It’s that time of year, Saratoga foodies! Discover Saratoga’s Restaurant Week will return Monday, November 7 through Sunday, November 13, and this year you’ve got plenty of options, so start planning out your lunches and dinners for that week now.
On the $15 lunch front, your (current) choices are Eddie F’s Eatery, Kaffeehause, The Mill on Round Lake and Sweet Mimi’s Cafe, all of which will be offering Restaurant Week deals for both dine-in and takeout, as well as The Hideaway, The Iron’s Edge and Thirsty Owl Bistro, which are dine-in only. Standout lunch options include The Hideaway’s Cubano, served with a side and soup or salad or dessert, and Thirsty Owl’s Chicken Bruschetta Sandwich, which comes with your choice of salad, Apple Pumpkin Bisque or Sweet Corn & Crab Bisque.
You’ve got even more options once dinnertime rolls around. Head to 30 Park at Hilton Garden Inn Clifton Park, Dizzy Chicken Barbecue, Eddie F’s, Jacob & Anthony’s, Nove Italian Restaurant, Parting Glass, PJ’s BAR-B-QSA, Taverna Novo, The Hideaway, The Iron’s Edge, The Local Pub & Teahouse or The Mill for a $25 three-course meal. At Taverna Novo, diners can choose between Pumpkin Ravioli, Caesar Salad or Burrata Novo to start; Margherita Pizza, Chianti Braised Pork Ragu or Penne with Lemon and Artichokes for their entree; and Death By Chocolate Brownie Cake, Italian Ricotta Cheesecake or Limoncello Mascarpone Cake for dessert.
And for the slightly more expensive price of $35, the following restaurants will make your dinner one to remember: 30 Lake, 30 Park, Boca Bistro, Brasserie Benelux, Chianti il Ristorante, Chez Pierre, Diamond Club Restaurant at Embassy Suites, Dunning Street Station, Forno Bistro, Hattie’s Restaurant, Jacob & Anthony’s, Morrissey’s Lounge & Bistro, Morton’s The Steakhouse, Panza’s Restaurant, PJ’s BAR-B-QSA, Prime at Saratoga National, Scallions, Sperry’s Restaurant, The Brook Tavern, Thirsty Owl and Wishing Well Restaurant. Need a recommendation? Prime will be serving up Potato Leek Chowder or Caesar Salad; Glazed Duck Confit, Seared Salmon or Blistered Cauliflower; and Crème Fraiche Cheesecake or Macaroons, while Morton’s will offer Lobster Bisque or Caesar Salad; Honey-Balsamic Glazed Salmon, Chicken Christopher or 6oz Center-Cut Filet Mignon; and Cheesecake, Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse or Raspberry Sorbet.
Keep an eye on Discover Saratoga’s website for an updated list of participating restaurants and their Restaurant Week menus!
For the last few years, Comfort Kitchen has been known as a quick and easy place to grab a handheld lunch or perfectly plated early dinner. But this past summer, owner Rory Moran decided that an earlier, coffee-fueled start was what was missing at his Saratoga Marketplace restaurant, and a mouthwatering breakfast menu was born.
Served Tuesday through Saturday from 9am to noon, Comfort Kitchen’s breakfast menu consists of sweets (“the favorite so far has been the pancakes,” Moran says), eggs (“we’re getting local eggs from Elihu Farm and Featherbed Lane Farm, so people are really digging all the egg dishes”), sides (including Vermont bacon, potato hash and house-made sausage), baked goods (fresh-baked muffins and coffee cakes), and drinks (“I’m very happy that it’s caught on that we have our beer and wine license—we’re selling a lot of mimosas.”).
And don’t forget coffee. “We’ve always had a really great relationship with Death Wish Coffee,” Moran says. “So it’s been exciting to be able to serve that—and to drink it every morning.”
In the early 1940s, World War II was on everyone’s minds, including those of elementary school students in Saratoga. “All the guys were just waiting to get old enough to go into the service,” says Paul Eichman, who attended School 3 on Catherine Street from 1937-1945 and now lives in Tennessee. “You had a coupon book that would get you sugar and gasoline and a few other things. What you wanted to eat, you grew in your backyard.”
Saratoga schoolchildren, including those in this 1942 photograph from School 2 on Van Dam, were able to help with the war effort by purchasing defense stamps for as little as 10 cents and pasting them into a booklet. Once the booklet was filled with stamps totaling $18.75, it could be turned in for a war bond, which would be worth $25 years later. “Everybody had a book,” Eichman says. “I think most kids did it.” Most adults did it, too—some 85 million Americans purchased bonds totaling $185 billion between February 1942 and December 1945. “The whole attitude of the country was different,” says Eichman. “It was a different era, to say the least.”
On Wednesday, Saratoga Living teamed up with Bailey’s and Deep Eddy Vodka to host the first-ever Single in Saratoga mixer event. Some 50 local singles and wingwomen came out for an evening of beer pong, Saratoga Photobooth photo ops, games and Deep Eddy drinks, and let it be known: they want more events like this in Saratoga. So, save the date, singles! Our next singles night at Bailey’s will be on Wednesday, December 7. Yes, ugly sweaters will be involved, and yes, we will get the local single men up and out of the house somehow, someway.
Miss Scarlett is best known for summertime dresses and accessories that dominate the Saratoga Race Course fashion scene all season long, but come fall, the Phila Street Boutique has you covered with equally fabulous looks for life beyond the track.
For all you working girls, slipping into this Kelly green pant and blazer set paired with a sleek black stiletto is the power move of the season. Then for casual Fridays at the office, don Miss Scarlett’s feminine maxi dress, which goes seamlessly from boardroom meetings to happy hour or a downtown dinner. Zhuzh it up with a pair of flower drop earrings, and this multi-purpose stunner will take you all the way to a chic fall gala.
Second grade teacher Emily Mopsik started her @slice.of.saratoga Instagram account to share photos and videos of the way her family-of-three lives: their love of all things local, spending time in their shared urban garden, and the meals they prepare in their 1880s brick home on the East Side. But this past summer, Mopsik began sharing more than photos of the meals she cooks—she started selling the meals themselves.
“In an effort to push myself creatively,” Mopsik says, “I decided to start offering Mid-Week Meals this summer, as I already offer seasonal weekly baked goods.” Recent Mid-Week Meals include chicken marinated in a Green Goddess dressing served with roasted petite potatoes and a side salad, and pan-seared meatballs with pesto orzo. Mopsik posts each week’s meal on Saturday, her followers place their orders by DM by Monday, and meals are available for pick-up by 4:30pm on Wednesday. Each meal is two servings.
While she loves providing healthy meals to the Saratoga community, Mopsik says Mid-Week Meals are about more than that. “I wanted to showcase and demonstrate the importance of eating in season and supporting our local farms,” says Mopsik, whose father-in-law, Eugene Mopsik, runs the cleverly named Instagram account @phillyloxsmith with similar good food–sharing goals. “Where and who you buy your food from matters. I strongly believe it is our responsibility to support our community, however we can, and for me that is with my fork.”
Bookmark this one, bibliophiles: The second annual Saratoga Book Festival is hitting downtown October 21 and 22, with engaging keynotes, panel discussions, readings, interviews, workshops, youth programs, a literary marketplace, and an emphasis on local media.
“The festival is a walkable literary event designed to encourage more people to read,” says Ellen Beal, president and founder of the festival, which recently became part of the Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library. “We have everything from literary fiction to popular genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and suspense/thrillers. Our nonfiction categories include history, cookbooks and current events.”
The festival (saratogabookfestival.org) is free to attend, save for the two $20 keynote speakers: Gregory Maguire, the multimillion-copy bestselling author of Wicked (the basis for the blockbuster Broadway musical), and Meg Wolitzer, the New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings, The Wife and The Female Persuasion.
Saratoga will be represented by a host of local authors includingSkidmore’s Jennifer Fawcett, author of the new thriller Beneath the Stairs; golf pro and television golf broadcaster Dottie Pepper, who will talk about her Letters to a Future Champion: My Time with Mr. Pulver; young adult authorsSteve Sheinkin, Emma Kress, Meredith Ireland and Jennifer Dugan; and Nicolas DiDomizio, who recently released his debut novel, Burn it All Down.
“So many of us, myself included, can get caught endlessly scrolling our phones,” Beal says. “But there is something fundamentally different about reading book-length works. We want to shine a spotlight on that!”
There are several iconic sports records that will likely never be broken—or even approached: Baseball legend Cal Ripken’s 2,632 consecutive games played, hockey GOAT Wayne Gretzky’s 2,857 career points, and boxer Archie Moore’s 131 knockouts, to name a few. In horse racing? Secretariat’s records in the three Triple Crown races have stood for almost 50 years, but there’s another lesser known record holder who’s been holding onto a Saratoga-specific title for more than 130 years.
A chestnut daughter of 1869 Travers winner Glenelg, Los Angeles began her super-star career in the spring of 1887. By the time she was retired in 1891, she had compiled a career record of 48-23-13 from a whopping 110 starts with purse earnings of $98,295. But her ultimate claim to fame came at the Spa. It was here that she won 16 stakes races, a number no horse has beaten since. It gets better: Los Angeles won 18 of 25 total starts at Saratoga, never finishing worse than third. And she did it largely in open company, meaning she regularly faced male competition.
As a 2-year-old in Saratoga, Los Angeles won the historic Spinaway Stakes against fillies and the open Equity Stakes. The following year, after several disappointing efforts in the spring and early summer, she acquitted herself well once again at the Spa, with a strong second in both the Travers and Alabama, followed by consecutive wins in the Foxhall, Kenner and Pocahontas.
In 1889, the Elias “Lucky” Baldwin–bred mare won the Excelsior at Saratoga, defeating future Hall of Famer Hanover, before traveling to New Jersey to defeat another future Hall of Famer—Firenze—in the Champion Stakes. Back at Saratoga, she closed out her summer with the first of her three consecutive victories in the Congress Hall Stakes, an event specific to its era that demanded its winner prevail in two of three heats at six furlongs. Los Angeles never lost a single heat in her three consecutive Congress Hall victories.
Our horse for the course struggled early in 1890 but once again found her form at Saratoga by winning six of her seven stakes appearances. Her performance in the Excelsior was among her career-best efforts, as she defeated Hall of Famer Kingston (who won a record 89 career races) by a length; she also won the Beverwyck, California, Congress Hall, Kearney and Merchants’ at Saratoga that summer.
A step slower in general as a 6-year-old in 1891, Los Angeles lost two of her first three starts at the Spa before conjuring up her old form and turning the clock back her third Congress Hall victory, a walkover in the Morrissey Stakes, and an easy victory in the important—and fittingly named—Saratoga Cup.
In August of 1992, I learned that John J. “Jack” Wilpers, Jr., a US Army intelligence officer–turned–CIA employee who played a key role in the arrest of former Japanese Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo just nine days after the formal end of World War II, was a Saratogian. As an Albany-based reporter (who would later become a long-time Saratogian myself) for the Associated Press, I then spent the next 18 years trying to get the veteran to talk about what happened on September 11, 1945, without avail. It wasn’t just me—Wilpers’ lips were sealed to everyone, including his wife and five children, one of whom was a journalist himself. But thanks to a chance encounter on a Massachusetts beach involving a nasty impending storm and a Saratoga Race Course giveaway baseball cap, I finally got my interview.
Let me back up.
Wilpers was born in Albany in 1919, and moved with his family to Saratoga as a boy (“Dad was a bookie,” he would eventually tell me, and his mother ran a tea room next to McGregor Links). Wilpers graduated from St. Peter’s Academy in 1937 and joined the Army, which brought him to New Guinea, the Philippines and, obviously, Japan.
For the non–WWII historians amongst us, Hideki Tojo was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army and served as the country’s prime minister from 1941 to 1944. He oversaw Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor before falling out of favor with Japanese Emperor Hirohito in 1944 and being forced to resign. Shortly after Japan’s surrender following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, US General Douglas MacArthur ordered Tojo be found and taken into US custody as a war criminal. That’s where Wilpers, then a 25-year-old Army intelligence officer, comes in.
Sixty-five years after what Wilpers refers to as “the Tojo incident”—the capture of the former prime minister that he played a starring role in—the veteran received a belated Bronze Star medal from the Army for his actions during Tojo’s arrest. It was then that Wilpers finally broke his silence, in a 2010 Washington Post story about his being honored by the Pentagon.
I didn’t learn about the Post story until late August of that same year, when it popped up as I Googled Wilpers’ name to find out if he was still living. Seeing that Wilpers had finally talked to a major media outlet about the Tojo arrest, I decided to give him another call on the chance he would agree to an interview with an AP reporter from his old stomping grounds.
(From left) Lt. Jack Wilpers wearing a uniform jacket belonging to Gen. Hideki Tojo following the former prime minister’s botched suicide attempt; Wilpers at this summer home in Maine in 2008.
But that would have to wait until I returned from my annual vacation on Horseneck Beach in Westport, MA.
It was the week before Labor Day, and a tropical storm was making its way up the Eastern Seaboard, headed straight toward the southern New England coast. Mandatory shoreline evacuations were expected, so I would have to leave my beachfront rental a day earlier than planned. I decided to spend part of my last full day, a Thursday, on a stretch of beach I rarely visited.
While sitting on the sand watching the surfers taking advantage of the big waves kicked up by the approaching storm, I noticed that one guy walking by with his surfboard was wearing the same flat track hat I had on: the khaki one from 2004 with the Saratoga Race Course clubhouse awning logo embroidered in red.
I struck up a conversation. He said he had relatives who used to live in Saratoga and owned a couple of businesses, but that was years ago. I asked him his family’s name.
“Wilpers,” he said.
“Tell your old man I’m still pissed off at him for not talking to me about Tojo,” I said.
It turned out that the surfer was John Wilpers, the oldest of Jack and Marian’s five children. John, a journalist-turned-media consultant, lived outside Boston and was vacationing in Westport with his wife and two daughters.
After explaining who I was and telling him I planned to call his father when I returned home from vacation, we parted ways. The following Tuesday morning, I called Jack Wilpers at his home in Garrett Park, MD. He didn’t hang up on me as he had done several times before. I mentioned meeting his son on the beach in Westport. He said John had alerted him that I would be calling for an interview but, at 91, he didn’t think his memory was all that good.
His memory was fine.
For about 90 minutes over the next two days, Jack Wilpers provided details of his early life, his wartime service and Tojo’s apprehension, itself a bizarre series of events that unfolded inside the ex-prime minister’s Tokyo home before a gaggle of reporters andphotographers from some of the world’s biggest news outlets, including the AP, United Press International and The New York Times.
Jack Wilpers’ son, John (at left), and writer Chris Carola wearing matching Saratoga Race Course hats on Horseneck Beach in Westport, MA eight years after they first met.
The story: The Army had followed journalists to a home in a Tokyo suburb. (“The best way of finding Tojo was to find our own US newspaper people, because they were there well ahead of us,” Wilpers told me.) Standing outside the home of Tojo, the group heard a gunshot inside and Wilpers, with the help of a fellow officer, busted down the locked front door. They found Tojo slumped in a chair, blood flowing from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his chest. In filed the press members—one of whom, Sergeant George Burns of Yank Magazine, just so happened to be an Albany Times Union photographer before the war. Burns shot a now-famous photo of Wilpers, his Upstate New York neighbor, picking up the handgun the retired general had used to shoot himself in the chest.
Tojo ended up surviving his suicide attempt; an Army medical team arrived, stabilized the former prime minister and took him to a military hospital, where he recovered. His trial for war crimes started in 1946 and lasted two years, ending in his conviction. He was executed by hanging in a Tokyo prison in late December 1948, by which point Wilpers was already back home, a year into what would be a 28-year career with the newly founded CIA—and a 65-year career of keeping quiet about the capture.
Following our conversations in 2010, I never spoke with Jack Wilpers again. I did, however, keep in touch with his son John, who in early 2013 informed me that his dad’s health was failing. Jack died that February 28 at the age of 93. I wrote his obituary for the AP’s national and international wires.
Would Jack Wilpers have talked to me if I hadn’t met his son on the beach that day? Possibly. Regardless, the journalism stars aligned on September 2, 2010, the 65th anniversary of the end of WWII. Of the thousands of stories I wrote over my 31 years spent with the AP in Albany, the Jack Wilpers story is among my favorites. He had played a key role in the arrest of one of the most infamous Axis leaders of WWII, a man blamed for the deaths of millions across East Asia and the Pacific. Finally getting Wilpers—a fellow Saratogian—to talk in detail about that day and sharing it with a global audience (more than half the world’s population sees AP stories every day) was a highlight of my career. And it was all because of a free Saratoga Race Course hat.
It takes weeks of grueling physical and mental work to prep the autumn-themed flower arrangement at the Route 9 entrance to the Saratoga Spa State Park. And Dan Urkevich is the man for the job. Born and raised in Mechanicville, Urkevich started gardening in the park while in his 20s, planting flowers at different areas on the golf course when it was run by the state. Impressed with his gardening skills, park management asked him to take charge of the flower designs when they decided to create the fall display in 1999, and he’s been responsible for Saratoga’s most Instagrammable autumnal photo-op since.
“It’s a destination spot in the fall,” says Urkevich of the display he finishes constructing mid-October and is in full pumpkin glory by Halloween. ‘It’s all about impact from the road. It’s an eye-catcher.” He “changes it up every year,” working closely with family-owned Sunnyside Gardens in Saratoga Springs. This year, fall flower-admirers can expect to see mums, asters, ornamental cabbage, sunflowers and fountain grasses in addition to the existing annuals.
With the help of assistant gardener Gail Riecke, Urkevich creates gardens that showcase destinations all over the park: the Victoria Pool, the administration building, the Spa Little Theater and the toll booths. Beaming with pride and tan from the calling of outdoor work, when the gardening duo talk about their vision for the park’s gardens, it’s clear they have enviably satisfying work.
Between obsessing over the weather, hoping for that perfect balance of sunshine and rain, and protecting the gardens from persistent wildlife, Urkevich works tirelessly to keep everything beautiful and fresh. “We have bugs, rabbits, squirrels and moles,” he says. “You have to work with them because they’re not going to give up! It’s very hard work, but people really appreciate it. They go out of their way to thank us. You work hard, but you get to look back on it and say it was worth it.”
The humble, self-taught gardener is not concerned with titles. “Horticulture Specialist!” suggests Riecke, who says Urkevich has earned his knowledge through years of hard work, trial and error, reading books and magazines, and sheer determination. “There is no one who does what he does,” she says. “People ask him questions all the time and show him photos of their gardens. They beg him to come to their home!
