A creative takeout idea
La Belle Aurore in Niantic offers themed Date Night Kit take-home meals
Say you wanted a special meal to celebrate Valentine's Day. Or Mardi Gras. In past years, you'd settle into a nice table inside your favorite restaurant and pore over the menu before making your selection. You'd have the dishes brought to your table, piping hot and sinfully delicious.
But: the pandemic.
With all things COVID in mind, La Belle Aurore is offering a creative, take-home option.
The Niantic restaurant is selling what it calls Date Night Kits. It features a new theme or destination each weekend and boasts an appetizer, main dish and dessert for one or two people.
The Mardi Gras Date Night Kit, for instance, cost $75 for two or $40 for one, and the menu was muffuleta spread (olives, artichoke and herbs); Mardi Gras salad (red cabbage, mango, edamame); Jambalaya (andouille sausage, chicken and shrimp) or crawfish etouffee; and King Cake.
About 90 percent of the Date Night Kits have sold out, and La Belle Aurore owner Dawn Bruckner says people who try one tend to become repeat Kit customers.
Over the last year, Bruckner has been coming up with innovative, pandemic-friendly ideas for La Belle Aurore, which doesn't have indoor dining right now because it's such a small venue with little ventilation. “We're doing what we can,” she says. In addition to regular takeout, the restaurant is offering Grab and Go items from its freezer; retail items like spices and kitchen gadgets; and baked goods and fresh bread.
“It's throwing (ideas) up in the air and seeing what sticks,” Bruckner says.
Local businesses have been collaborating, too. North Stonington-based Terra Firma Farm, for instance, now sells some La Belle Aurore items, including the cookies, pot pies and granola that the restaurant makes.
Irish to Minnesotan food
La Belle Aurore is a higher-end restaurant, with a menu that changes based on what food is available that's true to its farm-to-table ethos. Eating there pre-pandemic was a whole experience, Bruckner notes.
La Belle Aurore has very loyal customers, and Bruckner started contemplating what she could put forward that was special during the pandemic. She thought of these kits and, considering no one has been able to travel because of the coronavirus, the theme at first was traveling out of the country.
Asked if she's worried about running out of ideas for the kits, Brucker laughs and says, “There's always something.”
Coming up on March 12 and 13 is an Early St. Patrick's Day Date Night Kit, which is $90 for two. The kit boasts colcannon (mashed potatoes and herbs); Irish brown bread; mushroom rarebit with mash and thyme gravy or
Galway Bay stew (a seafood stew of shellfish, salmon, cream, potatoes, white wine) or Shepherd’s Pie (using Sankow Beaver Brook lamb); Bailey’s cupcakes and Guinness stout ice cream.
While some of the initial Date Night Kit inspiration was about going abroad, Bruckner has now taken a cue from Molly O’Neill’s “One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking” book and is making some kits with food from across the U.S.
“It’s fun. It’s a learning thing for me, too,” Bruckner says. An example: Minnesota Date Night Kit is set for March 5 and 6. (It’s $75 for two, $40 for one.) Included: Booyah (Midwestern soup/stew; the La Belle Aurore version will be a hearty vegetable stew); Hot Dish — homemade tater tots topping either chicken and vegetables in a cream sauce or vegetables in a mushroom cream sauce; and Scotcheroos (dessert bars made with Rick Krispies, peanut butter and chocolate).
Just heat up at home
The first kits Bruckner did were cooked to order, but that proved impossible, with people waiting for their meals to be finished. Now, the “kit” part just means that people heat up the food at home — which was something folks were doing anyway, to a lesser extent. Heating instructions are included.
Most of the kits also boast something for breakfast for the next morning. The St. Patrick’s Day meal includes Irish soda bread scones. The Sicily one featured pistachio sweet rolls, which were such a hit, they’ve been added to a regular rotation.
Orders are usually required by Wednesday, and people pick up their kits between 5 and 7 p.m. on Fridays and noon and 8 p.m. Saturdays.
The kits can include decorations, maybe a postcard from the foreign country the food represents.
“We try to make each a little unique,” Bruckner says.