Sonsie is the Apple of the Back Bay’s Eye

By Sandra Miller
Back Bay Sun

The Thanksgiving table is filled with lots of high-maintenance dishes. Here’s an easy but decorative salad for the Turkey Table, as well as year round.

Sonsie’s Stacked Apple Spinach Salad is easy to make and looks fabulous, with slices of apple alternating with spinach leaves, and sprinkled with walnuts, blue cheese, oil and vinegar, and and grilled pepper bacon. It’s quick to make, and perfect for the Thanksgiving table.

The salad is on Sonsie’s executive chef Bill Poirier’s new apple-tizer menu, which features five items made with their seasonal ingredient, apples. “It’s kind of like Iron Chef,” he says. In the summer, they did the same with crab, and in the spring it was asparagus.

The French onion soup is made with apple cider, apple brandy, and some julienned apples sharing the bowl with carmelized onions. It’s sweet mixed with the topper of gruyere on toast, hearty yet bright. Another appetizer features four sea scallops browned in a buerre blanc/apple cider sauce, paired with granny smith sliced and spiced with cinnamon, clove and curry. The smoked shrimp is brined in apple cider, and paired with with a vanilla bean and endive salad. And even the pork cheeks are seared and braised in pork stock and cider for three hours until tender.

Poirier learned how to cook from his Italian grandmother, and later at Johnson and Wales; he was one of the famous alumni chefs, along with Gordon Hamersley, Jasper White, and Lydia Shire at the Bostonian Hotel’s Seasons. He’s also cooked in Providence, Washington DC, Florida, and Tokyo, until opening Sonsie with Lyons Group’s Patrick Lyons and CEO Ed Sparks 15 years ago.

He’s still making local favorite steak au poive and spicy thai stirfry noodles, but he and his crew area always looking to keep things fresh by offering a mix of comfort items and more complex offerings. “Over the years, the customer base have changed,” says Poirier. People are more educated. We have to keep pace.” He says the prices are lower than a high-end restaurant, suiting its café atmosphere they describe as “relaxed yet sophisticated.”

He loves that Sonsie has become the neighborhood spot for Back Bay. “We get foodies, Berklee students, tourists, and repeat customers. I try to keep them coming back. I want them to find something on the menu that will make them happy.”

Sonsie will also be working to make Thanksgiving happy for locals. They’ll be open on Thanksgiving; the day before, they’re making dinner for the nearby firehouse crew.


Stacked Apple Spinach Salad with Walnuts, Blue Cheese and Pepper Bacon

Ingredients

(for each serving -- adjust for your number of guests)

1 small apple, core removed but unpeeled (preferably a red apple for drama – Cortland, mac, fuji) (You can also use a pear.)

1 cup baby spinach leaves

2 tb toasted walnut halves (toss with olive oil and salt, place on cookie sheet in 350-degree oven until golden throughout)

3 Tb crumbled blue cheese (high quality, such as Great Hill from Marion, Mass, or gorgonzola or Roquefort)

1 Tb julienne red onion

2 Tb extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp cider vinegar, (chef first reduced cider, and blended with more cider for more punch)

salt and pepper to taste

2 strips pepper bacon, grilled. (If you can’t find peppered bacon, buy whole double-smoked or cobb-smoked bacon, slice it yourself and add pepper. Grill, not fry, bacon.)
Method:

Thinly slice apples to 1/8 “ thickness horizontally. Keep together to retain apple shape. (Chef used a mandolin, but a sharp French knife will work.)
Arrange, alternately layering apple with spinach leaves, to reform the apple stack.
Sprinkle salad with remaining ingredients.

“It’s such a simple salad,” says Poirier. “The freshness of the ingredients will shine through.” He suggested such variations as using Asian fruit with soy dressing, and adding grilled shrimp or scallops. “Simple can go in any direction.”

Poirier says this recipe gets pretty popular. “We sell so many of these it’s off the hook. Once one or two goes out (into the restaurant), others see it and we get a run on them.”