New York dreamin' for Geneva chef

NEW YORK -- The fork-tender maple-glazed pork belly with creamy cheddar grits that made diners swoon represented more than one component of a six-course meal.

That succulent pork belly, along with the foie gras-laced Brussels sprouts, velvety roasted chestnut soup and pheasant sausage that came before and the juniper berry-brined venison and huckleberry buckle that followed, embodied the dreams of Jeremy Lycan.

Lycan, the 31-year-old wonder chef at Niche restaurant in Geneva, shared this dream meal with 66 guests at the James Beard House, a gastronomic temple in New York City (see sidebar Page X). In the 20 years that the James Beard Foundation has been showcasing American culinary talent, up-and-coming chefs, including Wolfgang Puck and Charlie Trotter in their early days, have cooked in the kitchen at the Greenwich Village brownstone where culinary icon James Beard lived until his death in 1985.

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If being in the same kitchen where such famous toques had previously boiled, braised and sauteed rattled him, Lycan didn't show it.

Amid the whirl of a blender, the clanking of sauce pots and bustle of waiters hurrying hot plates out of the tiny kitchen, Lycan remained calm, exuding a sense of composure that resulted from extensive planning and methodical training.

"That was the fastest, most craziest party I've pulled off," Lycan said, his cheeks aching from smiling and a glass of 2005 Tablas Creek Counoise in his hand after the last dessert plate left the kitchen.

What took the rooms full of diners about two hours to eat took months to plan, two days to execute and started one Friday evening in October.

New York calling

Lycan started planning this dream meal following a phone call from Sylvie Forest, a volunteer with the James Beard Foundation's programming committee. Forrest said she read about Lycan and how he worked to open Niche after the passing of Joel Findlay, his mentor and chef at the nationally acclaimed 302 West in Geneva. After new owners took over 302 West and decided to change the restaurant's fine dining format, Lycan and the rest of the crew walked out.

After regrouping and finding investors in the form of Wayne couple Bill Ferguson and Andrea Redmond, they opened Niche in August 2006 just steps from their former restaurant.

"When I first heard that a woman from the James Beard Foundation was on the phone, I thought they wanted a donation," Lycan recalled.

Forrest had another mission: gauging Lycan's interest in presenting a meal at the hallowed House.

"I liked that they took over for their mentor and that they kept the crew together," she said at the New York dinner, after finally tasting a morsel of Lycan's seasonally focused, regionally influenced cuisine. "His commitment to keep them (the crew) participating in the process impressed me. It was very brave of him and Jody; keeping their mentor's vision alive."

After thinking about the idea for, oh, about a second, he knew his answer and with the rest of the Niche crew started formulating the menu for "A Midwestern Night's Dream."

"This restaurant is our dream and our menu reflects the dreams of these small farmers and producers -- these are all people who took a chance on something."

Lycan searches out locally grown produce, like microgreens sprouting just miles from the restaurant, and artisinal cheeses and meats, such as the heritage Berkshire hogs grown by caring farmers.

He said he wanted the menu to represent the best of what these thoughtful producers offer. So while he worked with a rancher in Texas to hunt down the leanest venison and a grower in Ohio to procure the freshest herbs, Richardson worked with small, boutique wineries on the West Coast and a Warrenville microbrewer to determine the appropriate beverages and wines for the menu.

"I sat down with the kitchen staff and started talking about what we wanted to do. We wanted to portray us and part of us is 302 West," he said. The lightly seasoned seared scallop plated with the foie gras Brussels sprouts, toasted hazelnuts and velvety duck sauce was an homage to Findlay and 302 West.

"I started looking at what other chefs had done, and some seemed to pile everything they've ever done on the menu. I wanted to scale that back.

"It was driving me bonkers. I couldn't stop thinking about it," Lycan said of the planning. "This is the culmination of 15 years of my career; it has to be the best meal I've ever cooked."

He said the planning was complicated by the seasons.

"I usually don't plan a menu until about two weeks in advance, and now I was planning a menu 3#189; months out," Lycan said.

Envisioning a blustery city in the throes of winter, they created a menu that included hearty fare such as duck confit, roasted-carrot soup, sweet potato chips and rich cheddar grits.

The programming committee accepted the menu and plugged the restaurant in for Jan. 29.

"We've always considered ourselves a little restaurant in the Western suburbs; we didn't expect to be recognized at this level," Lycan said.

Then the reality hit. That Lycan and his crew would have to create that meal not in their own familiar kitchen but in one half a country away.

Mis en place

In the French brigade system of running a kitchen the term mis en place loosely means "everything in place"; it's the process of having ingredients measured and ready to add to recipes before the cooking actually begins.

To pull off the James Beard dinner, Lycan had to mis en place to the 10th degree.

"Once we had the framework, we started putting a few of the items on as specials and at our wine dinners," Lycan said. The restaurant also hosted a dinner in early January at which they practiced the whole menu for 80-some people.

"I'm so glad we did that practice. Things went from conceptually in my mind to the plate," he said. "I took two pages of notes -- what worked, what didn't."

The garnish on the chestnut soup, for instance, originally was mirco-sorrel, but he didn't like the contrast and wanted sorrel oil to swirl on top. And he didn't like the red oak lettuce plated with the scallop and opted for the brighter deer tongue variety instead.

Now they had to replicate that effort -- not with five chefs for a roomful of diners coming in at different seatings, but with three chefs and one big banquet-style dinner.

"That will be the tricky part," Lycan said before the event. "I can do anything in this kitchen."

Traveling toques

Many of the chefs invited to the James Beard House cook in or around New York City, but out-of-town chefs face the additional challenge of procuring and transporting ingredients and wine.

"From Day One I said I wanted to drive the wine out," Richardson said "I didn't want to take the risk of anything happening during shipping. Maybe it's the control freak in me."

Driving 16 cases of wine cross country in a rented van was one thing, but that wouldn't work for the food. Because the James Beard House hosts events sometimes seven days a week, the kitchen isn't available to chefs until about 8 a.m. the day of the event. The pork belly smokes for several hours, the pecan-flecked ice cream for the buckle needs time to freeze, and the sauces need time to reduce and intensify.

"I heard about one chef who planned to get all his ingredients in New York," Lycan said. Instead of taking a couple of hours to track down the ingredients at a handful of stores, it took him five, leaving him just a few hours to prepare the meal. Other chefs had shipped boxes to the New York address, only to arrive and find items broken or boxes missing.

Lycan didn't want to chance it, so he chartered a private plane to get him, two other chefs and the precious cargo to New York.

The prep work started early on the Sunday before the Tuesday dinner.

"We completed 60 percent to 70 percent of every dish," Lycan said. "We carefully looked at the menu; things like the duck confit, the bisque, when they sit overnight they get even better."

As Richardson headed east in the van, the kitchen crew put in a full shift and then some making huckleberry cake and sauce, creme Anglaise, lobster tots ("like a little tater tot packed with lobster goodness," Lycan said), pheasant sausage and other delicacies, then packing them in Gladware and vacuum-sealed bags.

Monday morning they were back at the restaurant packing everything into insulated boxes.

"We got to the restaurant at 8; the scallops arrived at 8:10. The microgreens were cut at 7:20 this morning," Lycan said, adding that he over-ordered product so he could select the best of the best to make the trip.

Then they headed to the DuPage Airport in West Chicago, where the jet transported the chefs, the food, a restaurant owner, a finance officer, a public relations manager and a reporter to New York.

They stored the boxes overnight in a cooler at The Harvard Club (the chef there cooked at the Beard House a few years back). At about 7:40 a.m. Tuesday, they loaded the items into the rented van and headed toward the James Beard House.

Arriving in Mecca

About an hour later, Lycan stood in front of the Beard House. Its nondescript door has only a small brass plaque identifying the historical spot.

After bowing to the door and posing for pictures, he stepped through the entrance where Clayton Triplette, Beard's longtime assistant and now house steward, greeted them with a heartfelt welcome. The world maps Beard had papered to the walls, his utilitarian white kitchen cabinets and over-sized spice cabinet remain, as do a handful of copper pots and rolling pins.

A pair of House kitchen managers helped track down ice and equipment and chatted with the Geneva crew.

"Jose, you call me 'chef' one more time and we're going to go a few rounds outside," the boyish Lycan said. "I'm just a cook."

Guests would arrive for hors d'oeuvres at 6 p.m., so the crew got right to work going over the inventory, again, and loading food into coolers. Lycan's first order of business was trimming the tenderloins off the venison chops and soaking them in the brown sugar, rosemary and juniper berry brine. Chris Kline went to town peeling potatoes for the parsnip-pear puree while Chris Ayukawa started in on the cheddar grits and sorrel oil.

As the blender churned, Ayukawa noticed something didn't look right. The sorrel oil didn't have the vibrant green they wanted. Had the pressure change on the plane affected it? The trio decided a trip to the Chelsea Market, several blocks away, was in order so they could pick up spinach or watercress, something to punch up the garnish.

After a few more hours of prep work in which sweet potato chips were fried, the Brussels sprouts par-boiled and deer tongue lettuce trimmed, they broke for a trip to the market where they grabbed sandwiches and cupcakes and found the Manhattan Fruit Market.

"I'm like a kid in a candy store," Lycan joked about the market atmosphere. Ingredients like watercress, candy cane beets and blue-footed chanterelle mushrooms, not readily available in our local grocery stores, filled the bins.

At Kline's suggestion, they picked up a couple packs of baby pea shoots for garnishing the scallops.

The heat is on

With less than four hours before guests started arriving, the pace intensified and Lycan checked in with the crew at Niche, only to get some not-good news.

The cooler and the hot water heater were on the blink. "They weren't even going to call to tell me," Lycan said. By the end of the call Lycan was confident the team had solutions and the restaurant would open as planned.

Richardson arrived with longtime waiter Brian Busch to get the cocktails made, wine open and chilled.

"I'm going to open and taste every single bottle," Richardson said, "taste 72 bottles of wine to make sure they're not corked."

The guys in the kitchen pulled out the house's Rosenthal dishes to determine how to plate the food. They'd served the meal before, but on round plates (these were square).

The three chefs methodically moved the venison medallion around on the plate and played around with the buckle placement, wanting the food to look its most appealing for diners. I didn't realize so much thought went into food placement.

Minutes before diners arrived, they decided to thicken the cr#232;me Anglaise with xanthan gum so it didn't run into the red huckleberry sauce and re-blended the cranberry coulis so it wasn't too seeded.

Lycan also tore apart the tiny lettuce heads that he'd so carefully kept together earlier before drizzling them with kumquat oil and cranberries on the sausage plate.

Guests, mostly foundation members and a few in the general public, walked through the kitchen to get to the reception area in the greenhouse. Lycan stopped to greet every one of them, passing out red curry squash cakes topped with sage-infused mascarpone to salivating passers-by.

Wendi Royal said the chestnut soup and the wine pairings on the Niche menu caught her attention and prompted her to book two seats at the dinner.

"The idea of local products, local ingredients; we like regional cuisine," said Royal, a New Yorker and member of the foundation. Royal said she dines at the House about four times a month.

After the dinner, Royal said the chestnut soup met her expectations, but the pork belly blew her away. "That pork dish was all about the maple; it was a new experience."

"Each course was so different, he really outdid himself with the assortment of dishes," Forest said. "We really got a look at what he can do." She also lauded Richardson's "good discoveries," particularly the 2005 Tablas Creek Counoise from Paso Robles, Calif.

At the end of the night, washing down sushi with Coke at a late-night bar, Lycan said he was still in awe of the whole experience.

"That's it, that's the James Beard dinner. I'm so proud of these guys," Lycan said, his heart still racing. "Do I wish there were things I did differently? Sure. I'm a perfectionist."

Getting the dishes out of the kitchen faster, for instance. "This is why we don't do catering."

Richardson had hoped for more interaction with diners, but because of the numbers, the Beard House waitstaff delivered wine to the table.

"I really wanted to pour the wines. I didn't feel I had the contact with people that I usually have," she said.

Lycan hopes this wasn't Niche's last visit to New York. The foundation announces its nominees for top chefs next month, and Lycan admits he wouldn't mind seeing his name on that list.

"That's not what drives me to be a better chef, to be a better restaurant," Lycan said. "The New York trip was very inspirational. I would be happy (to be nominated), but I do what I do so I have a cool place for 25 people to come to work and for people to come to dinner."

Chestnut Cream Soup

4 cups roasted and peeled chestnuts

4 cups whole milk

2 cups heavy cream

Salt and pepper

Pinch of nutmeg

Combine all ingredients in a large sauce pot over medium heat bring mixture to boil; reduce heat to low simmer for at least 45 minutes or until the chestnuts are tender.

Puree mixture in a blender until smooth using water to adjust consistency pass soup through medium mesh strainer season with salt, pepper and nutmeg garnish with roasted cippolini onion.

Serves six to eight.

Nutrition values per serving: 520 calories, 31 g fat (19 g saturated), 51 g carbohydrates, 4 g fiber, 8 g protein, 105 mg cholesterol, 85 mg sodium.

Chef Jeremy Lycan, Niche Restaurant, Geneva

Huckleberry Buckle

1#189; cups sugar

#189; cup butter, room temperature

2 eggs, room temperature

2 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 cups all-purpose flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

4 cups fresh or frozen huckleberries (well drained)

Streusel

1 stick butter

2#189; ounces (about #188; cup) sugar

2 ounces (tad over #188; cup) brown sugar

#188; teaspoon salt

#189; pound pastry flour

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Line a 9-by-13-inch baking pan with parchment paper and grease and flour the sides.

In a stand mixer, cream sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla until light.

In a separate bowl, whisk flour, baking powder and salt until well combined. Add the flour mixture and the milk alternately to the creamed mixture, ending with flour. Cream until just blended. With a spatula, fold in berries.

Pour batter evenly among the pans and bake until cake is golden brown and toothpick comes out clean, about 1 hour.

For the streusel: In a large bowl, combine the butter, sugars, salt and flour, rubbing the ingredients together with your fingers until combined and crumbly. Crumble over cake to taste.

Serves 15.

Nutrition values per serving: 410 calories, 13 g fat (9 g saturated), 67 g carbohydrates, 2 g fiber, 7 g protein, 60 mg cholesterol, 360 mg sodium.

Pastry chef Ann Marie Braun, Niche Restaurant, Geneva

Parsnip Pear Puree

3 cups parsnips, peeled and rough chopped

1 cup Idaho potatoes, peeled and rough chopped

1 cup pears peeled, cored and chopped

3 cups heavy cream

Salt and pepper

Combine all ingredients in a medium sauce pot over low heat; cook until parsnips become tender. Strain and reserve the cooking liquid.

Add parsnips, potatoes and pears in a food processor and cover with half of the cooking liquid puree until smooth, using reserved liquid to adjust consistency season with salt and pepper.

Serves six.

Nutrition values per serving: 500 calories, 44g fat (27 g saturated), 26 g carbohydrates, 5 g fiber, 4 g protein, 165 mg cholesterol, 50 mg sodium.

Chef Jeremy Lycan, Niche Restaurant, Geneva