grilled roasted garlic studded pastured MA Beef Tenderloin with sour cream whipped potatoes and orange bearnaise.

This dish has been on our menu since we opened in June of ’98. Yeah, that’s 25 years of making the same dish over and over again. We have perfected it.

I came up with this dish while I was still the chef of The Bostonian Hotel and it’s since closed, highly acclaimed restaurant Seasons. I was roasting lamb legs for a sandwich we had on the lunch menu, for extra flavor we would poke holes in the meat and stuff them with garlic before popping them into the oven. While the legs roasted the garlic would also cook seeping mellow sweet slightly caramelized garlic flavor into the meat. This process got me thinking about doing the same thing with individual beef tenderloin steaks. Since the beef would cook much faster than the lamb, I thought that using garlic that was already roasted would work with similar results. I was right, this dish is fantastic. The dish never made on to the Seasons menu, it came close though. I was planning on adding it to the fall menu when I decided that after almost 10 years at the hotel it was time for me to move on and open my own place. I knew then that this dish was coming with me and would be the star of EVOO’s menu for the foreseeable future, I was right.

The pastured beef we use is almost exclusively from Carne Locale, a Waltham, MA, based company, run by Andy Carbone. Andy works directly with Massachusetts livestock farms distributing their products to some of the areas finest restaurants.

The vegetable accompaniments change with as the local growing seasons change. Depending on the time of year you can get it served with carrots, mushrooms, broccoli, asparagus or as we are now serving it with green beans.

An testament to the love that this dish receives, my wife has often commented, hopefully jokingly, that she would “dump my ass” if I ever took it off the menu. So it remains…