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.

Review: Sangria's, Part II

One of the first restaurants we reviewed was Sangria's, a tapas restaurant where we had a light lunch. We knew it was just a trial, though -- we can't let a tapas restaurant go without a real meal. We went back for our anniversary (which was over 6 weeks ago, so that tells you how far behind I am) for tapas.

For our first round, we got the fried calamari, the patatas aioli, and the chorizo in wine sauce; the second round was meatballs and a salad. We got a carafe of sangria to accompany our meal. Anyone who knows the kind of eating we usually do at a tapas restaurant already knows that something was amiss if we only did two rounds of five dishes. And it was -- salt and oil.

The chorizo, for instance, was outstanding -- smoky, fatty chorizo, plenty of melt-in-your-mouth onions, a deep umami flavor to the sauce -- but it was all we could do to eat it all from the salt. Everything but the salad followed the same pattern -- delicious thanks to all of the salt and oil, but difficult to finish for the same reasons. Unfortunately, this is neither authentic to Spanish tapas nor appropriate to the ways Americans eat tapas. It might be more reasonable to start with a plate or two before a pan of paella (which we have not tried), but Sangria's was a difficult place to make a meal.

The calamari followed the same pattern: barely overcooked at all, far less so than most American restaurants, but Melanie likened it to Kentucky Fried Squid -- heavy breading that overwhelmed the flavor of the squid itself.

And so on: the potatoes were nicely fried, but swam in oil with a layer of heavy aioli on top; the meatballs were garlicky and flavorful, which was partially owed to the hefty helping of salt they had.

Sangria's does deserve applause, though, for their willingness to shy from an excess of consistency. The sangria had different fruit, following what was seasonally available, and the salad was topped with different stuff -- different cheese, different charcuterie, etc. Kudos to Sangria's for bucking the insistence that every dish must be cookie-cutter identical and keeping our palates entertained day after day.

In the end, that openness to variation could come in handy, since Sangria's is definitely the sort of place I could start out most any night with a tapa and a glass of sangria. For appetizers or a light lunch, Sangria's is wonderful, but for a meal -- maybe not so much.

Review: Magic Wok

I want to take you away to a magical place of fantasy and make believe. I speak of a place where the greasy spoon in a roadside trailer meets the moderately rude Chinese joint; a place where there are two things on the menu and no one knows what the other one is; a place called Magic Wok. I'd link to their website, but really, don't be silly. This is a place with three tiny tables inside an immobilized 50's-model trailer with an adjoining overflow seating area with decorations that range from "Funky School Bus" toys (whatever the heck that is) to the normal Chinese mountain scenes.

I went to the Magic Wok with some work friends a few weeks ago. The question isn't so much "what do you want?" but "how spicy?" You get the cashew chicken. The menu technically has "dish with rice" on it, and in theory I suppose there might be another dish, but no one orders anything but the chicken. (Well, people order the kim chee, which isn't much like any other kim chee I've had -- it was much fresher -- and I have on good authority isn't much like Korean kim chee either, but it was tasty.)

This isn't your pedestrian cashew chicken. This has cashews that have just been roasted on the stove top, slightly smoky. The chicken has the wonderful flavor of a well-seasoned wok, not the anodyne restaurant cleanliness.

But let's talk spice. You can order the chicken one of three ways: "Chicken"; "spicy chicken"; or "extra spicy chicken." If you order it spicy, they've got a dozen hot pepper plants sitting outside the trailer so you know you're in for some zing. If you order it extra spicy -- and I must stress that I am not joking or exaggerating here -- they pass you a molcajete out the window and a baggie of habaneros, and you make your cashew chicken just as damn spicy as you want it. They pass you a molcajete and a baggie of habaneros. Seriously.

Magic Wok doesn't have the best Chinese food you'll ever have. In fact, it probably won't even be in your top five, but that hardly means you shouldn't eat there. It's got wonderful home cooked flavor, and if nothing else, Magic Wok is an experience. I grinned like a fool for an hour afterwards, and so will you.

Necessity is the mother of delicious

I've complained before about the kitchen we're stuck with for a while in our temporary housing. Tonight, that lousy kitchen blossomed into something really quite lovely.



This week at the Oak Ridge Farmers' Market there were several vendors with deep green bunches of basil that caught my nose. Although early season and so a bit overpriced, I picked up a bunch and resolved to make pesto. I've always made pesto with a food processor before, but this time I'd have no such electrical assistance; this would be made all by hand. And I mean "by hand": since the townhouse has a glass cutting board and dirt-cheap knives, I don't even have a reasonably sharp blade to work with.

So I toasted up some pine nuts I had left over from a salad, chopped the basil as much as I could without destroying it, and crushed some garlic. Lacking even a cheese grater I had to buy pre-shredded parmiggiano, but at least it wasn't in a green can.



Without a reasonable pot, the wrong way to cook pasta had to suffice:



Cooking the pasta in far too little water had two effects: as expected, it was unevenly cooked, and some bites were definitely much more toothsome than others; but secondly, the salt was more concentrated, so the pasta was very flavorful, and carried the pesto very well. This sort of light pesto doesn't carry a ton of flavor on its own, so the extra saltiness of the pasta helped it along.

I tossed the raw pesto ingredients with a generous drizzle of the old extra virgin and the hot pasta, barely steaming the garlic. The end result was really splendid:



This was a pesto far more reminiscent of the wonderful pasta olio e aglio I had in Italy, and less reminiscent of the heavy, oily gloop that comes out of the food processor. It still wasn't nearly as creamy or cheesy as the real pesto genovese, but it was definitely fine summer fare. Once I get sharp knives and reasonable cutting boards back, I'll certainly be trying this again -- and may even be cured of my food processor pesto habit forever.

4th of July bonus

A couple of weeks ago after dinner we swung by Chez Liberty for some cheese and digestifs. Luckily I'm way behind on my blogging, so I didn't get to write them up until Independence Day, which seems apt.

I should note that this isn't a real review, since we didn't do dinner there. We split a plate of the St. Andre triple-cream cheese, which was heavenly. Creamy (as you might imagine) and rich, firm but not unyielding. Chez Liberty has a lovely little cheese list at very reasonable prices, so they may become our go-to restaurant for postprandial cheese.

I don't know if cheese and brown liquor go together, but we didn't particularly care; I was in a scotch mood, so I ordered a MacAllan 12 off their very well-apportioned scotch list (which may be a touch overpriced or may just tend towards better scotches). Melanie got a glass of Fundador, a Spanish cognac that she liked quite a bit, although it was a bit spicy for my taste.

As the night wound on and Chez Liberty started closing down, the owner came around to talk to the cognac drinker. They've managed to score an 81-year-old bottle of cognac that was literally hidden from the Nazis in France during WWII, and which they'll be popping open this fall and serving at a discount. Needless to say we'll be going back, and not just to eat there so we can write the place up properly.

Review: Calhoun's

I didn't want my introduction to Tennessee barbecue to come from a chain, but that's the way it happened. Normally I wouldn't even admit to have patronized a chain in this space, but, as you'll see, they earned it.

On Sunday last we were on a wild notary chase, and had been frantically looking for a notary all morning. When 1:30 rolled around and we still hadn't eaten we were a little punchy. We had planned to try a little 'cue joint in Oliver Springs, but they were closed, so when Calhoun's came into view, we stopped there. We had heard decent things about them, and they're a small local chain, so we suborned our principles to our hunger and went on in.

Not bad barbecue. Pleasantly vinegary. Nice smoke ring. They've probably got a skinny white dude tending the corporate-approved ovens, and while he's doing a swell job, he's no 350 lb. guy named "Cincinnati Jefferson" running a smoker on wheels in a gas station parking lot. Overall: very tasty, but not transcendent. About the best you could get from a chain -- certainly better than other chain BBQ I've had.

A high point was the beer selection. As far as I can tell, no macrobrews were offered. They had their own beers, and maybe some other local brews. (I don't recognize the names yet, so I couldn't tell.) But there was no Miller Light to be found; no Bud Select, and no Sam Adams. Even more impressive, when I jokingly asked the waitress for a glass of something cold, amber-colored, and mildly intoxicating, she started listing off the beers that were actually amber-colored. This was no rote list of every beer they had; she filtered out the ones that were too dark or too light and suggested a brew based on my half serious criteria. Most waitrons wouldn't know Select 55 from Old Rasputin if Ol' Raspy jumped up and bit them in the butt -- that's the bartender's job, right? But this waitress was carefully distinguishing between the pale ale and the red ale based on a glib offhand comment. Oh yeah, and the beer was good too.

But wait, there's more!

As we were leaving, refueled, we asked offhand if they had a notary on staff. They didn't -- but within a few minutes we had the general manager, the assistant manager, the hostess, and a waiter all calling people, leafing through phone books, and wracking their brain to figure out where we could find a notary on Sunday afternoon. For fifteen minutes.

Impressed, my wife said she felt like she should buy one of the shirts in the display case to thank them. Pretty soon the GM came over with a shirt.

"I know you said you should buy a shirt," he said; "but I think you should just take one." We were a bit stunned. "But I'm not being selfless here," he cautioned. "Here's why: First, this shirt is a medium. I don't have a lot of guys in the kitchen who are mediums, so I've got a surplus of these. [There goes my skinny white dude theory.] Secondly, this doesn't have the Calhoun's logo on it, and that doesn't make me happy. But it does have the word 'Pitmaster' on it." He asked if we knew what a pitmaster was, and resisting our desire to mention the Sarlacc we told him we did. "Great," he said; "so when someone asks you what a pitmaster is, you can tell them this story." And with that he wrapped up a few of his business cards in the shirt and handed it to us.

I'm guessing he didn't know at the time that he was talking to East Tennessee's most widely read food bloggers (okay, only food bloggers), and that the story would be told to an e-audience of up to three readers. He just did it because he knows that word of mouth is great advertising, and that he had sufficiently wowed us with a spontaneous act of awesomeness that we'd be talking.

So go to Calhoun's. They've got pretty good barbecue, great beer, out-of-this-world service, and an awfully nice system of bribery going, too.

Meat. Meat!

The first time I went to the Knoxville farmer's market, I noticed a remarkable lack of meat. Someone willing to raise and whack their own hogs, pigs, or chickens could make a killing.

Well, that guy exists, but only goes to the Oak Ridge farmer's market. Fine by me. Apparently their business from high-end resorts and eateries must buoy them enough that they don't need the Knoxville business. Laurel Creek Meats sells a remarkable variety of assorted cow, pig, chicken, turkey, and duck parts, plus more esoteric beasts as well -- goat, game birds, and Lord only knows what else. We picked up a pair of massive bone-in pork chops last week to grill today. These things were seriously huge -- over an inch thick, with a tremendous thick rind of fat on them.

Given our spartan kitchen, I just rubbed them with salt, pepper, olive oil, and some rosemary off the plant we brought with us. Turns out that was the right choice: the magnificent swiny taste of the meat shone through, and the fat rind crisped up gorgeously, the sweet fat balanced by the acidic woodsmoke. We rooted the sweet melty marrow out, scraped the dark, hugely flavorful meat from the bones, and were generally barbaric. Some grilled farmer's market summer squash rounded out the meal. (The patty-pan squash was particularly nice.)

I still think that what Laurel Creek needs the most is competition (although their prices were remarkably low for a de facto monopoly). We've found our meat vendor for the forseeable future, but someone must be able to turn out better sausage, or a nicer broiler chicken, or a hanger steak that will make me weep. Prove me wrong.