“There are two opportunities to burn yourself tonight,” Waldy Malouf said. “This is one of them.”
The Beacon Restaurant chef was referring to the miniature cast-iron skillets he’d placed before our table of six, each piping-hot pan filled with a bed of rock salt on which sat two oysters on the half-shell, accented with a delicious mignonette and shallot-herb butter sauce Malouf encouraged us to slurp (but only once it had cooled). The second opportunity for injury arrived later in the evening when we each placed rectangular slices of raw Kobe beef atop smooth stones that had been heated to the temperature of the sun. We ate 10 other courses, none of them as hot but all as delicious, as part of Beacon’s Kitchen Counter session.
Upper-crust restaurants commonly pull stunts like this now, exercising various levels of secrecy, but this was the first I’d been to. Kitchen Counter is an exclusive, reservation-only little get-together, for which six people get to sit at a long, narrow, freestanding wooden table in a special section near the back of the restaurant, directly in front of the open kitchen. Chef Malouf, who’s sharpened his knives and culinary skills at classic Manhattan hotspots like the Rainbow Room, the St. Regis and the Four Seasons, then shepherds the party through a two-hour dinner that features wine pairings with each course and a few surprises, explaining each dish and answering any questions.
Malouf seems like a cool guy. He resembles a shorter, ST:TNG-era Jonathan Frakes and he talks like Rocky, only with diction. (I swear, it’s the same tune, cadence and depth.) Unlike brethren chefs with Napoleon complexes, he joked that he compensates for his short stature only by hiring staff 6' and taller, women included.
After our group had been introduced and served near the bar with a fried lobster-tarragon amuse-bouche and a Kir Royal-like drink seeded with grains of dry ice, so that it bubbled and steamed from the flute like a magic potion, the hostess escorted us to the table in the back, where Malouf shook my hand and no one else’s; he said he appreciated me taking the empty sixth seat on short notice.
In typical New York City exclusive restaurant fashion, one must reserve a spot for the Kitchen Counter months in advance. When I called Beacon yesterday, a woman named Dalia was able to accommodate my attendance tonight because the sixth member of the other five people in my group, none of whom I knew, had to bail at the last moment. Those three gentlemen and two ladies, each three to five years younger than I, had cherubic complexions and made a lot more money than I do. They weren’t rude but I didn’t talk to them much because they had their own group dynamic, featuring discussions about their offices, their secretaries, the artwork in their offices, their homes in Connecticut and the best lodges at Stowe. Although it pleased me to hear that they’d been waiting since October 2007 for their reservation confirmation, one of the fun things about outings like this is potentially meeting new people; maybe next time for that.
In addition to the oysters, early in the meal we were each served a tiny rectangle of wild mushroom pizza, the lamest and most incongruous course on our private menu. These two dishes are the only ones that appear on Beacon’s regular menu. Everything else, said Malouf, is a rare menu special or an exclusive to the Kitchen Counter.
Among the more adventurous dishes, I ate the moistest fish I’ve ever laid lips on, wild bass cooked in a corn husk with lemon and fennel.
The gentlemen ate squab, served rare and garnished with huckleberry jam, salsify and Brussels sprouts, “to evoke the season,” said Malouf, with mock pretension. At first, the ladies didn’t realize the dish was pigeon and when they did, they had visions of the Washington Square Park variety spit-roasted by bums over a trashcan fire. They passed. I should have told them that if a purebred squab met a city pigeon, he’d probably bore it to death cooing about his sheltered upbringing, his Whole Foods diet, his home in Connecticut, the best lodges to roost upon in Stowe, etc.
We had pâté, paired with a strange and delicious combination of braised short ribs, grits and acorn squash, although I remain suspicious of pâté; it will be forever Fancy Feast to me and you cannot convince me otherwise that the French have been playing upon us a hearty prank all these years.
I ate a watermelon radish, a mutant vegetable that didn’t appear on our menu and which looked to have been plucked from the cartoon soil of Super Mario World.
I ate scallops, squash-mascarpone ravioli and marrow from the trough of a long, bisected bone. (I wasn’t a total savage; I spread it on the provided flat-leaf toast.)
We finished with a two-course dessert, comprised of a pear-grapefruit sorbet, a chocolate soufflé with smoked vanilla ice cream, and a cool Australian muscat that tasted to have been distilled from the smiles of supermodels. My soul writhed around my body in satisfaction.
Throughout the dozen dishes and a didn’t-even-notice overtime of 2.5 hours, I enjoyed watching Malouf and his staff hustle about. It was satisfying to view each of our courses prepared right before they were served, directly in front of us, and taking precedence over all other orders in the kitchen—and because it’s Restaurant Week, the place was busy. The kitchen itself at Beacon arcs directly above the Kitchen Counter table. At times, standing in the bright light at the arc’s apex, Malouf resembled a symphonic conductor, which is a kitchen cliché, but also in this case true. I heard him drop only one F-bomb, over an incorrectly prepared dish, then he moved on. He’s not one to linger. He did ten things at once, including entertaining us, and he revealed that he’d like to enact the Kitchen Counter twice a week, except that his staff would kill him, then possibly cook him in a cassoulet, which he would then critique from beyond the grave. (He didn’t actually mention a cassoulet, but I imagine it to be true.)
The Kitchen Counter at Beacon Restaurant
- 25 W. 56th St. (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues)
- (212) 332-0519
- Meal 4 of 52: 12-course dinner, including tax, drinks and 20% gratuity ($109).