L'Affaire Gourmande

(Nate's and Kent's Secret Dining Club)

    We (Nate and Kent) love food and we love wine.  More importantly, we love each other, we love the culinary arts, and we relish dining above most other pastimes.  

    We believe that Tavern on Kruse has become a great restaurant and we are proud of everything that makes its way from the kitchen to the table. That said, we cannot deny that our artistic passions are bridled by needing to turn a profit in a city which consistently ranks "The Olive Garden" in the top dozen restaurants among 160 in our city.

     Nate, who spent 4.5 years working for one of the greatest chefs in the world, Laurent Gras, and Kent, who has spent much of the last three decades studying wines of the world from the comforts of his own wine glass, need to exercise our wings.  We miss the period when we, together, won "Top 100 Fit For Foodies Restaurants in the United States" awards three consecutive years among 13,000 restaurants as judged by 5 Million votes.  We miss the hours of pairing wines to intricate dishes, discussing textures and flavors while sitting outside Uptown on a summer day, eating deep-fried Spanish sand eels and sipping Cotes du Gascogne as if they were curly fries and beer. Tavern's increased share of the "foodie" niche in Lake Oswego becomes more obvious with every menu change - the chatter and the compliments confirm it - and so both Nate and Kent remain resolute in providing every resident of our great town a menu that THEY find fulfilling while we slowly, cautiously introduce increasingly creative menus.

     We will pick a Tuesday or Wednesday night once in a while and do what we love.   Ours is an invitation-only dining club meant to enthrall "experiential diners" rather than simply satisfy people who "know what they want."  Our menus will be based solely upon Nate's and Kent's creative whims and therefore we unapologetically span nature's food chain, rarely offer substitutions, maintain no predictability, and prove that we have no reason behind this than to celebrate our collective enthrallment with food and wine and sitting with people who matter.  We will announce our "L'Affaire Gourmande" dinner dates at least 3-5 weeks in advance- and reservations can be made at that time.  We will announce a rough menu approximately one week in advance and any cancellations will be expected within 24 hours. The wines will be announced the "night of" for last-minute pairing reasons.  Our target price for these five-course dinners will be $80-$110/pp with wines paired to each dish and will vary depending upon our costs for the night. Also, please know that we may or may not combine your twosome with another twosome to fill a four-top table; our experience being that such matchmaking invariably proves new friends to be as much reason for celebration as new culinary finds.

     We are chomping at the bit, so...

     It is with that introduction, that Nate and Kent invite you (and few others) to join their secret dining society, "L'Affaire Gourmande."    If you would like to be invited to our "unadvertisable" dinners at Tavern, please fill in the information below. 

 

          Cheers,

          Kent Lewis & Chef Nathan Bates