Multitasker & team player
Restaurateur Clare de Boer, Hudson Valley’s ultimate
When the New York Times declared its 2023 list of the 50 best restaurants in the United States, five spots from New York state made the grade. Four were in New York City. The fifth, however, was Stissing House in Pine Plains, a small town at the northern edge of Dutchess County.
The Times praised Stissing House with a glowing mention of its chef: “Clare de Boer is that dinnerparty host whose spreads are simple, effortless and maddeningly good.”
Having sat down with de Boer at the beginning of February, a week after she received a fourth James Beard Award nomination (Best Chef, New York), I can imagine her wincing at the word “effortless” — at least when it comes to her food. Yes, perhaps simple fare should appear effortless. However, it’s often anything but. And when I meet de Boer, who is British but had a globe-trotting early life — India, the United Arab Emirates, England, and the United States, where she studied at Brown University — she certainly doesn’t give the impression of someone living an effortless life.
Being greeted by de Boer in the darkened rear hallway of Stissing House, several hours before opening, she is luminously pale in the sun-starved English sense. The effect is augmented by the all-white outfit she’s wearing, even though she is not currently clad in chef ’s clothing.
De Boer, 34, is the mother of three young children and has been awake since 3 a.m., she confides. She met her husband of five years, Luke Sherwin, at Brown. An entrepreneur, Sherwin was a co-founder of Casper, the mattress company. Later on, I make the mistake of describing her family as large. The chef snorts and says, “I only have three.”
I don’t mention that I myself have no children, just one ancient dog, and therefore three sounds like a huge number. (And quantity of work.) Instead, I try to cover my mistake. “Oh, I thought you had six,” I venture. “Three children and three restaurants.”
On this point, at least, I’m correct. De Boer is also co-founder of King, in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, the restaurant where she made her name, and Jupiter, a restaurant that spoons the ice rink at Rockefeller Center.
How did de Boer get here, to a trio of restaurants and three children? The answer is: via Goldman Sachs, briefly (“It was not meant to be. I spent most of my time curating my lunchbox”), cooking school in Ireland, a stint at legendary London restaurant River Cafe (alumni include Jamie Oliver and April Bloomfield) and various supper clubs in New York City.
By age 26, de Boer had opened King. I suggest that this transpired incredibly quickly. Shrugging, de Boer explains that it was easier to secure a visa as a restaurant owner than it was to earn one as a line cook with little experience behind her. But she also admits to a certain brighteyed naiveté when she opened the spot alongside chef Jess Shadbolt (whom de Boer met at River Cafe) and Annie Shi.
“We ordered three pork chops, cooked them, customers came, and then we had no food!” she said.
Stissing House is de Boer’s first solo venture. She describes herself as its “caretaker.” She’s been in charge for two years, but the property has a long history in hospitality: it opened in 1782 as a watering hole and inn and boasts the oldest domed ballroom in the United States. Reviewing its latest incarnation for the Times Union, Susie Davidson
The Stissing House chef is a four-time James Beard nominee, runs two more restaurants and writes a popular food newsletter. Oh, and she has three children.
Powell wrote of Stissing House as “both farmhouse and tavern, all burnished coziness and sepia tones” and raved about “de Boer’s buttermilk sherbet draped in a sesame-cardamom caramel sauce” as part of a “memorable meal.”
I ask de Boer to describe her culinary secret. She says she makes “homemade cooking, but better than you’ve had it at home.… It’s not gastronomy, it’s food!”
Before answering many of my questions, de Boer pauses briefly, and I detect a rapid calculation spinning through her thoughts: “How can I make this answer not about me?” The words “joint effort” come up a lot. When later I asked Stissing House for a portrait of de Boer, initially I received a group shot and the explanation, “Clare prefers to use team photos.” The restaurant industry may have been dominated for eons by a certain type of male chef and his frail yet gluttonous ego, big as an ostrich egg, but de Boer’s attitude represents a 21st-century shift; professional kitchens these days are more likely to function as democracies than dictatorships.
But there is, in fact, one public sphere in which de Boer functions alone, queen of her own cuisine. For seven months she has been writing recipes for her newsletter, The Best Bit. Not only are her dishes smile-inducing and very much achievable in a home kitchen, but they are also beautifully written.
For example, she writes about baking a ginger cake “until the top has set and feels like memory foam.” When instructing the reader how to make a honeynut squash soup, she urges you to join her in developing “a wider range of flavor to ground the sweet squash, which can be reckless on its own.” And then there’s her website’s raison d’etre, de Boer’s invitation to potential readers: “If you like the crisp edges of lasagna, the soaked croutons, the whipped cream that gets icy around the chocolate scoop — you’re in the right place.”
I imagine de Boer scratching her head as she toils away to compose perfectly evocative lines, bent over a laptop or oil-spattered notebook. But she gives me a look that suggests I’m way off the mark.
“I’m just talking about food the way I talk about it,” she frowns, going on to explain that she started The Best Bit while on maternity leave, “stuck at home for three months.” She speedily writes her recipes and their intros on her iphone while “on the subway or walking in the backyard with my baby in the carrier. It’s very instant. I cook something and then go write it up!”
So it seems, at least, there is some sense of effortlessness in de Boer’s life — she can talk (and type) about food without breaking stride, or childtending duties. She possesses that ineffable gift rarely mentioned when we discuss great chefs: a sense of taste, an intuition for what we crave on our plates, even if we’re unaware of that specific desire. She can talk and think and breathe a sense of culinary idealism. And if she can’t be in three restaurants at once (separated as they are by 100 miles) while simultaneously looking after and feeding three children, she can still share her philosophy, her food language.
When asked for a recipe to share with Times Union readers, de Boer offers sheet pan yogurt and herb chicken. I cook de Boer’s food in my own kitchen, adding a simple broccoli salad on the side. The chicken thighs are outstanding, having been tenderized in their overnight yogurt bath. The dairy is rich and has turned almost into an herbaceous pesto with a sense of guiltless creaminess. Dare I say it, the whole process is perfectly … what’s the word?
Effortless.