→ December 7, 2012
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Nashville eats, 2012 edition.

I ate really, really well in Nashville this week, which is what happens when you get the hell out of the Opryland Hotel, itself a testament to what happens when capitalism’s DNA mutates and reproduces out of control. Over the last five years it seems that Nashville has had a culinary boom, and I had more places I wanted to visit than I could have gotten to in a week.

Our first big group dinner was Monday night at City House, one of the most-recommended restaurants in Nashville by those of you who live there, and one of the most enjoyable meals I have ever had when you combine the food and the company at the table. Because of the size of our party, we were served family-style, which had the benefit of allowing us to all try more items. I thought two items really stood out above everything else: the belly ham pizza and the bread gnocchi. We tried all four pizzas on the menu, with the anchovy pizza the only disappointment, but the belly ham pizza with fresh mozzarella, oregano, and a pretty healthy dose of red chili flakes was incredible, from the light, almost cracker-like crust to the bacon-like pork to the bright, creamy cheese. The gnocchi, without potato as traditional gnocchi would have, were the best I’ve ever eaten (caveat: potato gnocchi don’t thrill me) and are served with a scant tomato sauce, braised pork butt, and grana padano (essentially Parmiggiano-Reggiano from cows near but not in that specific region). That’s the dish everyone was talking about the next morning. The octopus starter everyone’s joked about was just fair, cooked correctly (that is, not till it was a spare tire) but still not that pleasant a texture and without the powerful flavors to stand up to the fish. I loved the rigatoni with rabbit sugo and fennel, kind of like a duck ragout with big flavors from the aromatics and tomato. That night’s special dessert was a chocolate-peanut butter pie that would put Reese’s out of business.

Tuesday night’s dinner included at least 16 of us from the media side at the Pharmacy Burger Bar and Bier Garden, one of the best burger places I have ever visited. Their burgers are made with Tennessee-grown beef and served on stark white rolls that are as soft as potato bread and are custom-baked for the Pharmacy. They hand-cut their fries, including skin-on sweet potato fries served without that annoying sugar topping so many places use or any tricks to make them crispier, and they serve their own tater tots, which might have been an even bigger hit than the burgers. They also had a strong selection of regional beers, including the Nashville-brewed Yazoo Gerst Amber beer, so smooth it went down almost like soda and might be too mild for folks who are more serious about their beer than I am. As for the burgers, most of us went for their signature item, the Farm Burger, with bacon, country ham, and a fried egg on top, which is a top five burger for me at this point.

We ventured out to two new lunch places, Fido and Marché. Fido is related to the Bongo Java coffee shop and retains that coffee-shop vibe even when serving sandwiches or fish entrees like the trout special I ordered, along with a cinnamon cheesecake that Jonah Keri said was to die for and a chocolate-chocolate chip cookie that also really strong. Marche offers a duck confit sandwich about which one probably needs to say little more, because really, it’s some damn good duck confit. Molly Knight ordered a latte which was large enough to drown an orangutan. Both places were worth hitting again, especially because they gave us a chance to eat somewhat more healthful items in expectation of big dinners.

On the way to the airport I made a detour to revisit Arnold’s Country Kitchen, a meat-and-three place that seems to rate as Nashville’s best and where I had a great meal back in 2007. The meats change every day as do about half of the sides available; Thursday’s options included roast beef, while mashed potatoes and turnip greens (with ham hock) appear to always be options. One of the special sides that day was fried green tomatoes, about four-inch discs breaded with seasoned bread crumbs and quickly deep-fried. They’re not good for you – none of this is – but the salty-sour combo was surprisingly satisfying. For dessert, they offered four different kinds of pies plus a few other options. The hot pepper chocolate pie wasn’t very popular but I’d gladly eat that again – the filling had the texture of a dense mousse and the flavor of half-cooked brownies, and once you finished a bite, a warm heat took over from what I assume was cayenne pepper. A meat, three sides, bread (which I skipped), dessert, and a drink ran about $13 and I was full for the whole flight back to Arizona.

Finally, the headline meal of the trip was at The Catbird Seat, named one of the ten best new restaurants in the U.S. this year by Bon Appetit. This was the most expensive meal I have ever eaten, and one of the longest at over four hours and nine-plus courses. It’s a set tasting menu, and the food tends toward the experimental – not quite Alinea territory but along the same philosophical lines. All of the courses hit the mark save one, and I was challenged by a number of the dishes to rethink ingredients or flavors. If you’re not interested in a $150+ meal that goes on for days, feel free to stop reading here – that’s why I’m covering this last. Also, each dish comes with a wine pairing, which the sommelier introduces and explains in some depth, but as the group’s driver I skipped this part.

* The meal began with quarter-sized ‘oreos’ made of a parmiggiano cream or mousse sandwiched between two slices of porcini mushrooms, producing a gustatory dissonance as my palate kept expecting sweet. The point of this starter, other than just being playful, became evident later on.

* The first actual course was a trio of one-bite items, including a raw Island Creek oyster with kimchi and a lime foam, a “cracker jack” using shiitake mushrooms roasted until crunchy, and a rectangle of chicken skin baked until crunchy and topped with ground red pepper for a twist on Nashville hot chicken. That’s the first raw oyster I’ve ever eaten, incidentally – growing up on Long Island during a time when raw oysters were quite dangerous to eat, I had no exposure to them and had (have?) a long-standing bias against raw shellfish of any sort. The faux cracker jack was the best item here, combining the earthiness of the mushroom with the hint of sweetness and crunch you’d expect from something that looks like caramel corn.

* Second course was a diver scallop crudo, sliced thinly, served with their own dashi, smoked roe of Arctic char, crumbled chicken skin, lime juice, finely minced serrano chiles, soy sauce, and shiso leaves. As complex as that sounded, and even looked, the end result was perfectly balanced and nothing overshadowed the scallop itself. This was also one of the largest portions of the night.

* Third course was a soup of roasted sunchoke and caramelized yogurt, poured tableside over a quarter of an artichoke heart, shaved roasted fennel, black olive, black garlic, and a tiny bit of black truffle. Cooked yogurt is very much not my friend, but the texture of the soup was unreal, like double cream, and the roasted sunchokes gave it the appearance of a rich light-brown roux with hints of sweetness and a nutmeg-like spice.

* Fourth course was Arctic char with cream cheese gnudi, dill-infused oil, pureed Meyer lemon (rind and all, apparently), capers, and sorrel leaves. I love Arctic char, a fish nearly indistinguishable from salmon, but prefer it cooked a little past medium rare; this was practically swimming upstream. The gnudi, marble-sized spheres of (I presume) cream cheese with just enough flour to give them structure, had the texture of potato gnocchi and just a hint of the tang from the cheese so that they could soak up some of the dill flavor below them. (Gnudi means “nude” in Italian and refers to a filling cooked without its pasta wrapper.)

* Fifth course was probably the restaurant’s signature dish, roasted pigeon leg, served with the claw still on it, along with a celeriac ribbon, smoked butter, cured egg yolk, chestnut purée, and huckleberry reduction, with the last two items perhaps a play on peanut butter and jelly. Pigeon (usually marketed here as “squab,” for obvious reasons) was another first for me, here cooked rare with a flavor like that of a duck breast with a texture a little closer to a rare lamb rib chop. The chesnut purée stole a fair bit of the show, though, with the crisped skin of the pigeon also standing out.

* Sixth course was a large medallion of rare “Wagyu” beef ribeye with roasted Belgian endive, little spheres of Asian pear, roasted maitake mushroom, and walnut butter. This was by far the most generous portion of the night, but a little tricky to eat with all the components in one bite, in part because the beef, while tender, wasn’t quite that “like butter” consistency I’d expect from that particular cut. (There’s also a lack of labelling standards for “Wagyu” beef, but I’ll trust that the Catbird Seat is at least buying very high-quality inputs.) Getting a sphere of anything the size of a large marble on to the fork with four other elements is nearly impossible, even though the fruit’s mild sweetness was a perfect complement to the various savory elements. Great ideas here, but perhaps not fully executed.

* Seventh course was the one whiff for me, Rush Creek Reserve cheese with a curried granola, rose-water honey, and apricot jam. The cheese looks like mayonnaise and had a heavy, cheddar-y flavor that I simply don’t like. It’s supposed to be one of the best domestic cheese around, so I’m chalking this up to my specific palate and not the dish itself, although Jonah expressed his dislike of the curried granola, which I probably could eat by the bowl.

* From there we move to desserts, three plates although they’re listed on the menu as just two courses. Course 8A was a play on coffee and tea, with coffee ice cream, molasses cake, rooibos (red tea) foam, and a hazelnut and coffee crumb, just insanely good across the board, a dessert where everything was sweet but nothing was too sweet, and a great way to show off the complexity of rooibos’ flavor. (I happen to love the stuff, and especially like to drink it when I’m sick because it has no caffeine.) Course 8B was a maple-thyme flan-like custard cooked in an egg shell with a maple glaze on top and a single stick of bacon protruding from the top – an egg-and-bacon dish that implied there were pancakes on the plate that required the use of maple syrup.

* The ninth course was the most impressive dessert from an execution perspective: charred oak ice cream, vanilla cake, pineapple gelée, and bourbon balls – bourbon encapsulated in a very soft gel so they’d explode in your mouth almost on contact. The ice cream here was smoky but also had subtle flavors that reminded me of caramel, coffee, and of course whiskey, and its texture was as smooth as that of good gelato.

* Finally, another small plate of three Oreo-like items appeared, but this time, they’re sweet, with chocolate wafers and a vanilla cream. They don’t taste anything like the real thing, but speaking as a devout chocoholic, I appreciated the hit of bitter cocoa at the end of the meal.

Someone in Nashville asked me if I preferred the meal at City House or the one at the Catbird Seat but I struggled to compare them. City House is pretty straightforward upscale cuisine – recognizable dishes, done well from start to finish, using fresh, local ingredients with outstanding execution. You will also leave there stuffed. Catbird Seat is experimental and challenging; it isn’t food to be consumed so much as it’s food to be considered. Your preference would likely depend on what you prefer. Catbird Seat is doing things very few restaurants outside of New York, LA, and Chicago are doing, and that makes it the “better” restaurant, the place I’d absolutely take my wife for a special occasion or a client I wanted to blow out of the water. On the other hand, if my goal was to go have a boisterous meal with nine friends, which was what we did on Monday night, I’d take City House. You can’t lose either way.

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→ April 16, 2008
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Kentucky eats.

Food notes from about 24 hours on the ground in Kentucky…

Ramsey’s Diner is a local Lexington chain promising home-cooked meat and three meals, but it couldn’t have been more of a letdown. I went with the pot roast, which is the type of slow-cooked dish in which meat and three restaurants specialize, and chose pinto beans, fried okra, and mashed potatoes as sides. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was good. Everything except the small cornbread stick lacked salt. The pot roast was dry, tasteless, and grey, and they skipped the critical step of browning the meat before braising it. The mashed potatoes tasted cheap and thin. The okra missed the salt most sorely. And the cornbread stick was dry enough to use as a bat in the world’s smallest game of baseball. The only minor pleasure of the meal was dessert, as Ramsey’s serves pies from Missy’s, which is apparently a local pie-shop icon. I went with chocolate meringue over coconut, fearing the coconut might be sickly-sweet, and the chocolate was in fact quite sweet, but at least the custard brought a strong chocolate flavor (milk chocolate, but I’m trying to be positive here), and it was topped with a generous quantity of meringue.

For breakfast the next morning I wanted to see downtown Lexington, so I went to Tolly-Ho’s, allegedly a UK institution. The food sucked, which is all you need to know about Tolly-Ho’s. Fortunately, I was a few minutes’ drive from Spalding’s Bakery, established 1929, and was fortunate enough to walk in when a batch of glazed donuts had just come out of the fryer. One was enough, sixty cents’ worth of golden brown deliciousness, not too airy, with a real crust to its exterior. The selection is limited so I imagine it’s hit or miss, and it’s not a typical donut shop serving coffees and lattes, but that donut was worth the little drive. It’s across from the Jif peanut-butter plant (I was surprised not to see giant tanks of corn syrup on the property) on US-60.

I had a little time to kill before going to back to the Louisville airport, courtesy of a high school coach in Tennessee who decided at the last minute to skip his top pitcher’s start this week, so I drove to Louisville and went to Mark’s Feed Store for lunch. Mark’s is another local chain, but the food was better than the food at Ramsey’s. They specialize in barbecue; for $8, I got the small babyback ribs platter – I was still full of donut at that point, three hours after eating the thing – which was four ribs and two sides. The ribs had a thick bark on the outside and were basted in a mild barbecue sauce that was a little sweet, but not Tennessee-sweet, but I found the meat to be a little bit dry. To be fair, I was there after the lunch rush, and it’s possible that I ended up with meat that wasn’t fresh out of the smoker. The “smoky beans” were too sugary but had a good texture, and their green beans side comes with pulled pork mixed into it rather than bacon or ham hock. They serve burgoo, a Kentucky specialty stew that is traditionally made with some unusual meats, like squirrel, but I asked the server what was in it and she said pork and beef and other less interesting types of animal. Also, the meal came with one piece of grilled white bread. I have never quite understood the purpose of that, although I’ve seen it many times at southern Q joints. Is it just a side? Am I supposed to construct some sort of open-faced sandwich? Of all the starches in the world to serve, soft white bread was the choice? If I’m in the Say-uth and I’m having some sort of baked flour product, I want biscuits or cornbread. Or both, which, after all, is the #1 reason to visit a Cracker Barrel. White bread? Toasted on a flat-top grill? I just don’t understand.

Finally, I should mention two places at Logan Airport in Terminal A, which is the Delta terminal. There’s a Legal Seafood Test Kitchen which has some interesting dishes at double-digit dollar prices, but I didn’t see much that appealed to me. I did like what I ordered: a crab-meat club sandwich, with a generous portion of shredded crab meat (I can never remember which part of the crab that’s from, but it’s not lump meat), a couple of thick slices of bacon, and lettuce on brioche bread. There’s barely any mayonnaise on the sandwich – just enough to hold the crab meat together between the slices of bread – and it’s a good-sized portion. The other place, Lucky’s Lounge, is a culinary disaster, and there’s a nonzero chance I got a mild case of food poisoning from eating there. So you might want to skip that place.

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→ December 6, 2007
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Nashville eats.

So before I get to the food, let me talk about the hotel that Minor League Baseball likes to force down the throats of the major league clubs (you know, the ones who make minor league owners’ insane profits possible) and the media covering the event, the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. You’re probably familiar with Hell’s Kitchen; this place is Hell’s Outhouse. I’m a pretty hardcore capitalist, and even I’m offended by the existence of this hotel. It’s enormous, large enough to get its own ZIP Code, with more wasted space than a banana plantation in the Yukon, and it’s overflowing with fake plastic trees and fake waterfalls and other crap straight from the mind of a designer who was clearly very, very mad at society when he came up with the concept. It takes about fifteen minutes to make a full circuit around the hotel, and can easily take upwards of twenty minutes to go from the lobby to certain guest rooms. Every restaurant and shop in the hotel is outrageously overpriced – $2.75 for a 20-ounce bottle of Dasani – and non-guests are charged $16 to park with no in-and-out privileges. There’s no central lobby area for the winter meetings’ standard evening congregations, and the hotel itself is located a good fifteen to twenty minutes from downtown or any area with non-chain sit-down restaurants. I’m tempted to go for a career switch, train as a munitions expert, bribe a county official to condemn the building before the meetings return to this scar on America’s landscape and culture in 2012, and (with the government’s permission, of course) blow the damn place to oblivion. I have yet to find a front-office exec, scout, or writer who likes the place. But hey, outgoing Minor League President Mike Moore loves it, so it’s been there every four to five years for forever now, and we may be stuck with it even after the door hits Moore square in the ass on his way out. Thanks for nothing, Mike.

First meal had to be quick, so I stopped by Fat Mo’s, a small Nashville-area fast-food chain along the lines of In-n-Out and Five Guys. The burger was excellent by fast-food standards, a wide half-pound patty with plenty of salt and some black pepper in it; it was well-done, of course, and it would have been nice if my “no cheese” request had been followed. (It wasn’t a big deal – I just peeled off the one slice of yellow crap.) Their French fries are very good, although not up to the hand-cut standard of the other two chains, although again Fat Mo’s gets credit for understanding the culinary value of salt. A burger and fries plus a bottle of water came to just over $6.

Whitt’s Barbecue shows up on a number of “best barbecue in Nashville” lists I found online, and their Q was solid. It’s a bare-bones joint and the menu is sparse. I ordered the cornbread dinner with pork, which comes with one side and fried cornbread, a Nashville specialty that elsewhere seems to be called a “corn cake.” The pork had a mild smoke flavor and no hint of dryness, meaning that very little sauce was required. The beans were fair, perhaps a bit too sweet, and the corn cake had a good crumb and savory taste but wasn’t very hot, so it had started to dry out.

Swett’s is a classic meat-and-three joint (which means you pick one meat item and three sides) in southwest Nashville that’s been open since 1953. Service is counter-based – you stand in line, get your order, pay at the end, etc. There’s a full list of items sitting on the top of the counter before you get to the food. They offer five standard meat items plus a couple of items from a list of five non-daily meat items, including pigs feet (not available the day I was there, darn it). I ordered the turkey and dressing, one of the non-daily meat items, as well as just two sides – pinto beans and okra – and baked corn bread (a muffin), as well as blackberry cobbler for dessert. The turkey and dressing was over-the-top good; I’m a sucker for cornbread dressing, and theirs was moist with a great mix of cornbread, onion, celery, and herb flavors, while the turkey was moist and the gravy was smooth with a good but not overpowering chicken-stock flavor. The pinto beans were classic southern-style with chunks of ham hock, while the okra was steamed (I was hoping for fried and didn’t see the okra before ordering it) and had little flavor. The cornbread was too sweet but had a good crumb; the cobbler was probably made from frozen blackberries and the cobbler dough was greasy, although neither fact stopped me from eating almost the entire thing.

The Yellow Porch is a sort of casual fine-dining restaurant on the southern end of town, with a strong emphasis on fresh ingredients, local ones if possible. The menu isn’t long but the dishes are layered – Calvin Trillin’s “something served on a bed of something else” expression comes to mind – and despite the obvious quality of the inputs, my meal didn’t add up. A perfect example of their too-clever-by-half philosophy is the oil served with the bread (which was, by the way, an outstanding soft sponge bread): Olive oil with chopped fresh herbs, with a pool of balsamic vinegar (might have been a reduction, but it wasn’t sweet) in the middle, with a small pile of fresh feta cheese in the middle of that. It was a taste overload, and the tart-with-tart combo didn’t work that well for me.

For the entrée, I went with grilled shrimp with “grits custard,” sautéed spinach, roasted red pepper coulis, and a “caraway spiced napa cabbage salad.” That last part, the cabbage salad, proved the undoing of the entire dish. The shrimp were outstanding, fresh, Cajun-spiced (but not blackened as the menu said), and the coulis was delicious. But in the center of the dish was a ring-molded grits custard, which was grits mixed with beaten eggs and what I think was parmesan cheese (not the real stuff) and baked. The texture was a bit odd, not firm like custard or smooth like grits/polenta. But the killer was the cabbage, which was shredded and drenched in white vinegar, which dripped down into the grits below it, rendering both items inedible. (Vinegar and parmesan cheese ≠ good eats.) To the restaurant’s credit, when I told the server that I was “disappointed” and explained about the excess vinegar, he took the entrée off the check.

For dessert, I had a slice of flourless chocolate-espresso torte with a raspberry coulis. The coulis was excellent and the texture of the torte was great, but it could have been darker. They get big points for having a wide selection of loose-leaf teas.

The next day’s lunch was at another meat-and-three with my comrade-in-fork, Joe Sheehan, who is also a frequent comrade-in-pork. Arnold’s Country Kitchen seems to be the consensus pick for Nashville’s best meat-and-three, and once we saw a diner with the pork barbecue on his plate, our lunchtime destinies were sealed. I paired mine with black-eyed peas and green beans. (Note: If the menu was posted somewhere, we didn’t see it, but there’s an image of it on their website.) The pork is a Wednesday special, and we picked the right day to go, because it was amazing, moist with a good smoky flavor, and the sauce had a nice molasses base without overpowering the flavor of the meat. The black-eyed peas sucked; there was no hint of ham hock or salt pork or, frankly, any flavor other than onions. The green beans were a little bit overstewed but otherwise solid. Arnold’s serves both baked cornbread and fried cornbread with every meal, and these were probably the best I’ve ever had, with no sweetness, plenty of fat in the recipe to keep them moist, and an absolutely perfect crumb. For dessert, I tried their “chocolate pie,” a thick chocolate pudding that tastes a lot like brownie batter topped with meringue. The filling was delicious and the meringue helped cut the richness of the filling, although the crust was too greasy and not very tender.

Last stop – with Sheehan, Kevin Goldstein, and Will Carroll in tow – was Calhoun’s, a Tennessee-wide chain of barbecue restaurants. They’re known or claim to be known for their ribs, so I went with the half slab with smashed red-skin potatoes and beans on the side. The hickory-smoked ribs were smoky but didn’t have a lot of hickory flavor; the best part was the top and end bits, with that indescribable pork taste and just the right amount of tooth. The mashed potatoes were good but generic – definitely made in a huge batch – and the beans were more like a chili than baked beans, which made a fan of Joe but was a little less of a hit with me. Pre-meal cornbread was on the sweet side, although the buttermilk biscuit was solid-average. They do get points for having Newcastle Brown Ale, which was about the last beer I expected to find in Nashville.

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