A pairing dinner where the wine simply arrives is a nice dinner. A pairing dinner where somebody stands up and tells you what to notice before you swallow is a different thing entirely. On Sunday, September 20, Enology Wine Bar & Bistro in Saint James gave its dining room over to a single seating for a fundraiser for the Suffolk County Dental Society, and put two men at the front of the room who had reason to know what they were talking about.
One seating at 5 p.m., $155 a head, as Long Island Wave reported when the dinner was announced in July. What that bought was five courses from Chef Albert and six wines, and a room that was told what to notice in each of them.
Guenter Jonke and Jimmy Kilimitzoglou are both active members of the society, and both are past presidents of it. They walked the room through the evening, course by course and glass by glass, telling the stories behind what was in front of everybody. Kilimitzoglou was not a guest speaker borrowed for the night: Enology is his. Long Island Wave's own March interview with him described the restaurant as his brainchild, and on this evening a past president of the society was hosting its fundraiser in his own dining room.
What came out of the kitchen
Chef Albert built a coursed menu rather than a set of plates, and it opened small: an amuse-bouche of whipped ricotta on sourdough with fig jam, chili oil and peanuts. Sweet, hot and salty in one bite, which is a deliberate way to wake a table up before anybody has settled.
A Waldorf salad followed, and not the tired version. Sliced apples and celery, walnuts and crumbled blue cheese, with pickled grapes doing the work that keeps the dish from going soft and sweet.
Then a choice. Charred octopus with salsa criolla and grapefruit confiture, or a lamb flatbread with tzatziki ricotta and pickled red onions and cucumbers. Two very different routes to the same place, both of them leaning on acid and char.
The main was another choice: hanger steak with bistro sauce, radicchio and smashed crispy potatoes, or a salmon fillet with the same bistro sauce and the same potatoes. Dessert was a chocolate budino, which is the right call after five courses because it is rich without being heavy enough to end the conversation.
The six wines
Six wines were poured across the evening, and the lineup covers a lot of ground for one dinner: Mas Fi Cava, Paco & Lola Albariño, Bodega Garzón Tannat, Napa Cuvée Cabernet Sauvignon, Joseph Drouhin Bourgogne Pinot Noir, and G.D. Vajra Moscato d'Asti.
Read that list and you can see the shape of the night in it. A Spanish sparkling to open a room that does not know each other yet. An Albariño with the coastal acidity that a charred octopus asks for. A Tannat from Uruguay, which is about as grippy as red wine gets and has no trouble with a hanger steak. A Cabernet and a Burgundy Pinot Noir sitting next to each other, which is a genuinely instructive pair to taste in one sitting because they want opposite things from the same piece of meat. Then a Moscato d'Asti, low in alcohol and gently sweet, to meet the budino without fighting it.
What a single seating does to a kitchen
An evening like this is harder to run than a full dining room on a Saturday, which is not obvious from the guest's chair.
Courses do not go out a plate at a time. Every plate of a course is built, lined up and sent at the same moment, so that a room of people is eating the same thing at the same time and the wine poured to meet it is still at the right temperature when it lands. It also means the pass goes from empty to full to empty again in about ninety seconds, several times a night.
The payoff is the thing everybody notices and nobody quite plans for. Somewhere around the third pour, a room that arrived as a collection of separate tables stops behaving like one.
Everything else on the calendar
Two more classes are on the books, both Saturdays, both 1 to 2:30 p.m., both six wines, and both $69 per guest for the class and the wine or $89 with an individual cheese plate. Seats are limited and registration is required.
Bordeaux is Saturday, October 17: Left Bank, Right Bank, and the art of the blend. The useful thing about Bordeaux as a subject is that its most famous habit began as a practical one, since the region blends grape varieties as insurance against a bad year for any single one, and risk management turned into a template half the wine world still copies. Germany and Austria is Saturday, November 14, and it goes deliberately past Riesling: Grüner Veltliner, Weissburgunder, Silvaner, Blaufränkisch, and Spätburgunder, which is Pinot Noir speaking German.
The one-off worth circling is The Raw & The Refined on Friday, October 2, 5 to 10 p.m.: a one-night menu built entirely without fire. Cheese and the things that belong beside it, salads, vegetables, a chilled soup, and dips with chips made in house. Nick Picarella plays raw and unplugged from 6 to 8.
Live music runs most Thursdays from 6 to 8, at a volume chosen so the conversation still works. Emy McB plays September 24, October 29 and November 12; Greg Antonelli October 1, November 5 and December 3; Mark Hubbard October 8 and December 10; Austin Merullo October 15 and November 19; and Nick Picarella October 22 and December 17.
Beyond the dated nights, four things run year round: the wine tasting classes on most Saturdays, the Blanc & Franc brunch on select Sundays, built around Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc, a monthly trivia night with no entry fee, and happy hour Tuesday through Thursday from 5 to 7 at the bar, no reservation needed. The room also takes private events, from tastings to buyouts.
If you are going
Enology Wine Bar & Bistro is at 412 N Country Road in Saint James, open Tuesday to Thursday 5 to 9 p.m. and Friday and Saturday 5 to 10 p.m., closed Sunday and Monday, with happy hour at the bar Tuesday to Thursday from 5 to 7. The number is (631) 517-0277.
Photographs from the evening courtesy of Enology Wine Bar & Bistro.
Both classes take reservations on their own pages. The rest of what is coming up, including the live music dates and the Blanc and Franc brunch series, is on the events calendar, the full run of classes is on the wine tasting classes page, and a table on an ordinary evening is booked through reservations.
Loading comments…