Behind the Fall & Winter Menu: A Conversation with Chef Andrew Smith

What does it take to turn the flavors of fall and winter into a menu that works for events of every size, from harvest dinners to holiday parties? For Great Performances Culinary Director Andrew Smith, it starts with a list of seasonal ingredients, a lot of creative thinking, and plenty of planning. Each dish in our fall and winter menu represents more than a combination of flavors. It has to look appealing on paper, excite clients, make sense for the colder months, and be practical to prepare and serve at scale.

We spoke with Andrew about how he develops new dishes, reimagines familiar favorites, and brings the menu from an idea to the plate.

“I always start with season,” Andrew explains. He begins by listing the ingredients available at that time of year and thinking through the flavors that work well together. He describes the process as a kind of crossword puzzle, looking for combinations that complement one another and create something unexpected.

But the ingredients are only the beginning. Andrew also sketches out how a dish might look on the plate and considers how it will read on a menu. Clients often encounter a dish through its written description before they ever taste it, so the language and presentation need to capture their interest.

The goal is to find the right balance between familiar and distinctive: comforting flavors that immediately appeal to guests while still offering something new.

One example comes from the Composed Savory Tasting Plates: a Pumpkin Pesto Risotto with Pumpkin Seeds, Pecorino, and Delicata Squash. The idea for the pesto began with an unexpected ingredient challenge. Working with an herb garden that produced an abundance of different basil varieties, he experimented with drying them together, which kept the basil usable long after summer ended. The resulting blend was aromatic and floral, but using dried basil in a traditional pesto presented a challenge.

His solution was to rethink the preparation entirely.

This cold-weather version combines roasted seasonal gourds with pumpkin seeds, olive oil, and the dried basil blend, with Pecorino added when the pesto doesn’t need to be vegan. The result is a distinctive pesto that can be used in several ways, from pasta and risotto to hors d’oeuvres. Folded into a warm risotto, it’s the kind of dish guests crave as the weather turns cold.

It illustrates an important part of Andrew’s approach to menu development: start with what the season offers, whether that’s the last of the fall harvest or the squash that carries a kitchen through winter, then find a creative way to make those ingredients work.