New Year’s at Max
For a guy who’s preparing an intimate, romantic New Year’s Eve dinner for several hundred couples, Mike Thornton is surprisingly calm.
Perhaps that’s because he’s used to the heat.
Thornton, the newly named executive chef for Max at Mirabeau, the award-winning restaurant at the Mirabeau Park Hotel, 1100 N. Sullivan Road, is charged with preparing food for the hotel’s most ambitious New Year’s Eve celebration to date.
“I have good people, a good crew working on everything,” he said. “It’s going to be a madhouse all day New Year’s Eve, and because New Year’s Day is also the first of the month, we have to do our monthly inventory first-thing the next morning. I’ll probably be here until 1:30 or 2 in the morning and be back at 5 a.m. to start on the inventory.”
With a schedule like that, one wonders whether Thornton’s calm is just the beginnings of sleep-deprived catatonia.
“We’re always busy with the holidays,” he said. “We were really hopping with Christmas parties.”
And at 26, Thornton is at an age where he’s still running on youthful enthusiasm.
“Mike is a young guy, but that’s where you find the quality chef you want for a place like this,” said Dennis Manley, the director of food and beverage for Mirabeau Park Hotel. “We brought Mike in about a year and a half ago and made him our chef de cuisine and he’s been running our kitchen ever since. I promoted him to executive chef about a month and a half ago to make it official.”
Thornton is far from a culinary rookie. Before coming to Spokane he was executive chef at a private country club in Alabama for more than five years.
“This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “I went to culinary school right out of high school in Scottsdale, Ariz.”
Under Thornton’s direction, the restaurant earned the prestigious People’s Choice Award at last month’s Epicurean Delight, Spokane’s culinary gala at the downtown convention center, for its pine-nut crusted Chilean sea bass.
“That was the last award to be given out,” assistant manager Paul Santos said. “We thought for a minute there that we’d been shut out of the awards, and all of a sudden they award us the biggest one of the night.”
Plans for the grand ballroom celebration got under way before Thanksgiving. The availability of seasonal items influenced the decision-making process.
“There’s a lot that goes into the planning of something like this,” said Santos, who worked as a sous chef in the restaurant’s kitchen before moving into management. “We talked over different items with our owners and got their input. We’re excited about what we have on the menu.”
The hotel’s New Year’s Eve celebration, complete with country recording artist Barry Lee White and the Moonshine Band and a champagne toast to welcome in the New Year at midnight, is ambitious. In addition to the restaurant’s regular menu, which will be served in the restaurant and features more than 100 items, Thornton has a mouth-watering menu designed for the occasion.
“This isn’t exactly our first big New Year’s Eve event like this, but it is the first one that we’ve planned ourselves,” Manley said. “When our current ownership took over the hotel, there was already a New Year’s Eve package planned by the Red Lion and we went ahead with it as scheduled.
“The last couple of years we’ve done New Year’s Eve in the restaurant.”
New Year’s Eve at Max has been popular – filling the restaurant to capacity each of the past two years – especially as the restaurant gained notoriety.
The award-winning Chilean sea bass, prepared with a celeriac puree, saffron tomato relish and balsamic vinegar aged 25 years, is one of four entrees featured on Thornton’s special menu. Also offered are tournedos of filet mignon, New Zealand lamb shank and a seafood bouillabaisse. The menu opens with lobster cream bisque, with a mango-huckleberry sparkling ice as an intermezzo course. For dessert, Thornton offers a choice of truffle pie and eggnog crème brulée.
“We’ll have somewhere between 15 and 20 people on the line in the kitchen turning out food,” he said. “It will be very busy, but we have a very good kitchen staff that is dedicated to maintaining our quality standards for every dish.”