The
Joel Palmer House
600
Ferry St., Dayton, (503) 864-2995
www.joelpalmerhouse.com
"An Evening in
Oregon" at the James Beard House sold out almost immediately.
Jack Czarnecki
is the author of A Cook's Book of Mushrooms and Portobello
Cookbook.
NEW YORK--The plump morel mushroom bobbing in Ellen Gasnick's
won ton soup had--like James Beard years ago--traveled from
wooded Oregon to New York City's West Village to be part
of a culinary happening. Gasnick, a psychotherapist living
in Queens, had never heard of the Joel Palmer House restaurant
in tiny Dayton, Ore. Nor had she known of co-owner Jack
Czarnecki's reputation as the reigning champ of the mushroom.
But when the four-year member of the James Beard House saw
that Czarnecki was bringing his wild bag of tricks east
for last week's "Magic Mushroom Dinner," on Tuesday, June
13, she made a reservation immediately. "I looove mushrooms,"
Gasnick says.
She is not alone. Roughly 90 New Yorkers showed up for
Czarnecki's fungal feast, cramming three creaky floors of
the Beard House for a night dubbed "An Evening in Oregon."
And how: Oregon winemakers from Griffin Creek, Belle Pente
and Witness Tree vineyards came east to pour 10 different
wines with dinner. Czarnecki, his wife and partner, Heidi,
and their staff (their youngest son and his girlfriend,
the Palmer House pastry chef, and two Oregon buddies) jetted
and then cabbed 15 pounds of Mount Hood morels, 30 pounds
of cèpes from Sisters, 10 pounds of Alaskan Copper
River salmon, 10 Oregon beef tenderloins and assorted blooming
produce for an exercise in extreme cooking.
The majority of the meal's nine elaborate dishes would
need to be prepped, cooked and served in the space of about
12 hours, a feat not unlike building all the sets and stitching
all the costumes the day of a Broadway opening. The crew
left Oregon on a Sunday midnight red-eye. Arriving Monday
afternoon, they had half a day to see New York before reporting
to the Beard House kitchen a little before 7 am on Tuesday.
They flew home Wednesday at 6 am. "This is more like a military
campaign," Czarnecki quipped.
The jocular, round-faced chef knows a thing or two about
tough conditions. A third-generation mushroom hunter, he
learned from his father and grandfather that some days would
be spent hiking around in the rain, returning home with
only his knife in his basket.
Mushrooms are a strange, elusive treasure. But they remain
the 50-year-old's unmitigated obsession. "By their infinite
variety and ability to delight the senses, mushrooms hold
a mystical place in the culinary galaxy," the chef wrote
in the introduction to A Cook's Book of Mushrooms,
one of his three cookbooks on the subject, which won a James
Beard Award in 1996. Similarly, in the two years since Jack
and Heidi moved from Reading, Penn., to Dayton, buying a
house on the National Historic Register and naming it for
its builder, a Northwest pioneer and author, Oregon has
come to hold a mystical place in their galaxy. It was their
dream to open a mushroom restaurant in wine country, and
when Jack's dad died in 1995, they both thought instantly
of the place they had honeymooned 26 years before. Joel
Palmer House has since received widespread critical praise
(including a Restaurant of the Region nod from this newspaper
in 1998).
But good press can't make cheese cake with candy cap sauce.
That dish, which Czarnecki referred to three times as "the
world's only true wild-mushroom dessert," needed to be cooked
and cooled by the afternoon. The dessert, a three-mushroom
tart and teff cakes (made from the fine, Ethiopian grain)
were all to be well along by early afternoon. By Tuesday
mid-morning, then, the Beard House was already permeated
by the thick, earthy smell of cooking mushrooms. Clay Triplette,
the house steward and James Beard's old friend and assistant
who had once sewn silk bowties for the chef before he died
in 1985, leaned over a bowl of bubbling broth. "That smells
fine," he said appreciatively. Triplette wore a black mesh
Oriental Dolls baseball cap tilted back on a loosely cropped
Afro. Large-frame glasses dominated his face. "I liked this
menu when I first read it," he explained, "because I didn't
see foie gras and I didn't see venison." Triplette
turned suddenly and pointed away from the kitchen toward
a window in the foyer on West 12th Street. "If I open that
window, people on the street will stop and come in and go
crazy." A few minutes later he surveyed Czarnecki's stash
and announced, "Everything here Mr. Beard likes. He was
crazy for mushrooms."
Crazy for mushrooms: That may as well have been an alternate
title for the evening's event. By the time guests began
arriving just before 7 o'clock, Czarnecki and his crew had
gracefully outwitted a faulty blender (which sent precious
chipotle sauce streaking across the counter), the perils
of two missing tenderloins and the general chaos of a foreign
kitchen to build a nine-course temple to mushroom lovers.
Tim and Patty Wallace reserved a spot in April to celebrate
their 30th wedding anniversary à la 'shroom. "So
far, with the hors d'oeuvres, it's been fabulous," Patty
gushed between gardenside noshes. Leslie Russell, the Beard
House committee member who organized the event, declared,
"This guy's the king of mushrooms." Sitting beside her,
Melissa Hamilton, the kitchen director of Saveur
magazine, was enjoying her first Czarneckian dining experience.
"I grew up in Pennsylvania, and I remember there was a lot
of hoopla about him," she said. With the night's hoopla
winding down and plates once holding cheese cake with candy
cap sauce and praline hazelnut mousse in tuile being massaged
clean, Czarnecki led his crew up the stairs to the second-floor
dining room. It was nearing 11 pm, but the chef still politely
answered questions such as "What is teff?" and "What flavors
were we tasting in the soup?," beaming proudly all the while.
Then Czarnecki told the diners that he had promised his
wife he would make their 25th anniversary tonight memorable.
The crowd clapped enthusiastically. Heidi quickly reminded
Jack it was actually their 29th year of marriage. He was,
it seems, youthfully delirious on the mystical powers of
mushrooms.
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