When Aaron Philipson, the quieter of the husband-wife team that runs the Blue Bottle Cafe, sits down each season to create the restaurant’s new menu, it’s a sight to behold.
“Every dish is planned in his twisted little culinary mind,” wife Rory said. “Apparently he can taste these flavors before he even cooks.”
Like a writer impelled by a tight deadline, Aaron dreams up the Hopewell restaurant’s New American cuisine in a frenzy of last-minute creativity.
“We actually sit down three days before the menu is due, and he’ll just start going,” Rory said. “It’s like watching a mathematician figure out the world’s most challenging equation. It’s pretty intense to watch him. He’ll have one idea and then another, and then he’s almost rambling in thought and coming out with some of the most creative and balanced approaches to seasonal cuisine I’ve ever seen.”
Effusive praise is one thing coming from one’s wife, but another coming from the New York Times.
The Philipsons founded the Blue Bottle Cafe four years ago and found themselves mobbed by customers just two months after opening because of a rave review in the Times.
Rory can quote it from memory:
“You can take the measure of a man by the dough he makes. On the gnocchi scale, Aaron Philipson is quite a man,” Rory said.
Those two sentences helped make the Blue Bottle Cafe, the couple’s first restaurant, an overnight success, and gave gnocchi a permanent place on the restaurant’s ever-shifting menu.
The Philipsons, both graduates of the Culinary Institute of America and Ewing residents, started the restaurant in 2006 when they were 29 years old. Aaron creates the entrees, while Rory makes the desserts.
The current menu includes items like red roast pheasant leg with a scallion pancake, ginger sautéed spinach and baby bok choy. This season’s gnocchi, the 14th variation since the restaurant opened, is served with pork and beef bolongese and shredded piave cheese.
There’s seafood too, including seared yellowfin tuna served with a white bean puree, escarole, roasted red onions, gaeta olives and tomato fennel broth.
With the exception of bread from New York and sorbet from the Bent Spoon in Princeton, everything is made from scratch in the restaurant.
“It’s essentially seasonal ingredients in creative preparations,” Rory said.
But the food is only half the story. The Blue Bottle is named after the famous local blue bottle trees, many of which are created by a still-anonymous local artist.
Rory said that artist gave the restaurant a “blessing” to use the name, but declined to decorate a tree as a signpost.
Blue bottles are everywhere in the cozy restaurant, and a vast collection of them takes up an entire wall.
Rory said the idea for the theme came up during a discussion she was having with her mother, Joyce MacKay, over the name of the restaurant. Rory’s first idea was to call it Insolia, after a type of southern Italian grape, but her mother took a drive and found 37 Italian restaurants within 10 miles.
“Me and my mother actually had an argument at the kitchen table,” she said. “She did not like the name, Insolia. She did not want it to be an Italian sounding name. She kept saying she wanted it to sound more ‘Hopewell.’ She was snapping her fingers at me: ‘Hopewell! Hopewell! Hopewell!’ I pretty much blurted out, ‘What do you want me to call it, the Blue Bottle Cafe?’ She said, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s perfect!’”
Soon Joyce was decorating the place with her blue bottle collection. Customers have added to it over the years, and the Philipsons pick up interesting blue bottles when they see them on the road.
The old folk tradition of hanging up blue bottles in trees was meant to ward off evil spirits.
“That seemed like a pretty good idea for our first restaurant,” Rory said. It seems to have worked.
The Blue Bottle Cafe is located at 101 East Broad Street in Hopewell. For more information, or for reservations, call (609) 333-1710 or go online to thebluebottlecafe.com. The restaurant is open for dinner Tuesday through Thursday from 5 to 9 p.m. and Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m.
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