If you owned a little restaurant what would be your signature dish?

A free range chicken, whole garlic & lemon dish I first learned about on A2K. (Courtesy of Deb, when I was stuck for dinner ideas one Saturday, a while ago.)
A really simple recipe, almost impossible to stuff up, but utterly delicious! Served with steamed rice & a green vegetable (usually French beans.)
I have since cooked it enough times to be able to do it in my sleep.
People usually ask for seconds, which is not always the case with my culinary efforts.

Ive made quails stuffed with venison sausage that I made on a whim to serve some relatives that came over from Poland for a visit. I just made the dish because we had a poultry farm near us that was growing quails and guineas. SO i tried several styles till I came up with this recipe . It has a browned venison sausage with lots of savories and veggies. Each quail is deboned a sgood as I can (I only remove the backbones and the breastbone. I brown the sausage, wrapped it like a big meatball with the quail meat and did em in the oven in an onion sauce with some bacon as larding. I did a beet reduction to make a sweet sour sauce like almost a red raspberry flavor. This got poured over and along the sides as a dippy. It took me months to get the damn things right. The kids hated quail when I was done obsessing about cooking them.
If I ever do a cookbook, this recipe would be the first one in it.

I had a quail entree at a restaurant once and it was kinda flat. I also had a venison sausage appetizer once and it sucked. When they were put together (each person gets two of these as a serving) it was delicious.

Glad you asked. but Ill never open a restaurant, they never last long when they are some persons passion.Passions cool, partnerships erode and split, arriages of restaurateurs usually fail. ONLY DINERS and DUDES ABIDE.

Breakfast omelets!

Slow roasted short ribs with caramelized onions, spicy green beans, and a side of buttery grits.

GREE" YUTS????
wha the hell we gonna do with the greeyuts? Someplace you gotta tell me how to make caramelized onions. I **** em up all the time and my wife doesnt like em so she wont even try.,

I discovered grits are quick replacement for things like rice and I love them for the way they soak up sauce.
The secret to caramelizing onions is to sprinkle in some white sugar half way through the cooking process. Also, don't turn them too often, let them sit until they start to brown. Most people stir them too frequently which makes them flabby and tasteless.

AHA!!.

Wait till SUnday dinner. Im cookin caramelized onions with pork chops .

Report back as to the missions outcome.

Boomerang, I'd be interested to hear which dish you'd choose.

I have no idea what mine would be. I'm fairly good at many things but not great at any one thing.

Maybe navy beans and cornbread. I'm good at soups, especially bean soups.

I'm really enjoying reading everyone's replies here and it makes me wish I really had a specialty!

Good idea.
If I hadn't gone for chicken/lemon/garlic dish, my next choice would be a sort of "soup of the day" cafe, boomerang.
Cook a few huge vats of a really good, tasty, healthy soup & that would be it.
No other choice for that day.
I think a (much better organized than me) person could make a real killing, in the right location.

I would try something on the comfort food spectrum.

Meatloaf.

I like my cooking though I'm not so sure if I could get a line forming. I would need a full kitchen and an unbiased food taster to try different variations of spices and whatnots in my cooking to see if I could pull it off.

I make a lot of soups, some terrific, some tasty, some what-was-she-thinking, and never the same.

My favorite recipe is the Craig Claiborne Spaghetti with Anchovies and Clams -
http://able2know.org/topic/81749-1#post-2234289
But, I rarely get to use real clams in the shells, or even real salted anchovies, so CC's probably worked out better. I add less anchovies, more garlic, and definitely more hot chile flakes than he did. On the other hand, available pastas tend to be better nowadays.

Years ago I was imagining opening a soup and salad fast food type place. I thought if I could do it, it would just work, at least in west Los Angeles. But, I was never so serious about it that I really considered doing that. And given warmish summers, I'd have had to come up with an alternative to soup - easy enough now, egads, there is a taco place in Costa Mesa that I'd like to fly off to tomorrow - but it was back in the seventies or early eighties that I was envisioning that.

Yum!
I just saved your recipe, osso.

I happen to be making it tonight.. pasta is already in the boiling water, linguini in this case.

I make a mean canneloni or some wicked poultry dishes, usually stuffed with fruit and a side dish of my risotto and stuffed peppers.

If you owned a little hair salon, what would be your signature cut?

If it weren't for all the chopping involved, I'd open a chopped liver cart. I make that good. I also make a very good chicken soup. Easy. I make a few other things well, but they tend to be up and down.

I make an absolutely perfect quiche. My restaurant would have two different versions each day of the week...one with meat, one without.