Dining
Lemon-artichoke soup $5.95
Midtown pasta $13.95
Quail $9.95
Lobster andouille lasagna $26.95
Pierogi $15.95
Frenched pork chop $22.95
Ducks in a Row $27.95
Aging makes people do weird things. Women get their eyes done. Men marry trophy wives or, worse, grow mustaches. Facing the specter of middle age, Midtown Café recently made the simple, counterintuitive decision to go gray.
Last summer, as his 19-year-old eatery was getting a little peppery behind the temples, owner Randy Rayburn called in restaurant designer Nancy Inman of Inman Designs to create a fresh look for the compact dining room, which, to a cadre of business and Music Row types, is the still point of the turning world. Inman selected a sleek palette of gray walls, black linens, black-and-brown carpet, and an array of monochromatic canvases on loan from Zeitgeist Gallery. The black-box scheme makes any guest in dark trousers or skirt—and that’s most everyone in Midtown’s chic neutral-clad universe—virtually disappear from the waste down, to the point that the restaurant seems populated by so many well-heeled torsos from commerce and the arts.
In addition to a $75,000 aesthetic makeover, Rayburn, who purchased Midtown a decade ago, poured $100,000 into expanding the kitchen and upgrading equipment. He declared the restaurant and its tiny bar smoke-free, upgraded to Riedel stemware, made the long-overdue decision to buy bread from Provence and installed himself as general manager. Then Rayburn struck a deal to lure chef Paul Ent back into the Hobbit-sized kitchen renowned for Midtown pasta and lemon-artichoke soup.
Ent is a former Marine and self-taught chef whose tours of culinary duty include Mount Vernon Inn in Virginia; Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Rayburn’s Sunset Grill and Midtown; Pearl’s Café in Sewanee; B. McNeel’s in Murfreesboro and, most recently, The Riverfront Plantation Inn in Dover, Tenn. He draws from a family history in the restaurant business. His grandfather was a barbecue master and his mother worked as a manager for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Ent was raised on a farm in Indiana and remembers attending company events at which Colonel Sanders passed out silver dollars to the children. It is no surprise that his food preferences are decidedly Southern.
Ent reworked the menu, trading French influences for more down-home flair. The result is a two-faced book of “Midtown Classics” and “New Creations.” One page pays homage to the hearty cannon of food that made Midtown a landmark. The other page introduces a playful assortment of new dishes—at once rustic and refined—that barely hints at what chef Ent really wants to do in the kitchen.
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Among the outstanding New Creations when we visited was an appetizer of quail lacquered with date jus. With skin roasted to a dark, crisp caramel, and stuffed simply with chorizo, the delicate bird delivered an unexpected amount of meat and flavor. Spiced-rubbed snapper also stood out, with its delicate palate of sweet fruit and fish. The flaky, moist snapper came beautifully plated over Israeli couscous with curried currants and apple-and-corn sauce.
While Ent and sous chef Richard Radford eschew the histrionics of molecular gastronomy and all the bizarre kitchen science of manipulated foams and essences, they make a humorous gesture toward avant-garde cookery with the chicken pot pie, which arrives artistically deconstructed into components of puff pastry, grilled chicken and a ramekin of creamy filling with peas and carrots, to be mixed together at the table.
The similarly nostalgic offering of shepherd’s pie, a baking dish of stewed lamb covered with mashed potatoes, could have been more interesting had it also been separated into its components and served in a less monolithic bowl.
Ducks in a Row, delivered on an elegant rectangular plate, configured a trifecta of tender duck prepared as pastrami with mustard, confit over sweet potatoes, and seared breast. The Moroccan shrimp, with its zingy infusion of citrus and spices, brought a novel rub to a menu so long colored by heavy sauces such as pesto, marinara and béarnaise. (The light seafood could have benefited from a more delicate side than its redundant gravel of black-eye peas, but it’s rolling off the menu anyway.) For people who like raw meat, lamb carpaccio offered an unusual twist on the thinly shaved medallions of red meat. Tuna spring roll with chunks of sashimi that melted away with a trace of spicy slaw, ancho Dijon sauce and barbecue was a more satisfying use of seafood than the lobster pupusa, which buried the sweetness of the crustacean in a pocket of deep-fried cornmeal. Likewise, the lobster andouille lasagna, with its heavy-handed red sauce, could just as easily have used eggplant or another less precious filler, leaving the lobster for some higher use.
Of course, Ent and Rayburn already know that. But they also know their clients, and lobster sells with this crowd.
Rayburn didn’t get to be the unofficial don of Nashville restaurants without knowing what and how Nashvillians like to eat. His acute sense of appetite keeps his restaurants buzzing, and it helps explain why, after so much decorative nip and culinary tuck, Midtown still has the cautious love handles of lemon-artichoke soup, Midtown pasta, Veal 3 Ways and other dated offerings.
“They’re old and they need to be more modern,” says Ent, who would prefer to eighty-six the Midtown Classics to devote the limited kitchen resources to more artisanal and adventurous foods, like homemade pastas, which he frequently showcases on his tasting menus and daily specials.
But when Ent and Radford rib the boss about Midtown’s legacy items—and rib him they do, at least behind his back—they do it with ample respect for the reputation he has created for Midtown and his other iconic restaurants, Sunset Grill and Cabana.
“We know that if we got rid of the lemon-artichoke soup, they’d string Randy up out front,” says Ent, adding that it’s Midtown’s audience more than the restaurant’s owner that resists change. So the old favorites—crab cakes, crème brûlée and grilled trout over fried green tomatoes with goat cheese, crabmeat, corn, peppers and bacon—remain. Still, that doesn’t keep Ent and Radford from conspiring in the kitchen, tweaking the ever-changing menu to see if anyone notices when they drop a classic every now and then.
Later this month, Ent will introduce his third menu since coming back to Midtown in September 2006. He and Radford have currently given up eating meat as part of their training for the Memphis in May triathlon, so they plan to infuse the spring table with unusual vegetables like ramps and fiddlehead ferns, with an emphasis on raw veggies. Expect a shrimp-and-grits dish, a stuffed chicken with cream sauce and some innovative twists on retro favorites like fire-and-ice salad (cucumbers and onions) and various aspics, as well as vegetable-based sorbets and smoothies. This spring, Ducks in a Row will likely make way for a troika of another kind of meat, Radford says, adding that variation on the theme of a protein is something they expect to adapt from menu to menu. So while the classic Veal 3 Ways—piccata, Oscar and saltimbocca—might not be going anywhere any time soon, it might need to make room for a younger, hipper threesome.
Midtown Café serves lunch Monday through Friday and dinner seven nights a week. Complimentary shuttle service is available to Schermerhorn Symphony Center and TPAC.