| CARVIEW |
Happy Easter to all of our friends and family. It was a very successful Easter buffet at the hotel for 600 people. Looking forward to having my family at the upcoming Mother’s Day celebration at the hotel, only two weeks away. Hope everyone else in the business had a smooth and successful day today.
I am very happy and proud to announce that as of August 25th I am now the Executive Chef of the Cincinnati Marriott Northeast. This is a big opportunity in my career and life and a chance for me to use everything I have learned over the years and apply it to the daily operations of the hotel. I will continue to push myself to learn more from a culinary standpoint and continue to improve my business acumen and understanding of what it takes to manage the business of the culinary department. I am currently looking for a Sous Chef to round out our team and continue to move forward delivering all our guests a great dining experience.
Thank you to my friends and family for all their support during all the years of working holidays, nights, days and weekends to get to this point.I would also like to say thank you to all the great chefs and cooks I have worked with over the year helping me get to this position, without the guidance and teaching of those from my past I would not have been able to do this. Thank you all!
Thanks to my family for their support each and everyday.
During my time at the hotel I have been responsible for creating and executing a featured menu for our guests. It has given me the opportunity to be creative and teach my cooks some new techniques and expose them to some new ingredients. The most recent menus have transitioned to a focus on fresh, local and sustainable products whenever possible. The menu is changing every two months right now and our third installment rolls out tomorrow. Here is a preview of a few dishes:
Heirloom Tomato Salad
greens/white balsamic/fresh bacon
Dungeness Crab Risotto
saffron/barley/vanilla
Tempura Squash Blossoms
goat cheese/tomato jam/lemon
Vegetable Terrine
house made ricotta/pesto/pine nuts
Bison Strip Steak
corn/black beans/jalapeno popcorn
Olive Oil Poached Pacific Halibut
baba ganoush/cous cous/olive salad
Roast Gerber Farms Chicken
barbecue/grilled fruit salsa/tabbouleh
Strawberry Honey Tart
local honey/marscapone/balsamic
Banana Ice Cream
banana brulee/peanuts/chocolate
I am very proud of how far our team has come since I first got to the hotel and how far these menus have come. We are a suburban hotel serving a business travelers and I feel as though we are providing a better dining experience than anyone in our competitive market. If you are in the area stop in and try it out.
We arrived from our long weekend in Wapakoneta for Eric and Crystal’s wedding and were all pretty much wiped out. Madeline, Nicole and I slept in late on Monday after all having a lot of fun this weekend. Madeline stayed the night with Grandma Chris and Grandpa Doug for the first time after the wedding so it was an exciting time for her too.
The wedding cake really turned out pretty good for a couple of non pastry chefs. We made 4 three tier sheet cakes to serve to all the guests as well as a three tier fondant covered cake for the bride and groom. We learned from this experience as neither of us had ever done anything like this before. The sheet cakes were a basic white box mix I picked up and baked at work for ease and convenience and they had a really nice flavor. For the wedding cake Nicole made a lemon pound cake that was very good which she baked here all while watching Madeline and making raspberry puree while I was at work, she did an amazing job on them. We brushed all the layers with a raspberry simple syrup and filled them with a layer of raspberry preserves and a raspberry mousse from the previously mentioned puree. Next we cover all cakes with buttercream icing and put the sheet cakes away in the cooler for the wedding, a.k.a. the kitchen cakes. The wedding cake was covered with white rolled fondant, dusted with silver dust and covered with sugar pearls in an evenly spaced pattern around the cake. Overall we were really happy with the cake and came out of the situation with a lot of knowledge for the next time we tackle a project like this.
Eric and Crystal's Wedding Cake by Josh House and Nicole Walker
Bourbon is good for you
I was inspired by my friend Ethan Ray to give this blog a face lift with the intention of actually doing some blogging again. Friends and fellow chefs are spread abour across the country and it is really the best way for us all to stay connected and share our ideas. We are all busy and use our spare time to enjoy it with our families but we all love to cook. Even more so we all love to talk about cooking and what we like and dislike and what ever changing ideas and concepts are running through our minds while we are changing a diaper or having a late night drink.
Nicole, Madeline and I are heading up north to Wapakoneta this weekend for the wedding of Nicole’s brother Eric. We are making the wedding cake and just doing some general cooking while we are up there and are really looking forward to it. I might spend all day cooking at work for people I don’t even know and get a paycheck for it but there is nothing more rewarding than sharing your craft with family and friends. Neither of us are pastry chefs but I think we are going to put together a really nice cake for the wedding and there will be plenty of pictures to follow.
The new picture on my heading is from McCrady’s upstairs kitchen taken during our recent trip to Charleston and fantastic dinner and tour of the restaurant. It was a truly inspiring and humbling experience to see what was going in the restaurant. So much so we went back the next night for bar snacks and apps with my parents and also took Madeline for her first big dining experience. She slept the entire time but when you are 4 months old I guess it is acceptable. Pictures and some insight from our dinner will be provided soon.
If anyone still looks at this I hope everyone is doing well and I look forward to posting some stuff to look at and talk about once again.
This is something which has bothered me for many years and I figure why not bring it up now. The job of a food critic is one in which I envy, question, and look at every time I read a review. Each week I read reviews from different critics in different cities across the country all reviewing a variety of restaurants. Most of these I will never get the chance to dine at or have no wish to dine at period. Whether the review be good or bad I always find myself angry after reading the comments section which follows the reviews. This gives everyone the chance to weigh in with their opinion and thoughts on the restaurant and what the review had to say. Some people agree and some disagree, that is the beauty of cuisine in which people can universally disagree on what is good and bad, new and outdated, or creative and bizarre. What really pisses me off is the people who think this is an open forum to bash the food critic because they didn’t like that particular restaurant. They feel as though a critic must love every meal they have or they are somehow out to destroy these restaurants they consider sub par. It is the job of the critic to give an unbiased opinion of these restaurants so the public has something interesting to read and at the same time it provides free PR to these restaurants. Food critics have no obligation to restaurants to give them great reviews their obligation is to the reader who spends the money to but the paper they write for and give them a review that is honest and fair to their customer, the reader. If you want your favorite restaurant to stay open and busy continue to patronize the establishment and spread the good word but don’t sit at home and cry and criticize these people for doing their job. Are some reviews biased, of course, a good way to figure out the truth is to get up and go try the place yourself. Maybe you will find out you disagree with the reviews, maybe you agree, or maybe you will realize the job is harder than it seems.
Well as many of you know Nicole and I are expecting a baby girl sometime between now and March 3rd. It is a very exciting time in our lives right now and we are anxiously preparing for this day to come. For anyone who doesn’t know we got engaged on Christmas night and are planning to get married sometime in the Spring of 2011. Besides all of this we moved into our house in October so it has been a very busy few months to say the least. Couple this with working a lot of hours at the hotel and it makes it hard to find time to post anything. I wanted to give a little update before I do start posting again, hopefully with more regularity.
I am very proud and excited to report we closed on our house this past Monday and picked up the keys tonight. We are moving to Milford which is about 25 minutes East on 275 from where we are living now in Mason. I will add some photos as we start the moving process.
It is has been far too long since I have posted anything on this blog. Truth is since getting moved back to Ohio and finding a new job I have been very busy. For anyone who doesn’t know I am now working at the Cincinnati Marriott Northeast in Mason, OH. My current role is Sous Chef of the hotel which has 302 rooms a large amount of banquet space and a three meal a day restaurant. Out of our kitchen we produce all banquet, restaurant and room service food for the hotel. It has been a great transition for my career and an opportunity to gain more business and management experience. Even though I am not working with the same high dollar ingredients I am used to we are still producing high quality food with the same amount of care and effort as before. As we produce more new promotions I will add some pics from the restaurant and post new menus as they roll out. I hope to stay up to date a little better for the people who actually read this.
Last Friday Grandma Edna and I had a chance to go out to lunch at Rue Dumaine in Centerville. The restaurant opened while I was living in Phoenix and I have been wanting to get there and try it ever since. On Friday’s they open for lunch and run a special limited menu with some nice options. It is nice to see someone from the same area as myself who has been successful come back and add a nice establishment to the area which desperately needs a break from all the overpriced chain restaurants. Chef Anne Kearney made her name in New Orleans at her restaurant, Peristyle, and has brought that feel to Rue Dumaine. Google her name to get some more background info on her and her inspiring story and what she truly means to the Culinary world.
Now on to the food. As I was saying Friday is the only day they are open for lunch and I believe our menu had either 6 or 7 choices total. Between the two of us we sampled most of the menu and I would definitely go back again for dinner and enjoy some wine with my meal.
To start we had some bread and cold butter. The bread was nice but the cold butter is impossible to spread so that was a little disappointing.
For the first course Grandma made the wise decision and went with the white bean soup with crispy chorizo and greens. It was served smoking hot and had a very nice flavor with the house made chorizo which was fantastic.
I went for the boiled potato salad with hard boiled eggs, gherkins, celery, cherry tomatoes, chickpeas and a light vinaigrette which was drizzled over the dish. To me it was under seasoned but the flavor was balanced and light.
Once again Grandma made the right choice and went with the house made Chorizo sandwich with caramelized onion and saffron aioli. This was the best thing I tasted all day. Soft toasted bun with a great sausage in between is pretty hard to beat.
I opted for the Skate served with haricot vert, sliced almond, orange segments and an orange vinaigrette of sorts. Once again I felt the dish was under seasoned but I have a high tolerance and need for salt. The skate itself was not that great and the dish needed another fatty element for my taste. The haricot were nicely cooked and helped to add good texture to the plate.
For dessert we both had the flan with caramel sauce and to me it appeared to have been scrambled. The caramel sauce was perfect.
The interior of the restaurant is very nice and comforting without being stuffy and pretentious which I enjoyed. Kitchen is open for everyone to see into and Chef Kearney was there cooking lunch while we were there. The bar area was very nice looking and I would love to check it out more whenever I go back. You would never realize you were in a strip mall once you were inside this space. On the way to the restrooms there is a huge mural of Chef Kearney for one of her awards which is really nice and I believe you can see a picture of this on the website.
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