Fish & Farm seems to be everywhere these days.  Best burger in the city.  Industry nights. A glowing 2.5 star Bauer review. It seems you can’t look at a food blog without a mention of Chef Chad “Don’t call me Burger King” Newton, and the fine local fare he’s producing at Fish & Farm.  I stopped in talk talk about beer pairings with me (more on that in the future) and see what all the fuss was about.

I popped my head into the kitchen to share a few local beers and talk about pairings.  The kitchen crew was friendly and inviting, but focused as they prepped for the evening rush.

The infamous burger looked particularly good, but Chad had other plans in mind.  He wrote out a quick menu for me to taste, and I was sent out into the dining room.   What I didn’t realize at the time, was he was trying to kill me using only local organic produce and product.  I ordered a Red Chair IPA and settled in for what turned out to be a marathon meal.

Homemade chips with a horseradish / mustard sauce. “I want to bath in it” was the main reaction at  our table.

Sweet corn soup – super rich with a great creamy texture. Amazingly, it’s apparently made with no cream – rather a stock is made from the corn cobs, extracting starches and sugar.   The edible flowers were a nice touch.

Heirloom tomato salad – The only dish I didn’t love.  There wasn’t anything wrong with it, at all, it just didn’t come together for me the way some other dishes did.  Speaking of which…

Housemade gnocchi with braised romaine.  Awesome.  Hands down the knock-out star of the meal.  The gnocchi has a perfect sear on them, and were engulfed in fresh herbs (common thread in every dish, and a welcome one.) Best of all was the braised romaine, which still has a hint of crunch in the center stem, but a silky texture in the leaves.

Pork chop with chard and mac and cheese.   This pork chop came with a much needed steak knife.  At over an inch thick, this beast with juicy and perfectly pink in the middle. Straight forward “comfort food” expertly preferred.  On a regular night, I bet I could share this dish with a date, and both of us would leave full.

Like the pork chop, the halibut didn’t offer any surprises, but none were needed. Aggressive seasoning on the crust of the fish gave way to a flaky interior.  Underneath, ripe summer tomatoes were mixed with the croutons gave this dish much needed texture.

He called them “Bacon Tater Tots” which fits in nicely with their upscale comfort food motif, but they are actually much more refined than that.  Underneath the crunchy shell is a creamy mashed potato filling, specked with smokey bacon bits. They’re really more like “mashed potato and bacon croquettes.”  I suppose that doesn’t quite have the ring to it.

Finally, we had arrived at dessert. Summer peaches and strawberries, topped with a rich butter pecan ice cream. The butter (browned butter?) in the ice cream was rich and creamy, and nicely offset the lightly sweetened fruit underneath.  A very restrained dessert, which was good, seeing as how we were too full to move.

I’ll have to go back for the burger – but be sure, if all you get is the burger, you’re missing out. Fish and Farm prides themselves on their working relationship with local farms, and aim to reinforce that relationship with the “just let the ingredient speak for itself” style of cooking. But that description misdirects attention away from the technical skill and focus that allows these ingredients to sing. Finding that balance is what the kitchen at Fish & Farm is all about – the work that goes into “a simple dish” is hiding just below the surface, making it appear easy, when it is in fact anything but simple.

Tags: Fish & Farm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.