Smoked salmon is this chef’s niche
JULY 20, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2014, 1:43 PM
BY ELISA UNG
RECORD COLUMNIST
THE RECORD
This summer, we’ll be spotlighting locally produced foods and drinks that have caught the attention of North Jersey’s chefs, bartenders and other tastemakers.
Where it’s on the menu
Moveable Feast provided this list of the local restaurants, caterers and clubs that serve its smoked salmon and other fish:
Alpine Country Club
Bareli’s, Secaucus
Bottagra, Hawthorne
Chakra, Paramus
Chef’s Table, Franklin Lakes
Fiesta Banquet, Wood-Ridge
The Elan, Lodi
The Graycliff, Moonachie
Latour, Ridgewood
Le Jardin, Edgewater
The Park Steakhouse, Park Ridge
Park West Tavern, Ridgewood
Rudy’s Inflight Catering, Teterboro
Village Green, Ridgewood
Alain Quirin has always been intrigued by how fresh-from-the-sea salmon can be transformed into the thin, silky, smoky slices that are twirled into canapés and draped onto buffet trays.
When the French-born chef ran the kitchen at the Greenwich Village restaurant Raoul’s, he often could be found spending afternoons on an outdoor terrace, tending to a few fillets of salmon in a small smoker, which he piled with ice to keep it from getting too hot.
“It was kind of like a game for me,” Quirin said. “It was interesting to go from A to Z on something that normally you just open a package.”
And eventually, he and his wife, Denise, turned that game into a family business. Their Moveable Feast, whose headquarters is in a Moonachie industrial complex, cold-smokes 5,000 pounds of buttery salmon a week, and customers say its quality is unrivaled.
“It’s just so much fresher,” said Chris Waters, executive chef of The Elan catering hall in Lodi, who serves platters of smoked salmon and also uses it in an avocado salad with apples and red onion. “You can smell the smoke as soon as you open the package. It takes over the room. People turn their heads.”
At Village Green in Ridgewood, chef-owner Kevin Portscher layers the salmon over warm potato pancakes, garnished with onions, capers and dill crème fraîche. “I couldn’t make it better myself — that’s why I buy it from him,” Portscher said. “There’s no chemicals, no crazy flavors. It’s fish, salt, hickory smoke. That’s the way they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.”
Adds another Ridgewood chef, Michael Latour, who occasionally uses the fish in specials: “Some salmon can be a little too slimy. His technique is drier.”
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/food-and-dining-news/food-news/the-deans-of-smoked-salmon-1.1054271#sthash.Uh9A5QQR.dpuf
