Peninsula Grill: Served with Style

Peninsula Grill: Served with Style by Graham Dailey; Melissa Bigner; Brys Stephens. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780615696881.

Peninsula Served with Style. Published in 2012. 246 pages. Since the mid-1990s, Planters Inn and Peninsula Grill have thrived in an 1850s stucco building steps away from Charleston, South Carolina’s historic City Market. Peninsula Served with Style shares the story of how the Relais & Châteaux restaurant catapulted onto the national dining scene with accolades from Esquire, Bon Appétit, The New York Times, Southern Living, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine—which named it one of America’s top 50 hotel restaurants—and secured its place there. Epicureans are in for a world-class treat, thanks to scores of many never-before-revealed recipes for the Mobil four-star and AAA four-diamond restaurant’s sumptuous dishes, sides, and legendary sauces. And fans of Peninsula Grill’s succulent grilled steaks, chops, and fillets learn the chef’s secret marinade and his basting tips, while sweet-tooth gourmands get instruction on how to prepare the pastry team’s divine desserts—including, of course, the famed Ultimate Coconut Cake. Oenophiles are in luck, too, as they meet the city’s foremost sommeliers and are invited into Peninsula Grill’s famed wine cellars, where a cache of stunning international labels await. Backstage stories abound, as well, from how the restaurant’s founding chef worked his way to a cook-off on Iron Chef to how the current chef guest-starred in the James Beard kitchens. Readers also learn how its first pastry chef created a coconut cake so praised by Martha Stewart that it yielded its own cottage industry, and how the wait staff established a style of service so graceful that it became the standard-bearer for fine dining in the region. And the tales stretch beyond the culinary world.