The original chef at the Greenwich Delamar will be the executive chef at the still to be named restaurant at the Delamar Southport hotel.
Frederic Kieffer was the executive chef who helped Charles Mallory, the owner of the Delamar Southport, open Delamar at Greenwich Harbor”™s accompanying restaurant, L”™Escale. Kieffer then became the executive chef of Gaia restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, which is now Morello Italian Bistro.
“It worked out very nicely that Fredric was available at the right time and actually living in Fairfield,” Mallory said. “We are very happy to be working together again and a great opportunity for us. His sensibility and style works very well with what we are looking to do here. We are very confident in what he can do in and out of the kitchen. There will be things on the menu that you are familiar and comfortable with, but they are going to taste better than you have ever had them before; that is what we are looking to do here.”
The restaurant will serve breakfast, lunch and dinner and is scheduled to open this spring. Mallory said the restaurant”™s name would be a play on words, though it is still being debated.
Kieffer is a Parisian-born and trained chef who has strong ties to the farm-to-table movement which he help forge with Bill Taibe, owner and chef of Le Farm restaurant in Westport. Kieffer said he would be obtaining large portions of his ingredients from produce to seafood from privately owned farms from Maine to the Hudson Valley.
“Our plan for the food is to be very sustainably based, it will be an American cuisine with strong farm to table and seafood elements,” Kieffer said. “We have a local mission and there will be a strong focus on the ingredients, and definitely an influence of French provincial cuisine.”
Kieffer said he plans to offer a more intimate and personal approach to his cuisine by being present in the dining area and giving patrons a better sense of the ingredients and stories behind how and where they are obtained.
Mallory said rather than mimicking the Mediterranean cuisine and style of the sister location in Greenwich, the Southport restaurant is more in the style of European countryside with large iron doors and a 9-foot-high, white porcelain wood burning stove, imported from Sweden. The restaurant also has a courtyard patio terrace, which extends the dining and hosting areas to outdoors in the warmer months. The restaurant will seat 30 at the bar and 100 in the main dining room.
“We look forward to having a similar kind of relationship to the business professionals in this area as we have in Greenwich,” Mallory said. “This is a great location, pulling from Fairfield, Westport and, of course, Southport, and a place where a lot of the leadership of the companies in the area live. We want them to all know we are here.”
