Hens of Paradise

Enough with movies, let’s focus on food. Huntsville continues to impress with its hidden gems of culinary delight. I’ve probably discussed the Chef’s Table with most of you before. It’s a neat little restaurant in Jones Valley.

There are two things you should know about the Chef’s Table. One, for some odd reason they’ve Google-Proofed their webpage. If you do a Google search for “Chef’s Table Huntsville” you’ll find plenty of references to them but you won’t find their actual website. This is due to the odd fact that their website address is their name without any vowels in it, http://www.chfstbl.com/, and they don’t really have their name on their website as text (it’s an image). Clever, huh? No. It’s stupid.

The second, and more important, thing you should know about the Chef’s Table is they host a wine pairing dinner once every four-to-six weeks. They open up on a Monday (which they are normally closed on) and hold a reservation only four course meal. This Monday was one such dinner and Dawn and I were there.

For each of the four courses you get an either-or choice of two items, which allows each person to personalize their dinner while allowing the kitchen to focus on making a small set of really good dishes. Dawn and I split, choosing the opposite item for each course, allowing us to sample the entire possible menu. I had Chicken & Fig Wontons, Cold Cucumber & Cream soup, Blacken Cajun Dusted Grouper, with a Goat Cheese & Mascarpone tart for dessert. Dawn had Escargot en Voulavent, Grilled Radicchio & Endive salad, Grilled Buffalo Sirloin, with some sort of crème brulee for dessert.

All the food was really tasty; the only real surprise was buffalo is tough meat. Like really tough. It was tasty but extremely chewy. Dawn’s was cooked pretty rare and even then it took me a good minute or two to chew a single bite of sirloin. Someone else at the dinner, who had ordered the buffalo, said he felt like he’d been chewing gum for hours while only partially through his serving. I now have a new found respect for the plains Indians, and an understanding why you mostly only see buffalo burgers.

The wines were decent, but nothing special. There was a Grenache blend that we liked. The most interesting pairing they did was to pair a really sour cab-something blend with dessert. Normally I would have expected either a dry sparkling white or something sweet to go with dessert. The super sour wine made the dessert stand out as the sweet thing. Some people really didn’t like the pairing and made some pretty awful faces when they tasted the wine. While I’m not saying I want a sour wine with every dessert, I really appreciated the change up from the normal dessert/wine formula.

In Black Evil Egg news, this weekend the egg scored again with an awesome pair of Cornish game hens. Dawn brought these bad boys home on Sunday afternoon and I butterflied them, brined them, seasoned them, let them smoke on the Evil Egg for awhile then basted them with an “Asian” barbeque sauce. The barbeque sauce was only Asian in-so-far as I added a touch of soy sauce, a little bit of mustard seed, and a whole lot of chopped crystallized ginger. I think the results speak for themselves.

Please, no licking your monitors.