Protégé has a full bar and wine cellar with room for 2,200 bottles. The afore-mentioned Cornish game hen, described as "brick chicken" on the opening menu. Photos posted by the restaurant on Yelp show dishes such as a little gem salad with avocado, radish and puffed quinoa oysters on the half shell sablefish with asparagus, dashi butter and crispy koshihkari rice and a whole Cornish game hen served with saffron rice and sweet peppers, among others. Ricotta dumplings with English peas, beech mushrooms and black truffle are on the menu at the newly opened Protégé in Palo Alto. Diners can choose to have two, three or four courses. Kelly and Secviar have described Protégé as an "approachable" neighborhood restaurant that will serve a burger and crispy chicken sandwich in a casual lounge but also have a more formal, reservations-only dining room with a hybrid prix-fixe menu that starts at $55 per person. They conceived of the restaurant several years ago and entered a protracted city-permitting process to open in Palo Alto more than a year and a half ago. Protégé has been a long time coming for Kelly and co-owner Anthony Secviar, a former sommelier and chef, respectively, from the three-Michelin-star The French Laundry in Yountville. The exterior of Protégé Restaurant on California Avenue. on Friday and Saturday, per the Protégé website.Ĭo-owner Dennis Kelly said on Tuesday, March 27, that the restaurant is now taking a limited number of reservations online. The restaurant's hours are 5:30-9:30 p.m. only for dinner and with limited, first-come first-serve seating. “I want there to be an explosion of beautifulness in your mouth,” she said.Protégé, a highly-anticipated restaurant from two alums of The French Laundry, quietly opened its doors this week in Palo Alto.įor now, Protégé is open at 250 California Ave. What she really hopes is that when you walk out after eating her food and having had a completely unique experience. Most recently, she invented a dish called Portugese Sausages. By the morning I wake up - and voila! I just wake up with the recipe and write it all down.” But it’s all cooking in the back of my mind. “I just look at them and think of the flavors that I like now. Often she will come into the Astoria restaurant early, way before her shift begins. It’s not just traditional Greek food anymore.”Ĭharalambous is always trying to dream up new dishes at mussels ‘N sausages. “I see all kinds of fusions and flavors happening. And she has invented every dish on the menu.Ĭharalambous said she loves being part of the Astoria food scene: “It’s definitely growing,” she said. But she walked out with an even better job: executive chef. She came across an ad for a job at mussels ‘N sausages, which is owned by Francis Staub, who also owns Le Coq Rico in Manhattan. I’m here anyways - let me do it for a year.” New York is considered one of the food capitals of the world. But she told herself, “I came here for a reason. “It was supposed to be called The Khemistry Bar where people could meet and they create chemistry.”īut unfortunately it didn’t last long, and Charalambous wondered if it was time to go home. “A Jamaican woman was opening up a great concept in Brooklyn, right on Malcolm X Boulevard,” she said. “Everybody told me you have to come and work in New York at least once in your life,” Charalambous said. But while she loved her life and career Down Under, New York beckoned. It was instinct - a gut feeling.”Īfter her travels, she worked for a variety of eateries in Australia. People used to say to me, ‘How do you eat this raw, and this cooked?’ I didn’t know what I was doing. “It wasn’t just the cooking,” Charalambous, now 34, recalled. She was falling in love - with cooking and with what she could do with her imagination and her instincts. And something else momentous was happening. She traveled for about a year, working various jobs along the way. She went to a great many places, including Southeast Asia and Europe. I didn’t want to play the traditional female role: the housewife and all of that.”īut that all changed when she went traveling around the world, armed only with $900 and a pack on her back.
#PROTEGE RESTAURANT HOW TO#
So by the time I was 11, I knew how to cook - I just didn’t like it. “A traditional Cypriot woman needs to teach her daughter how to cook.
So even though they were in a foreign country, they thought they were still in Cyprus,” she recalled. “Growing up in a Cypriot family, my mother and my grandmother - they carried on their views. She brings an old-world sensibility to her creations that she got from her mother and grandmother, but transmutes it into more modern cuisine. The prize was to work at his restaurant for a year, but she ended up staying for three. Ramsay told her that her palate was amazing.
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