VENUE:
Craigie on Main
853 Main Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-497-5511
DATE:
July 29, 2010
Time:
7:00 PM
PRICE: $150 per person inclusive
Tickets available July 1, 2010
Visa Signature Price: $130 per person inclusive
Visa Signature® tickets available June 28, 2010
Does your card say Visa Signature? Check your wallet.
HOST VENUE - Craigie on Main
You hear a lot of talk these days about terroir – a sense of place. As you know, at Craigie On Main, we are all about terroir. Food that is locally sourced, from purveyors we know personally. Wines that just taste like they have a story to tell.
So we were pretty psyched when we had the opportunity to move from our old location on Craigie Street to bigger digs at 853 Main St. Sure, it would be a bit weird to keep the “Craigie” name, but this was just our kind of place. It’s a weirdly shaped, funky old Cambridge building. And it has always housed small family businesses, from a drugstore to the legendary La Groceria Italian restaurant… to us. While building Craigie On Main, Chef/Proprietor, Tony Maws aimed to preserve the “great bones” of the iconic Cambridge building, to retain all of the coziness of Craigie Street Bistrot, and to make the new space totally “kitchen-centric.” As a cook used to a Lilliputian kitchen at Craigie Street, Tony finally realized his dream with a Molteni cooking suite, a 12-foot long, six-foot wide stainless steel sparkler made in France. Molteni (the Mercedes of custom ranges) builds each unit by hand upon consultation with the chef. The result: an island suite nerve-center for the kitchen, complete with hot top, flat top burners, charbroiler, plancha grill, and enough space for his team to work together to create each dish.
We are honored to be the keepers of this tradition, and we hope you’ll enjoy the “updates” we’ve made to the space, while also appreciating the sense of history that it retains. Dinner guests always gravitate toward the kitchen, so we’ve designed Craigie On Main with the kitchen right smack in the middle where it can be seen from every table. We didn’t want to lose the “homey” and “cozy” vibe of the living-room sized Craigie Street Bistrot, so you’ll see many familiar decorations (including our collection of pig art). And since we are a family-run business, not a big, impersonal company, you’ll feel the same sense of “home” in our new Craigie On Main (with chairs that are a just little more comfortable).
Our hospitality also shines in our friendly, informed staff – each and every staff member shares your love of food and wine and is unusually well-trained to answer any questions.
CELEBRITY CHEFS - Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot
Ideas in Food, LLC
Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot are the owners of Ideas in Food, LLC, a consulting business based in Levittown, PA. They met in the kitchen at Clio in Boston in 1997 and have been cooking together ever since. Aki and Alex specialize in sharing techniques for creativity with restaurants, food service companies, and home kitchens using modern ingredients, equipment, and innovative approaches to food. The business grew out of their blog, Ideas in Food (www.ideasinfood.com). In addition to their one on one work with individual chefs, they have consulted with companies such as the No. 9 Group in Boston, Fourth Wall Restaurants in New York City, Frito Lay, and Unilever. Aki and Alex began the website Ideas in Food in December 2004. It began as a digital notebook to record their work in restaurant kitchens. Over the past five years the websites popularity has grown from a cult following of professional chefs into the benchmark for culinary blogs. It is a favorite go to site for chefs and foodies in the know for the combination of creative ideas and illustrative photography. Aki and Alex have been invited to speak at professional conferences for Star Chefs, Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, the Experimental Cuisine Collective, and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. They have appeared as guest chefs for three Holland America cruises, leading demonstrations and teaching classes for groups of passengers from12-150. Aki and Alex are often invited to cook guest chef dinners at restaurants and events around the country such as McCrady’s in Charleston, Woodberry kitchen in Baltimore, Elements in Princeton, and Taste3 in Napa Valley.
The pair writes for Popular Science online. Their column is titled Kitchen Alchemy and focuses on scientific explorations in the kitchen. Aki and Alex recently published an article about garlic in Sante Magazine in March of 2009. They contributed an essay to the anthology Food and Philosophy, which was published in November, 2007. In addition to this they have been featured in articles for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Food and Wine magazine, Saveur, Sante Magazine, and were highlighted in an interview for Gourmet online. Aki and Alex appeared in an episode of The Food Detectives on the Food Network demonstrating the uses of liquid nitrogen, which aired in September of 2008. They discussed food science with Michael Colameco for his radio program Food Talk on WOR in New York this past May. They are always open to opportunities to talk food and broaden their culinary horizons with new audiences.
HOST CELEBRITY CHEF - Tony Maws
RESTAURANT - Craigie on Main
Tony Maws is a non-traditional chef – an “idealist with a kitchen” might be a more appropriate job description. His ideology: that local, seasonal and sustainably sourced ingredients are intrinsically better, and that these ingredients form the most significant part of what makes great food great.
His resolute commitment to these tenets may have made Tony something of a pioneer in the “locavore” movement and in “Nose to Tail” cooking, but he admits that these ideas are not particularly novel. “Basically,” says Tony, “these are ideas that are shared by about 90% of the world’s grandmothers.”
Much as he honors his Grandmother and culinary muse Hannah, Tony’s international acclaim is surely the result of other factors as well: his relentlessly innovative culinary techniques are precise enough to baffle any grandma and his ability to match just the right food combinations to create the perfect dish has been called “uncanny.”
Despite his modest ambitions and major space limitations at Craigie Street Bistrot, word got out, and before long Tony’s combination of a Parisian “slow-food” philosophy with ingredients from New England began to earn widespread attention, including being named as one of America’s top 10 new chefs by Food & Wine magazine and Boston’s best chef by Boston magazine. He has also been featured in Travel & Leisure magazine, Gourmet magazine, the Boston Globe and numerous others. From the humble little-bistrot-that-could, Maws found himself being invited to appear on NBC’s Today Show and Fox News, and cooking at culinary events in locations as diverse as Singapore and Aspen, Colorado. At Craigie On Main, Tony’s earthy side and his mad-scientist side combine to create a menu best described as “refined rusticity.” This restaurant, opened in November 2008, is a newer, more spacious incarnation of Craigie Street Bistrot, Tony’s first labor-of-love located a couple miles down Mass Ave., which opened in 2002. Tony takes pride in the fact that the spirit of his tiny bistrot remains alive and well in his new space.
The new location and international recognition have not changed Tony’s hands-on approach at Craigie On Main. Far from being an “executive chef,” he works practically every night as a line cook. Additionally, he is one of the few chefs who is also his own wine director. Since he was a teenager, Tony always worked in restaurants —17 in all — and has performed every restaurant job. His real culinary training, though, was earned through what might be called “The Long and Winding Road Cooking School” (apologies to Sir Paul McCartney). After earning a BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan (which, surprisingly, does occasionally come in handy in the restaurant business), Tony embarked on an eight-year journey that included stints under local chefs Kenneth Oringer at Restaurant Clio and Steve Johnson at the Blue Room; Bernard Constantin at Larivore in Lyon, France; Roland Passot at La Folie and Wolfgang Puck at Postrio in San Francisco; and Mark Miller at the Coyote Café in Santa Fe. Tony is particularly grateful to Chef Chris Schlesinger, for giving Tony his first big break: a chance to chop vegetables at the East Coast Grill.
Tony grew up just across the river in Newton, and now lives in Cambridge with his wife Karolyn and their baby son Charlie. His career highlight to date was last year when he got to cook for his favorite band, Wilco. His interests include the Red Sox, reading cookbooks for pleasure (he has a collection of more than 200), skiing, eating Chinese food, and traveling — particularly to France.
