Great news for us Peter Pratt’s Restaurant in Yorktown New York is featuring our Mint Jalapeno jam on their Easter menu this year. They are incorporating the Jam in their Moroccan Lamb sliders with a Mint jalapeno jam cucumber salad.
By way of a thank you to them we thought it was fitting to share this glowing review that was published in the New York times.
When February’s deep freeze sends us looking for a snug spot with a fireplace and hearty food and friendly people to tend us, the Tack Room at Peter Pratt’s Inn will do quite well. This cellar room, in a mid-18th-century house, flaunts its age: A whitewashed stone foundation supports a dark ceiling of hand-hewn beams, but the tables are dressed in white linen finery and nosegays of full-blown white roses, soothing reminders that spring is less than six weeks away.
O.K., the chef is new, a couple of entrees were misconceived, and all desserts needed rethinking, but diners would do well to work around those flaws, for the best of the menu here is very much worth having. And for watching the flames of a cheery fire, there’s not a sweeter place in town.
All of the starters were delights that diners won’t find just anywhere. Salads made up almost half the starters, and it was hard to ignore the endive with Stilton and, especially, the chopped salad with the gorgeous Tickler Cheddar cheese; but the frigid weather steered us to heftier choices, like Big Al’s house-cured boar-bacon mac and cheese, an ultimate comfort food. The mix of smoky bacon and melting cheese, trapped in the tunnels of extra-large elbow noodles, made this dish devilishly good.
Weightless, excellent chips accompanied a heavenly match of tuna tartare and guacamole. But the appeal of gnudi has always escaped us, and their seasoning here seemed lacking.
Soups have long been a highlight at Pratt’s, yet to judge from an enormous bowlful of one evening’s ultrarich shrimp chowder, there can be too much of a good thing. Hardly a prelude to dinner, the soup was dinner itself. Diners might want to share other starters, like a splendid pizzetta, the soft, pillowy crust layered with mellowed smoked salmon, cream cheese and strands of scallion or leek, and a charcuterie simply loaded with cured meats, pâtés, toasts and condiments.
The entrees were generally less exciting, except for the luscious braised lamb shank, which melted into a snowbank of whipped potatoes and was, indeed, “like butta,” as an old menu wittily promised. Perhaps some patrons will recall those fun menus that listed items like Banana Miranda Sundae, Hula Shrimp, Lawrence of Arabia Hamburger, and Ragin Cajun numbers. Perhaps it’s time to get playful again.
Moist, delicious bronzed breast of duck with dark lentils needed some color relief, as did the white-on-white look of six big ravioli, stuffed agreeably with lobster and corn and cloaked by a thick cream sauce. But nutty, crisped brussels sprouts and a thin parsnip purée put the spotlight on a perfectly grilled 14-ounce rib-eye steak. And big scallops cooked merely to medium-rare were matched with herbed cauliflower and delicious “cream-less creamed spinach,” puréed cauliflower providing the creaminess. The roasted salmon was bland.
Except for a banana bread pudding and a lovely cheesecake, most desserts were so sweet they might as well have been pure sugar, but even the cheesecake was burdened one evening by an overly sweet medley of chocolate, nuts and caramel sauce. Yet if you’ve come this far you’ll be too satisfied for dessert anyway. So skip the coconut cake with its sugary cream cheese icing. The miniature desserts are an inspired idea that might work, if the fruit cobbler had more fruit and the tiny scoops of house-made blueberry and goat-maple ice cream had freshness and flavor.
But there’s no doubt that the Tack Room is a welcoming place for lingering while appreciating the tastes of the present against the craftsmanship and history of the past.