Sunday, June 17, 12:00 noon
Members $55, guests $65

If Gabrielle Hamilton, chef/owner of Prune, learned one thing from her dad during her childhood, it was how to throw a party. Once or twice a year, Jim Hamilton would assemble a hundred people or so and start cooking. "He couldn’t roast a leg of anything; he had to roast a whole animal," she recalls. The family’s rural New Jersey home would glow with candlelight and resound with happy voices. The air was suffused with the smell of wood smoke and roasting meat. Everybody feasted and fêted.

In 1988, Dad decided to turn pro. He spent time in the kitchens of some of the country’s greatest chefs—Alain Sailhac, Jacques Pépin, Jasper White, Jeremiah Tower. Then he left behind a career as a set designer (Jesus Christ Superstar was one of his successes) and opened Hamilton’s Grill Room. (His daughter Melissa, now test kitchen director for Saveur, was his partner.) The food—from Tuscany and the south of France—was an instant hit in lovely Lambertville, Hamilton’s hometown. In 1993, he hired Mark Miller, a veteran of Philadelphia’s classic Le Bec-Fin, as chef de cuisine. Two years ago, Miller took over the stoves. That year, the much-lauded Grill Room earned three stars from the Philadelphia Inquirer, a Top Ten Best Restaurants nod from the Star Ledger, and an "Excellent" rating from The New York Times.

Hamilton has followed in her father’s footsteps. At Prune (christened with her childhood nickname), she turns out food that is, as Newsday put it, "truly her own and startlingly delicious." Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld of New York called it "a grab bag of eccentric, multicutural influences that is, at heart, ineluctably American." The tiny restaurant is "a sort of fried green Provence, a hillbillette bistro," as Matthew Debord wrote in New York Press, where hungry foodies devour the pork chops wrapped in bacon, with smoked tomatoes and Swiss chard; the house-made grilled lamb sausages ("rustic, flavorsome bliss," Newsday declared); the "decadent" roast suckling pig that "attests to a chef who truly loves to eat," as Daniel Young wrote in a three-star Daily News review. Prune, The New Yorker opined, would be better-named "Raisin: it’s dark and tiny, with pure, distinctive flavors and a sweet personality." Eric Asimov put it a little more simply. Prune, he said, "is a plum."

For Father’s Day, the Hamiltons and Miller have planned a bash to rival those summer cookouts back in Lambertville. Bring your Dad—and your appetite.