Holdfast Dining New Year’s Dinner

I’ve been to several Holdfast Dining events and been a fan since 2014, and realized I’ve never shared the experience on the blog before! My most recent dinner was #609 for Holdfast Dining. This particular dinner was a special luxury ingredient themed dinners especially for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. For $175 I enjoyed an incredibly filling 10 course dinner with 6 wine pairings. So here’s a recap of my Holdfast Dining New Year’s Dinner.

Holdfast Dining is reservations only via their website, doing one 7 PM dinner seating each on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Normally their dinner is a 10 course prix fixe chefs tasting menu with 5 wine pairings for $105. On Monday they hold Deadshot, a more casual a la carte version of their food that does not require reservations.

If you are attending on a reservations dinner, you check in with the wine director when you enter past the curtained entrance and are greeted with a glass of bubbly. He will then direct you to your seat based on the size of your party – at a countertop bar or at a table. I was seated at the bar which I always enjoy watching the plating and chatting with others.

Before each course, after watching them plate it in the open kitchen, Chefs Will Preisch and Joel Stocks talk about the dish in terms of inspiration or what they did to create the dish.

Chefs Joel Stocks and Will Preisch of Holdfast Dining

The third member of the team is Ty Bohl, who  is now leading the Holdfast Dining wine program (he also works with Fausse Piste Winery, which is the location Holdfast still has their dinners). For each pairing Ty also gets a couple minutes to tell us the story behind the wine, including where it comes from, what is unique about the winery or the way they make the wine, and why he picked the flavors of this wine to go with the next 2 dishes. Usually its one pairing for every 2 dishes. For tonight’s dinner, the first two courses were paired with a Champagne from a 200 year old grower, Lelarge-Pugeot ‘Tradition’ Extra Brut MV and he sabered it open!

We started with what the menu described as oyster, mignonette, creme fraiche, but you learn quickly that there is always more to a dish then what is the few handful of ingredients written down. Here, it was a Shigoku oyster with mignonette granita with red wine vinegar, pickled onions, creme fraiche with black pepper panna cotta.

This was a great dish contrasting the briny smoothness with the oyster with the creamy texture of the creme fraiche and the acidity of the pickled onions and mignonette. It stood out in its creativity and uniqueness of how they served oyster in a new way I hadn’t ever had before.

The next dish was described as crab, uni, caviar, seaweed.

This translates to a crab crepe with an uni puree, then served with a caviar champagne butter and a seaweed salad with chili thread. Every bite was melt in your mouth creamy.

Next were two courses of seafood. These were paired with Terre Nere Etna Rosata 2016 from Sicily, in the Mt Etna area of Italy. This wine has a rose color which was inspired by one of the two winemaker’s daughter favorite color It had a great mineral sharpness which was great for the first seaweed dish, but I found a little too much hint of fruit for the second. Anyway, the first seafood dish of the two was a spot prawn, abalone, chawanmushu.

The chawanushu was pretty full of the chunks of meat from the prawn, and the abalone on top was sauteed with a smoked scallop.

The second fish dish was almost like a fish Inception (referring to the movie) with sole, smoked steelhead, mushroom, fumet. Here, sole is wrapped around a smoked steelhead mousseline and accompanied by a couple kinds of mushrooms in a sauce from fish bones, leeks, and white wine.

Next was the only course that had a wine pairing all to itself, a foie gras, quince, and apple dish. This was soooo decadant and rich with a foie gras combined with cream to make a generously size terrine with a quince jam. This terrine is then served with different picked apples, and pickled mustard seeds and some mustard greens. To go with the foie terrine was their still warm signature Holdfast Dining housemade steamed brown bread. This was paired with Ciderie du Vulcain ‘Trois Pepins” 2015 from Fribourg, Switzerland, a cider made of equal parts of apple, pear, quince.

Next were the protein courses. You should definitely make sure you eat light the day of your Holdfast Dining dinner reservation. These were paired with San Fereolo Dolcetto 2009 from Dogliani, Italy. This was an ok pairing, though I sorta wished for a slightly smokier richer wine. The first meat dish was veal, vermouth, onion. For this course, they presented veal breast braised for a long time then deboned and pressed and slightly roasted to warm it up. This veal is served with a vermouth and shallot cream sauce and crispy charred sweet onion chip with leek ash and charred pearl onions.

Next was the Holdfast Dining take on an Oregon Steakhouse Platter, beef, bone marrow, truffle. In reality, this translates to Oregon Wagyu Beef with a bone marrow and truffle demi-glace, a mashed potatoes combined with the rendered fat from bone marrow, and their mini Caesar salad wedge covered in truffle shavings.

This was quite a dish – even though I wasn’t sure how I would finish this I made myself rise to the occasion and find the room. I was definitely regretting wearing black jeans with my sequined sweater instead of the looser dress I had debated earlier that evening!

Ok, only 4 more dessert dishes! Next is their signature dessert, the only dish that appears at all the Holdfast Dining dinners. This and the next dessert are paired with Donnhoff Norheimer Kirschheck Riesling 2015 Nahe from Germany, providing a crispness yet sweetness. The first dessert is a combination of sweet and savory, the signature dessert of the cornbread madeleine, parmesan, lardo, honeycomb.

Next was labeled simply honey, yogurt. This includes granulated honey from Fubonn and a honey granita and frozen yogurt snow for a play of sticky and icy textures.

Next was the main dessert, chocolate, cherry, meringue. This was paired with Niepoort Late Bottle Vintage 2013 Douro from Portugal, a port wine. The chocolate with macerated cherries and cherry jam were fine, but my favorite were the dehydrated meringue and toasted cream and especially the use of cherry juice to give it an extra cherry flavor.

Finally, a set of Candies that included a toasted coconut shell ball, a cranberry pate de fruit that was sour reminiscent of a sour patch kid, and a brown butter caramel with sea salt.

The dinner is finished also with Heart Coffee, a warm towel, and a tin with another small slice of their homemade brown bread wrapped in the recipe for the next morning.

Have you heard of Holdfast Dining before? Is there any dish that interests you that you want to try? What did you enjoy for your New Year’s Eve dinner before ringing in 2018?