Published: May 30, 2006 10:56 am            

Frontier’s Chef Paul works pasta magic

CLINTON — The pasta buffet could be the Best Western Frontier’s best kept secret. If you are a connoisseur of Italian cuisine, all you have to do is walk in the front door on any Thursday and know you are in the right place.

The aroma of Italian spices and sautéing meat and vegetables hits you right off and draws you in — there is no turning back.

When Frontier’s Director of Sales and Marketing Barb Faulkner invited me out for a taste test of the new pasta buffet, I thought, ya, right! What’s the big deal about a selection of noodles. Even the news that the buffet was to be featured on “Paula Sands Live” didn’t win me over. How much can you do with a plate of spaghetti?

But Barb assured me that I was going to love it and she ushered me on a test run of a beautifully set buffet table.

“We start with some very, very good soup,” she said as we started at the head of the table. “This is all homemade.”

An extensive salad bar came right after the soup. It was stocked with every kind of vegetable, cottage cheese and the Frontier’s famous coleslaw and homemade salad dressings.

By the time we hit the bread selection I was beginning to change my mind about this pasta buffet. There were bread sticks, Italian bread and hard rolls followed by a green bean casserole.

But the chafing dish of steaming lasagna stopped me in my tracks — I had to have some but Barb kept urging me forward to what was considered the “pasta buffet.”

Set before my eyes were bowls of vegetables — peppers, broccoli, artichoke hearts, onions, mushroom and tomatoes.

Bowls of different types of meat — Italian sausage, meat balls and pepperoni were only a few — bowls of pasta including spaghetti, bow ties, fettuccine and several I didn’t recognize.

I am a lover of ethnic food, especially Mexican, Chinese and Italian — but I want to know exactly what I’m eating, I want no squid or octopus on my plate.

But I got to choose the ingredients that went into my pasta bowl and when I didn’t know what something was Chef Paul patiently pointed every everything out.

Chef Paul is probably the most important ingredient in this buffet. He personally creates each diner’s order by juggling four sautéing pans at a time.

He heats up a pan of virgin olive oil and garlic as Food and Beverage manager Julie Witt reads off you selections. Once the meat and vegetables are sautéed to perfection he adds your choice of pasta and sauce and tops the dish off with parmesan and mozzarella cheese — and the fun part is you can watch him do it.

Chef Paul Inskeep is very humble about his profession. He doesn’t consider himself a chef but says he has been cooking for 25 years. He has been at the Frontier for five years.

Once Chef Paul was done, he turned his creation over to Bart A. Baker, co-owner of the business, who personally delivered the order to the diner’s table making small talk along the way.

The pasta buffet was Baker’s idea. “My wife’s Italian, her family’s all Italian, we get together and have great pasta meals,” he explained. “I just through it would be a neat idea to have guests order their own pasta.”

Baker says the concept is something new to Clinton and will probably take a few years to become as famous as the Frontier’s fish fry. “It’s gone over fantastic, it’s certainly on the right track,” he said.

Most of the recipes are created by Chef Paul but Baker says they get a lot of ideas from their customers.

Most of the diners enjoying the buffet were repeat customers. Jean Koehn has returned every week since it began some five months ago. “Love it, that’s why we keep coming back,” she said. “The help is so great — they make everybody feel like family.”

I usually eat yogurt for lunch but managed to put away a savory serving of sautéed onions, mushrooms, sun dried tomatoes, Italian sausage, and a fettuccine pasta mix with Alfredo sauce.

I didn’t handle the extra baggage well but Julie assured me that many of her noon customers consider it nap time after they leave.

As I was getting ready to leave, laden with a carry-out box graciously prepared for my friends in the Clinton Herald newsroom, Clayton Cook, one of the pasta buffet’s best customers came up to me and said, “It’s awful good food. You can put that in your article.”

All I can say is if you go once you will return again and again. If my friends in the newsroom are any indication — they were still talking about it the next day. Although Associate Editor Scott T. Holland wasn’t sure what he was eating, he was sure he wanted more.

        

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