Wednesday, November 16, 2005

A MOM-AND-POP AFFAIR--The Tasting Room (NY PRESS)



Between 10 and 11 every morning, chef Colin Alevras heads to the local Greenmarket to pick out that day's ingredients. But first he drops off his three-year-old son Lincoln at the neighborhood nursery school. Then, with bursting bags in hand, he heads back to the Tasting Room, the tiny East Village restaurant that he and his wife, Renee, built with their own hands six years ago. Renee is usually there by then, paying bills, fielding reservations and generally managing things, all with their newborn baby, Beatrice, strapped to her chest in a harness.

In the notoriously high-pressure restaurant business, couples working together are the exception—the mom-and-pop restaurant model is an old one, but a hard one to follow. Yet Renee and Colin Alevras have managed to carve out a life that includes both a thriving restaurant and a growing family. "Not everybody is prepared to work with their spouse," says Colin, a tall man in his mid-30s with a shaved head, wire-rimmed glasses and the air of a slightly goofy teenager. "Working with your spouse creates new joys and new pressures. It brings grievances, petty and otherwise, to the forefront." He holds his daughter Beatrice in his arms and rocks her back and forth. "But we really love doing this. It's a life. Our jobs aren't separate from our lives. This is it. This is what we do."

"You lose your ability to do anything else," says Renee, a small woman, also in her mid-30s. "This is all we talk about." She looks at Beatrice, who's staring at the ceiling fan. "Actually, now that we have kids, we do have something else to talk about. I am that person now, the one who's always talking about her kids."

The two met at cooking school in 1993, while washing dishes in the pantry. Renee was 23 and Colin was 21. Renee had graduated from Columbia a year earlier with a bachelor's degree in architecture. Colin came to cooking school by way of construction work, a year studying photography and a year at one of "the last real hippie schools," as he calls it, traveling by school bus and studying environmental education.

After working at several restaurants in New York, the couple flew to Paris "to go see what people were doing over there," Colin says. They spent several weeks traveling and eating before ending up as apprentices at Arpege, which had just received its third Michelin star.

"That whole trip was also an experiment in cohabitation," says Colin. "If we could spend four months in a country where we didn't speak the language, didn't know anyone else and didn't kill each other, we knew we had a chance."

Soon after, the couple returned to the United States and got married. They knew that they eventually wanted to open a restaurant, so they started to plan. Rene moved into management so that she could run the front of the house and the business side. Colin studied to become a sommelier, and her worked at Daniel as the cellar master and as a private chef to a UN ambassador, which taught him "how to please people." In the fall of 1999, they opened the Tasting Room.

"We had nothing to lose," says Renee. "No money, no apartment, no kids. Now the stakes have gotten much higher."

The restaurant sits near the corner of 1st St. and 1st Ave., across from a playground where their young son plays with his preschool classmates. The seating area is fronted with glass, and the interior walls are made from red brick. Crumpled pencil drawings of Irish landscapes hang on walls above sleek-yet-simple chairs and tables, enough to seat 25 people. The restaurant, including the basement kitchen and the ceiling wine loft, measures just 750 square feet.

"It's hard to escape in a restaurant so small," says Colin, "You can only lock yourself in the bathroom for so long." And yet the diminutive scale of the restaurant is what gives him the freedom to change his menu daily, depending on his mood and what's available at the Greenmarket. On a recent night, the menu included honey-cap mushroom soup with raw goat-milk cheese, scallions and popcorn; and Montauk scorpion fish with green zebra tomatoes, leeks, crosnes and Rocambole garlic.

The intimate nature of the space also allows Renee to shower their guests with personal attention. "Our guests know us," she says. "They become our friends."

The best part of running your own restaurant? "We can do what we want, when we want to," says Renee. "We're closed four weeks a year, and we're open only five nights a week. When we first opened, we were open six nights a week. Then we cut back to five. That's how I got pregnant," she says with a laugh.

"I could just lock the door, if I wanted, and stop," says Colin. "It's a bizarre comfort. I could just make it stop."

Renee looks surprised, and then laughs. "That's so funny," she says. "Because I think it's the exact opposite; because we run it, we can't quit."

Colin shrugs. "I'm the apocalyptic one."

"I think what makes it work," he says, "is that we have separate areas of expertise—there's a clear division of labor."

"But because we've both cooked and worked the floor, we have empathy for one another" says Renee.

Colin smiles and passes the baby. Beatrice is hungry, and so Renee grabs a shawl, throws it over her shoulder and commences to nurse.

The Tasting Room72 E. 1st St. (betw. 1st & 2nd Aves.)212-358-7831

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