Bill Addison
6/1/2009
Among the forty-four dishes listed on an April menu at Restaurant
Eugene, my eyes came to rest on a description that roused my curiosity:
“Roasted shad roe, onion puree, lime pickle butter.” An uninitiated
tablemate cocked his head quizzically when this plate arrived at the
table. No way around it: Shad roe is one of nature’s uglier handiworks.
A lobe of tiny eggs from the notoriously bony shad fish that runs
briefly through the mid-Atlantic rivers in spring, the roe looks like a
bloody horror-flick prop when raw and turns an unappealing gray when
cooked. Yet this fleeting prize is sublime in flavor, offering a mild
but hardscrabble pungency that suggests freezing water, upstream
struggle, and the funkier nuances of caviar. Matching it with lime
pickle butter tamed its feral qualities and evoked two distinct
cuisines: Pickles are a staple in the South, but the triple hit of
brine, heat, and citrus tasted undeniably of an Indian condiment. What
an ingenious collaboration.
The shad roe stood out as an especially dazzling feat among many
highlights over three recent meals that all illustrated how much
Restaurant Eugene and its chef/owner, Linton Hopkins, have evolved in
the last five years. Buckhead’s moneyed and mature crowd immediately
embraced Eugene when it opened in 2004, offering them a concise,
frequently changing, and generally conservative menu of New American
dishes with regional overtures. It may have been enough to sustain the
restaurant for a good long time.
A tasting of local spring vegetables
An Atlanta native, Hopkins named the restaurant after his grandfather,
a Tennessean who grew up on a farm and cooked frequently for his
family. After sixteen months or so in operation, Hopkins began to
retune Eugene’s cooking style, drawing on his heritage in earnest. He
developed close relationships with local farmers and experimented with
gussying up traditional regional dishes—at a time when few Atlanta
fine-dining restaurants venerated Southern cooking. Soon he established
a three-course Sunday Supper menu for $29.50. Its weekly centerpiece
remains the fried chicken—browned in a combination of oil, lard,
butter, and bacon renderings—inspired by Mary Randolph, the author of
the 1824 cookbook The Virginia Housewife.
And last year, in the space opposite Eugene, Hopkins and his partners
opened Holeman and Finch Public House, a gastropub whose food,
accompanied by smashing cocktails, illuminates the connection between
Southern and British cooking. His gambles to celebrate and explore his
culinary birthright have reaped awards: This year, Hopkins has been
nominated—for a second time—as Best Chef Southeast by the James Beard
Foundation, and he was named one of 2009’s Best New Chefs by Food and Wine magazine.
The myriad accolades, and the public’s support of Holeman and Finch’s
adventurous nose-to-tail cooking philosophy, seem to have liberated
Hopkins, allowing him to take his firstborn in playful and unrestricted
new directions. As Hopkins tells it, he and his wife, Gina (who manages
the restaurant’s intelligent wine program), came to dine at Restaurant
Eugene early in the year and felt constrained by the succinct menu’s
lack of options. He and Eugene’s chef de cuisine, David Bies, concocted
a solution that goes fantastically overboard: a menu of more than forty
dishes, dominated by small plates and divided into three sections that
focus on vegetables, seafood, and meat and game. Folks attached to the
restaurant’s former approach can still pluck out appetizers and
entrees—silky Charleston crab soup poured tableside over jumbo lump
crab, for example, followed by a skillet-roasted dry-aged rib-eye with
potato gratin. Really, though, the kitchen now clearly aims to coax
diners toward shared small plates and their whirligig of ingredients
and preparations.
Where on this feverishly unwieldy menu to begin? Simply, perhaps, with
French radishes garnished traditionally with fleur de sel and
clean-tasting butter. (Note: The menu never, ever stands still. Even
this uncomplicated dish changed in the course of one week—first with a
side of herbaceous radish pistou, then without. Both charmed.) From
there, it’s up to your predilections: Most servers will encourage you
to order piecemeal, two or three dishes at a time. I leaned toward the
customary progression of lighter to heavier. One meal kicked off with
marinated, uncooked fluke dressed with rivulets of blood orange juice,
jalapeño, and shaved fennel; segued to butter-poached lobster with
orange mustard and fried sage (a later switch to tarragon more
graciously complemented the lobster); graduated up the food chain to
crisp, lusciously salty duck confit over blushing sea island red peas
with apple for juicy contrast; and peaked with sliced porchetta (a
Tuscan method of roasting richly seasoned pork) flanked by an earthy
duo of cauliflower and shiitakes.
Another night, I lingered over the vegetable offerings, most of which
are prepared to proudly flaunt their clear, sometimes strong flavors.
Thin spears of little gem lettuce came splotched with sheep’s milk
yogurt—a study in enjoyable sourness that its adornment of the Spanish
anchovies called boquerones further accented. House-made cow’s milk
ricotta added a luxe touch to thumbnail-size sunchoke agnolotti. Smoked
trout roe, caramelized on the surface but which still popped in the
mouth, gave the licorice aspects of roasted baby fennel an unusual
radiance. Turnip gratin proved a lovely sidekick to meatier dishes such
as pheasant two ways (roasted and made into a complex sausage) and
sweetbreads served with peppery arugula pesto and a poached egg sexily
oozing its yolk.
This changeover must be murder on the kitchen staff, but remarkably few
disappointments appeared. A confit of cod shone less brightly than
other fish treatments and concealed soggy bits of fingerling potato
underneath. Sweets—along the lines of smoked chocolate mousse (weird
but rather delicious, too) and buttermilk cream pie domed with
meringue—also included a dessert billed as an inventive-sounding
chocolate “popover.” Bummer: It was essentially a conical-shaped
chocolate cake, though piercing mint ice cream and house-preserved
cherries alongside mitigated the letdown. And in the glow of this
enlightened and intrepid shift in course, the formality of the dining
room feels . . . well, not stodgy, but certainly not as jaunty as the
food. The skilled servers, too, retain a sense of formality: They may
relax as word of the small plates brings in an entire new generation of
Restaurant Eugene devotees. And fans will appear, all right. In five
years, Hopkins has grown from a competent fine-dining chef to one of
the driving minds behind Atlanta’s reclamation of Southern gastronomy.
I can’t wait to taste where his restless imagination takes our dining
scene next.
Restaurant Eugene
Rating ***
2277 Peachtree Road, 404-355-0321
restauranteugene.com
Photograph by Amy Herr
Originally published in the June 2009 issue of Atlanta magazine
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