The Starry Night Café is about 15 miles up Route 7 in Ferrisburgh. We went early on a cold Thursday night. Two waitresses and what looked like a chef were toying with a baby and talking with a man at the bar. We walked through to the main dining room, a circular room that seats maybe fifty. Tonight there was only a party of the elderly and Caroline, Thomas, and me. The walls are hung with local art.
Restless hands soon discovered that the underside of the table was pleasantly tactile – it was carpeted. Caroline had the scoop: “It softens the noise bouncing off the hardwood floors.” So that is why we heard, on satellite radio, only the voices of various soul singers, and not their accompanying bands: the voices of soul singers eludes the shag carpeting that lines the bottom of tables. This may or may not be the sonic principle behind Infant Sorrow’s “Furry Walls.”
Our waitress brought us soft white bread and rosemary olive oil. We forget her name. The bread and oil was nice. Still, Thomas was unconvinced. “One day I am going to invent a sauce that makes bread delicious,” he said as we ate. So I guess he did not really like the rosemary olive oil? Caroline and I did. Still, if one day you find yourself dipping bread into some truly delicious sauce, think back to this man’s ambition.
The service turned out to be good – not too quick, not keeping us waiting either. Soon the appetizers arrived. Thomas had the Lobster Phyllo, which quickly emerged as the table favorite. Phyllo I guess means puff pastry filled with stuff – in this case, with creamy lobster. This obviously is very good – a tastily alternative take on the lobster roll. I ate a salad with fried oysters, local VT feta cheese, grapefruit, avocado, and a ginger balsamic vinaigrette. Caroline had the other salad on the menu, greens, goat cheese, toasted almonds, and mango. For the sake of locavores in the blogosphere, we asked: are these mangoes local? They were not local.
Our waitress was very nice about it all. She asked what I was scribbling in my notebook. Going into the meal, I had this idea that I would stay undercover so as to not get the preferential treatment that surely is given to reviewers from widely-read food blogs. I did not want to say that I was drafting metaphors about under-table carpeting, so I said, “wine.”
“Oh, did you have any questions about our wine list?”
“Oh, no. Well, ah, maybe, yes… what’s this one?” After she explained in poetic detail we had no choice but to partake. Caroline tried the Wine of the Month, a blended red called Domaine de Triennes; I had the Malbec. Thomas - underage, but a gifted sommelier and undaunted by the restrictions of the law - was eager to weigh in on the two glasses. “I like the aftertaste of the first one, but I like the in-my-mouth taste of the second,” he said.
When my pork special arrived I was surprised by both the size of the portion and the neatness of its presentation. These are qualities that do not often co-exist on a plate. For a plate of pork shank, it was colorful. The cabbage was beet-red, carrots and broccoli bright and healthy-looking on top of the white horseradish mashed potatoes. The shank itself was flavorful and falling off the bone.
Thomas’s oatmeal fried Misty Knoll chicken breast was topped with a little bit of pulled pork and a smoky BBQ sauce. This is a combination that I hope will come into wide use. Two great things, one on top of the other. Furthermore, the inclusion of oatmeal – even just the use of the word “oatmeal” on the menu – alleviates some of the fried-food guilt, for those of us in touch with that particular kind of regret.
Caroline’s salmon was cooked just right, flaking into slices at the slightest nudging. It was served on a bed of lentil, red pepper and wilted greens and topped with lemon hummus. This was a very light dish, full of stand-alone flavors. “Lentils look like deer poop,” Caroline actually said.
Around this time we concluded we liked the appetizers better than the main courses, though, we thought, it was all pretty darn good. Just that the appetizers were really good. Dessert was, too. “Every time I see something like ‘Chocolate Indulgence on the menu, I get it,” Caroline said. She got it, and immediately started bragging about how good it was. “If you like it so much, why don’t you marry it?” said Thomas, and we high-fived across the table. It was a rich flourless cake topped with house-made orange sorbet – delicious sorbet, but I think I would have preferred simple vanilla ice cream. Vanilla ice cream did in fact come with Thomas’s apple pie, and that classic combination worked as it should. My carrot cake was soft and moist and topped with thick frosting. As Caroline feels about Indulgence, I feel about carrot cake. I always ask my mom to make it for my birthday. This was very good – I won’t compare it to mom’s, but I would get it again. Finishing my last bite I realized that I had been rubbing the bottom of the table with my palm to the point of rug-burn while forking from plate to mouth with the other. I was overcome with in-my-mouth taste. The wine was gone and Caroline’s face was now quite red. The elderly at the next table were coughing into the middle-distance. When we left the waitress - who at this point knew what was up with the notebook - handed us copies of the menu and wished us good night.
No comments:
Post a Comment