquats, this question inevitably stumps me for a second, and I say, "You eat them."  Which destroys my credibility, even though it's completely true.

Last week a woman in the grocery store asked me what to do with kumquats, and I told her that you eat the whole thing, peel and all, just pop it in your mouth.  I gave her one from the bin and told her to try it, because I shop enough at Sunflower to feel perfectly comfortable giving out free samples.  She looked at me like I was insane, pretended to eat it, and walked away without tasting it.  Okay, I've done everything I can for you.

Kumquats are one of the few fruits that are carried only seasonally in stores.  They have a short ripening season, and they aren't popular enough here to try to get them to produce out of season or cultivate them in the Southern Hemisphere (they are native to China), so they are sold only between about November and March.  I understand this.  I embrace this.  That's why the kumquat sauce is on our menu right now, and won't be in a few months.  However, this past week I went to three different stores and couldn't find kumquats, and when I asked the produce guys whether they had any, each one shook his head and said, "Not this time of year, they aren't in season."  I've gotten this response before, and I have learned that it's what they say whenever they're out of some type of produce.  They just tell you it's out of season, which puts them on both the intellectual and moral high ground, since you're supposed to feel bad for even wanting to buy fruit that is out of season AND dumb for not knowing which season the fruit ripens in.  This strategy does not work on me, and it makes me really mad, because 1) I am not dumb, 2) I am attempting to buy food in season, and 3) you doing selling heirloom tomatoes in February right over there!  I do support encouraging people do buy produce in season, but not by lying to them.  I also support kumquat consumption, so if you see any in your store, pop one in your mouth (you can eat one in the store, just tell them I said it was fine)--they'll be gone in another month!