Paula Lambert, Mozzarella Company Owner & Cheesemaker

In our long road to gastronomical sophistication, we have recently discovered cheese, in particular artisan cheeses. Yet, it wasn’t anything so bucolic as a fondness for cows or goats that led Paula Lambert to the cheesemaking business. It was a taste.

Paula wanted fresh mozzarella; the moist kind that oozed milk when cut with a knife, the kind that she’d savored on numerous trips to Italy. Such mozzarella was not to be found in Dallas.

Whenever a new Italian restaurant opened near her, Paula would call and ask, “Do you have fresh mozzarella?” When told “yes,” she would rush over to taste it. But it was never right: not like the mozzarella that sold in every corner market in Italy or straight from the cheese factories. It was always old and dry and sour.

So Paula became a mozzarella cheesemaker herself. (She had a will to find whey.)

Her training began by traveling to the source of great cheesemaking: Italy. Her first stop at a small, family-owned cheese factory at the foot of the hills in Assisi. “It wasn’t a place where the milk went into a tube and you never saw it again,” she recalls. The family welcomed her to spend time and learn the process.

“They just let me put my hands in it and let me touch the cheese and ask all the questions and make notes and take photographs,” says Lambert, who spent a month observing and learning.

From there she went to visit a renowned professor at a government-run cheesemaking trade school in northern Italy. He, in turn, referred her to a young professor, who was excited by the idea of a trip to Texas to help set up a cheese operation.

Back home, Lambert set to work converting an old drugstore in a warehouse district on the edge of downtown Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood and in 1982, The Mozzarella Company was born. Paula was ahead of her time but her will still held. After three years of losing money, it moved into the black.

When asked what made her successful, Paula replies, “Owning a business is always harder and takes more time than you anticipate,” Lambert says. “But if you love what you do, it’s not really work.”

Today, Paula’s hand-crafted, award-winning specialty cheeses are sold throughout the United states to restaurants, hotels and gourmet shops, as well as to cheese lovers. She and her staff of 18 produce 27 different cheeses. A James Beard Foundation “Who’s Who,” Paula can be credited among the earliest artisanal cheesemaker pioneers in the United States.

Over the years Paula’s cheeses have become famous. They have been featured in publications such as Gourmet, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and The New York Times. And they have been served at the Academy Awards.

Best of all, Paula’s work has enabled her to travel extensively, to teach, to write and to become a leader in the hospitality industry and a respected community leader too. She has created a life.

Getting Started:

If you’re like Paula and have a passion to make cheese, you may have to chart your direction, find your own way. It may be as simple as taking course and getting started.

Besides investing in Paula’s book, may I also suggest The Cheese Chronicles: A Journey Through the Making and Selling of Cheese in America, From Field to Farm to Table by Liz Thorpe.

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King Cocktail Dale DeGroff, Photo by George Erml

Even with Thanksgiving approaching, we all seem to be wrapped up in cold blankets of fearful thoughts and somber outlooks. Perhaps the best way out of the gloom, think I, is to introduce you to one of the sunniest people I know, master mixologist, King Cocktail, Dale DeGroff.

The London Tribune has described Dale as the “Billy Graham of the holy spirits.” It is right, as always.

Dale DeGroff is to cocktails as a hand to a glove. They fit. He also is the 2009 James Beard Wine & Spirits Professional Award recipient, the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from Nightclub & Bar Magazine recipient, the 2008 TOTC Helen David Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and was named the 2007 Cheers Beverage Industry Innovator of the Year with his partners, for Beverage Alcohol Resource (B.A.R.) seminars. Not surprisingly, Dale is a co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans.

For 12 years, Dale ruled the luminous Promenade Bar at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. He says, “I fell in love with bars because of the uninhibited, disordered, and surprising way life unfolds at the bar. The only logical progression in my life has been the wealth of characters that have crossed my path. I don’t know how Muhammad Ali felt the first time he climbed into a ring, or how Louis Armstrong felt the first time he picked up a trumpet, but for me, I knew I was standing in a very familiar and cozy place when I was standing behind a bar for the first time, I knew I was home.”

Dale took a journey back in time to hone his craft. He used only freshly squeezed juices and natural ingredients and figured out how to achieve just the right balance of sweet and sour, strong and weak. He searched for out-of-print recipes for cocktails everywhere he could find them, in garage sales and rare book collections. He experimented with hundreds of recipes, adjusting them to the modern palate and today’s larger portions. (The modern palate doesn’t have as sweet a tooth as once it did.)

He soon discovered something that bakers have long known: he couldn’t simply increase the quantities and hope to get the same result as when he mixed drinks individually. He had to adjust and balance the ratio of acidic fruits to various other components of the cocktail to achieve the results he was seeking.

Dale urges bartenders to attend cooking school in order to get a feeling and respect for composing the many elements and flavors of the ingredients that make up a good recipe. He also encourages an understanding of using correct techniques. He often says, “Watch how chefs use their tools. Collect your own specialty tools and treat them with respect.”

When asked where he got started, Dale answers, “I learned about cocktails much the same way I learned to tend bar–through research and experience and talking to connoisseurs. My fellow bartenders taught me about life, and my mentor, the great restaurateur Joe Baum, sparked my curiosity to find out what makes a great cocktail.”

If you feel the same joy of being behind the bar that Dale described, if you dream to follow in Dale’s steps, but don’t how to begin, may I suggest one of Dale’s excellent online barsmarts seminars or the purchase of one of his instructional bartending DVDs.

If you simply want to learn how to make the most sublime Sazerac ever sipped, begin with Dale’s Craft of the Cocktail.

And now, I hope you will enjoy Cocktail Jerez*, an original Dale DeGroff cocktail that is just right to share with friends and family at Thanksgiving and beyond the last drop of the last leaf.

In Dale’s words, “it is like the fall season in a glass.” Cheers!

COCKTAIL JEREZ*

Ingredients

1 1/2 ounces Jameson
1 ounce Lustau dry Oloroso sherry
1/4 ounce Lustau Pedro Ximenez Sherry
Dash Angostura Bitters
Flamed orange peel garnish

Stir the first four ingredients well with ice and serve strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a flamed orange peel and zest.

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Waiter Waiting

Chefs are worried all the time. They worry about the quality of the ingredients. They worry about the cost of the ingredients. They worry about the quality and cost of the staff. They worry about consistency — and the price of gas.

But when it’s show time, the executive chef is ready. The chef de cuisine is ready. So are the sous chef and the chef de partie, the line cooks, the poissonier, the saucier, the entremetier, the grill cook, the garde manger chef and even the lowly stagiaire (trainee). They are all ready to get to work. They are ready to suffer heat prostration and burn their hands and experience emotional melt down and fend off an unceasing barrage of abuse while in painstaking pursuit of perfection. They work as a team, minute by minute. Time is of the essence in the kitchen.

The front of the house staff worry too. They agonize that every little teeny tiny thing has been fine-tuned in anticipation of the arrival of the first guests. The crisp tablecloths are carefully placed with the crease in the linen facing up (or is it down?). The crystal is polished until it sparkles. The silver gleams. The flowers are in full bloom. The lights are dimmed just so.

The receptionist is poised: her pen hovers over the reservation book. The bartender stands ready to pour. The wait staff is ready to perform a sublime symphony of synchronous service. For the evening meal, everyone is at his or her appointed place. Everything and everyone is ready.

What if there are 5, 10, 20 or more “no-shows”?

For a small restaurant this can spell the difference between profit and loss, success and failure. Even the finest of the fine establishments suffer irretrievable losses.

Who else loses? The sommelier, who advises. Those who depend on the receiving of tips. Those who were ready to remain vigilant and watchful, fetching and carrying, and delivering directions to the men’s room.

The  losses extend to the busboys who had hoped to bus and the runners who aren’t required to run. The Maitre d’ and Captain who maintain the tempo, beat, rhythm, meter, measure and pacing of the place and the General Manager whose task is to ensure the happiness of all who reside beneath his roof.

Who wins when those without a conscience don’t call to cancel a reservation?

NOBODY.

Many a guest, who wouldn’t consider blowing off an appointment with the dentist, the doctor, the hairdresser or the auto repair shop, don’t give a hoot about failing to show up at a restaurant. These miscreants deserve to be reprimanded. A new kind of alert (or phone app?) should be created.

We could take another leaf out of the famous Hollywood madam’s little black book and post the names of the irresponsible, immoral wretches online. They could be shown, full face on Facebook, LinkedIn or on YouTube. There could an escalating scale of punishment for the no-show offenders.

One failure to show up and the next time she goes to a restaurant she will not be permitted to order a dessert (or sauce on the side).

Two no-shows will result in the doubling of the check at the next meal.

The third offense will require the would-be customer to surrender his or her right to ever again cross the threshold of any of the 535,052 restaurants in the United States.

His name will be registered on a special DO NOT SERVE website for the rest of his natural life plus 44 years.

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