Richard Blais’ The Spence.

I have a new draft blog post up for Insiders on Clint Frazier, and the new episode of my Behind the Dish podcast is also up.

I had one of the best culinary experiences of my life at Richard Blais’ The Spence, located right near Georgia Tech’s campus (and, amusingly, very close to The Varsity). Chef Blais appeared with me on an episode of the Baseball Today podcast last year and we’ve kept in touch since then, so when I mentioned to him I was coming to Atlanta, he set up a tasting menu of sorts for me for Monday night. (I missed Richard by about a half an hour, but as I was walking out, I bumped into another former Top Chef contestant and fellow sports fan, Eli Kirshtein.)

Needless to say, this was a lot of food, but there wasn’t a mediocre dish among the set. The menu featured a lot of the playfulness that characterized Blais’ cooking on Top Chef, especially messing around with textures and presenting foods in unexpected forms, and the flavors were consistently balanced yet powerful.

I can’t even get to the menu items without mentioning the bread – parker house rolls, incredibly light, served with homemade coconut butter with flaked sea salt. I could have licked the board clean of the butter. It seemed foolish to eat bread when I knew a lot of food was coming, but I couldn’t let that butter leave the table alive.

The Spence’s menu has three main parts: Small starters, somewhat larger starters, and full entrees. I got two of the small starters, Blais’ take on oysters and “pearls” as well as fried olives stuffed with cheddarwurst. The oysters were absurd, in a citrus/cucumber juice/vermouth bath with little pearls of frozen horseradish and crème fraiche. (I’m doing most of this from memory, so my apologies if I get an ingredient wrong.) I’ve mentioned before that I’ve long had a fear of raw oysters, since Long Island had a major pollution problem when I was growing up there, but this is the second time I’ve had them at a high-end restaurant and I see the appeal now. The texture was perfect and there was plenty of acid to balance out the mellow saltiness of the mollusk, with those late bursts of heat as the horseradish pearls melted. It comes on a bed of smoked sea salt as well if you want more of a briny/salty flavor, although I thought the oysters were perfect as is. The fried green olives were very briny, so they balanced out the oysters well, although I concede green olives aren’t my favorite color (Kalamata uber alles).

Next up was the bone marrow, served with bread crumbs, finely diced tuna tartare (brunoise style), and two fried quail eggs, along with grilled bread to carry the load. I’ve never met a bone marrow dish I didn’t like, and this was perfectly cooked, just to the point where I could start to spread it on the bread but without losing its texture entirely, and the cold tuna, providing the fresh ocean flavor, gave little hints of contrast to the heavy, earthy flavor of the marrow. Quail eggs are very trendy right now – really all non-chicken eggs seem to be – and here their main advantage was that they fit perfectly on the marrow bone.

The dish that had me laughing out loud was a beet-cured kampachi crudo with freeze-dried horseradish and chicharrones – the kampachi was sliced thinly and shaped like roses on the plate, which worked beautifully with their pink flesh and with the surrounding leaves on the plate. I love crudo fish dishes, so this was right in my wheelhouse, and the beet cure just imparted a hint of flavor to the fish without masking the flavor of the fish itself. The horseradish was sprinkled on the plate like snow, so I would drag the fish in it a little (kind of like dipping your sashimi in soy sace), while the chicharrones, which looked like chunks of puffed rice, were too big to incorporate into the main bite. This was my favorite dish of the night, for what that’s worth.

Then came the pork terrine, another item I’ve learned to appreciate over the last year or so, served with a celery root jam, spicy mustard, and pickled zucchini, plus some more grilled bread. The jam was the star, sweet, lightly acidic, with a hint of spice – ginger, I think – with a texture like what you’d expect if you candied celery root and pureed it. It was a little tricky to assemble the dish with the pork, jam, mustard, and pickle all in one bite, but the balance of savory, sweet, tart, and spicy was spot on.

I got to try both of the pasta dishes, the english pea cavatappi with bacon, peas, and a little mint gremolata, as well as the squid-ink pasta with a pork meatball and a very light tomato/black pepper sauce. I could eat that cavatappi all day – I adore fresh English peas (even growing them in our backyard garden and shelling them with my daughter), which pair beautifully with cured pork, and the pasta just exploded with the flavor of the legumes. The squid-ink pasta was overshadowed a little by the perfect meatball on top, and the sauce was very black peppery, but it was perfectly al dente and I admit my inner kid thinks black pasta is very cool.

The one item I tried off the entrees section was the duck, which I would have ordered if I had had the choice anyway. It’s served sliced with blood orange slices, bok choy, and a puree that I believe contained both charred eggplant and a little chocolate. Duck, orange, and bitter greens is another classic combination, but the puree on the side was the twist, giving a smoky/bitter component that balanced the sweetness of the duck and the orange sauce. I did find the duck slices varied a little in how they were cooked, and since I’m an oddball who prefers his duck a little more cooked than most people do (I just don’t like meats cooked rare, because they taste “cold” to me), this worked out well as I could attack the more cooked slices first. I do want to know what they do with the duck legs though – could there be a confit dish coming on a future menu?

The server suggested the fried brussels sprouts side dish, which comes with fried green beans and a Thai vinagrette. The vegetables are fried plain, without breading, so they’re naturally sweet from all of the caramelized sugars on the exterior; the dressing is just lightly spicy and provides a dark, acidic note to balance out the sweetness.

Andrea Litvin, the Spence’s pastry chef, came out herself to deliver the dessert, the carrot cake, served in little cork-sized pieces with frozen dollops of crème fraiche, tiny meringes, violet leaves (from her own garden) and shaved drived carrot strips. It’s very typical of everything I ate at the Spence in that it looked unexpected, but there was a familiarity to the flavors when you got all of the components in a single bite. I don’t love carrot cake but this was moist and dense and not cloyingly sweet, and the frozen crème fraiche pastilles were amazing, a bright contrast to the richness of the cake. Litvin was also kind enough to answer some questions about making French macarons, my current bugbear in the kitchen as I can’t seem to get enough height on them. She’s up for the Food and Wine Best New Pastry Chef honor in the east region, and you can (and should!) vote for her here.

And finally, I nursed a cocktail through most the meal – the Sailor’s Crutch, containing dry gin, lemon juice, falernum syrup, and soda. I’m a dedicated rum drinker, but I could happily consume a Sailor’s Crutch a day and give up the demon spirit for a long time.

Full disclosure – they wouldn’t let me pay for the meal, and much of the staff came by to chat, so this was an extraordinary experience on many levels. I did see the prices, and I think it’s reasonable for the kind of food they’re serving, comparable to what I’d pay in Phoenix (at Citizen Public House or crudo) and less than I’d pay in New York or LA. Everything I had was wonderful, so I’d recommend it highly even if I had paid full fare.

I should also mention that I bought Blais’ new cookbook, Try This at Home: Recipes from My Head to Your Plate, about a month ago and have had great success with it so far. I need to try more recipes for a full review, but the sweet potato gnocchi were a big hit, even with my daughter who otherwise doesn’t like sweet potatoes.