The Coach House Mushrooms a la Grecque (1980)

Today’s dish is from Benson & Hedges Presents Entertaining with Style, Recipes from Great American Restaurants. I love this cookbook because, like the Campbell’s Great Restaurants Cookbook, USA, so many of the restaurants no longer exist. It’s a little glimpse into the past and gives me a reason to do a little internet sleuthing–which I do enjoy! The best example of this may be the dinner I created for the release of the Jenna Blum book, The Lost Family. I think I fancy myself a bit of a food historian.

But back to the dish. This is from the Coach House in NYC. The restaurant was most famous for its black bean soup and corn sticks (I want that recipe!) as well as for its famous patrons–James Beard was a huge fan, dining at the Coach House every Christmas Eve.

After 44 years in business, The Coach House closed in 1993. The building sat vacant for years before Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich opened famed Italian eatery Babbo in 1998. Babbo still exists, but Crocs-lover Batali is no longer an owner. He sold all his shares of all of his restaurants with the Bastianich family once the sexual harassment scandal broke in 2017.

Apparently someone tried to open another Coach House in 1999 , but it closed, too. I have no idea exactly what year, but it is now the Avalon Hotel. 

This recipe pretty straightforward.

I made the mushrooms last month when my parents made a visit. We had a socially-distanced picnic at a local winery, Basignani.  It is a lovely little vineyard and they have excellent brick oven pizzas. If you happen to be in central Maryland, you should make a stop.

The resulting mushrooms were fine. They were bland. I know that these are marinated and not pickled, but I would have appreciated a little more tang to it than just the lemon juice. However, the texture was lovely.

I have another recipe from this cookbook in the queue, so keep an eye out.