Back Again

Wacky stuff like lump crab cakes (built up from a scallop mouselline) with Osetra caviar, parsnip purée and fried parsnips. Like real duck-confit pizzas made in the custom stone oven. Like lamb sliders on housemade focaccia with tzatziki. "I have not skimped on anything here," he pointed out.

Tipsy's, Twigs and Pickles all opened on April 7. The day we talked, Cina had been up and running for three weeks. He sounded more relieved than anything — happy to be back in the kitchen, happy to be drawing a paycheck. "It's good news," he said, maybe trying to reassure himself as much as me. "I'm happy. Lucky. I landed on my feet."

Leftovers: Early this week, I checked in with Leigh Jones about the new concept she's cramming into the Dish Bistro space at 400 East 20th Avenue. When we'd talked before, she'd said she was having trouble coming up with a name. The one she really liked was The Zephyr, but there's already a Zephyr Lounge in Aurora. She also gave some thought to going the English pub route — naming it after some neighborhood landmark or feature — but told me that "the Homeless Fountain Pub" just didn't quite have the right ring.

In the end, she essentially came down to naming it after herself, deciding on Jonesy's Eat Bar (which, the more I think about it, the more I like, if only because it reminds me of one of my favorite juke-joint dives in the country: Doe's Eat Place, in Little Rock, a back-in-the-day haunt of then-governor Bill Clinton). "It's kind of like at Mel's," Jones said of her eponymous decision. "Even when Mel isn't there, you still have that feeling of it being his place. And all my regulars? I think they'll get that, too."

Though chef Carl Klein moved on when the Dish closed May 4, Jones has retained journeyman cook and knife-for-hire Mike "Waldo" Walden, a veteran of Solera and the kitchens of Matt Selby who'd been there about a month when Jones decided to close the restaurant. "He gets it," Jones said. And he'll have the chance to prove it when Jonesy's Eat Bar opens the first week of June.

In the same April 24 Bite Me column where I first wrote about the Dish closing, I talked a lot about Georgetown history, as told by Rube Goeringer of the Georgetown Valley Candy Company, which occupies the former home of the Silver Queen restaurant. While doing some background research on Rube, I'd stumbled across a two-line mention in a 1960s tourist brochure of a French chef who'd opened a fine French restaurant in Georgetown sometime in the late 1800s. Which, unless I am terribly mistaken, could possibly be the first true French restaurant opened in the West.

From what I've been able to dig up since, the chef (ex of Alencon and Paris, France, a runaway seminary-school student and U.S. Army deserter who — like so many other shady characters — worked briefly as a journalist) went by the name Louis Dupuy, which he adopted after going AWOL in Wyoming. But according to research done by the Hotel de Paris museum in Georgetown, his real name was Adolphe Francois Gerard, and his restaurant inside the old Hotel de Paris opened sometime between 1873 and 1890.

I'm still following a few leads, and you can read where they take me on the new Cafe Society blog.