Alchemy Bistro brings continental cuisine to Capital Avenue

Chef Tim Leininger at Alchemy Bistro and Catering

I'd never eaten a hard-boiled quail egg for lunch before today, when I visited Alchemy Bistro and Catering at 552 North Capital Avenue, in the spot where That One Place used to be.

Chef Tim Leininger has been cooking there by himself since before Thanksgiving. Prior to that, he had been doing mainly catering from a kitchen in the Trackside Mall. When he saw the kitchen on North Capital had opened, he jumped at it.

A native of Pine Grove, Pa., near Hershey, Leininger grew up in a family of cooks. He worked at restaurants while attending college. After graduate work at Penn State, he came to Idaho in 1989 to work environmental safety and health at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. After leaving the site in 2006, he went to the French Culinary Institute in New York City.

Leininger said he has mixed feelings about the restaurant business because of all the waste he sees. "I don't like waste because of my French culinary background. The French, they use everything. They look at the whole chicken."

Though it has daytime hours -- 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday -- Alchemy is doing some special dinners in February and March. To learn more, visit alchemychef.com or the Facebook page. The phone number is 529-1032.

By the way, though it was the size of an olive the quail egg tasted like most of the hard-boiled eggs I've  eaten.