Saturday, October 4, 7:00 pm
Members $100, guests $125

If ever there was a hotel that deserved to be called a “grande dame,” it’s The Breakers. Built in 1896 by an oil magnate, the stately neoclassical building was twice devastated by fire—first in 1903, then in 1925. Each time, the hotel rose from the ashes in an ever more glorious incarnation, like a phoenix with a serious trust fund. The days when four dollars would cover the cost of the Rockefellers’ room (meals included!) are long gone, but we’re not complaining. The AAA Five-Diamond, Wine Spectator Grand Award–winning L’Escalier is one heck of a consolation prize. With his “alluring, playful” menu, chef Matthew Sobon provides a “wonderful, fanciful culinary voyage, 20,000 leagues above the competition,” Paul Reid wrote in his four-star review for The Palm Beach Post.

A graduate of the CIA, Sobon worked in the kitchens at Atlanta’s Swissôtel, The Pine Crest Inn in North Carolina, and the Bahia Resort in San Diego. He was sous-chef at the Dining Room at The Woodlands, an AAA Five-Diamond resort in South Carolina, before joining L’Escalier.

Noting the popularity of Sobon’s innovative foie gras preparations, Bob Angelone of epicurus.com asserted, “His creativity with goose liver is exceeded only by his mastery of everything else.” Sobon’s deft imagination fuels an ever-changing menu, with offerings such as white sturgeon with fava bean purée, pea tendrils, warm bacon vinaigrette, and cured tomato; or South Carolina squab with maiitake mushrooms, butternut squash, and grapes.

Paul Reid warned, “If you live your south Florida life without ever taking a meal at L’Escalier, you have lived an incomplete life.” Luckily for us, Sobon’s agreed to make a House call.