I got here to Saratoga in the winter. It was so peaceful…the snow…when it snowed, it was beautiful,” celebrity chef and businessman David Burke tells me when I ask him at the height of the 2018 summer season about being the newest addition to this renowned resort town’s burgeoning food scene, its restaurants now giving its legendary racetrack a run for its money—well almost. Let’s not go overboard. A menu, no matter how well-written and maintained, will never replace the Daily Racing Form in Saratoga Springs. Yet it was that lack of racing that lay incongruously before Burke when he first arrived here, just the charm and allure of Saratoga itself, a no-horse town in such months. Winter’s terse whisper, tucking itself into corners of Broadway after finding its way uphill from Phila Street, was even quieter than a jockey’s mysterious whisper in a horse’s ear between the paddocks and the gate when their last bit of bonding is taking place just as the first bit was happening between Burke and the town.
