For kitchen-tech nerds, celebrity-chef groupies, and Martha Stewart watchers, the place to be last Friday evening was the modest, pristinely restored, early 19th-century Greek revival home of Ellen Hanson and Richard Perlman on a back street in Sag Harbor, Long Island — or rather, around back, in the couple’s unusual wine cellar. It was created out of an ancient cistern, discovered, accidentally, beneath the house.

That cellar was where Mr. Perlman was unveiling a residential model of an olive-green, speedcooking double oven ($7,895) made by TurboChef, a company that Perlman, a self-styled “serial entrepreneur,” purchased a few years ago. Previously, only commercial models of the oven were sold to fast-food vendors, the biggest of which is currently Subway, and restaurant chefs, notably Chicago chef Charlie Trotter.

Mr. Trotter, a spokesman for TurboChef, was on hand at the Perlman-Hanson home, along with a team of six from his eponymous Chicago restaurant, to cook dinner for three dozen of the couple’s friends. The idea was to use the new oven — it blasts food with a one-two patented punch of “Air-Speed” thermal heat blowing up to 60 mph and microwave energy bursts — to make each and every course in a fraction of the time required by conventional ovens.

Martha Stewart, wearing trim, above-the-ankle tan slacks, a billowy white blouse, a white sweater draped over her shoulders, and brown-ribbon tied wedge shoes, couldn’t stay for dinner, but she did stop by early to watch Mr. Trotter demonstrate the new oven. “See this rack of lamb?” he said. “In the restaurant, it would need 45 minutes to cook mediumrare. Now it’s going to be roasted perfectly in exactly four minutes.”

Into the upper oven went the pre-marinated lamb. Ms. Hanson operated the control wheel in the upper right-hand corner: spin to roast meat, spin again for lamb, spin for a size of two pounds, and once more to account for the number of racks in use. While everyone waited, Stewart exercised her almostpredatorycuriosity. Where had the antique sink in this “summer kitchen” come from? “A nunnery in Vermont,” Ms. Hanson said. Stewart said she had something like that, too. What about Ms. Hanson’s black stone pendant cross? An antique from Africa, given to her by a friend, Ms. Hanson responded. Stewart said she also has one.

As Stewart sipped from a flute of Billecart-Salmon rosé champagne 1998, Cuvée Elizabeth Salmon ($190 at Zachys), she fastened her eyes on the lower oven. Told that it was a conventional convection model, that could also be used for bread proofing and as a warming drawer, Stewart said, “Oh, great — it could do chicken jerky strips for my dog, which I now do in a dehydrator.”

“I can do perfectly al dente asparagus in this oven in 45 seconds,” Mr. Trotter said. “And artichokes that need 60 minutes of braising on a standard stove are done in six minutes.”

“I’ll be cooking on the ‘Today Show’ on Thanksgiving Day,” Stewart said. “I’d love to use a couple of these ovens.”

Two minutes passed. The conversation, fueled by the graceful champagne, was “cooking” nicely. Meanwhile, the rack of lamb had failed to sizzle. In fact, it wasn’t cooking at all. Mr. Trotter and his sous chefs peered into the oven. So did Stewart and Ms. Hanson.

“Ah yes, one little pesky detail,” Mr. Trotter finally said — and he pushed the “on” button. Sometimes, you just need the skills of a world-class chef.

Now, the TurboChef did its fourminute magic. The rack of lamb emerged, as Mr. Trotter had promised, sizzlingly, perfectly browned, and rosy-pink at the center. “It even tastes like lamb,” Stewart said.

“Are you a wine collector?” she asked.

“A little bit,” Mr. Perlman said while he led Stewart back to the rear of the basement, where dozens of candles, set into whitewashed, spool-style candlesticks, cast their glow on two long dinner tables. At the center of the space, a stairway led down to the circular, 600-bottle, wine cellar.

“The house was in bad shape when we bought it,” Mr. Perlman said. “Our contractor was poking down here, and he warned us that the floor planks were rotten. Just then they collapsed under him. He sunk to his thighs. That’s how we discovered the cistern, 30 feet deep. We filled most of it in and converted the upper part to the wine cellar.”

Ms. Hanson added: “After we installed the custom semi-circular wine racks, we called our neighbor, Don Zacharia, to fill them up.” Mr. Zacharia, proprietor of the esteemed Scarsdale wine shop Zachys, obliged with an eclectic assemblage including Chateau du Tertre 1990, an underappreciated Bordeaux, and Giuseppi Mascarello’s “Monprivato” Barolo 1999. The shop also supplied all the dinner wines, and a pink-shirted Mr. Zacharia was on hand to help drink them.

Stewart picked up one of a dozen bottles of wine clustered on a table at the rear of the basement and turned it toward the candlelight. “A beautiful Barolo — how great for the lamb chops!” she said It was Altesino’s Brunello di Montalcino “Riserva” 1999 ($109), which would indeed be great with the lamb. But first came Casco Bay cod with a tomato-caper vinaigrette served with an Austrian Riesling Smaragd 2004 from F.X. Pichler ($39) tasting of tangy apricot. Chilled globe artichoke soup with Maine lobster and preserved ginger, which was matched to a, muscle-flexing white burgundy, Bonneau du Martray’s Corton-Charlemagne 2004 ($95), was served next. Five years from now, this currently buttoned-up wine will have more to say to your palate. After that, the roasted rack of lamb with eggplant and kalamata olives was served with the fleshy, deep-flavored, Altesino Brunello. Dessert was an apricot tart with burnt orange-caramel sauce and vanilla mascarpone.” It was served with the most dramatic of the evening’s wines, Chateau Climens 1986 (currently not in stock at Zachys), a golden Sauternes that tasted like the caramelized top of a pineapple upside-down cake. Two decades old, the wine radiated sweet energy, proving that, while things can be sped up in the oven, a great wine needs slow time in the bottle to reach its hour of glory.