Cooking to Taste

Chef Didier Poirier, owner of Ventura’s 71 Palm restaurant, can’t promise that his students will have quite the results from an upcoming cooking class that a certain Nanci Kuhn had at one of his workshops five years ago.

“That’s how I met my wife, at a cooking class,” Poirier said.

Poirier met the woman who is now Nanci Poirier at a class on roasting goose while he was a chef at the Barzac Brasserie in the San Fernando Valley. He’s not likely to provide nuptials after a Sept. 19 class at 71 Palm, but he is offering a tasty menu and a fun time.

“The most important thing is to learn, to have fun, not to be scared,” Poirier said.

Poirier will lead guests through a menu featuring an eggplant, vegetable and goat cheese terrine appetizer followed by an entree of oven-roasted salmon in a shallot and red wine sauce. For dessert, he will show his class how to prepare a vanilla creme bru^lee.

Each course, accompanied by a different glass of wine, will be served to participants.

“This is my first class at this restaurant. People have been asking me to do one since I opened [almost a year ago],” Poirier said. “I’m going to do one every three months.”

The class will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Cost is $55. Limited to 20 students. For reservations call (805) 653-7222.

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Commercial fisherman Bill Sutton catches enough fish to accommodate about five seafood restaurants.

But for now, two will do just fine.

Sutton and his wife, Mayra Sutton, co-owners for 13 years of the Seafresh Seafood restaurant and market in Ojai, are about to open a second Seafresh Seafood.

The new establishment, scheduled to be up and running within a few days, will be at 105 Brazil St. in Thousand Oaks. The site, off the heavily traveled Moorpark Road, previously was occupied by Cafe Bellissimo, the Italian restaurant with the singing waiters that closed in August.

“We’ve been looking for a location for 2 1/2 years,” said Mayra Sutton. “We had looked all the way from Goleta to the north to as far south as Agoura and we just never found a location we thought would work for us. Then this became available.”

Like the original Seafresh Seafood, the new operation will be a combination sit-down restaurant, sushi bar and fresh fish market. Operating both restaurants, Mayra Sutton said, will allow the restaurateurs to expand their catering services and otherwise flex their muscles a bit.

“We had outgrown our operation in Ojai, that was obvious,” she said. “It’s a great location for us, but we needed a bigger location. We do catering in Ojai, but we’ll have a lot more room here.”

Though the final layout of the new restaurant has yet to be determined, Sutton said there will be 22 tables on the patio alone, compared to 22 in the entire Ojai restaurant.

Under the direction of executive chef and business partner Merced Robles, the Thousand Oaks Seafresh restaurant will serve lunch and dinner 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays, and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Prices for both lunch and dinner will begin at $5.95.

Sutton said the family-style atmosphere of the place should attract a lot of diners who already visit the cluster of surrounding restaurants.

“This is a great area. It’s nice that a lot of restaurants are in the vicinity,” Sutton said. “We don’t look at it like competition at all. It just means people are coming to an area, whether it’s your restaurant or someone else’s. They’ll see us and eventually give us a try.”