You’ve really got to give it to Chef Cosentino – he doesn’t do anything halfway.  When he says “I’m going to serve offal and make it delicious” he really means it, and when he says “I’m going to cook with beer,” he jumps in to the deep end of the pool. At the Incanto & Magnolia collaboration beer dinner, we jumped in with him.

A meal like this is all about context – a great dining room?  Check.  Attentive service? Check.  Good company to eat and drink with?  Elianna and I were joined by Damian from my homebrew club and his wife Heather, as well as Bryan from the Brew Lounge and a friend of his. Check. All I needed now was a beer and the first course.

We started things out with the the Half Step Hefeweizen paired with Kampachi crudo, strawberries & vanilla salt.  The beer was light and tropical, with a hint of sulfur in the nose.  The crudo was stellar – the fish was thinly sliced, and plated with strawberries that had been macerated in the same beer.  It was the vanilla salt that really made this dish sing, and pulled together the whole plate. We were off to a great start.

Next we were given glasses of the Spud Boy IPA.  This is a English Style IPA, clocking in at 6.0% alcohol and 70 IBUs (for the not so geeky – this means “bitter and hoppy.”)  It’s a citrusy character is largely derived from Cascade hops, which have a distinct, grapefruit peel aroma. After these beers arrived, we turned out to have a surprisingly long wait in between course – enforcing a sort of European dining pace on our normally rushed American lives. No matter – every dish was hot when it arrived, and worth the wait.  In the meantime, we sat around, quaffing our IPAs.

Then, the next course arrived, greeted with a round of oohs and ahs. It was a Fritto of duck bits, IPA aioli.

Inside the tempura batter was a collection of duck livers, duck tongues, a squash blossom, and roasted duck hearts.  It was served alongside a IPA aioli.  Like the beer it came with, this dish contained hop.  There were cascade hops integrated into every part of the dish: pulverized hops in the IPA beer batter and reduced IPA in the aioli.  To up the ante further, the livers were breaded in a mix of flour and dehydrated spent grain. The result was an aggressively bitter finish to the somewhat greasy batter that some at the table found off-putting.  The final reaction was mixed – some didn’t care for it and volunteered parts to others, who happily helped clean the plates. I was happy to take a squash blossom off of Eli’s plate. The duck hearts were the surprise winner of the dish – enjoyed by everyone.  Chef, I’m pretty sure you won a few offal converts with this one.

Luckily, whatever complaints there were about the frito, they were washed away by the next course.

Where the hoppy frito plate was challenging, the Bourbon barrel-aged Weekapug Gruit and Lovage pappardelle with rabbit sugo was the warm embrace of comfort food.  The gruit had overt oak character and soft hints of spice, and was widely regarded as the best brew of the night. The noodles were perfectly cooked, and the rich rabbit sugo was comforting with fantastic depth of flavor.  The sauce for the pasta was reinforced with wort – the unfermented sweet malt juice that is transformed by yeast into beer.

Our last savory course was also my favorite: Boccalone sausage, smoked escolar, potato & horseradish crème fraîche, paired with Big Cyprus Brown Ale.   This dish worked a so many levels – the escolar was perfectly smoked and meltingly tender.  The sausage tasted like it had been stuffed minutes before being roasted and plated. The potatoes were well cooked, and the whole thing was topped with shaved horseradish.  My only complaint – and it’s a minor one with such a great dish – was the beer pairing.  Both were great on their own, but together, didn’t do anything for each other. The beer had a nice brown, roasted coffee flavor, which was far more roasted and darker than either the sausage or the fish.  That said, my plate and glass were both empty at the end of the course.  I think this opinion may be the result of the bar being set so very high.

Dessert brought us back into surprisingly experimental hop territory.

We were served roasted peaches, berry essence, almonds & cascade hop ice cream paired with cabernet barrel-aged Tweezer Tripel.  The beer was mellowed by the barrel aging, but it did not take on nearly as much oak character as the gruit earlier in the meal.  It had a fruity nose with hints of alcohol, which matched nicely with the peaches. The peaches had a great carmel edge, and were sweet in a way that reminded us that summer is finally here. The hop ice cream was the surprise on the plate.  It was made with cascade hops, which gave it a hoppy, vegetal flavor.  Taken in one bite with the peaches, the suger helped balance the hops, but it still was mighty aggressive. I didn’t love it, but deeply applaud the effort – hops very difficult to cook with, and Chef Cosentino’s ambition to put them front and center on the plate is remarkable.  I nearly finished the serving repeatedly taking small bites, trying to take apart the interplay of cascade hop resin and cream.  Would I order it again – no.  But I would recommend that every serious hop head out there try it at least once to see what they think.

After dinner I waddled, very full, back to the kitchen to thank Dave and Chris for an outstanding meal.  Chris was kind enough to allow me to poke into the kitchen, where his staff was diligently knocking out dishes for waiting diners.

Thanks to the Incanto and Magnolia teams for a great meal.  It’s this sort of experimentation and boundary pushing imagination that makes the world of beer and food pairings so exciting. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.

Tags: beer dinner, incanto, Magnolia

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Reviews, Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.