Round two with Pete List, exec chef of Beatrice & Woodsley

Lori Midson

This is part two of my interview with Pete List, exec chef of Beatrice & Woodsley. Part one of that chat ran yesterday.

How do you go about conceptualizing and developing new menus? When I write a menu, I focus on the seasons. I usually start thinking seriously about new items a few months in advance, and then I play around with ideas for specials, get feedback and make adjustments. I'll start the process with probably twice the number of items I need: Some make the cut, some get shelved for future reconsideration and some just suck. Once I have a general rough draft of the menu, there's more testing and tasting to refine each new dish until it gets it to the point where we're happy with them. It's a long process, what with writing recipes, costing out the dishes and formatting the menu, but I enjoy it a great deal -- at least most of the time.

Favorite dish on your menu: I really like the four-day guinea fowl. The dish is really simple and straightforward, yet it has all of the complexities that I like to play with. We brine the bird for four days to infuse a little extra flavor and moistness. The birds are then split and roasted and served on the bone alongside a warm salad of French lentils and farm vegetables that I get locally from Dew Farms in Longmont.

If you could put any dish on your menu, even though it might not sell, what would it be? I really enjoy working with offal, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a big demand for it in Denver -- or much interest at all for that matter. Grilled fresh lamb liver with a ragout of kidney, sour cherries, shallots and chanterelle mushrooms is a good example of a dish I'd love to put on the menu, but there are so many other possibilities and parts of the animal that are overlooked and underappreciated.

Favorite dish to cook at home? I don't often cook a full meal at home, and when I do, I tend to go with a simple roasted chicken or leg of lamb. I'm only cooking for one, so I keep it simple and make sandwiches with the leftovers.

You're making a pizza. What's on it? Spicy sausage, olives, oven-dried tomatoes and Pecorino.

Guiltiest food pleasure: There are so many things that I could call a "guilty pleasure," almost all of which contain fat in various forms. I love sausage, from the rendered fat that squirts out of a fresh sausage that's just came off the heat, to the delicious little nuggets of fat in a dry-cured/aged sausage. I love foie gras -- need I say more? -- and duck confit, cooked and stored in its own fat. I love duck rillettes; confit of duck cooked in even more fat until the meat can't possibly absorb any more; butter, which I use liberally; and my biggest weakness these days is ice cream. We make it in-house at the restaurant in many interesting flavors and, well, I have to taste them all. While it may sound like I survive on fat alone, I don't, and that's why I can call it a guilty pleasure. Ice cream, on the other hand, is an every day indulgence, even though my weight is still less than 200 pounds.