Monday, November 17, 7:00 p.m.
Members $90, guests $115

The Friends Lake Inn has been welcoming friends for a good long time. A rambling Victorian structure, the inn was opened in 1860 as a home away from home for tanners (tanning hides was then a major industry in nearby Chestertown). By Prohibition, it had become a popular summer retreat for New Yorkers, who traveled by rail from the city. Guests dressed for dinner, socialized together, and dined at assigned tables; a house band played nightly for dancing. But over the decades vacation fashions changed, and despite the lovely lakeside setting, the inn fell on hard times. By 1969, it was empty.

When Greg and Sharon Taylor bought the building 14 years later—it had stood empty for years—they envisioned a menu brimming with a harvest of Adirondack game, fish, and produce. They pictured desserts sweetened with local berries, maple syrup, and honey. Indeed, “these local foods featured prominently on their menu,” Sarah Tomlinson wrote in the Christian Science Monitor. “But since the inn’s opening in 1984, the owners have also given the restaurant cuisine a modern, New American touch that keeps dishes simple but incorporates some of the techniques and flavors carried to the area by an influx of Europeans over the years. ‘It is a melting pot, as is cuisine in America today,’ Taylor says.”

The man responsible for that imaginative melting-pot effect is Kirk Gibson, who, as a native of Syracuse, grew up eating upstate New York’s local bounty. Smith’s palate was first tuned by his Italian-American grandmother; his earliest memories are of her homemade bread and pasta. Later, he sought professional culinary training at Paul Smith’s College, then externed at a Michelin two-star restaurant in Chablis, France.

Gibson’s special talent is in pairing food and wine, a skill that doubtless comes in handy at Friends Lake Inn. The AAA Four-Diamond Inn has held Wine Spectator’s Grand Award annually since 1997. As Kim Marcus described it in that publication, the inn is “the center of wine appreciation for the entire Adirondack region.” This year, The Times Union cited it as having the Best Wine List in the region, writing that it was “an extremely subjective call to make, and [there were] plenty of candidates for the honor. But the nod pretty much has to go to Friends Lake Inn, and its 20,000-bottle collection.” The inn also earned Santé’s Cooking for Wine award in 2002, as well as its Fine Dining award.