Dinner Menus – Second Sunday Supper Circle

After a bit of faffing about as the saying goes, I’d decided that for awhile, I didn’t want to return to the kitchen professionally. During the previous couple of years one of the things I’d done was go through the basic sommelier’s training program from the Sommelier Society of America, and one day a friend called up and asked me if I’d come help him run the wine program at a new restaurant, American Renaissance. It was my first wine gig, and led to a decade plus of some fairly intensive immersion into that whole world. It did give me a bit more time to restart up the dinner parties, and this was probably the true first dinner of what became the Second Sunday Supper Circle.

Early on, the dinner parties were a collaboration between myself and my friend Pat Sterling, and at the time we thought we’d keep those going for awhile. This (the 4th) was, however, the last dinner in which she participated as a collaborator, she went and found herself a boyfriend and moved up to the Hudson Valley. Good help is hard to find, you know?

The rabbit dish is a South American one from Felipe Rojas-Lombardi’s excellent The Art of South American Cooking. The salad comes from the Nero Wolfe Cookbook by Rex Stout.

This was developing into an interesting series of dinners…. I wasn’t working in the restaurant field, temporarily, having been hired by the owner of a small restaurant to be her chef so that she could “step back” from the day to day management, and then suddenly walked in one day, announced that she’d missed being the chef and person in charge, and suggested I seek employment elsewhere. While looking around for a new gig I was doing some temp word processing work at a law firm, where I met the cast of characters who participated in these early dinners.

The second dinner in the series…

…which resulted in three of us writing up our impressions… we had way too much time on our hands. In order, written by me, John Haggerty, and then Frank Rocca.

The very first dinner party menu in what eventually became the Second Sunday Supper Circle