If you were a James Beard Award-winning chef stopping by Nashville for a visit, it stands to reason that you'd want to peek at what the local James Beard Award-winners are up to. Trouble is, you'd have to find one, and given how few of the esteemed honorees there are in these parts, that's no easy feat. Louis Osteen, chef at the recently opened Fish & Co. in the Adelicia high-rise, took home the venerable medal in 2004 — but he was working in South Carolina at the time. And while the New York-based foundation rightly bestowed the title of America's Classic on Arnold's Country Kitchen in 2009, there's not exactly a lot of culinary innovation on display when it comes to frying chicken livers at the landmark Eighth Avenue meat-and-three.
So when awardees John Currence of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss., R.J. Cooper of Rogue 24 in D.C. and Michael Schwartz of Michael's Genuine Food & Drink in Miami showed up this month to cook for the CMT Artists of the Year Awards gala in Franklin, they used their free time to call on Tyler Brown at Capitol Grille and Tandy Wilson at City House, both semifinalists for the 2010 Beard award for Best Chef in the Southeast. (Former Capitol Grille chef Sean Brock, now at McCrady's in South Carolina, took the award home.)
Brown led the chefs on a tour of the historic Glen Leven estate on Franklin Road, where he and the Capitol Grille team have reclaimed a pasture to grow heirloom produce for the menu at the Hermitage Hotel. Later that night, Wilson put on the dog at City House, lavishing his guests and their entourages — including a few journalistic hangers-on — with a feast that would make even the most esteemed arbiters of the food world think about dropping a medal on Wilson's Germantown doorstep.
Now, don't confuse the description that follows with a standard-issue weekly restaurant review. After all, nothing about this dining experience was anonymous. Three James Beard laureates, their sous chefs and a reporter from Esquire's food blog do not cut a low profile in the center of a restaurant, especially when they're passing plates, taking notes and pronouncing the cuisine to be everything from "honest" to "bangin'." Currence, a friend of Wilson's who showed up to cook for a flood-relief fundraiser this summer, asked the chef to send out dishes of his choice. So, sans the formality of menus and ordering, big white bowls of food just started showing up. Wine and Sazeracs flowed freely, and I have no idea who paid. Like I said, not a standard-issue food review — but nice work if you can get it.
It's a bold move to open with seafood in a landlocked city, but Wilson debuted with a cold salad of chickpeas and Gulf octopus tossed with celery hearts, garlic, oregano and lemon juice. The meaty mollusk was boiled in a superstitious medley of celery, garlic and wine corks — yes, wine corks — with the theory being that enzymes in cork can tenderize the octopus without having to boil it so long that it loses the vibrant purple color. (Wilson concedes that it's probably an old wives' tale and that he uses corks out of nostalgia. Still, the octopus was succulent, not to mention positively regal in its purpleness.)
Next came pig's ear Milanese served with pickled vegetables. The floppy triangles of pork were boiled into submission for seven hours, then breaded with Parmigiano-Reggiano and pan-fried in olive oil until a sandy crispness concealed the buttery silk purse beneath.
Dressed casually in a T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon pig, Wilson stopped by the table as we tucked into braised pig's tail served on cannellini beans with fennel, carrots, onions and fried bread crumbs made from a house-made loaf and pizza dough. In this group, no one flinched at the rubbery little knuckles of vertebrae discarded on the edges of the plates. (By comparison, at the CMT awards dinner the next night, the word "belly" was consciously omitted from the menu description of the pork belly course.)
Among the many off-the-menu delicacies, Wilson also delivered City House staples, including his signature house-made summer sausage and spicy fennel sausage, shaved into thin coins; pan-fried trout and bread crumbs tossed with peanuts, raisins, chilies and lemon zest (a spin-off of the traditional Italian treatment with pine nuts and currants); pork meatballs; broccoli with peanuts and raisins; collards with sausage and yellow onions; and a fire-pocked thin-crust pizza yanked from the wood-burning oven and drizzled with olive oil.
This was not the first time Wilson's carnivorous refuge delighted us with its uncommonly fresh treatment of vegetables, and the much-anticipated — and ever-evolving — cauliflower salad emerged this time as a cruciferous confection of crisp florets from local Delvin Farms, tossed with pomegranate seeds, fried almonds, cracked wheat, parsley, red onion, lemon and orange juices and olive oil.
Maybe it's because we didn't start the meal with unnecessary bread, but even after an endless supply of food circled the table, there was room for dessert. Pastry chef Rebekah Turshen folded pureed sweet potatoes into a traditional layer cake and frosted the spongy stack with a mousse-textured blend of mascarpone and pureed spuds. The beautiful pastel-orange confection — plated with a sticky peak of house-made marshmallow fluff, a gravel of peanut brittle and a drizzle of Jack Daniel's caramel sauce — will be available through the end of the year.
Here again, I won't pretend my assessment of this meal was wholly unbiased, as it would be in a standard-issue weekly restaurant review. I was rooting for the home team (or House team, as it were) to impress a group of James Beard honorees. Wilson and his team certainly showed they had the mettle. Maybe someday soon, they'll also get the medal.
City House serves dinner nightly except Tuesday.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
