rev:text
| - Full disclosure, I was a little wary because I thought Heirloom might be too high brow for me. I see the pictures of the food on Twitter and Instagram and thought maybe this was a place only a Top Chef judge would love.
I was very happy to be both right and wrong at the same time. Short version, we had an incredible experience from the moment we walked in the door.
Beautiful, rustic decor on the inside, but in no way kitschy. The service was excellent. Our waiter knew the menu back to front, and same for the wine selection. The menu changes daily and everything is hyper-local. The server who brought our wine over gave us a great rundown of the local NC wineries.
We did the 12 course tasting menu because why not? If you are going to a place like this, just get the full experience. Back to my concern above about high brow food, I thought each dish might just be a few bites and we'd leave hungry. We actually left the restaurant completely indulged. Although I wouldn't have wanted to give up any of the dishes we got, we probably could have done the 7 or 9 course menu and been completely satisfied. I won't give the complete rundown of every dish, but a couple of the highlights for us were the egg yolk pasta with braised duck and garlic cream sauce, NC grouper, duck confit, and an unreal rice pudding with a blueberry jam.
I have no problems paying up for what I feel is well-crafted food that you can't get anywhere else, along with being waited on and treated like I'm spending a lot of money. That's EXACTLY what I got at Heirloom. We paid a recent visit to the new restaurant Kindred in Davidson and had a good experience. Nothing out of this world, but good. Heirloom knocked my socks off. The quality of the effort being made here is on par with some of the nicer restaurants we went to in Sonoma/Napa/SF on a recent trip.
I can't wait to go back.
|