Ad Hoc’s Famous Monday Night Chicken Dinner

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Ad Hoc’s Famous Monday Night Chicken Dinner

I’ve had three fried chicken epiphanies during my lifetime, and each one stands out in my memory like daylight on a glistening meadow.

My first was at age fourteen, in Laconia, New Hampshire. I was on the way home from summer camp when my father decided to try Kentucky Fried Chicken, new at that time.

The Original Recipe featured a perfect crust, juicy meat, subtle spicing. I never realized it could be like that. Much later, I came to use that expression in a different context. (What they have in today’s KFCs tastes nothing like the chicken they prepared in the sixties.)

Four years later, while matriculating at the University of Wisconsin (by that I mean drinking nickel beer in the Memorial Union, cutting classes and playing bridge until dawn), I discovered something called Maryland fried chicken being prepared by an African-American lady named Essie in a girl’s dorm.

Essie’s fried chicken was, and remains, the best I ever had, with a crust so brilliantly golden Edward G. Robinson would have worshiped it, crackling skin, moist meat and an otherworldly fragrance, though my reason for being in the dorm, a certain Wendy, smelled even better.

And last Monday evening, I had my third. They say three’s the charm. And so it was that on my third attempt to eat the legendary buttermilk fried chicken dinner served at Ad Hoc, Thomas Keller’s casual prix fixe restaurant just down the street from his more famous French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., that I finally made it.

This dinner, it seems, is only served on alternate Mondays, and the previous two Mondays I visited the Napa Valley were barbecue nights at the restaurant. This time, I planned my visit around the dinner, and I am still nostalgic for it, four days later. It won’t be my ne plus ultra for fried chicken, but it’s a close second. And the other courses served with it certainly beat the Colonel’s Cole slaw or Essie’s hush puppies.

Ad Hoc, a smallish place in a converted wooden house, posts a menu on the front door on the mornings of the nights it is open. Tables are at a premium here; it’s the clear favorite among Napa Valley royalty. On a round table across the room sat the owners of Stony Hill, accompanied by the actual Martha of Martha’s Vineyard, and the Heitz family.

Ad Hoc, loosely translated as “temporary”, became so popular that the chef decided to keep the place open permanently. On the other days it is open, Thursday-Sunday, there is a sort of market menu, four courses at one price, $49. I’d eat here three times a week if I lived in Napa.

My wife and I were seated at elbow’s length from a cute couple from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. They were on their honeymoon, and more interested in the chicken than each other, Julia Moretti, a nice Vegas girl who happens to be Ad Hoc’s Beverage Manager, brought us flutes of Billecart-Salmon Brut Rose, an inspired match for this chicken.

But first, there was a broccoli rabe and cauliflower salad, white, purple and cheddar colored cauliflowers, crisp polenta cubes, pixie mandarin orange slices and light garlic vinaigrette.

The dish tasted lightly stir fried, perhaps to bring out the vivid colors of the vegetables, which tasted as if they had just been pulled from a garden. I could have been happy had I stopped right there, but a higher authority had a different plan.

Then came a basket filled with eight pieces of perfectly golden buttermilk fried chicken, sitting in a neatly arranged pile. Side dishes of snap pea Cole slaw and Carolina Gold rice with pulled pork, spring onions, and pickled Fresno chilies, were also part of the deal. I know this was the best chicken my wife ever ate, because this was the first time I’ve ever seen here eating the crust, as opposed to pulling it off first, to get to the meat underneath.

Keller, incidentally, wants you to try this at home. His book, Ad Hoc At Home, is available in bookstores, and his chicken recipe is in the book.

But the menu was far from complete.

A hunk of Fiscalini Farm’s San Joaquin Gold, like a Vermont farm cheddar, came along with Medjool dates rolled in toasted sunflower seeds and living arugula. And the last course was banana trifle, served in a parfait glass with pieces of banana bread and a caramel mousse, a trio of bite sized homemade Pecan Sandies lurking on the side.

All in all, it was a dinner worth planning a trip around. Did it live up to the hype? You bet. Even Essie would have been impressed.

Ad Hoc, 6476 Washington Street. Yountville, CA (707) 944-2487. Dinner from 5:30, Thursday-Monday. Reservations Essential.

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