“For me, comfort food is slow food and that’s really what I embrace,” says the steakhouse’s chef de cuisine Shad Newton, who was raised in the Sierra Nevada Mountains eating “down-to-earth” dishes like black-pepper roasts with root vegetables that his mom, a descendent of dairy farmers, frequently cooked for the family.
“Now, I take all the techniques and everything I’ve learned working in super refined restaurants and apply them to the things I grew up on. I’m stilling doing that food, 100 percent,”
Newton says. Mr. Lyons’ French onion soup falls squarely between comfort and refined. He caramelizes the onions with butter and herbs for a few hours before deglazing them with sherry and Marsala wine. “The goal is to get those sugars out,” says the chef, who adds that the soup’s veal stock base is the culmination of two cooking processes that take almost 24 hours in total.