Back in the early spring, Christopher Brewer had just spent a couple of weeks pulling apart and scrubbing the crowded kitchen at Elixir, the popular WRJ restaurant where he’d been head chef for almost seven years. Its longtime owners and guiding lights, Skip Symanski and Jane Carrier, had decided to close the doors, and Brewer needed to get it ready for a sale.

But then a remarkable thing happened. Symanski and Carrier called him in and asked if he’d like to take it over himself. “I didn’t have anything like that capital in hand,” he says, “so my immediate response was to wonder how I’m going to do this. And at the same time I was struggling with the question of how I could possibly work for anyone else after working for these guys.”

They sat down and decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign. “They put it out for $25,000, but in the end it brought in closer to $32,000,” Brewer says. “My jaw hit the floor.”

Which all came as a relief for Upper Valley diners dedicated to Elixir’s truffle fries, red curry coconut mussels, and other signature dishes. Brewer took the restaurant over and re-opened in June—though while his application for a liquor license had sailed through the process in Hartford, the state was dragging its feet. For the first month or so, Elixir—despite its popular bar—was strictly BYOB.

That wasn’t the only growing pain. Like most restaurants in the area, Brewer has struggled to find staff. “The business is there,” he says. “People have been coming to the door. But, say on a Friday or Saturday night before the pandemic Skip and Jane would have five servers on and we could do 120 people, now I haven’t been able to get five servers yet. I’m having to stop reservations, or not take walk-ins.” The crunch does appear to be easing slightly, he adds.

And he’s been careful about playing with the menu. “I tried to take the red curry coconut mussels off,” he laughs. “The mussels I put on were received well, but people were like, ‘They’re not as good as the red curry. You need the red curry back.’” It came back.

One thing he has not messed with is those truffle fries. In his ideal world, they would be a two-day production: hand-cut, soaked overnight to get the starch out, strained, blanched at 250 degrees for five minutes, set out to dry in the cooler… and only then would they be ready for frying. As it is, the kitchen doesn’t have the space. So the fries Brewer works with are pre-cut and pre-soaked, etc.

Christopher Brewer

So what would Brewer himself choose for dinner ? As a preface, here’s how he approaches his recipes: “It typically starts with the protein of the dish for me,” he says, “then depending on where I want to go I find a balance of what acids work well with the protein, what fats work well with it, and how to put them together and neutralize them in a way where it’s a clean flavor across the palate: it’s not too acidic and it’s not so buttery that it’s just like a bad viscous cream flavor in your mouth.”

It’s that balance he likes about his pork madeira. “If I had to pick one dish for dinner, it would be that,” he says. “We poach Bartlett pears in red wine and sugar for about an hour and a half. We then strain that and use that liquid as our sauce in the pork dish. So we heat a frying pan to a smoke point, season the pork chop, sear it on both sides, I’ll add some shallots, deglaze the pan with madeira, then add some of the poached pear liquid with a one-ounce ladle of veal glaze demi-glace, then we’ll pan roast that for about 10 minutes, flipping it once. We’ll then take it out of the oven, put it on a resting rack and reduce the sauce to about a half a cup. Then we’ll just put some cold butter in, swirl it around—it brings the sauce together—and pour it over the pork chop, with apricot and leek gratin, and with some good crumbled blue cheese. Winner, winner, pork chop dinner!”

— by Rob Gurwitt