If I might select anybody on the earth to host me for a cocktail party, it might be Martha Stewart.
She is, in any case, one of many world’s premiere home entertainers, so there’s no query the occasion could be epic. And whereas this precise expertise will most likely ceaselessly stay a pipe dream, I really got here fairly darn near dwelling it once I was invited to hitch Stewart for a chat at her Las Vegas restaurant, The Bedford. Throughout our temporary however fruitful sit down, I managed to snag some main entertaining suggestions from the long-lasting life-style guru—together with her favourite low-cost, low-lift method to zhuzh up a seated dinner.
Stewart’s surprising banquet trick includes, of all issues, a humble potato. Extra particularly, it includes selecting up a fresh-out-of-the-oven baked ‘tater with a scorching glove and smashing it down onto a chopping board. “I’ve smashed potatoes tableside at residence since I purchased my home in Maine about 18 years in the past,” says Stewart. “It’s a easy, really scientific factor to do. It breaks up the fiber.”
The Bedford’s menu, Stewart tells me, is impressed by issues she serves at residence, so it needed to characteristic her signature smashed potato. The restaurant’s model is a jumbo oven-roasted Yukon Gold potato completed with butter, salt and pepper, and served with creme fraiche, chives, and bacon lardons. For the actually decadent, Golden Osetra Caviar can also be added. “It is completely scrumptious,” Stewart tells me. “The truth that no person’s ever finished it in a restaurant earlier than is bizarre.”
“It is completely scrumptious. The truth that no person’s ever finished it in a restaurant earlier than is bizarre.” —Martha Stewart
This smashing presentation isn’t the one tableside occasion featured at The Bedford, both, and Stewart tells me the others are honest sport for copycatting at residence, too.
The roast hen, for instance, is carved tableside. However even simply serving The Bedford’s model sans fanfare could be sufficient to impress your visitors—it’s significantly probably the most scrumptious hen I’ve ever tasted. Whereas the restaurant isn’t keen to half with the proprietary recipe utilized by its chef, they inform me the preparation is a two-day course of, beginning with a salt rub and ending with an herb stuffing below the pores and skin and a butter coating to roast. The completed chook is then served with an herb-roasted chicken jus.
Stewart tells me you possibly can seize her favourite cocktail shaker and duplicate The Bedford’s tableside Martha-tini in your personal residence, too. “It is enjoyable to see any individual shake and shake a martini, after which make enjoyable of Tom Cruise—keep in mind Dangerous Enterprise?—doing the bartending,” she says. (Sadly, I am really sufficiently old to do not forget that film, however Stewart tells me not to worry, because age isn’t *a thing*.) Tableside bartending is, after all, one thing she does at her own residence—of which the restaurant’s eating room is a near-exact reproduction of.
All this discuss of Stewart’s party-throwing prowess, coupled with my adoration of completely each phrase that comes out of her mouth, has me extra determined than ever to be invited over to hers. In fact, I’m removed from alone on this want, and Stewart’s depth of expertise taking part in hostess is why she’s so assured within the continued success of The Bedford. “I assumed, ‘That is most likely a great way to entertain the general public’,” she says. “As a result of all people loves coming to my home for dinner.”
“I assumed, ‘That is most likely a great way to entertain the general public’,” Stewart says. “As a result of all people loves coming to my home for dinner.”
I wager they do, Martha. I. Guess. They. Do.