A Husband-and-Wife Team Showcase Elegant Tasting Menus Centered on Seasonal Ingredients
The chilled oyster arrived at the table in a handmade ceramic oyster shell that was nestled into a bed of rockweed and adorned with a deep green celery leaf mignonette and a foamy sweet corn chiffon. The artful first bite set the tone for the just-as-intricate seven dishes that followed—all part of the ever-changing seasonal tasting menu served at the Providence restaurant Claudine.
After more than a year of planning, chefs Josh Finger and Maggie McConnell, a husband-and-wife team who met in the kitchen of Thomas Keller’s lauded New York restaurant Per Se, opened Claudine this past June. Serving tasting menus only, the duo highlights seasonal New England ingredients prepared using classical French cooking techniques. McConnell, who grew up in Providence, is the pastry chef, while Finger, who is originally from Williamsburg, Virginia, handles the savory side.
The menu changes every day, and sometimes even in the middle of a dining service, explains Finger. “We don’t do it for some sort of gimmick,” he says. “It’s just the mindset in which we cook. Even though it’s a tasting-menu restaurant, you might be eating something different than the person next to you because if we don’t have enough of an ingredient to get through a full night, we’re going to make a change.”
When service has wrapped up for the night, often past midnight, they look at the produce that’s still available in their walk-in—much of it from local farms and delivered by Farm Fresh Rhode Island’s Market Mobile—and start dreaming up the next day’s menu. A starting point is typically something along the lines of, “We’ve got 20 pounds of potatoes” or “15 pounds of carrots” and the dish evolves from there.
“It’s a skill we both learned at Per Se,” Finger says. “At the end of the night, you sit down with your team and create the menu and talk about what you want to do the next day. It gives you the opportunity to work in a very seasonal way. It’s a skill, but it’s something that becomes very enjoyable because it forces you to be creative.”
It’s also time-consuming. “It’s a 24/7 job, but we love it,” adds McConnell. “What makes it work for us is that we’re both dedicated to the same goal—we both love hospitality and will do anything to make guests happy. We treat it like we’re welcoming people into our home.”
Each of the chefs has one chef de partie, or line cook, working under them, which leaves a lot of the labor involved with creating their elaborate tasting menus to the couple themselves.
The sequence of the meal typically moves from lighter to heavier dishes and always includes supplement options and two desserts. Other than that, the chefs cook according to their inspiration.
“The only thing that we can guarantee is that you will have vegetables, fish and some sort of animal protein—unless you choose to do a vegetarian or vegan menu,” Finger says.
The chefs rely heavily on New England distributors and food producers, including Providence’s Fearless Fish Market for seafood and North Scituate’s Hopkins Southdowns farm for lamb, but also embrace luxury ingredients from afar, like Japanese Wagyu beef and Osetra caviar. The wine menu focuses on biodynamic pours from France and other Old World wine regions, and a creative non-alcoholic beverage pairing is also available.
As a pastry chef, McConnell likes serving one lighter, often-fruit-forward dessert followed by one that’s a little heavier, possibly including chocolate and/or nuts. She also enjoys referencing nostalgic treats like s’mores, and she frequently serves creative ice creams and other frozen elements such as crème fraîche sherbet.
“One of the things I love about being a pastry chef in a tasting-menu restaurant is that every guest sees dessert,” she says.
Finger and McConnell first met at Per Se in 2018 but didn’t start dating until 2021. “I was working on the entremetier station, which is the vegetable cooking station, and would look across and see Maggie at the pastry pass,” says Finger, who worked at the restaurant for many years as executive sous chef while McConnell served as pastry sous chef. “I admired her from afar for quite a while, and then we eventually became friends and then more than friends.”
After they started dating, McConnell regularly brought Finger home to visit Rhode Island. Eventually, the idea came up to move closer to her family, and they started dreaming up the idea of their own restaurant during relaxing summer visits to places like Ninigret Pond, in Charlestown.
“We just fell in love with the idea of opening something here because Rhode Island already has such a rich culinary scene,” says McConnell, who also worked at the French Laundry in Napa Valley, California. “And being close to family is an added bonus.”
While the restaurant’s 26-seat dining room has a sophisticated feel—with a gold-foiled ceiling, rich red marble counters and window treatments that completely block out the view to the outside—there are some homey touches, too: Herbs and flowers hang to dry by the open kitchen; favorite cookbooks line the shelves, and they named it after Finger’s mother, who worked in the industry as a server and restaurant manager while he was growing up.
And although McConnell and Finger are clearly proud of and influenced by their time working for Keller, they are on a mission to make Claudine all their own. There aren’t any direct references to the chef or his restaurant group’s signature dishes on the menu.
“When I look back on the time we spent there, it’s really the culture [of Per Se] that comes to mind,” McConnell says. “Everything is done with intention, and everyone is so focused and directed. Nothing is haphazard. We’ve taken that and applied it to how we do most things in life, including Claudine.”
Jenna Pelletier is a Rhode Island–based features journalist who has worked on staff as a writer and editor at Boston magazine, The Providence Journal and Rhode Island Monthly. Her food writing has also been published in Food & Wine and The Boston Globe.
Claudine 225
Weybosset St., Providence
ClaudinePVD.com
