Making a festive night of takeout dinner, cocktails
In pandemic times, a Friday to savor requires planning
Remember when Friday meant cocktails after work (the kind without mandatory food) or table hopping with no reservations but a bunch of friends? Or when date night didn’t involve checking social media to confirm which restaurants were open, hibernating or temporarily COVID -closed? Well, Fridays keep rolling round, and if you’re wanting the weekend to look different from the home-cooked meals you made all week, join the club. And I mean that literally.
January is a notoriously slow month for restaurants, so now’s the time to order in one of the family-style weekly dinner or meal-kit subscriptions to cook at home. Some are offering their own delivery (hopefully by now you know most third-party delivery companies price-gouge restaurants with fees). Others are carefully boxing up something harder to replicate: fine-dining chef ’s plates and layered bartender cocktails capable of transporting you to pre-pandemic times. Well, at least you can give the nightly G&T a rest.
The reality is that we still crave flavor. There’s a reason we say variety is the “spice of life.” No matter how much you fancy your vastly improved kitchen skills, Zoom calls only prove how much we like to talk about the foods we miss. And the novelty of cooking wears thin when we’re doing it every night. Could we recreate a restaurant experience at home, I wondered. Friday night with a quarantine friend. Dinner and cocktails, no sweatpants allowed.
What we had: The COVID -19 Cocktail Club by Plumb Oyster Bar (Troy), food from dp: An American Brasserie (Albany), delivery by Falcon Club (Capital Region).
Starting the New Year off right — if you aren’t attempting Dry January — is a four-week cocktail subscription service: The COVID -19 Cocktail Club from Plumb Oyster Bar in Troy, which is otherwise closed until April. Having launched a prepaid cocktail delivery program after the first lockdown to generate funds, owner Heidi Knoblauch and her lawyermixologist wife, Kelly Ncnamee, are back with a new and improved 2021 program, pairing Mcnamee’s intriguing cocktails with an add-on option: Delivery by Falcon Club, a luxury ride service in the Capital Region.
It’s a clever collaboration. Falcon Club already partners with area restaurants through its Restaurant Network, a driveand-dine plan giving a 20 percent discount on rides to participating restaurants
and a perk with dinner (drink, gift card, etc.). Reduced restaurant traffic during the pandemic prompted expanding Falcon Club offerings like this (and ferrying Santa to home driveways over the holidays). Those close enough to
Troy can pick up their cocktails from Plumb, but the rest of us benefit from a door-to-door delivery for just a $10 fee.
Curb-to-couch cocktails are a gloriously civilized affair. On-time delivery, doorbell, cocktail hand-off, and the car is on its way. For $165, the monthlong club includes four cocktails weekly and a snack, per current liquor law rules, making each cocktail less than $10 a pop. This week the snack is coconut-corn soup, a lightly sweet, thick puree we sip as an hors d’oeuvre shooter before pouring the numbered, single-serve cocktails into rocks glasses or coupes, following instructions and adding ice, if required.
You get the sense Mcnamee is fun in the kitchen. She makes prodigious use of spices and vegetables in infusion or simple-syrup
form and is well-versed in layering botanicals and bitters. Her “Flee Manhattan,” an apt riff on the Manhattan classic, deploys anejo tequila, cardamom amaro and mole bitters in Rough Rider Bull Moose rye. Pop in an aromatic orange rind twist for the perfect aperitif. The mood is set.
Dinner is from dp: An American Brasserie in downtown Albany, which offers a perfectly formed takeout menu in line with our goal of crafting an upscale din
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ing experience at home, with courses to pair with the cocktail flight. Entrees tip the takeout scale at
$25 to $27, but daily dumplings are just $7, a daily salad $12. (The full food, wine and cocktail menus for dp and its upscale sibling, Yono's, are available for takeout by phone order only. Both restaurants are also open for in-house dining Monday through Saturday nights.)
We pop the winged flaps of waxed cardboard boxes, extracting dp’s signature bakmi goreng, Indonesian stir-fried noodles with sauteed celery, onion and cabbage; their infamous fried Brussels sprouts caramelized with pork belly, shallots and sambal glaze into sticky, crisp bites; and thickly pleated chicken dumplings that we lightly reheat and slip into ponzu sauce. A mystery salad of frisee and cucumber hides softly roasted beets, onions and pepitas. Sauces and dressings are all secure in little lidded tubs. Due to lack of availability, the braised beef cheeks we’d ordered are, unexpectedly, saucy braised short ribs. They're such an impossibly tender, rich indulgence, I could cry.
We move onto cocktail No. 3, the gin-based Apres-ski, with silkiness and bitter notes from blood orange-infused olive oil, Aperol and Pastis, then a refreshing vodka-based Side Salad served over crushed ice that deservedly gets its name from a prominent celeriac and basil cordial, cucumber and nutty Skinos Mastiha liqueur.
Plates cleared, we must assemble the prettiest, deconstructed rhubarb pavlova, filling a meringue nest with tart compote and tipping spiced pears on top. It’s the perfect size to share and leaves cocktail No. 4 for our finale. Eyes grow wide at the sweet earthiness of velvety carrot and cardamom syrup shaken with bourbon, Madeira and Cynar (itself made from artichokes) and served over a large cube of ice. Mcnamee named it “Buzzed Bunny.” We’re home, relaxed with no need to drive, and nicely buzzed too. Could be the new Friday night.
To sign up for future months of Plumb Cocktail Club, visit plumb.bar (delivery optional). For Falcon Club car service or delivery of your takeout food: falcon-club.com. For dp: An American Brasserie dine-in and takeout menus: dpbrasserie.com.