A long overdue review of the best restaurant yet

Jeez, who's running this place? The lazy schmuck needs to get off his butt.

Hey, we're alive. We have a house with a kitchen that doesn't suck. I have my knives back -- a heavenly choir sang when I unpacked them, I swear. I also owe you guys a lot of posts: I've got a grand rundown of Knoxville area barbecue; a detailed expose on how Calhoun's is even better than I gave them credit for; and a throwdown for all of you Southern types who think you can make pie.

For now, you'll have to settle for a review of RouXbarb, certainly the best restaurant I've eaten at in a long time. I anticipate it will be a strong contender for the best in all of Knoxville.

My first visit to Knoxville was back in April, and my Knoxvillian friend Matt took me out to RouXbarb. It was awesome. It was also in the middle of a whirlwind trip and I don't remember it all that well. To repay the favor, the Knoshers took Matt out. I'd like to say I remember my second trip with perfect clarity, but there were a couple of bottles of wine involved.

First off, RouXbarb is a BYOB joint. Which is awesome, because it means you can have a $15 bottle of wine for $15 (plus corkage, which is reasonable), not $65. (We brought a bottle of chambourcin from Holy Field Winery outside of Kansas City -- a little merger of the Knoshers' midwestern roots and our Southern branches.)

We started, as you must at any good restaurant, with appetizers. They're so dang good here that we each got our own: Matt got the Southern fried chicken livers; Melanie got the watermelon, goat cheese, and arugula salad, and I got the mussels.

I am a professed liver hater -- along with button mushrooms, one of the very few foods I dislike -- but the fried livers were delicious. The jam and grits they were served over offered a balance of sweet and creamy to the fried breading and the dark liver taste. Melanie's salad was magnificent, but then it's awfully hard to go wrong with fruit and goat cheese. Still, the attention to ingredients was evident, and the salad was like a Platonic ideal of salad, identical to the concept that appeared in the chef's mind: the watermelon was perfectly sweet and crunchy (which tells you how long ago this was...), the chèvre tart and creamy, the arugula tiny and barely bitter yet.

I like to think I won the appetizer round, though. The mussels transcended everything I thought I knew about mussels, steeped in a deeply smoky sauce with morsels of salty, meaty local bacon. I'm accustomed to taking my mussels à la marinière, and I thought it unlikely that they could stand up to such an explosively flavorful sauce, but the combination of salt-briny seafood and salt-smoky hog was perfect. A little thirst-inducing, so thank goodness for BYOB.

By dinner, things start getting a little hazy thanks to the drink. We know Melanie ordered some manner of steak, which she describes as "delicious." I got the duck terrine -- duck breast over duck confit, with sweet corn and other magic. The sweet corn tried, but couldn't quite succeed, at balancing out the tremendous richness of the confit, and the flavorful skin on the breast threw its hat into the flavor competition as well. It was one of those dishes you're forced to eat slowly or else be quickly overwhelmed. Matt came away the unquestionable winner, though, ordering lamb loin chops that, while outwardly simplistic -- certainly more so than my hot duck-on-duck action -- were simply transcendent. Unfortunately I was only able to wrestle one bite out of him, and surrounded as that bite was on both ends by the best red wine in Kansas (which is really good, I swear!) the details have been lost to the sands of time.

Dinner must have sobered us up, though, because dessert remains clear as a bell. Matt tells me that he doesn't usually get dessert, but you simply have to at RouXbarb. There's just no other option. He ordered the blondie, which sounds pedestrian but was packed with all sorts of chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and other assorted gooey novelties. I went with the blackberry buckler, which, with generous dollops of whipped cream and vanilla ice cream, was nearly as good as Melanie's blackberry pie (more about which in a future post). And Melanie got the strawberry jam cake, a moist, eggy triumph loaded with buttercream frosting and wonderful strawberry jam that left the three of us with one victory each.

Unfortunately, my hazy memory, aided by the passage of time and wine, hasn't made this blog post as forceful as it should be. (Melanie notes that we'll simply have to go back. Darn.) But despite my own personal failings, frequency of updates chief among them, RouXbarb was a Go-Tell-It-On-The-Mountain kind of experience. Hallelujah, praise the Lord and pass the fried livers.