'THE SOUL OF A WHALE'

What would Great Barrington be like without The Prairie Whale? Restaurateur Matt Straus thinks we’re lucky we don’t know.

STORY BY MATT STRAUS, PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE ZOLLSHAN

GREAT BARRINGTON — “If you want to know the essence of a restaurant in the Berkshires, visit it after the weather turns,” said nobody, ever, so far as I know. But, it was an inescapable impression on a recent night on Main Street in Great Barrington: The first flakes of snow were falling after dark, and I peered into the organic machinery of The Prairie Whale.

I say organic because the restaurant just celebrated its ninth birthday, and after nine years in the restaurant business, nothing is a fluke. Even if you tried to add something artificial — some flashy sconces, a breed of beef from Japan that nobody’s ever heard of — it wouldn’t work anyway. At age nine, a restaurant is what it has wanted to be all these years, and never more transparently so than when life turns inside in the colder months.

One gets the feeling when seated somewhere in the colonial-style home that is The Prairie Whale that there are many more rooms, alcoves, nooks and crannies than one ever will see.

From the bar, just inside the front door, in the center of the space, there are modestly sized dining rooms — six or eight tables each — to the left and the right, and nothing more. There is an intimacy to the space, conferred by the low ceilings, and perhaps by inheritance — courtesy of the families that probably lived in the house since the early 18th century or before.

On the evening of a recent visit, an easygoing Monday night, memories of previous visits, of quaint summer evenings on the veranda or the lawn out front, tomato salads, linen shirts, perspiring glasses of Provençale rosé, were squarely in the rearview mirror. The place was loud and boisterous; the colonial’s bones were enjoying a bit of a Whale-style dust-up.

The dining room is filled with alcoves and nooks.s.

Journey and Tom Waits were the tame selections on the playlist, joined not just by Deadbolt, but also by The Dead Boys. Those among the service staff not carrying plates through the room, or dancing behind the bar and making drinks, were gathered on stools at the bar, drinking drinks. By the time I left, there were a half-dozen employees munching french fries with cocktails in hand, and vague dimensions of an educational tasting of some bottles from the top shelf.

This is not a place where you might expect to find poached fish in a butter sauce, and indeed, you do not. My mahi-mahi was served over cranberry beans, the leafy green called spigariello, and rocketship romesco, which was quite generally spiced, as is the case with most everything that comes out of the belly, er, kitchen of the Whale.

The food is usually delicious, and almost always seems somewhat irreverent. “Pig Head Rillettes,” especially when named that way, draw a certain line in the sand. The towering mound of castelfranco salad I ate before my fish arrived included cubes (parmentier cuts) of butternut squash and apple, and was showered in judiciously candied pumpkin seeds.

The castelfranco salad, served with orange, radish, candied almonds, piave cheese and horseradish dressing.

The Prairie Whale restaurant in Great Barrington serves a menu that evades categorization.

The cuisine Chez Whale, the menu as a whole, does not seem much interested to be categorized. There are nods to Americana, like fried chicken and mac and cheese; but a tagliatelle dish, with bacon, broccoli raab and egg yolk, could show up, verbatim, as carbonara in a Roman osteria. The pig’s head is joined in the roster of smaller dishes by chicharrones, the fried pork skin that is a staple of many Latin American cuisines.

In fact, the menu design seems to thrive on risks and tweaks, and the choices of many ingredients further betray an experimental streak. Fish and chips, often accompanied by nothing but a bottle of malt vinegar, was prepared that night with mackerel, and served with coriander pickles and aioli flavored with urfa, a Turkish chile pepper.

In about a dozen visits to The Prairie Whale in the last year or so, my disappointments have been very few, indeed. This is partly because a restaurant such as this, that goes out on a limb as a matter of course and imbues that risk-taking with a measure of modesty (most larger portions are priced from $20 to $30), deserves a bit of latitude. You don’t expect your headbanger daughter to come down the stairs in the morning in a skirt and a pressed cardigan, and neither should you be surprised when something racy in some dish doesn’t seem quite right.

A few weeks before I ordered mahi-mahi with spigariello, I was served a side portion of the vegetable that was virtually all stems, and was not the most delicious thing I ever ate. On the other hand, how downright thrilling it is to find a wonderful and generally still-obscure green like spigariello in a restaurant kitchen so far from an urban hub.

The Whale, “goes out on a limb” and does so “with a measure of modesty,” says Matt Straus.

The offerings at The Prairie Whale, in spite of its Brooklyn genealogy, most remind me of a restaurant called Nopa, in my old hometown of San Francisco which is another place with spirit animals like pork chops, french fries, spigariello on romesco and a well-made Sazerac. The spaces hardly could be more different (Nopa was built in a former bank, with 40-foot ceilings), but both ambitious dinner spots are perhaps primarily moored in their love of cocktails and spirits, and the ingredient-driven fearlessness of their kitchens. While they are certainly not for everyone or every occasion, you can feel their personalities from the sidewalk.

The “Pig Head Rillettes’ appetizer, served with pickled vegetables and grilled sesame bread.

I used to wonder what Divisadero Street in San Francisco would be without Nopa, and I have that same feeling of indispensability about The Prairie Whale. How lucky it is for Great Barrington and for the greater area to have a place like this in the mix, and in spite of other fine eateries in the area, how diminished it would be without it. It is a restaurant with sophistication and local appeal in just the right places and proportions. After nine years, as it looks out on the north side of town from its slope-side perch, it feels like part of the natural landscape. ■

Matt Straus is the owner of Heirloom Café, a San Francisco restaurant, and recently bought the former Williamsville Inn in West Stockbridge. He has worked at renowned restaurants in Boston and Los Angeles. He was named one of the top sommeliers of 2011 by Food and Wine Magazine.