The James Beard House in New York’s West Village has been called the “Carnegie Hall of cuisine.” It’s where everyone aspires to make an appearance. Following the metaphor through, Eric Wadlund, the chef at Spencer’s, gave a concert there last week and was a smash hit.

The James Beard Foundation is at the center of the American culinary community, with a mission to “celebrate, preserve and nurture America’s culinary heritage and diversity.” It puts its highly prized imprimatur on restaurants, chefs and cookbooks every year with its awards and brings outstanding chefs to attention with the dinners that are given in their small town house on West 12th Street.

 

Wadlund has cooked in the James Beard kitchen before, when he was working for renowned chef Eric

Ripert. But this visit was the first time he had come as the head of Spencer’s kitchen, and he brought flavors from its menu in a carefully designed homage to California ingredients. The wines were from the Napa valley; the foie gras and the duck from Sonoma; the crab came from the Pacific off San Francisco; the prime rib from the Harris Ranch in Coalinga; strawberries from Oxnard.

 

The Beard kitchen is not particularly imposing, but it seems to work well. The crew was skilled and eager, full of camaraderie. The preparations were being carefully timed, with one crew member specially assigned to keep an eye on the clock. The cooks that plated the dishes had drawings by Wadlund showing how each dish should be laid out. It was an impressive demonstration of a team at work.

 

Guests were greeted by waiters with white china tasting spoons (brought from Spencer’s) with four mouthfuls: an heirloom tomato tartar with ricotta that brought a wonderful freshness to a dark December day and was a sample of the tomato tartar on the Spencer’s salad list; a Gulf Bass ceviche with melon and mint (the tomatoes and the melons were from the Palm Springs area); fried Pacific oysters, which anyone who knows and loves Wadlund’s crisp fried oyster appetizer would have recognized happily; and a Dungeness crab puff that was developed from the crab cakes on the Spencer’s appetizer menu. The party buzzed happily. When the guests were seated, the meal really got under way. There was a pan-seared Channel Islands halibut with Deglet Noor dates from Hadley’s Date Garden, with a lemony Israeli couscous (lemons grown in the valley), based on a Wadlund scallops dish he serves often as a special, followed by a vanilla-butter poached La Jolla Cove Spiny Lobster with white corn from the valley and a crisp sweet onion gratin. Spencer’s serves Spiny Lobster as a special in season, usually with a risotto,

but this dish was spun from his crisp-skin whitefish, a popular regular menu item.

 

The third dish was perhaps my personal favorite, a duo of pan-seared duck breast and a foie gras torchon. The duck was spiced with the same Moroccan spice mix that Wadlund uses at the restaurant for his breast of chicken, with similar elements in the composition. The foie gras was garnished with a fig relish that could be said to have started the planning for the meal. The figs had been harvested from a private garden in Palm Springs, and it was then that Wadlund determined to include the fig relish, which he has also been using in some of his specials at Spencer’s.

 

“The planning for this meal began back in June,” he told me. “That’s how long it takes.” The final entrée was prime rib eye, two ways, with fresh black truffle flown from Italy, caramelized cauliflower “risotto” and a black currant essence. Truffles and black currant essence are regular Wadlund favorites, and this is a classic Spencer’s dish.  The meal ended with the strawberries and a mascarpone sabayon, on a crisp lemon bar crust, garnished with a wild thistle honey that Wadlund discovered on a drive back from Napa and a crumbled almond crunch.

 

Then came the accolades. Diane Harris Brown, a longtime member of the James Beard House staff, declared it a triumph, the best dinner she had experienced in recent years. “Obviously,” she declared, “for anyone passing through Palm Springs, Spencer’s will be the must-dine place to eat.” Later she emphasized her enthusiasm in an e-mail to Wadlund headlined “Oh, What a Night!” describing each dish in the dinner as “imaginatively conceived and exquisitely rendered ... just a flawless experience.”Wadlund, of course, could find flaws, but he always can. I wouldn’t try.