Friday, August 2, 12:00 noon
Members $55, guests $65

Every so often, unrelenting culinary curiosity draws us into a sleek, sexy new restaurant where all of our senses are stimulated—except the one that attracted us in the first place. Happily, when the shiny glass doors (brandishing a buffed metal Z) opened on Zinc’s stylishly streamlined interior, a very different experience awaited. As Bill Daley of Northeast Magazine wrote, “Zinc is a four-star restaurant that truly delivers.”

It’s no surprise that Zinc looks as good as it tastes. Chef Denise Appel is a passionate amateur painter who honed her culinary craft as executive sous-chef at The Wadsworth Atheneum, a fine arts museum in Hartford. Now at Zinc, she serves a short, globetrotting menu of “brilliantly original compositions,” according to Connecticut Magazine’s Elise McClay. Daley praised Appel’s “imaginative and focused” food; Patricia Brooks of The New York Times enjoyed a “remarkably different and appealing dinner”; while Northeast Magazine stated that “Zinc’s fare could quite possibly be the best meal in Connecticut right now.”

Pastry chef Ken Ayvazian ensures that the delicious adventure continues through dessert. A self-taught pastry chef and charter member of the Bread Baker’s Guild of America, Ayvazian is a graduate of Yale who, during a semester in France, was smitten by the work of Gaston Lenôtre and soon turned to a career in pastry himself. “Zinc gives him a platform to really show his genius,” Daley wrote. Ayvazian’s desserts at Zinc also captured a Best Desserts in Connecticut nod from Northeast Magazine.