My husband and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary at the end of August; and because we’ll be noting that milestone with a two-week cruise later this year, we kept the celebration on the actual day rather low-key. We opted for a nice dinner out, deciding to try a restaurant in nearby Ashland that’s been on our radar for a while.

An article in the local paper just a week before our anniversary announced that local chef Billy Buscher had just been named 2016 Iron Chef of Oregon, having won that competition at the recent Bite of Oregon in Portland. That clinched our choice: Chef Buscher’s restaurant is Alchemy Restaurant and Bar in the Winchester Inn, a charming boutique hotel and the very place we’d been saying we needed to try. The restaurant and inn sit just a few blocks from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, making them popular with out-of-towners and offering food, drinks and accommodations of excellent quality. The bar offers an interesting array of craft cocktails along with the usual libations, and the wine list, spanning more than 20pages, offers an impressive selection for such a small establishment, mostly Oregon and Northwest wines from smaller production, boutique wineries, but most world wine regions are ably represented. General manager Drew Gibbs is also a certified sommelier, and his list has garnered Alchemy Wine Spectator‘s Restaurant Award for the past eight years.

For this special evening we determined to order from each course, and I went all in with my choice for the first: seared foie gras with house-made crème fraîche, truffled grapes, endive and almond brittle. It was pure, unadulterated decadence, with the endive and grapes offering textural counterpoints to the foie gras.

Harry thoroughly enjoyed his panko-crusted Dungeness crab cake, moist and light alongside the candied bacon, lemon thyme cream and heirloom tomato which accompanied it. I lightened up — slightly — on my second course, opting for the butter lettuce salad served with herbed goat cheese; beet wedges; candied sunflower seeds; and a delicious, light honey, tarragon and shallot vinaigrette.

Harry allowed me a spoonful of his seasonal grilled sweet corn soup with basil, a delicious mouthful of summer. Knowing it would be rich, I went against my better judgment and chose for my entrée the seared duck breast and duck leg confit served with a yellow beet purée, duck fat-cooked purple potatoes, Humbolt Fog goat cheese, grapefruit, citrus blonde frisée and huckleberries.   It was indeed as rich as it was beautifully presented, and, again, the combination of flavors and textures offset each other wonderfully. Harry’s halibut was also a lovely and
satisfying dish, served up with prosciutto and microgreens and set in a pool of an heirloom tomato sauce.

And how can you have a celebratory dinner without dessert? At least this time I didn’t choose the fabulous-sounding but really-this-round-just-too-rich chocolate cake and instead finished with a generous, refreshing helping of lemon sorbet. Harry ordered the beautiful and surprisingly light strawberry corn cake. Small squares of the brûléed sweet corn cake were served with raspberry-infused strawberries, lemon balm and lime ricotta whipped cream.

Our dinner at Alchemy provided a perfect way to mark our special day; I’m confident we won’t need a similarly notable occasion to find an excuse to dine there again.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor