A Bite Of The Big Apple Shenanigan’S Chef Earns A Shot At Cooking In One Of The World’S Most Notable Culinary Showcases

It’s Friday evening in Manhattan and at a brownstone in Greenwich Village, guests are trickling in for dinner.

But this isn’t your ordinary dinner party. This just happens to be one of the most prestigious culinary addresses in the country, better known as The James Beard House. The house belonged to the late Portland-born cookbook author and bon vivant, who was one of the leading figures in modern American cuisine in the 1950s and ‘60s.

When Beard died, Julia Child helped establish a foundation in his name and turned his home into a destination for this country’s most famous chefs.

Each month, the likes of Charlie Trotter, Jean-Louis Palladin and Daniel Bouley (all household names to people plugged into the food world) gather at the James Beard House to create elaborate dinners for discerning diners.

This particular Friday evening, Spokane’s own Paul Childers, the executive chef at C.I. Shenanigan’s, was in the house. He’s the first chef from Spokane to cook in this prestigious venue.

Childers was invited by chef Dan Lewis (who worked in Spokane for several years in the early 1990s) to come to New York City and assist him with a five-course dinner for 60 guests in this intimate, elegant setting.

“It’s like the culinary Carnegie Hall,” said the 31-year-old Childers. “It’s a wonderful place to showcase what you can do.”

Childers got his start in the restaurant business washing dishes when he was 16, but quickly moved up to cooking.

He met Lewis when the two worked together in the early ‘90s at Chic-A-Ria. Lewis later put him in charge at Ankeny’s.

Lewis is now the executive chef at Ironstone Vineyards in California’s Sierra Nevadas.

“He trained me. He taught me the classical French way of making sauces and stocks from scratch,” said Childers. “When he asked me to do something, I knew exactly what he wanted.”

That ability to communicate led to Childer’s gig at the Beard House.

“He (Lewis) had done this last year, and they promised him they would have people (from the Beard House) to help him out, but that fell through,” Childers said.

Lewis’ menu for guests at The James Beard House, which Childers said Lewis developed and tinkered with for six months, focused on foods native to his California residence.

With a running commentary from Ironstone’s owner-winemaker Stephen Kautz, the meal became a history lesson. Between courses, guests seated in what were once Beard’s library, living room and bedroom heard Kautz spin tales of California’s gold rush when miners were plucking greens from streambeds in the spring to combat winter scurvy and hunting wild pigs in the hillsides to stock their larders.

Guests arriving through the unassuming front entry must walk through the tiny kitchen with all its semi-frenzied activity. And on this recent June evening, there was Childers focused on plating the salad course, grinning like a kid with a roll of quarters at a video arcade.

After hors d’ouerves on the lovely garden patio, guests were seated and dinner was served.

Upstairs, the rooms filled with conversation and laughter, while downstairs in the kitchen, the crew was a whirl of motion.

“It was hard,” Childers said later. “Because the space is so limited, we had to do a lot of the prep at another restaurant and truck it across town.”

The servers made endless trips up and down the stairs to deliver the various courses, which were carefully paired with Ironstone wines.

Three hours later, the chefs came upstairs to take a bow. Kautz introduced and thanked Childers before turning the floor over to Lewis to answer questions about the dishes painstakingly prepared by the kitchen crew.

Would Childers like to go back to the Beard House?

In a New York minute.

“It’s great to get Spokane on the map this way. We have a lot of great chefs in this town,” he said. “I would love to be invited back there on my own, as the chef from Shenanigan’s.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: DINNER TIME Five-course meal

The five-course dinner Shenanigan’s chef Paul Childers helped prepare will be duplicated in Spokane at C.I. Shenanigan’s on July 20. Ironstone Vineyards’ chef Dan Lewis and winemaker Stephen Kautz will be in town for this special event.

The first course was a “hot smoked” wild salmon with chardonnay cream and caper berries served with a ‘97 chardonnay. The second course was a tenderloin of wild boar baked in puff pastry with a cream sauce spiked with the winery’s slightly sweet “Obsession” wine.

That was followed by wild greens garnished with blackberries that were pickled in cabernet sauvignon.

The main course was roulades of venison with wild mushrooms, blue cheese and an Ironstone port reduction sauce. Dessert was a mission fig ice cream with homemade almond roca.

For reservations, call 455-6690.