San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Spoon Eatery
Chef transforms upscale food well beyond banquet
Bisque, beets, carpaccio, caprese, steak, lava cake.
It’s a checklist of upscale American cooking. Or at least the over-plated haute cuisine of the ’80s, when every dish had swirls and waves and an upward grade like the Tower of Babel on bone china.
With its West Elm design aesthetic and Country Club 101 menu, the new Castle Hills restaurant Spoon Eatery knocks on the door of that tower. But then it circles around the outside to find its own language for modern American cooking.
Given its ownership team, Spoon’s crusade to revitalize the upscale American canon is a typically American adventure: It started somewhere else. Founders David Barquet and Arturo Fernandez sharpened their trade at restaurants both high and humble Mexico.
Fernandez, who oversees the kitchen, cooked with chef Ferran Adria at the famed El Bulli in Spain before running his own acclaimed restaurant Raiz in Mexico City. He and Barquet opened Spoon in early June.
Lobster bisque set the tone for a full-immersion American experience. It started with a silk blanket of squid ink pasta over sauteed shrimp. The waiter finished the bowl tableside with a bisque that told stories of the sea in dusky red and deepwater stock.
Red snapper started in a sous vide bath for a firm, consistent texture, then finished the ride in a hot saute pan for a precise and crispy golden exterior. Spoon finished its most balanced plate with a wedge of flaky and lush potato galette and pan-roasted squash, carrots and Brussels sprouts as bright as the harvest.
Back on land, tissue-thin slices of beef carpaccio forged armor with military precision across a bowl covered in plastic wrap that trapped hickory smoke just long enough to breathe its life into the raw meat.
Under-ripe tomatoes nonetheless found their sweet spot in a caprese salad. Not just a row of mozzarella and basil dominoes, but a disciplined cobblestone oval of basil pesto, tiny mozzarella spheres and curls of avocado mousse.
Steak’s just part of the American experience, but Spoon makes an experience of it. A chef with a tall white toque and a strong right arm wheeled out whole rib-eyes on a cart, where he cut them to order and priced them by the ounce, anywhere from $2.95 to $5.95. My 15-ounce Wagyu rib-eye clocked in at $64 with two sides.
The Wagyu rippled with fat, including a thick white bottom lobe barely rendered under a hard sear. Served with truffled fries, it was a bar steak experience with a steakhouse price tag. And like a handful of other dishes at Spoon, it was cooked a full shade past its ideal temperature and texture.
Something billed as “sous vide rib-eye stew” was more like a block of hard-cooked beef in a disconsonant wash of edamame and potatoes. A beef tenderloin that I requested rare-plus went full medium, but it was tempered by a mushroom demiglace any top-flight kitchen would claim.
But stodgy barbecue-glazed chicken crashed hardest, dressed like a bridesmaid at the wedding banquet where it might have felt more at home.
Pork belly bites got the wrong invitation, too. Sticky pork candy on a toothpick? The bachelor party’s next door — and take the fuzzed-out elevator music with you. I don’t know where the “stuffed meatball” was going. Just a block of hardcooked ground meat in scorched marinara drizzled with goat cheese. Somebody take its keys.
Spoon found a comfort zone between technique and execution with dishes like a fresh and clean sashimi plate of tuna and salmon with lavash-style flatbread. A beet salad was ar- ranged like a Venn diagram of sweetness and citric acidity, and a bowl of penne pasta from Spoon’s mix-and-match pasta section behaved like maximum mac and cheese in a four-cheese cream sauce with grilled chicken.
I was relieved that Spoon didn’t stay in that comfort zone. The kitchen found a happy place for a bubbling chocolate volcano of lava cake as well as iron skillets of peach cobbler and truffled fried potatoes with an egg on top.
Some of it went full-on wedding planner, with ecstatic results, like the stacked asparagus salad wearing a fuzzy orange wig of carrots with crispy prosciutto sticking out like Gremlin ears.
It’s imagination that saves Spoon from the velvet shackles of American banquet cuisine. What will it do with that freedom? Sell hats, maybe: Make American Good Again. I’ll buy that.