Dining
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Some of the dishes at Century are a bit more grown-up
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Published: July 3, 2008
EAST BEND - EAST BEND - I've eaten in echoing monuments to American abundance and overachievement.
I've eaten in greasy spoons and greasier places where using a spoon would probably be considered unnecessary and overdoing it.
I've eaten in old houses tricked out into restaurants, with waiters in black aprons to accompany creaky floorboards and cranky air-conditioning systems.
Until a few weeks ago, though, I had never eaten in a dining room surrounded by the dead and gone relatives of a restaurant owner.
Century Kitchen and Flint Hill Vineyards are built on farmland that's been in the Doub-Renigar family for more than 100 years. The farmhouse itself dates to the 1870s, and it feels like it, with front dining rooms that are lined in dark wood, heavy maroon curtains and sepia-colored portraits of men and women in tight, high collars. Rocking chairs, ferns and a screened porch ring the wide front porch.
The restaurant opened in August. It's still open only three nights a week, and with its 20 tables scattered through three rooms and the porch, it feels like you are eating in someone's home. In fact, you are, the stern sepia gazes remind you.
Century Kitchen is Some Where in a time when more of our eating options seem to be corporate-flavored, Anywhere chains.
I don't feel that way about the food. That's where Century Kitchen leaves me wanting more. Terroir (a French word that generally means a sense of place) is not just about how wine, coffees or teas from a certain region taste. Chefs can craft restaurants with terroir, too.
I don't feel that happening here. Instead, the menu meanders across the Southwest and Europe, with a hop over to Asia and an occasional nod to New Orleans. The expected makes up about one-quarter of the menu. There's the usual filet mignon with mashed potatoes, or sides of rice pilaf. Of course there's creme brulee.
A crepe filled with strawberries and blueberries tasted tired. A peppery shrimp etouffee appetizer was on the menu during one visit, but in the end, it was just a few bites of tomato sauce and shrimp on a crusty baguette slice. And it was $9. Some dishes have bigger ambitions but don't come together. A risotto appetizer is a confused dish, the tang of goat cheese and spring onions clanging up against briny olives and a red-wine sauce. It's a dish that's fighting with itself.
The other three-fourths are grown-up dishes, smarter, kickier. It isn't food that will amaze you with ingenuity, but it can deeply please.
There's molé-braised pork tenderloin with a rough and rustic salsa verde, or a small, sweet chicken halved and resting on creamed corn and poblano peppers with roasted garlic cream sauce. Roasted duck breast comes with an unbelievable compote of butternut squash and peach. A saffron-tomato broth with shrimp and clams was under-salted, but oh, the slices of spicy kielbasa-like sausage and dabs of rouille (a spicy sauce made with saffron, chiles and garlic) that came with them! It was like an enlightened version of bouillabaisse.
Vineyards and wineries across the Yakin Valley have been adding restaurants as they grow. In my fantasy, someday we will have a small cadre of good restaurants such as the ones peppering California's wine country.
Century Kitchen isn't to that level yet, but perhaps it's an early ancestor. I say that because of this dish: bay scallops against a background of sauteed silvers of bok choy and shiitake mushrooms, with a buttery sesame sauce dripped over all of it, the carmelized, seared shellfish, the nutty vegetables. It's an uncomplicated but completely delicious and light-headed treatment of ingredients. I wiped the plate clean before it went back to the kitchen.
The menu changes about every month, and it's short -- usually four entrees plus a special -- with as many appetizers and desserts.
Flint Hill's wine list is also small, limited just to the handful of wines (among them Syrah, Chardonnay, Chambourcin) they produce. I see that at many vineyard restaurants but they should be brave enough to open up their wine lists to a few outsiders. If you want to drink a white, and you happen not to like Chardonnay, then you have only one choice. That said, I'm not a big Viognier fan as a rule, but am partial to theirs. It tastes of honeyed peaches.
With the exception of the crepe, desserts uniformly look like petite, frilly ladies -- a little stuffy, but tasty. A small chocolate cake the size of a dessert place is iced with ganache and pooled by creme anglaise. Lemon shortcake is a layered confection of sponge cake, whipped cream and lemon curd, sitting in a cool pond of mango puree and blueberries.
It's fit for tea. Maybe it would win the approval of those relatives.
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