We're back from the first installment of chef chat with Sophie Elhage and her husband and co-owner, Hadi of Skewers.

EOW: So I hear you had a fire here...

SE: We had started the restaurant, and then we had an electrical fire in the kitchen. The power box blew up in the middle of lunchtime. I had to evacuate people from the restaurant...almost all of our appliances needed to be new, again. That took four months.

EOW: Wow. That's awful. Didn't you just want to give up?

SE: No, actually! My husband's definitely not a giver-upper...He pushes me, and he does not give up on anything.

EOW: When you go home now, do you cook?

SE: I mainly make pastries when I go home, because I'm so over the savory dishes here.

HE: When I first met her, she made the best baklava.

SE: Aww. That's how I hooked him in.

HE: The baklava and the --

HE and SE: Eggplant dish.

SE: Yeah. I cooked for him the first day he came over...a month later, he proposed. That probably had something to do with it.

EOW: Dating tips, too! So you, Hadi, handle the wines. What's so special about the wine here?

HE: We have something from everywhere. We like to choose a good price point that tastes really good -- that takes a lot of research. There are a lot of expensive wines, in my opinion, that don't taste good. And there are some less expensive that taste great. We have a good line of wine from Lebanon. Lebanon, I'm sure not everybody knows, we have very good wineries. The best of them is Ksara, which we carry wine from. Ksara was featured in Time Magazine as one great reason to visit Lebanon, so that's a good wine.

Then we feasted. Check back tomorrow for salivacious photos.