Join Us Monday for Fantastic Night of Chicories
The culinary team has been exploring recipes and preparations all week, getting ready for Monday night’s big celebration of seasonal chicories, including radicchio, endive, escarole and frisée. Demand for the dinner has been high, but a few tables remain. We would love to share the glories of this spectacular seasonal vegetable at Bramble & Hare Monday night, with seatings at 6, 6:30 and 7.
We often encounter chicories in markets and restaurants, and they can seem a bit like aliens. What exactly are these sturdy botanical specimens?
They all are part of the chicory family, which also includes frisée. And the chicory family falls within the broader lettuce family. But while lettuces kept getting selected and bred to shed bitterness and embrace a floppy leafiness, the chicories remained more wild, and went off in their own direction. In fact, wild chicory flourishes across Colorado; the plant has a long, spindly stalk with light blue flowers. You’ll find it beside roadsides and trails all over Boulder.
These are extremely versatile and profoundly delicious vegetables, but they only shine for brief windows every year. To protect themselves from pests, the plants concentrate bitter elements in their chemistry once they flower, which makes them largely inedible. But until they reach that tripping point, chicories are superb culinary partners.
Eric says the time to eat chicories is when you might need a heavy coat before heading outside. If you’re thinking flip-flops, it’s probably too late to enjoy the glories of vegetables like escarole and radicchio.
“Many people buy these vegetables in the summer, and have a bad chicory experience because they are so bitter,” Eric says. But right now, they are jaw-droppingly amazing.
Chicories hardiness makes them especially valuable at Black Cat Organic Farm. Lettuce gets zapped once temperatures sink into the 20s, but chicories can persist across most of Colorado’s tough winters. We’ve been harvesting and serving it all winter, for example.
For this Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner, on Monday, May 1, all of the chicories were seeded outdoors in September and October, and now are shot through with sugars and utterly delectable. The dinner will feature four or five kinds of chicory, including escarole, endive and radicchio. Varieties include Indivia Sacrola Gigante di Bergamo, an escarole from Italian seed, and Maraichere Tres Fines, a French frisée varietal (frisée is a kind of endive; it’s also known as curly endive).
Monday night’s Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner offers four courses revolving around these spectacular chicories, plus a welcome aperitif that plays with them.
Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more.
At each of our dinners, the sommelier game captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.
Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you, all of which will revolve around next week’s diva, rapini.
The celebration, on Monday May 1 in our convivial dining room, costs $75, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages.
Coming up: On Monday, May 8, we will celebrate arugula.
Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more.
At each of our dinners, the sommelier game captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.
Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you, all of which will revolve around next week’s diva, rapini.
The celebration, on Monday May 1 in our convivial dining room, costs $75, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages.
Coming up: On Monday, May 8, we will celebrate arugula.
