Alfred Portale - Bibliography

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Alfred Portale Simple Pleasures: Home Cooking from Gotham Bar and Grill's Acclaimed Chef

Alfred Portale; Andrew Friedman; Gotham Bar and Grill

When you imagine the quintessential New York City restaurant, one name comes to mind: Alfred Portale's Gotham Bar and Grill. The same is true when you think of the top American restaurants:Gotham has been one of our most cherished culinary institutions for two decades.

Led by executive chef and co-owner Alfred Portale, Gotham has been honored with four consecutive New York Times three-star reviews and has resided among the Zagat Survey's top five New York City restaurants for more than ten years. Known for Portale's defining modern American cooking, impeccable service, and soaring space, Gotham was recently named "Most Outstanding Restaurant" in the nation by the James Beard Foundation.

But what does Portale cook when he's not working? In Alfred Portale Simple Pleasures, one of our most accomplished chefs invites you to taste the sublime and surprisingly easy-to-prepare, restaurant-quality dishes he serves to friends and family at home.

The 125 recipes include home versions of Gotham classics as well as new recipes straight from Portale's home kitchen. They're all simple enough for any home cook, and spectacular enough to impress anyone who tastes them.

At the center of Alfred Portale Simple Pleasures are elemental main courses such as Roast Cod with a New England Chowder Sauce, Filet Mignon with Madeira Sauce, and Sautéed Chicken Breasts with Button Mushrooms and Sage. Pick one, then build a meal by pairing it with recipes from the chapters ofsalads, starters, and small plates; soups, sandwiches, and pizzas; pasta and risotto; side dishes; and desserts.

Along with the recipes, Portale offers pairing suggestions for building a menu, variations for adapting recipes according to season and personal taste, and flavor-building instructions on how to accent a dish with extravagant extras such as caviar or everyday additions such as flavored oils.In other words, home cooks will learn how to add a Gotham-inspired twist to their own favorite recipes.

The supermarket-friendly dishes include modern classics such as Spicy Shrimp Salad with Mango, Avocado, andLime Vinaigrette; Pumpkin and Caramelized Onion Soup with Gruyère and Sage; and Sautéed Spinach with Garlic, Ginger, and Sesame Oil. Alfred helps you transform everything from ordinary weekday lunches to Saturday night dinner parties into anything but ordinary.

Of course, no meal is complete without dessert, and Portale delivers sweet and sophisticated send-offs, including Lime Meringue Tarts, a simple Summer Plum Pudding, and an elegant Chocolate-Grand Marnier Cake.

Alfred Portale Simple Pleasures -- nothing could be simpler or more pleasurable.

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Alfred Portale's 12 Seasons Cookbook

Alfred Portale; Andrew Friedman

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Alfred Portale's Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook

Alfred Portale

Home cooks rarely have the chance to learn about cooking firsthand from one of the nations most revered chefs. But in this cookbook, the first of its kind, Chef Alfred Portale offers his readers the opportunity to do just that. The chef of the Gotham Bar and Grill offers not only recipes, but also a peek into the mind of a chef--sharing a host of suggestions, anecdotes, and advice designed to release the reader from recipe dependence and inspire him or her to think like a chef at home.With Portale at the helm, the Gotham has won praise from the critical world (four consecutive three-star reviews from the New York Times), the public (rated among New York's top five restaurants in the last six Zagat surveys), and the culinary community (Portale was named Best Chef in New York by the James Beard Foundation in 1993).In this book, Portale reveals the secrets that led to this success. More than a hundred dishes, comprised of over two hundred recipes, await the reader. But more than that, Portale has loaded these pages with notes on variations and flavor building that indicate how the recipes might be changed by a substitution of ingredients or enriched with additional elements. There are also ample "thinking ahead" tips, and bountiful advice about special ingredients and techniques.Portale also offers both restaurant and family-style presentation tips--magnificently brought to life by more than two hundred photographs--and explains the inspiration for many of his dishes, and how he turned that inspiration into culinary reality.As he says in his introduction, "My hope is for you to be able to master these recipes and confidently use them in a variety of dishes and contexts of your own design, perhaps creating your own signature dishes."After graduating first in his class from the Culinary Institute of America, Alfred Portale lived in France and worked in some of its most famous kitchens. Shortly after he returned to the United States, he took the reins of the Gotham Bar and Grill, where he promptly established himself as one of the most influential figures in New American Cuisine. He divides his time between New York City and East Hampton, Long Island.

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