But this is 2012 and the guys who previously had a nightclub of no culinary distinction here hired away the chef of Blue 13 (now gone), Chris Curren, to up their company’s food game, and so it has, for one thing, an inhouse charcuterie program. You would think the menu would be like any bar’s, “Angus” burgers and mozzarella sticks. Stout Barrel House looks like any bar in Chicago, dark wood and TVs turned to sports. And though some reviewers have dinged dessert because the chefs do it themselves and don’t really have a pastry chef per se, I loved the non-traditional dark and savoriness of a couple of the desserts, notably the coffee cake with smoked meringue. Still, it’s an intellectual pursuit worth paying for, I think.)įor now, don’t miss the bacon cured (!) sweetbreads with XO sauce and black garlic, which give insanely likable southern fried crunchiness with a dark, haunting Asian depth of flavor, the heirloom tomato salad with, I think, balsamic vinegar ice cream, and order whatever fish is involved in the smoked fish dish (sturgeon when I went, looks like Kentucky paddlefish now). (Which will be costly- it’s pretty pricey, but at last as small plates go, they’re pretty big. But I would need to eat more analytically, and less socially than I did that night, to start to get what it’s really about. not only have personalities but in some sense one personality they form in the kitchen. I’m convinced that this is not the case here, that the Sheerin Bros. Now, I’ve eaten at places that seemed like a different restaurant with every plate, and in most cases it’s simply a chef who knows how to do a lot of things but has no overarching personality of his own that comes out in every dish. (Not every time, of course, and when things don’t add up in the Sheerin’s new math, they’re often wan- corn tortellini in a broth, for instance, at the height of corn season, somehow fizzled on the launchpad. (Mike’s charcuterie at Three Floyds was certainly like that.) Somehow what they’re doing with them is more complex and surprising than that, a four-dimensional game of chess in which frying and pickling and smokiness and acidity and fruitiness and who knows what all get put together in a new strange way that’s different with every plate. I mean, they’re back there curing meats as you expect restaurants to do today, they’re buying good farmer’s market stuff as they always have wherever they worked… but the result isn’t Perennial Virant, a tribute to the fine intrinsic flavors of such things. Yes! At last, the Italian deli-chop suey fusion restaurant we’ve been waiting for! Yet however preposterous they sounded, they were mostly, if not always, pretty great.īut the way they were great was not like the way I’m presently used to things being great. Certainly some of the combinations, even in this era of weird combinations, seemed like parodies of 2012 fine dining- like mortadella fried rice. But it’s sure about something!) Also, as with the Coen Bros., the joke may be in some way on us the audience. (This is on my mind because someone recently asked me what No Country For Old Men was about beyond just really brutal violence, and my attempt to summarize some theme about individual will versus blind chance in an amoral universe promptly drove into weeds it could never get out of. Which is to say, possibly brilliant, in such a quirky, possibly three steps ahead of everybody way that I’m not sure yet what it was really about. I was trying to think of an analogy for The Trenchermen, the new restaurant from the Sheerin Brothers (which I went to for a PR dinner, so I don’t think I can fairly comment on whether service and kitchen execution is better for reviewers than normal folks, as has been alleged in at least one review). As I was saying about food before I was interrupted…
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |