Restaurant Review - Kitchen switch
How a new chef de cuisine makes for a new Dish
So much of the appeal of the neighborhood restaurant is that it relieves us of the fussiness that going out to eat often demands. We curb our expectations of perfection, and the restaurant doesn’t judge us for wearing last year’s jeans.
It seems almost a stretch to tag Dish as a neighborhood restaurant. For years since its opening nearly a decade ago in Virginia-Highland, Dish has served as a destination restaurant as much as anything else. But before Atlanta’s burgeoning city scene began breeding distinctive, quirky gathering holes in every corner of town, Dish was intown’s adopted neighborhood restaurant. Everyone wanted a part in its convivial vibe, whether they lived down the street or halfway across town.
The result has been a dining room that still fosters a shared warmth, despite the collective anonymity of the guests.
Dish’s service-station chic, with its concrete and exposed-brick walls and whimsical, provocative drop lights, might be a smidge outdated. Its menu, which reads like a playful throwback to the ’80s that doesn’t have much focus but doesn’t seem to want for any, flaunts more than a little kitsch. But they’re both timeless and energetic in a way that’s as constant as cocktail-hour gossip, which is precisely what the dining room’s sleek, central U-shaped bar, fringed by the textured stainless steel of industrial flooring, is used for.
For a while, it was easy to lament that the menu, always tacked to the outside door of the restaurant, rarely changed. The fast-growing disdain for seasonless, industrially produced food that knew no restrictions of weather or ecological cycles seemed to elude the kitchen at Dish. While an increasing number of the city’s restaurants printed up new menus every three months (or every day), Dish was serving the same salad of “seasonal” vegetables year-round. There were few new dishes to look forward to, but the favorites were constants we could count on, and the eclectic, fusion-inspired menu exuded such spunk that it resisted boredom. The service was a quirky blend of polish and edge that had the character to match the cuisine, which was good much of the time and occasionally outstanding.
There’s a heavier hand in the kitchen these days under the guidance of new chef de cuisine Stephen McGuffin, and if it’s shaken things up a bit, it’s also disrupted the consistency.
The menu still reverberates with playfulness, but the execution is missing the delicacy that once kept the results in balance. The kitchen has been slow to incorporate McGuffin’s dishes into the menu, and this restraint and caution seems to be well-founded.
A porcini-crusted beef tenderloin, one of the earliest additions, comes out with more than a hint of the steakhouse, including the price: At $29, it’s the most expensive plate on the menu, a bold departure from one of Dish’s primary draws — its relative affordability among a trend of rising entree costs. The filet is flawless — it’s nearly as tender as room-temperature butter, and as silken. But it’s fighting with a 1/2-inch-thick, heavy layer of bread-crumbed, butter-bound porcini mushroom “crust,” and an intense, peppery jus that is so acrid it overpowers everything on the plate, even the fat, starchy fries.
Skate, a longtime menu staple and a preparation executive chef/owner Sheri Davis brought with her from her stint at New York City’s Le Bernardin, is still cooked to a beautiful, golden crisp, still tastes of that briny amalgam of scallop and lobster that makes you wonder how it was ever tossed back from a fisherman’s catch. But the fried capers used in a once-tangy, rich and wildly addictive lemon-butter sauce are chewy, dense little pebbles, and tossed with a pretty but tasteless dice of tomatoes that does nothing to add pep to a tired sauce. The spinach salad it’s served over, scarcely wilted from the residual heat, is as watery and lifeless as the snapped green beans and soggy diced potatoes it cradles. It’s a disappointing rendition of what was arguably once the restaurant’s star offering.
Thankfully, other dishes have suffered less in the transition. The widely beloved free-form lasagna, sauced doubly with a lobster cream and arugula puree, is as unctuous as ever, its folds tucked through with so much lobster and scallops that just when you think you’ve eaten every last bit, you discover another buttery morsel. Mussels, steamed in a smoky, corn-studded chowder, are still substantial enough to tease you away from the entree selections, but no longer served in such gargantuan bowls as to capture your appetite entirely.
A recently tweaked dish of crab cakes, crisp with fluffy interiors and a little too much filler, are paired with a crunchy salad of shredded cabbages, pea sprouts and a tangy mango puree that’s bordering on citrus overkill but is so refreshing it doesn’t teeter over the edge. It’s fun, colorful, bold, and even a little bit social.
I still can’t get excited about dessert here, but then Dish’s dessert menu never really was the life of the party. Every now and then I try a fruit tart, or the signature chocolate confection, a mousse cake that’s cute to look at and cuddles up well to coffee, but nothing ever quite kills the pastry craving.
So I keep going back to one of the most enchanting surprises I’ve tasted recently here, something entirely new: a tangle of julienned Belgian endive, pear, walnuts and blue cheese, a purely engaging bitter-tart-sweet-creamy-crunchy soiree. Sadly, not long after it was introduced to the menu, it was gone. I can’t imagine why it wasn’t a smash hit. I’ll cross my fingers it finds its way back, or that McGuffin was just teasing us with hints of fun, flirty dishes to come. Dishes such as this have enough allure to pull you into a dining room that, for now, has enough panache to smooth over a transitional kitchen’s flaws. In the meantime, the neighborhood will be waiting.