Chad Montrie, Variance – A Multi-Course Tasting Menu In Your Home

#RealPeopleRealFood

This month, Butcher Boy’s guest blog focuses on the opportunity to book your own private dining event with Variance. Variance is…A pop-up restaurant. A catered party. A private dinner. Our guest blog series highlights our customers’ recipes, inspiration, and enjoyment of great food. For our latest posts and updates from our guest contributors, follow #RealPeopleRealFood on Instagram.

Variance is a lot of things, but what chef Chad Montrie aims to do consistently is serve exceptional food. Chad focuses on presenting fresh, seasonal, and fruit/vegetable-forward dishes. Variance’s cuisine is an inspired take on New American preparation with a Mid-South twist.

Although you wouldn’t want to cook and eat one (believe me, I’ve tried), a channeled whelk has at least a few things going for it. Among others, the sea snail’s shell puts pattern variation on full display. Years ago, when I was trying to come up with a name for my venture into the culinary universe, a friend picked up a whelk shell from the beach and brought it to the house. And there it was. The shell embodied how I like to cook, holding to tradition but making it current, changing dishes without straying too far. I want what I know about classical French cuisine and Mid-South foodways to be fully present in the dishes I prepare, but always with a twist. So, I called what I was doing “Variance,” and I took the channeled whelk for its symbol.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky (by way of Montreuil, France to Québec to Toledo, Ohio) and moved to New England in 2002. To make a living, I am a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where I teach a range of courses, including one on Food in American History. But I’ve also worked at Boston-area restaurants, including Café du Pays, in Cambridge, and Asta, in the Back Bay. The chef and owner at Asta, Alex Crabb, has taught me much of what I know about cooking. Drawing on this experience, next summer (2022), I’ll resume plans that the pandemic interrupted and operate a seasonal pop-up restaurant in Onset, on Cape Cod. In the meantime, I’ll be doing private dinners around Boston and in the Merrimack Valley. I can cook and serve a multi-course tasting menu in your home for up to fifteen people—a safe and comfortable alternative to dining out.

Although the Variance tasting menu ranges from course to course, and the dishes necessarily vary according to your taste, the focus is on what’s local, seasonal, fresh, and delicious. Radish with smoked haddock pâté and fried dulse. Roasted tomato soup with basil and lemon verbena oil. Butterhead bibb with tahini citrus vinaigrette and grapefruit. Pickled golden beets with dill cream and fried chicken skin. Brown sugar Cornish hen with buttermilk grits and smoked mushrooms. Lamb chops with shredded brussels sprouts and toasted hazelnuts. Lime sorbet with lime curd and pecan crumble. Almond cake with orange sauce and sweet mascarpone cream. Rosemary pine nut brittle. The list goes on.

To book your own private dining event, contact me by email (variancepopup@gmail.com) or phone (617-870-3809). We can discuss the kind of dinner you’d like to have, the food you’d like to feature, as well as the where and when of it. I’d love to play with convention and invention for you.