Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Wine Wine Wednesday: Go Big Orange! Volunteer Cabernet
Posted by Chris Chamberlain on Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 6:36 AM
- bnawinegroup.com
Although the name of Volunteer Cabernet actually refers to the fact that the group's head winemaker Tony Leonardi has served as a volunteer fireman in St. Helena, Calif., for 10 years, the folks at BNA Wine are hoping that Tennesseans will take advantage of the name to consider this as a perfect holiday gift for your favorite University of Tennessee fan.
Considering how the football season is going so far in Knoxville, your Vol fan friends probably could use a little cheering up, or maybe this could be a nice going away present for Coach Dooley. The cabernet, which retails for about $30, is a blend of Cabernet Franc and Merlot and then aged for 20 months in French oak to contribute hints of cherry, cranberry and toasted vanilla. Not as big or heavy-bodied as other California Cabs, Volunteer is a nice food-friendly wine that should still impress the wine snobs on your gift list.
The upraised hand on the bottle label might also represent someone volunteering to be the next coach of the Volunteers. Maybe Jon Gruden is a fan of red wine. UT fans can only hope ...
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Restaurant openings 'Gastropub' Called {Pub}licity Opening Soon in Bellevue
Posted by Dana Kopp Franklin on Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM
The new pub fills the space formerly held by Snappy Tomato Pizza. In fact, it’s the same ownership team, made up of local entrepreneurs Kevin Alexandroni, Simon Sedek and Uzi Shmueli. They decided to ditch the Snappy Tomato franchise and serve up craft beer and comforting pub fare instead. (The chef, Liz Standridge, cooked at the Iron Pork Chop and Battle Ground Brewery.)
General manager Melinda Johnson said the place will have a neighborhood hangout vibe, with 10 beers on tap and a selection of “classic cocktails with a modern twist.”
{Pub}licity, at 7073 Highway 70S, is expected to open around the second week of November.
A version of this story appeared in my Food Biz column in this week's print edition of The City Paper and online in the Nashville Post.
Coffee Filter Headquarters Coffeehouse Ready To Start Serving Up Java This Week
Posted by Dana Kopp Franklin on Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 12:04 PM
- Headquarters on Facebook
Owned and operated by Louisa Green and her husband James, Headquarters fills a renovated storefront that James, a professional carpenter, has stylishly outfitted using reclaimed wood. Headquarters will serve coffee from local roaster Roast Inc., along with pastries.
Headquarters had a preview party on Friday, and Louisa Green says she expects to open sometime this week. (Saturday at the latest, she hopes.)
East Nashville’s Dozen bakery will supply some of the pastry treats; a West Nashville bakery, Vegan Vee, will provide vegan and gluten-free delights.
Louisa Green said she’ll be serving up a signature espresso drink spiked with chocolate and cayenne, and a similar sweet-and-spicy flavor profile can also be found in the house roast that Roast Inc. created specifically for Headquarters. In addition, you can look for teas and herbal infusions from another local company, High Garden.
The Greens will open their coffeehouse early in the morning to supply morning joe to folks heading down Charlotte to work. It will operate Monday through Saturday, and at least at first, it will close in late afternoon. Headquarters is at 4902 Charlotte Pike.
A version of this story appeared in my Food Biz column in this week's print edition of The City Paper and online in the Nashville Post.
Events 'Big Kids' Get a Special Night (And Beer) at Nashville Children's Theatre
Posted by Chris Chamberlain on Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 8:32 AM
They're actually encouraging it in a fun little event coming up on Friday, Nov. 9, for their "Big Kid Night" production of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." Just $25 gets you admission to the show and beer from Yazoo. Table 3 will be preparing the food, and they've promised pimiento cheese sliders, caper tarragon deviled eggs and caramel corn as some high-end theater snacks.
So don't be a blockhead. Relive your youth with a performance of the Chuck Schulz classic and enjoy some flashbacks and fellowship with your friends at the Nashville Children's Theatre. The fun kicks off at 5:30 p.m. and the curtain rises at 6:30. Buy your tickets here.
Nashville Children's Theatre
25 Middleton St.
(615) 254-9103
Restaurants Celebrate Flyte's 'Hex-iversary' This Week
Posted by Lesley Lassiter on Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 6:53 AM
I stopped in last week with a friend for a preview and got to try out the anniversary cocktail “Hex in the City,” a Cosmopolitan-like concoction with a tiny kick because it features pepper and chocolate vodkas and an ancho chili rim (hex = six, get it?). It’s milder than you’d think and quite refreshing. I also tested pastry chef Tony Galzin’s “Apple-y Anniversary” dessert, a plate of apple fritters served with Cruze Farm buttermilk caramel and coffee-cardamom ice cream. Coffee ice cream isn’t my thing, but those apple fritters were delicious. I dragged them through a few dollops of crème fraiche, too. The dessert is specially-priced at $6 and worth every penny.
I didn’t get a chance to stay for dinner, which is a shame, because I’ve heard the food is fantastic. I hate to admit, but I’ve never been. We tried to go once, but it was a Monday night (when the restaurant is closed). So this week’s “Six Dinner Giveaway” is the perfect time to remedy that. Every night this week (through this Saturday, Nov. 3), diners can enter the giveaway by writing their contact information on the back of their receipt and leaving it for a drawing for a free meal during a return visit. One winner will be chosen from each dinner service Tuesday through Friday, and two will be chosen Saturday.
My suggestion? Stop in for happy hour, get a couple of discounted drinks in the lounge and then head over to the dining room and dig into the toasted farro. Happy hour runs each night, Tuesday through Saturday from 4:30 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. (I don't know about you, but I appreciate drink specials that extend beyond 6:30). Dinner is served in the dining room starting at 5 p.m. The restaurant is located at 718 Division St. (next to Frugal McDoogal) and is closed Sundays and Mondays.
Monday, October 29, 2012
TV Dinner Anthony Bourdain Gears Up for Nashville Visit and Debuts New PBS Show
Posted by Chris Chamberlain on Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 10:00 AM
This leg of his tour will take him through several Southern cities including Birmingham and Memphis, and some he has never visited, like Music City. He is excited about his first trip to our fair burg, and possibly even more excited than we are about Chef Sean Brock's recent announcement that he is returning to town. "There are a number of places that I've never been that I'm shamefully ignorant of," Bourdain shared on the call. "I've never been to Nashville and I'm looking forward to learning more."
If that's not enough Bourdain for you, the series finale of No Reservations will air on Nov. 5, and the second season of The Layover kicks off on Nov. 19, both on Travel Channel. In between those two, PBS will premiere a new series titled The Mind of a Chef, which will showcase many different cooks, but with a focus on Bourdain and David Chang, the mastermind behind several brilliant restaurants and Lucky Peach food journal. Bourdain is also developing a cooking-based competition/reality show for ABC, so don't be too sad about the demise of No Reservations after eight seasons.
Just to whet your appetite, here's the teaser trailer for The Mind of a Chef:
Drinks Vodka Can Be Interesting
Posted by Chris Chamberlain on Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 7:05 AM
A new product that has just arrived in town is Boyd and Blair Vodka, a small batch product that is still made with locally sourced Pennsylvania potatoes. "What? I thought all vodkas were made from potatoes." Not anymore. In fact, you can make vodka out of just about any plant matter that contains starch or sugar to kick off the fermentation process from yeast that naturally occurs in the air. That's why they can make it prison toilets or in Hawkeye and trapper John's tent in M*A*S*H.
Boyd and Blair is so much better than that though. The Spirit Journal has named B&B the top-rated vodka in the world for two years running, and noted liquor journalist Paul Picault gave their Professional Proof 151 five stars, his highest rating. Those are some big scores for a high-proof product that's assumed to be odorless and flavorless. The starchiness of the potatoes used actually provides a creamy mouth-feel that is unexpected in a clear spirit, and you can actually sniff a hint of potato skins on the nose. Served cold as part of a vodka martini, Boyd and Blair makes a wonderful mixer, and local bartenders are beginning to clamor to add it to their top shelves.
The normal 80-proof version is probably more appropriate for the home liquor cabinet and retails for about $30 per bottle. Look for it in your favorite liquor store and give it a try.
Another respected high-end vodka that has begun to make an impact on the local market is Purity Vodka. Purity is made exclusively from natural ingredients including winter wheat and barley in a proprietary pot still made of copper and gold at 13th-century Ellinge Castle in the south of Sweden. The end product is distilled a mind-bending 34 times, where 90 percent of the distillate is lost as they continue to select the purest of the liquid. The resulting spirit is a whopping 192 proof before it is cut with deionized water and natural mineral-rich water to produce a final alcohol level of 80 proof.
Purity maintains a very full-bodied character, especially for a vodka. I first encountered Purity a few years ago at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans where inventive mixologists had set up a "Make your own Bloody Mary" bar, but not the usual layout of bottled mixes, hot sauces and peppers that encourage you to ruin some perfectly good hooch by overseasoning it. Instead, participants added fresh herbs and vegetables to Purity in CO2-charged containers like the kind you make whipped cream or soda water in. Pressurizing the container and shaking it infused the flavors of the greens into the vodka, which was then strained to produce the best Bloody I had ever tasted, much less made.
Events A French Staycation: Step Up to the Plate Two Days Only at Belcourt
Posted by Jim Ridley on Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 5:00 AM
Earlier this year, lots of people turned out at The Belcourt to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a fine documentary about 85-year-old master sushi chef Jiro Ono preparing his son Yoshikazu to run his tiny Tokyo sushi bar. The cuisine may be entirely different, but in many other ways Paul Lacoste's documentary Step Up to the Plate is remarkably similar — down to the hunger pangs it triggers in a viewer for something we can't get locally.
Here Lacoste follows revered French chef Michel Bras as he prepares to hand over the three-star restaurant bearing the family name to his son Sébastien. As in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the pressure is on the son to uphold not only the restaurant's standards but the father's vision. But Sébastien has his own subtle innovations and flourishes which don't always jibe with his father's, even when the detail is as seemingly inconsequential as the direction of a stroke of purée on a plate.
The fascination here, as in Jiro, lies in the film's ability to convey to us why it matters — why it matters, for example, to use white borage flower in a dressing instead of blue. The minute, painstaking drips, dabs and swatches of flavors on a dish can seem fussy beyond endurance (though one amusing shot shows a pair of cooks forming a looped assembly line to arrange the minuscule ingredients). But Michel and Sébastien, who share a quiet, intense practicality, approach their work without pretension, breaking down for us the balance of textures and flavors that elevates a dish to sublimity. In one of the best scenes, Sébastien tries to create a Japanese equivalent to one of his father's classic desserts, substituting, say, puffed rice for bread crust. Asked whether the result is French or Japanese cuisine, he chuckles and says, "I have no idea."
Shot with great care and attention to texture, whether we're looking at plated food or water trickling under the ice of a wintry rustic stream, Step Up to the Plate is an uncommonly artful food doc, warmed by the glow of the Bras family's bonds — which Sébastien encapsulates, in a simple and joyous finale, in favorite ingredients. It'll make you want to cook with your kids. It'll also change the way you look at milk skin.
Step Up to the Plate screens Monday and Tuesday at The Belcourt; click here for show times and more information.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Coffee Filter Jackalope Brewing Co. Adding Coffeehouse Inside Taproom
Posted by Dana Kopp Franklin on Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 2:12 PM
Virball announced last week on the Jackalope blog that ZolliKoffee, owned by Belmont grad Zollie Wilson, will start brewing up joe in the back portion of the taproom. It will be open early so people can pick up their morning coffee on their way downtown to work.
The taproom’s beer hours are expected to expand as well, but Virball said that won’t be decided until after ZolliKoffee launches in December.
I asked Wilson for details on the food and coffee, and he emailed back: "Edibles will vary when first opening; [we'll be] testing different things to see what people are enjoying the most. I have a large collection of family favorite recipes and will be baking and cooking offsite with my mom and grandmother."
He added that he will be carrying Out of the Blue granola, and all coffees are from Klatch Coffee in California.
Jackalope is at 701 Eighth Ave. S.
Restaurant openings Sushi Train to Bring Conveyor Belt Sushi to West Nashville
Posted by Dana Kopp Franklin on Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 1:50 PM
Sushi Train is on track to open soon in the restaurant space on White Bridge Road where Chef Yang’s Chinese buffet used to reside.
Chef Alan Yang is also the owner of Sushi Train. He closed the buffet five months ago to completely renovate the space and reopen it with a new focus on sushi and other Japanese favorites like tempura, along with hibachi and Chinese entrees.
The buffet is gone, replaced by a more unique food delivery system: the titular sushi train. It’s actually a conveyor belt that circulates sushi and other delicacies on little plates for diners to spot, grab and make their own.
The new place will serve beer and wine, as well. Sushi Train aims to open around Nov. 1 at 94 White Bridge Road.
(A version of this story appeared in my Food Biz column in The City Paper and online in the Nashville Post.)
