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| - Where to start? The Local Kitchen is currently receiving so much hype, anybody would have a hard time living up to it. And live up to it it didn't, on our visit.
But let's start with the positive. Service. Utterly charming and well informed, super friendly without being in your face. If you're reading this, we loved you guys.
My wife and I arrived early and decided to celebrate the arrival of the warmer weather with a beer. They've got Mill Street wheat on tap, the perfect selection for the day. The beer arrived in a canning jar. That was the first sign of trouble to come. Now, you might think, what does it matter? It's only a beer, after all.
It matters to me because serving a beer that's been made by people who care about making good beer in a canning jar is disrespectful. It matters because the entire time you're drinking it you've got flashbacks to student parties where the host had run out of glasses and we had to make do with mugs and jars. It doesn't put me in the mood for an amazing dining experience. We all hated it, it spoiled an otherwise nice evening.
Dinner. Once our friends arrived we were seated - the Local doesn't take reservations, you arrive early and take your chances. I love the way the place looks, comfortable and welcoming, but our table was so close to our neighbors that it was impossible to have anything resembling a private conversation.
Before we move on to the food, let's talk meat for a minute. Justin, one of our dinner companions, and I have been curing meats for some years now. We write about, we shoot videos about it, we're not professionals but we're doing good - I am looking forward to channeling old Italien men sometime in the near future. I've got a cold smoker in my backyard where last year we made six pork bellies into pancetta and bacon. We've turned moose into sausage, we can quote entire pages of Michael Ruhlman's book 'Charcuterie' and we're in love with Jane Grigson. We're meat geeks and we're beginning to get reasonably good at it.
Naturally we both ordered the Local Kitchen's signature dish, the maple cured, cold smoked, slow cooked pancetta. We also wanted to taste the home cured fresh anchovies - if there's a second love in our lives, it's fermented fish - and a small salumi platter.
The girls tried the home made mozzarella, gnocchi and lamb ravioli.
The anchovies arrived first. Two tiny fillets on a crustini, with baby arugola underneath. Good, competent, but not in any way better than what any good Italian deli will sell you. The price/portion ratio (high/tiny) was a sign of things to come.
The salumi platter arrived next and again was competently executed without being memorable. Both textures and flavours were too similar, the flavorings too subdued to make any real impact. Nowhere near the Black Hoof in ballsiness and impact. Again, tiny slivers of cured meat, at a surprisingly high dime.
The home made mozzarella on the other hand was lovely. Creamy, soft and full of flavor. Very nice.
The much hyped pancetta, when it arrived, was probably the evening's biggest disappointment and the reason I am giving the Local Kitchen 2 stars only.
Let's start with the price/food ratio again. Now, in no way am I a fan of huge plates of food. I will always prefer a tiny morsel of something intensely flavorful to a heap of mediocracy.
But I also don't like to walk out of restaurants hungry.
The Local Kitchen served us ten paper thin slices of pancetta and charged $25 for it. Allow me to do some math. You and I can order an entire organic pork belly, Berkshire, locally raised by Monnonites, for about $60-70.00. Add curing ingredients, salt, pink salt, sugar, herbs, maple syrup and even if we're being utterly extravagant we should come in at about $100,00, $120.00 top.
Curing pancetta is neither hard, nor expensive. All it takes is time for the cure to do it's work, then you take the result and either hot or cold smoke it before cooking it low and slow.
No e of the above would have mattered, had the results been stunning. But they weren't. The maple cure drowned out the bacon flavour, making it sickly-sweet. The addition of a fried egg as a side created additional cloyingness. It was a huge disappointment. Ten tiny slivers of mediocracy served at a price I found impossible to justify.
The lamb pasta was ok but lacking in flavor - it was hard to tell the meat was actually lamb, the gnocchi were lovely, probably the best dish of the meal.
We ended up sitting round the table with a huge feeling of 'this was IT?'. Still hungry, not impressed with the food we had just been eaten and a bill of close to $300.00.
In the end we called up Parts & Labour up the road, where they had space at one of their chefs tables. Yes, we went for dinner after just having had dinner.
At P&L they fed us spicy elk tartare, fried veal brains that melted on the tongue and salty, savory bone marrow on toast. Happiness, finally.
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