Last week in our business pages we reported that Lahiere’s, the venerable Witherspoon Street restaurant, would close its doors on Saturday, November 13. In the Preview section of this issue our food writer, Pat Tanner, shares several decades of memories of dinners past and present at Lahiere’s. This restaurant has been featured in many different iterations in U.S. 1, and as a kind of culinary tribute, we have posted several of these stories on our home page, www.princetoninfo.com.
The first, “Itty Bitty Plates for Big Appetites,” written by Pat Tanner for our annual Spring Dining issue on May 7, 2008, captures some of the Lahiere’s best appetizer-sized plates. Tanner waxed poetic about the sliced, seared yellowfin tuna with wakame (seaweed) salad, and the risotto with roasted duck, sun-dried cranberries, toasted goat cheese, and cremini mushrooms.
Our Preview editor, Jamie Saxon, gushed about one of Lahiere’s most beloved desserts, the warm Valrhona chocolate cake with vanilla creme anglaise and ice cream, in a February 3, 2010, story titled “A Little Romance: Get Closer This Valentine’s Day.” She recommended taking the chocoholic in your life to indulge in the best $8.50 she’s ever spent and wrote: “You know when you take brownies out of the oven too soon? A little crust on the outside and gooey but not too gooey on the inside. That’s the consistency of this warm chocolate cake in a pool of chilled raspberry puree so smooth it’s practically translucent.”
Saxon was so upset when she heard that Lahiere’s was closing that she brought three friends to dine there on Thursday, November 11, before the Pink Martini concert (her sixth) at McCarter Theater, for one last fix. When no one was looking, one of her guests actually licked the plate. “Who cares?” he said with abandon. “What are they going to do — never let us back in?” Saxon reports they also had a killer Malbec — Bodega Septima, 2009, from Argentina. The excellent wine cellar at Lahiere’s will surely be missed by many.
You can see these stories on princetoninfo.com, as well as a November 14 piece by Angela Wu posted on “The Ink,” the online magazine of the Princeton University Press Club, titled “Lahiere’s: Closed Forever Ever.”
On the subject of restaurant closings, we have been told that Charlie Brown’s in Kingston (formerly Good Time Charley’s) has also closed.
#b#Addendum:#/b# In our November 10 issue we failed to provide contact information for the firm of Rebecca Mercuri, a computer security expert who provides expert testimony and computer forensics. Her firm, Notable Software, is based at 116 Grayson Avenue, Hamilton 08619. Phone: 609-587-1886. Website: www.notablesoftware.com.
We thank Mercuri for alerting us to the omission and for entering her information in our listing form at the company database online at www.princetoninfo.com.
