A menu is born: Inside a Garces taste-test

In larger restaurants everywhere, the quarterly menu-tasting is a day (or more) of excitement and challenge.

Chefs bring their dishes before a panel of management and their peers. The food is picked apart not only for taste, but for the ingredients within and the labor and techniques needed to complete the dish.

Jose Garces' organization calls the process a culinary development session, where Garces and the chefs de cuisine of his restaurants develop menu items. The process for each menu change takes as long as 90 days; when you factor in changes in more than a dozen Garces restaurants, it really never ends.

The formality of the sessions is what allows Garces to maintain quality control. The process is supported by Gregg Ciprioni, Garces' director of culinary operations; Dave Conn and Justin Bogle, the corporate executive chefs; and Michael Laiskonis, the corporate pastry chef.

At the conclusion of the testing, all standards and procedures are documented with step-by-step instructions to ensure quality and consistency.

To plan the fall menu at Garces Trading Company (1111 Locust St.), Conn sat down in September with the restaurant's chef de cuisine, Kyle Baddorf, to hatch ideas for 10 dishes. Baddorf and his team prepared them for a panel that included Ciprioni, Bogle, and Conn.

Garces reviewed the feedback from the session on an internal collaborative blog maintained by Ciprioni, and he selected six dishes for a tasting on Sept. 30.

Baddorf and team prepared two plates of each dish.

Antipasti

Celery root remoulade, shaved celery root, green apple, charred scallion mayo

Oven-roasted baby carrots, spiced yogurt, cilantro, mint

Soup

Olla gitana, butternut squash soup, lentil doughnuts

Cotriade Bretonne (a fisherman's stew, poached halibut, mussels, smoked mackerel, leek and sorrel broth)

Entrees

Duck choucroute, confit leg, duck and foie gras sausage, Riesling-braised sauerkraut

Lamb tagine, spice rubbed loin, braised shoulder, chickpeas, couscous (in two different preparations}

The tasters' comments were forthright:

- Let's brine the carrots before roasting
- Add more acid to the dip
- Change the plating on the celery dish - fold it up and use silver taco holders
- Add a dipping sauce for the doughnuts - with a group brainstorm of flavor profiles for the sauce.

And after all that, it was back to the drawing board after the Sept. 30 session.

Few of the dishes made the new fall menu. "We all agreed after discussing the items presented that the antipasti section of the menu was most in need of a seasonal adjustment," said Ciprioni.

The test dishes that did not make the cut are still in what Ciprioni calls "the development phase - being tweaked, reworked and retested for a menu change a little deeper into the fall season," such as the choucroute and lamb tagine. The chefs will run the items as specials in the coming weeks.

The new menu is expected to start Oct. 22.