Corned Beef

Warm on rye, with sauerkraut and Russian dressing, it becomes a Rueben. Smoked and seasoned it becomes pastrami. So how Irish is it? Kinda Lower East Side-Irish, it turns out, where salt-cured brisket substituted for unavailable old-country bacon-joint at the Easter feast. Once the treat that marked the end of the Lenten season, corned beef is now the talismanic ritual meal suturing the Celtic Diaspora on Saint Patrick’s Day, when Chef Rich will again serve his, simmered in corning spices with cabbage, potatoes and leeks and served with roasted carrots, cipollini onions and Dijon horseradish cream. The “corn” in the name comes from the pellets or grains of salt rubbed on the meat (in the days before refrigeration) to preserve it over the winter. Salt-water is used today, with Prague powder added to the brine to tenderize the meat and make it that nice, nitrate-y pink. Root vegetables make waspy Rich’s corned beef a lot like the traditional New England “boiled dinner,” but then Sage is no Four Corners . For that, you have 17th Street . Erin go bragh!

Prime Rib

If you gave up meat for Lent, stop reading. If, however, you have cannily but not-without-real-hardship given up chocolate or i-tunes, continue--for now you can finally sit down to your prime rib dinner free from holiday duties, dishes or in-laws. The menu at Sage Eastbluff now includes Natural Beef Prime Rib. Natural Beef is the grower, “prime” the real estate (ribs 6 through 12) as well as the grade. The roast is boned and tied with a half-inch blanket of fat over sliced onions and fresh thyme, seasoned with Chef Rich’s semisecret rub—salt (type withheld, probably important), garlic, onion, oregano—and rested, like a portly visiting dowager. The next day it’s roasted for 30 minutes (turned once) at 550°, not to “seal in the juices” (Alton Brown has shown us no such action occurs), but to form a crust and tenderize the meat. Then it’s cooled, sliced, and finished on the grill to your preferred degree of doneness. Served with grilled Portobello mushroom and spinach, fried, parmesan-crusted fingerling potatoes, beef jus, and Dijon horseradish cream. God bless us every one!

Green Garlic

The teeming eccentric unacknowledged progeny (or bulb-lets) of the deceptively self-contained tissue-wrapped garlic bulb, too small to bother peeling and so discarded at harvest, aren’t any longer. Solicitously collected and replanted under thick mulch, they send up shoots in early spring. Only then are the immature bulbs, no larger than a green onion, plucked from the earth and carted to market. Mild but unmissable, green garlic’s influence on the Sage menu is potent. Sage on the Coast treated guests to a green garlic soup with bacon, shrimp and parmesan croutons (where were you?), which became, alternatively (here tap twice with magic wand on inverted toque): green garlic and shrimp pizza with pesto and pea tendrils. Roasted green garlic and mustard greens punched up the winter-hearty red-wine braised beef shortribs at Sage Eastbluff, while a green garlic-roast turnip-Swiss chard sauté accompanied the fresh herb-grilled Hawaiian swordfish with lemon caper butter. Ravishingly understated, green garlic continues on the menu through spring.

Grind

Veterans of Sheboygan Days perk up with the smiling admonition (prairie shibboleth? moribund jingle?), “Don’t call them sausages!” when they see brats on the menu. Sage’s special spicy bratwurst, poached in dark beer, topped with crispy fried onions and served with a whole grain mustard-beer sauce and farmers’ market kabocha squash or lima beans, are custom-made by Jeff Linton at Santa Fe Natural Sausage Co. Jeff, a butcher by trade, had a little shop in the Palisades near Gladstone ’s. But he was wholesaling fish to the brood of Pelican-monikered restaurants around L.A. when he met Chef Rich at Stanley ’s in Sherman Oaks in the early 1980’s. His experience hand-grinding, -tying, and delivering fresh, all-natural sausages to a list of not-to-be-named celebrities led to his current artisanal adventure, supplying restaurants with sausages created just for their menu and clientele: Southwestern Chicken Cilantro, Santa Fe Turkey Jalapeño, Armenian Lamb with fresh mint. His chicken-basil-sundried tomato sausage has been part of the Sage Country Breakfast at Sunday brunch for years. Jeff creates in small batches, tinkering with flavors, using no preservatives or artificial casings. For him the differences between German wurst (pork and milk-fed veal, nutmeg, mace, milk, eggs) and Italian salsicca (coriander, anise or fennel) are not subtle. Sausage, already a gourmet product in first-century Rome, has endless varieties to draw from (kielbasa to saucisson, Spanish chorizo to Greek loukanika to Calabrian Nduja) and bottomless stores of regional pride and nativist standard-bearing to contend with (bologna, frankfurter, thuringer, vienna, toulouse, chiltern—though all began as a thrifty meal-to-go of blood, offal, fat, and meat bits for scrap-happy, basalt-trodding neoliths.) Chef Rich is currently grilling Jeff’s chicken Italian sausage and serving it on the small-plate menu with traditional Italian, pungently assertive, cruciferous leafy rapini, fingerling potatoes, baby artichokes and (so modest!) “red sauce.”
Eastbluff Shopping Center
2531 Eastbluff
Newport Beach, CA 92660
949.718.9650
 Crystal Cove Promenade
7862 East Coast Highway
Newport Beach, CA 92657
949.715.7243