Preview ConnecticutReprinted from “Preview Connecticut,” September 2003.
Photo by Nick Lacy. Preview Connecticut magazine can be accessed on the web at www.previewct.com.
The Good News:
Always Fresh, Carole Peck’s
Good News Café in Woodbury
By Janet Reynolds, Publisher & Senior Editor, Preview Connecticut, Hartford
One look at the menu of Carole Peck’s Good News Café and you suspect that the chef is something of a renegade. Talk to Peck for more than five minutes, and you’re sure of it.
A self-described old hippie, Peck, now 50, takes pride in testing the limits, in questioning authority, whether it’s culinary or political. Even her bus boys send a quiet but not particularly subtle message on red tee-shirts whose backs proclaim: “To your health. Eat well. Save the farm.”
Peck is a stocky woman with cropped graying hair. She is a straight talker who laughs easily, loves to read—“There are more magazines than should be allowed by law in our house,” she says at one point—and is opinionated on the tenor of the times. While she didn’t want her comments to be on the record, trust me, this woman has feelings—and can back them up with facts and statistics—about the man in the White House and the direction this country is taking.
That assuredness that comes from self-knowledge emanates everywhere—from her funky sea-glass blue glasses to the lime-green walls—from the red and yellow lava lamps to the food.
And diners reap the rewards night after night. Peck has won accolades aplenty, with features (many of them framed on the walls) in publications ranging from the New York Times and Connecticut Magazine to House Beautiful and Bon Appétit. Connecticut Magazine readers have voted her Woodbury restaurant the best place for desserts three times in recent years.
This is adventurous eating without being scary of off-putting. While Peck places a premium on local produce—organic wherever possible—she also leans heavily toward the unusual or offering a twist on the obvious.
Last month’s menu, for instance, featured an organic house salad with jicama, a legume also known as Mexican turnip and yam bean that’s popular in Mexico and south Texas. Grilled tuna was accompanied by a Sicilian stemperata sauce of celery, onions, garlic, green olives, capers, raisins and vinegar-roasted tomatoes and fingerling potatoes. A mixed meat grill featured lamb loin, wild boar chop, merquez sausage, crisp chicken liver, Vidalia onion, eggplant and asparagus with yucca fries.
The meal I ate began with pecan-crusted oysters with cherry, jicama, tomatillo salsa and chili aioli, a mixture that was absolutely out of this world. The sampling that quickly turned to complete gluttony also included a salad made from the hot new thing in the lettuce world—mache—but moved it beyond trendy to innovative by mixing it with fresh apricots, roast rhubarb and almond crumbs, topped with an almond oil and fruit vinaigrette. The Martha salad featured layered beets with avocado, peas and cucumber topped with horseradish cream and chive dressing.
Entrees included a mix of tofu, leeks, bok choy, green beans and sugar snap peas in a green curry coconut sauce, and a halibut fillet with horseradish crust on spinach and beet slices topped with matchstick potatoes. There was an unbelievable dessert, a peach and blueberry tart served warm with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. The whole experience was a culinary ride unlike many I’ve had before, ranging from subtle to surprising, all of it savory.
Raising the culinary bar is part of what Peck loves about her job. “I don’t want to turn people off to food,” says the woman who as a girl brought blood sausage sandwiches to school while her peers were eating peanut butter and jelly. “I want them to have a good experience so they will try things again.”
Peck admits she’s been helped in her quest by changes in eating habits over the years. Joe and Jane Diner have become more adventurous and savvy. She mentions those sublime pecan-roasted oysters as an example. “Ten years ago you couldn’t do that,” she says. “Now people who don’t even eat oysters will eat them.”
Which doesn’t mean Americans will try anything. “They’re adventurous to a point,” Peck says. She mentions never having been able to make people accept whole fish on a plate.
Sometimes experimenting means easing people in. Peck’s signature lobster macaroni is a case in point. A decidedly upscale twist on the comfort food concept so popular in recent years, Peck’s version features lobster and swiss chard baked with macaroni, imported provolone cheese and truffle oil sprinkle.
While many chefs cite their childhood as inspiration for their cooking, Peck is not among them. Her grandparents may have been Ukrainian immigrants, but Peck doesn’t lean toward Eastern European flavorings or mainstays.
She did have mashed potatoes every night during her youth. “That’s why I make such good ones,” she says.
Other than that, though, the food was unexceptional. “I was the black sheep,” she says. “Where did I come from?”
Peck got interested in cooking as a way to satisfy her creative edge after her parents nixed her dreams of going to art school to become a potter. “I feel like a composer,” she says of her artsy leanings. “I eat in my head. I don’t even have to taste the food.”
After starting out as a short-order cook, Peck took a fairly traditional route to her untraditional cooking. She was one of the first female graduates of the Culinary Institute of America. As a graduate, she found herself being offered pantry jobs rather than the more prestigious sous-chef positions.
Not content with that, Peck instead became a restaurant owner/chef when she was only 23. The restaurant was located in Fort Myers, Florida, and featured salads, healthy food and southern French cooking. She had this restaurant only two-and-a-half years before losing it in a fire. “Everything is a learning experience,” she muses.
Peck tried catering and wholesale for awhile in West Palm Beach—but found it to be too seasonal. Then she oversaw the Sea Pines Plantation Club in Hilton Head. From there she bounced to Cape Cod for more catering, then back to Florida to work at those swank clubs located at exclusive condo enclaves surrounding golf courses. Then it was on to Austin, Texas, to open La Provence, a restaurant that featured southern French cooking right in the heart of barbecue country.
Peck finally landed in Connecticut in the 1980s, where she first opened the eponymous Carole Peck’s in New Milford and, finally, Good News Café, which she opened in 1992.
She admits that 1992 was a crazy time to open a restaurant. The market had crashed and here she was opening a larger restaurant. “It was scary,” she says, “but I was confident I knew what people in Connecticut wanted.”
And what they wanted, Peck says, is good news—of all kinds. “When I opened it was about good news and listening to the radio and creating that whole feeling,” she says, referring to the dozens of antique radios lining a shelf near the ceiling. She says she’s had diners come in and recognize a particular radio from their youth. She recalls one man who said, “I listened to the baseball game with my father on that kind of radio.”
The name also celebrated the fact that Peck was back in business again—she took about a year off after selling Carole Peck’s—and that she was dedicating herself to promoting local produce and farms—and creating a sense of community within her restaurant.
Now for the legions of fans who travel long distances to taste Peck’s dishes, the good news continues. While she owns a home in Provence, France, with her husband, artist Bernard, and visits there at least three times yearly, Peck says she has no plans to sever her ties with the café.
“Good News is my final stop,” she says. Good news, indeed.
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