On behalf of the entire staff of the restaurant, I wish you all the best for 2009. May it improve for all of us!

This January 2009 newsletter represents the culmination of a lot of effort on my part, although if I have done my job correctly, you shouldn't really be able to tell it. Over the last six weeks, I have radically changed the way our web site and our electronic communications (including this newsletter) work, to greatly simplify maintenance going forward. Suffice it to say that the web site had grown by accretion over the past six years until beneath the covers, it resembled a Rube Goldberg contraption. It served its function, but not elegantly; and fixing problems and making changes was becoming nightmarish. If you haven't browsed the web site in a while, I invite you to look around. I would love to have your feedback.

Thank you for reading and see you in the dining room soon,

Ed Matthews
Chef and Owner

On Thursday, January 22, for our first monthly wine dinner of 2009, by special customer request, we will feature four courses of game meats paired with hearty wines. We're still working on the menu and will post on the web site when it is done. Possibilities include elk, bison, venison, antelope, quail, duck, pheasant, rabbit, and so forth. As for all our dinners, we start receiving guests at 6:30 and the first course will be served promptly at 7pm. The price is an incredible value of $85 per person all inclusive (includes food, wine, tax, and gratuity). For obvious reasons, we will not offer vegetarian accomodation at this meat-centric dinner. Please book now.

Of all the deer that I have eaten, elk (Cervus canadensis) is my favorite, followed closely by fallow deer. For the last few meal services, our menu has featured grilled elk with a cranberry-Merlot sauce and customers have loved it. Elk, also known by its Cree name Wapiti, has a flavor somewhere between beef and venison and it is high in protein and low in fat—it's such a low fat meat that I have to be careful how I cook it. Each guest that I spoke with in the dining room wanted to know where I get it. We get elk from our game broker who gets it from various sources, but the most consistent, best tasting product comes from New Zealand.

People are sometimes shocked that our elk comes from New Zealand, given that they perceive elk as a deer native to the US (maybe not, current thinking is that they came across the land bridge from the Russian tundra). Well, here's the catch. We (restaurants, that is) cannot serve to the general public meat that has not been slaughtered in a USDA-approved slaughter house. And it makes some sense from a public health perspective: the government doesn't want us serving something that your brother-in-law shot and hauled to us in the back of his unrefrigerated pickup truck. The only way to produce consistently safe game is to farm it and the Kiwis have been doing this in large scale for more than a generation now, giving the world an excellent and consistent source of low fat, high protein meat.

To anticipate your questions, elk and venison (red deer) are available for retail sale at Marx Foods.

I spent the month of December mostly working on the web site and not writing about wine, still here are some articles that you might like to read:

• Pass the Port, Please!, a short primer on Port.
• Sparkling Wine, enough to make you the cocktail party expert.
• I'm Not Worthy, my beef with Wine Spectator.

Here's a brief run down on the recipes that I published in December:

• Cooking with Herbs, some ideas for incorporating herbs into your life.
• Frittate, how to make the famous OBW frittata and kin.
• Winter Squash, what to do with all those gorgeous squash you see at the market.
• Bread Pudding Basics, easy winter comfort desserts.

After years of begging by my publicist and customers alike, I have finally consented to write a small cookbook that collects some of the recipes from the restaurant. Writing good cookbooks is tough and to do it correctly, you really need a staff to measure everything precisely, to cook the recipes on home equipment and tweak them accordingly, to downscale the recipes to family portions, to photograph the dishes, and to edit the recipes to eliminate the professional jargon that we chefs are prone to. Try this and running a small restaurant at the same time!

For this first effort, due out in the next month or so, I'm going to try my hand at an electronic cookbook that you can browse online, pass along to your friends online, and even print out for your kitchen, all for free. That's right, I'm going to give this first cookbook away for free to all takers in thanks for all the support of the restaurant over the years. Look for it on the restaurant web site and on my blog in the next few weeks.

On personal and economic levels, 2008 was not one of my more stellar years. But it was memorable—it's no stretch to say that I will never forget 2008! And I am sure that it was an equally memorable year for you as well. Here's hoping that 2009 is going to be better for all of us! I wish each and every one of you a great 2009 and I look forward to seeing each of you at the restaurant when you are able to visit. We're doing very exciting food now and I am looking forward to sharing it with you.