All of which is prologue to dinner at Lemaire. My colleague Tina Ennulat and I started with a couple of drinks. I ordered Two Grapes (Kluge Estate Cru with St. Germain elderberry liqueur and red grapes) while she tried a Bee’s Knees (Beefeater gin, house-made lemonade, smoked honey-thyme gastrique from the garden). Each was a delightfully refreshing aperitif after a suffocating day. For appetizers, we splurged and tried four dishes—spring strawberries with Brie salad, fried green tomatoes, a plate of pimiento cheese, and Blue Ridge apples with Surryano ham—a Spanish-style proscuitto from Edwards ham in Surry. The fried green tomatoes, breaded with Japanese panko, were crunchy and delicious—a favorite at our table. So was the pimiento, which, slathered on toasted sourdough bread, both evoked and exceeded the memories of having eaten it as youngsters. The pyramid of strawberries, Brie, pistachios, spicy greens and aprium (a hybridized plum/apricot fruit) was good-looking and fresh-tasting, and the combination of golden delicious apple slices with the dry-cured, razor-thin ham was a contrasting dash of Southern panache. The four dishes barely lasted four minutes amid a voracious clash of forks.
For our entrees, we went a little conservative. We ordered Virginia bison ribeye, a Berkshire pork chop and—hoping to balance the hit to our cholesterol count—a pan-seared Pacific halibut. We gave the bison our close attention, partly because it’s something of a red-meat rarity, but it garnered full respect: The meat was tender and flavorful, and it paired nicely with green tomato chow-chow. The pork chop was hearty, its heft leavened by “Coca-Cola BBQ sauce” and a heaping portion of collard greens. The halibut came with herbed spaetzel, asparagus, cherry tomatoes and mushroom broth.
For dessert, we shared two guilty pleasures out of the half dozen on offer. One was a warm strawberry rhubarb cobbler (with Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream) and the other the perfect foil: a hazelnut caramel layer torte, with dark chocolate, almond sponge cake, orange zest mousse and notes of cinnamon and espresso. And with those the conversational pace slowed, replaced with the air of ample satisfaction that comes with an exceptional meal. We were not surprised to learn that restaurant critic John Mariani, writing for Esquire magazine, put Lemaire on his list of “Best New Restaurants” last year.
Remarkably, says Eubanks, about 80 percent of Lemaire’s customers come from outside the hotel. He would like to see the restaurant capture more of the Jefferson’s guests, which ought not to be a problem. More generally, he says that Lemaire 2.0 “is starting to resonate with the community. There are still issues to address, work to be done, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
He says younger guests are coming in to try the new cocktails, and the restaurant aims to attract more of them with a new three-courses-for-$30 menu. “We want to make sure that people respond to the things that we do,” Eubanks says. “So far, the public has given us the flexibility to try new things.” We’d be disappointed if they hadn’t, having experienced, and enjoyed, the new Lemaire ourselves.
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