Lautrec (August 2018) - The Most Elegant Restaurant on Property
My spouse and I dined at
Lautrec on a Saturday evening in mid-August 2018. The restaurant is open for dinner
only on Tuesdays through Saturdays, plus a buffet brunch on Sundays. (Lautrec
is closed for dinner on Sundays and all day Mondays.) In addition, the hotel hosts
“Lautrec in the Lobby”, where some light fare and drinks are available at from
the very small service bar in the Chateau Lafayette’s lobby bar on certain afternoons.
(The menu for Lautrec in the Lobby doesn’t really reflect the kind and quality
of food served at Lautrec, so we aren’t sure why it is called by a similar
name.) We made our dinner reservation via email to the hotel concierge.
In 1997, Lautrec opened in Nemacolin
Woodland’s Chateau Lafayette, the French castle-looking accommodations for the
resort. Guests from the Lodge can reach Lautrec via interior connecting
hallways; whereas guests from Falling Rock must use the hotel shuttle or their personal
vehicle. Lautrec occupies a spacious high-ceilinged room with well-spaced tables,
some of which share a four-sided, high-backed upholstered piece of furniture where
one diner from each party sits, with the other person seated on a regular
chair. Large windows on one side of the room offer views of the front flower
gardens. In honor of the restaurant’s name, six original Henri de Toulouse
Lautrec lithographs hang on the walls in the dining room, in addition, a Lautrec-inspired
painting hangs outside the main entrance. Patrons
can close their eyes and imagine being seated at Paris’s Moulin Rouge amidst
the plush furnishings and deep red color scheme; however, the Paris nightclub
wouldn’t have such lovely china, crystal, and linens! The handsome Lautrec Bar
is located on one side the dining room, made more private by the clever use of
furniture dividers; a lounge singer entertains on certain evenings. But for the
ultimate dining experience, you can eat in the kitchen so that you can interact
with the chef and watch the staff at work. We chose the exclusive option of
dining in the gorgeously gleaming show kitchen, which boasts red accents and a
few framed canvases.
Guests
have several menu options, including a $115 four-course prix-fixe menu (diners
choose their dishes/courses, much like ordering from a regular a la carte menu),
a surprise menu option (called the “leap of faith”, where guests use an
old-time pen-and-inkwell to circle ingredients that they want the chef uses to select
their courses; note that guests do not receive any dishes that aren’t already
on the menu), or the $155 eight-course chef’s tasting menu (a multicourse meal
in which the chef makes all choices for the guest, unless they have allergies
or dietary restrictions). Wine pairings are available for an additional fee.
(Lautrec boasts a 1,200-bottle wine cellar.) A young adult menu is available;
however, the restaurant atmosphere is fairly formal and elegant, and younger
guests may not be comfortable sitting still and quiet for an extended period of
time. (The evening previously, during our dinner at Rockwell’s, a family with young
children [approximately age 2 and 4] dined near us; the children played around
and under the table while their parents dined, behavior that was tolerated in Rockwell’s
but would not have been acceptable in Lautrec.) In addition, business casual
dress is requested (no shorts or sandals) to enhance the dining experience.
We chose to dine in the
kitchen for the chef’s tasting menu, which we expected to cost $155 per person;
we were surprised when we received our bill to find that it was even more
expensive (about $225 per person). In addition, we were asked if we wanted to
add a foie gras supplement (for an additional $25 person), or a black truffle
supplement (for $40 each). But let’s get on to the good parts …
Spoiler alert: When we checked
in with the hostess at our appointed reservation time, she said our table
wasn’t quite ready, and she asked us to wait a few minutes. This was so that the
entire kitchen staff could assemble at the kitchen doors to greet us personally
and shake our hands! We do a lot of tasting dinners, and we occasionally dine in
the kitchen, but we have never received such a welcome as the one at Lautrec!
We were seated in the kitchen at
a butcher block table with high stools. (The table can accommodate four guests.)
Although we were presented with several choices of bubbly from the rolling champagne
cart, we declined and instead ordered two drinks from the bar (a gin-and-tonic
and a non-alcoholic iced tea). We received an amuse bouche from the chef to
prepare our palate, then a server delivered two kinds of butter and one kind of
honey to accompany a choice of five different breads. Our many courses were
well-paced and well-sized, and we liked them all. Particularly memorable were
the tiny soda bottle, the rolling candy/dessert/sweets cart, and the Mrs.
Butterworth’s syrup that Chef poured over the cheekily designed and named pancake
dessert. Executive
Chef Kristin Butterworth learned about
food in Italy and has worked at the Boulders Resort in Arizona, the Sea Island
Resort/Cloister Hotel in Georgia, and at the Inn at Little Washington in
Virginia in addition to being a featured chef at the James Beard House in NYC
and was a
semifinalist in their “Best Chef Mid-Atlantic” category. In addition, for the past 10 years,
Lautrec has earned a spot as a Forbes (previously Mobil) Five-Star and AAA
Five-Diamond restaurant, one of only 30 restaurants in the world to hold both distinctions.
After dinner, armed with
copies of the menu we had eaten and a box of sweets to go, we stopped at the
Lautrec bar for a cocktail so that we could listen to the lounge singer (whom
we could not hear in the kitchen). Our dinner at Lautrec was a memorable way to
celebrate a 50th birthday!
