Tuesday, December 16, 7:00 pm
Members $100, guests $125

Dine with a food professional (or garden-variety foodie), and no matter how stellar the meal, you’re bound to hear some sort of critique. Whether your tablemate is just posturing or has some fascinating knowledge to share, the beef cheeks could be better if braised a bit longer; Champagne vinegar, not rice vinegar, would play better in the tangerine gastrique; and the pistachio soufflé, though yummy, fell a little, er, short (nothing a little food science tutorial couldn’t fix…).

True to form, the professional eaters invited to last year’s Arthur Schwartz Honorary Dinner couldn’t keep their mouths shut about the food. But they had nothing but praise for Scott Cutaneo’s fabulous French cuisine. The meticulous cookbook author and Fine Cooking contributor Rose Levy Berenbaum marveled at Cutaneo’s “amazing balance and harmony of ingredients.” Wine Enthusiast managing editor Tim Moriarty enthused, “The sea bass changed my life!” Our own Mildred Amico cut right to the chase—“It was a personal pleasure for me to eat those short ribs again! They are memorable.”

Cutaneo trained in Holland and Paris, and cut his culinary teeth in two Michelin three-stars—L’Espadon at the Ritz in Paris, and Michel Guérard’s Les Prés d’Eugénie in the south of France. In 1996, after a stint at Restaurant Daniel in Manhattan, Cutaneo signed on as Le Petit Chateau’s new chef. A few months later, he assumed ownership, and started collecting four-star reviews with regularity—and repeated listings in Charles Dale’s The Chefs’ Guide to America’s Best Restaurants—for his expert handling of both classic French cuisine and the lightened Cuisine Minceur he studied under Guérard. “The cooking is flawless,” Cody Kendall wrote in The Star-Ledger. Arthur Schwartz called Cutaneo’s cuisine “the ultimate kind of high-style food…gorgeous ingredients handled with a great deal of respect.” This past fall, Cutaneo was featured on The Holiday Special with Bobby Flay’s Food Nation and Le Petit Chateau was picked as one of the six best French restaurants in the country on the TVFN show The Best Of, hosted by Jill Cordes and Marc Silverstein.