GYPSY APPLE BISTRO – Shelburne Falls

“You ought to write about Gypsy Apple in Shelburne Falls,” my dentist told me. He and I have been talking food for nearly 20 years now and his instincts are right. I put it on my list, but for one reason or another it took until this summer for me to make it up there. I missed too many fine meals because of the delay. In the last three years, owner and chef Michelangelo Wescott, a Brooklyn native, has created one of the best restaurants in the Pioneer Valley: GYPSY APPLE BISTRO (65 Bridge St., Shelburne Falls, 625-6345).

The food is elegant without being effete. The chicken liver mousse is a good example. It arrives in a small crock, a bay leaf peeking through the layer of fat. It’s accompanied by a daub of grainy country-style Moutarde de Meaux, cornichons that are not poisonously sour like so many I’ve had, croustades and a spray of tiny red Champagne grapes. The mousse looks stunning and tastes delicious.

Even a salad gets special touches. A piece of cooked red beet tasting of dill, one sweet Sungold cherry tomato, one roast fingerling potato, a slice of cucumber, a slice of creamy blue cheese and a mild salad dressing over butter lettuce – all speak to care and style.

Wescott has been cooking for 20-plus years. He got his start in Brooklyn, and put in stints in the Poconos and St. Maarten. It was in the Caribbean, cooking at a resort owned by a retired porn star, he says, that he met several chefs from the Pioneer Valley who convinced him to have a look. He liked what he saw enough to move here with his family, and he worked in a series of places including Green Street Café in Northampton before opening Gypsy Apple Bistro in April 2007.

The menu changes every four weeks to keep pace with what is seasonal, so the meal my wife and I and our intrepid friend Betsy had in August will be somewhat different from what Gypsy Apple is offering in September. Still, it will give you a sense of what to expect. We started with the aforementioned chicken liver mousse, an order of crab cakes with a French remoulade, and a tomato soup. The crab cakes were gently seasoned and filled with shredded crab. The soup, made with roasted tomatoes, was thick and rich and served with a dollop of pesto and a slice of Brie. A few drops of balsamic or some sea salt would have been welcome, but that is the problem with setting the bar so high: Your diners want perfection in every dish.

The rolls, served with an olive-caper tapenade, were fantastic and came on locally made bread plates. We’d originally planned to try the roast chicken, which is a good test of a restaurant, but my wife made a last-minute jump to an excellent shrimp in green curry, leaving me with the seafood stew: a mix of shrimp, mussels, scallops, two kinds of fish, a piece of corn and some fingerling potatoes in a spicy tomato broth. The seafood was fresh and I spooned up the remaining broth with gusto. Our third dish was gnocchi in a wild mushroom and truffle oil sauce with several large shavings of Parmesan cheese. The sauce for the gnocchi tasted richly of the mushrooms, but the gnocchi were a little heavy, and I heard Wescott talking to another couple about them. He sent them a dessert to make up for it. That is the response you want from your restaurant.

The desserts were intensely rich: a deep chocolate pot de crème garnished with berries and unsweetened whipped cream, a crème caramel that was like a vanilla version of the pot de crème, and a peach crisp with vanilla ice cream that I could barely pry away from Betsy long enough to taste.
Much has been written about Gypsy Apple in the local press so Wescott was reluctant to go over his biography one more time. Instead, I posed questions inspired by the “Top Chef Masters” finale: What dish made you want to be a cook? What was your first signature dish?

Wescott immediately jumped back to his Brooklyn roots, to a veal stew his mother made that was redolent with carrots and more, served with a dollop of sour cream over egg noodles. Not your average mac ‘n’ cheese.

He also mentioned a layered polenta and duck dish he made at Green Street: “I nailed that one.” Many chefs talk with their hands and he traced the size of the terrine in which he cooled the polenta before slicing it. “I did a duck and cassis reduction over the terrine,” he said. He recently filmed a Valentine’s Day segment for the “Katie Brown Workshop” show on PBS and it should be fun watching him cook.

Wescott is an avid fan of farmers markets. This time of year, he gets up to 90 percent of his vegetables from the markets and Foster’s Market in Greenfield. We talked about the difficulties of sourcing local meat on a large scale. “I’ll go through 50 steaks in a week,” he said. “It’s hard to find a local farm that can supply that.” He does use a naturally raised chicken, even though he needs to order through commercial sources.

Gypsy Apple is open for dinner Tuesday through Sunday, from 5 to 9 p.m. There is a good wine list and some local beers. Reservations are recommended, especially for the weekend. The trip to Shelburne Falls was shorter than we expected, so we walked over the Bridge of Flowers while we waited. You might try to get there earlier and browse the Lamson & Goodnow store for some knife bargains or stop in at one of the galleries that dot the town.

Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, September 4, 2009