[ food & drink ]
✚ Back in the Saddle <<< continued from previous page
Christopher Davis’ flavors don’t develop slowly. They rocket. Davis was Sabatino’s sous chef, and eventual successor, at Barbuzzo, and the pair reunited at the Pier after Davis spent a year as head chef at Popolino. Together, the chef-bros have created a menu that in execution, ambition and ingenuity per penny, can hang with restaurants way above its station. They do way more than they have to (a Sabatino signature that’s borderline masochistic in its intensity) for a place of Boot’s ilk: baking bread, curing charcuterie, making cheese, rolling out fresh pasta, like the tender chestnut-flour gnocchi I couldn’t get enough of one night. My table was already overcrowded with plates and pints, so I speared the dumplings standing, no room for the aromatic bowl. I may have even turned my back to my dinner pals, guarding the Vertri-esque gnocchi, in a ragu of tomatoes and mushrooms, like a feral Roman orphan. I proceeded to get my street urchin on with focaccia bathed in “pork butter” (rendered lardo), kale-and-pumpkin soup and braised beef cheeks seated on smashed celery root. Plates came quick, and the teeny table didn’t grow. Of the menu’s 13 savory dishes, I got nine, and they all arrived more or less at once, making the sweet server look like an airhead, the kitchen look lazy, or both. Scrambling to make room, I ate so fast I could barely give each dish its due. Fortunately, Davis’ flavors don’t develop slowly. They rocket: the aggressive char on seared broccoli, uplifted by luminous lemon zest and salty pecorino; the intense nuttiness of sesame seeds encrusting jagged sour-cream crackers sunk into airy whipped goat cheese. They stuck in my teeth and my memory. Things I hate, I loved. Turkey burgers — blech, and worse, on that villainous patty perpetrator, the brioche bun. Davis made me eat my words after eating the magnificent burger, its well-seasoned, cast- iron-seared patty blending white and dark meat from whole turkeys and chickens. Whole eggs and lots of butter, meanwhile, made the house-baked bun extra dense; its crumb hugged the meat like Martin’s instead of disintegrating the way most prissy brioche buns do, and its unabashed sweetness was as much a seasoning agent as the garnishes of pickled long-hots and roasted garlic-and-apple aioli. The brioche appeared twice more, breading date-relishdabbed cauliflower croquettes with silken centers and as a pain perdu dessert caramelized in apple butter. I loved the former, and the latter was the least offensive of the underwhelming desserts that included a hippie-dippy ancient-grains granola bar and dry chestnut-almondchocolate crepes begat by a multi-stage process that involves the freezer, two applications of Wondra flour and a deep-fryer. Seems sometimes Sabatino and Davis are capable of doing too much. Fortunately, the team’s A-plus efforts pay off everywhere else. (adam.erace@citypaper.net) C I T Y PA P E R . N E T | D E C E M B E R 1 2 - D E C E M B E R 1 8 , 2 0 1 3 | P H I L A D E L P H I A C I T Y PA P E R |
35