Mosaic restaurant offers daily menu changes to customers

Mosaic in St. James turns 10 this year, and there is no restaurant on Long Island quite like it. Other restaurants offer a chef's tasting menu; at Mosaic that's all there is. Other restaurants change their menus frequently; Mosaic changes it nightly. The five courses you are served depend entirely on the market, the season and the whims of chef-owners Jonathan Contes, 32, and Tate Morris, 37.

The restaurant is resolutely modest: 30 comfortable seats in a small, quiet dining room. All the flash comes from the tiny kitchen, where Contes and Morris put out dinner five nights a week with only a dishwasher to help them.

Mosaic's customers range from well-heeled older couples to tattooed hipsters. What unites them all, said Contes, is "they appreciate and understand good food and wine — and they want to enjoy it in their own backyard and without any pretense."

First-timers are warned about the menu when they make a reservation. "We don't want them coming in blind," Morris said. "The first time they dine here, they might ask for one or two substitutions, but by the second or third time, they don't even want to hear what the menu is for that night. They say, 'Just surprise me.' " (Dinner at Mosaic costs $65; the wine list is eclectic and extensive; course-by-course pairings start at $32.)

Kitchen sync

Contes and Morris met in 2003 in the kitchen of Mirabelle (then in St. James, now in Stony Brook). Morris, from Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region, had studied at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan and was the restaurant's sous chef. Contes, from Nesconset, was working as a waiter at Pasta Pasta in Port Jefferson and had no formal training but somehow managed to talk his way into a kitchen job at Mirabelle.

The two men are almost comically dissimilar: Contes a voluble, impish ham; Morris, the strong, silent type. But they are in almost perfect kitchen sync.

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After two years working together at Mirabelle, they began to feel constrained by chef-owner Guy Reuge's restrained classicism and so, in 2005, they set out on their own and opened Mosaic. The name reflected their approach to cooking — a cohesive whole, Morris said, "made up of smaller, colorful elements."

They did not set out to break culinary ground. In the beginning, there was a traditional menu. The chefs changed it every few months, they added nightly specials, but they were bored. Then, in 2007, the economy crashed. Business fell off dramatically and some nights there were no reservations. They didn't want to be unprepared for walk-ins, but they didn't want to buy food and have to throw it away. So they hit upon the idea of making one menu per night. "When someone wandered in," Morris recalled, "we'd asked them, 'What don't you like to eat?' and we'd make dinner."

Within six months the tasting menu had taken off with customers. It suited Contes and Morris perfectly. "When you have a big menu," Contes explained, "you can wind up either wasting food or serving something that you're not that happy with. We're able to cook everything in the kitchen, and we don't need that much storage space either."

Gathering dinner

Each night's dinner starts out with a morning perusal of what's already in the kitchen. On a recent morning, Contes, who lives across the street from the restaurant with his wife, noted that the freezer held a whole slew of lobster shells saved from New Year's Eve's feast. In the refrigerator were a few lengths of Spanish chorizo sausage, "beautiful turnips" from Hamlet Organic Garden in Brookhaven as well as some Hamlet cabbage that he had already braised with dill pickle juice, improbably flavorful strawberries, and a quart of preserved oranges made last week.

He jotted some notes on a piece of scrap paper and headed to Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace in Smithtown to go shopping for produce. "It's mushroom weather," Contes said as he loaded some oysters and shiitakes into the cart. Then it was golden beets ("these are so big and firm"), radicchio and endive ("I'm thinking about a bitter-oriented chicory salad"), spinach, onions and assorted other vegetables.

He allowed that he might do better on prices if he dealt with a wholesale supplier, "but this way I can buy smaller quantities — and I get to touch everything before I buy it."

Contes also likes dealing with local businesses. At Setauket Seafood, he got a big hello from owners Matt and Eddie Lin and then settled on some bright orange ocean trout for a first course and a glistening mahi mahi for the second. The Lins also asked him to deliver a quart of shucked clams to Mercep Brothers butchers in St. James, Contes' next stop. Peter Kinzie, Mercep's owner, happily received the clams, wrapped up a whole strip roast and a kielbasa and chatted about the ducks Mosaic would need for the weekend.

When Contes got back to Mosaic's kitchen, Morris, who lives in Bayport with his wife and two children, was tending to the lobster stock made with the leftover shells. Almost wordlessly, they put away the groceries and started to prep. Over the next few hours, the meal came together: The trout would be accompanied by the beets, bitter salad and pickled fennel; the lobster broth, enriched with chorizo, would anchor lobster-filled pierogi; the mahi mahi would get a mustard glaze and an assist from the turnips and mushrooms; the braised cabbage, kielbasa and a strawberry salsa would buttress the beef strip. Somehow Morris found the time to make a coconut-jasmine rice pudding and a mint-orange-ouzo-infused chocolate ganache for dessert.

It's all about the plate

At 5:30, customers began to arrive and the prep work eased into dinner service. With all the food ready, it was time to plate the courses. Aside from a short exchange over whether to shape the coconut polenta with a ring mold or use two spoons to make little football-shaped quenelles (quenelles won) there was no discussion: The two just stood on opposite sides of the stainless-steel kitchen table and arranged the components into little landscapes — a hillock of fennel here, a pool of emulsion there, a cairn of salsa over there. Courses one through five repeated for the next four hours, until the last dessert went out.

Neither Contes nor Morris has a good working definition of the kind of food they serve. With so many carefully wrought elements, the plates look modern, but you won't find any foam or spherification or smoke or other techniques beloved by the molecular gastronomy set. "We never want to make it look really cool at the expense of taste," Morris said.

MOSAIC DINNER MENU, JAN. 7, 2015, $65

Seared ocean trout, bitter chicories, golden beets, pickled fennel, caper-cherry emulsion, balsamic reduction

Lobster pierogi with chorizo-lobster broth, shaved romaine, blackened avocado, saffron cream, preserved orange

Mustard-glazed mahi mahi, coconut polenta, wasabi-honey turnips, mushroom-ginger oshitashi, miso-apple jam, toasted sesame

Roast beef strip, Jarlsberg crostini, dill-pickle-braised cabbage, caramelized red onion, kielbasa, strawberry-tomato-cucumber salsa

Dessert: coconut-jasmine rice pudding, fudge brownie, mint-orange-ouzo infused ganache, cookies-and-cream truffle, spiced pear soup, macerated strawberries, dulce de leche cream