BYO Restaurant Review: Russet

When it comes to eating, passion isn’t important. Most restaurants are in existence to give a specific audience food they already know and love. Whether it’s Pho or Taco Pastor or Pasta Carbonara, it’s all about comfort food, and passionate creativity in the kitchen is often a disadvantage.

When it comes to dining, though, passion can change an average experience into something very special. This kind of experience doesn’t just happen, it is born out of the crazy dreams of a kitchen-hardened chef. Such restaurants exist as an idea long before the walls are painted or the ovens are turned on. It is often no more than a book of scrawled recipes that look like the rantings of a feverish hobo.

From the moment you step inside, Russet is clearly such a place. The dining room is lovely, but is only a satellite to the kitchen; it feels like you are being sucked toward a dense element, like a little brown bunny into a gravity well.  And you are very happy bunny.

At Russet, passion and creativity comes across on the plate in many wondrous ways. As a former chef –and a cookbook author–I must admit I am very jaded when it comes to restaurant food. In plate after plate, Russet surprised and delighted me. Chef Andrew Wood speaks in a language of flavors I had never experienced before. It was magical.

He is the type of chef who thinks about food the way political junkies think about elections: no detail is too small to obsess over. When there is sepia pasta on the menu, the kitchen crew is massaging the ink out of the cuttlefish sacks. The baker mills her own grains for the bread. The vegetables are grown on the restaurants one acre of farmland. Charcuterie is crafted in-house.

The Farm-to-table ethos is often a marketing concept, it’s played the fuck out. But that is not what is happening here. This is the real deal, a decade in the making. Critics have pointed out the simplicity of the food, but that falls far short of the mark.

Saying the dishes at Russet are simple is the same as pointing out that Botticelli was pretty good at crosshatching. It’s technically correct, but also total bullshit.  This is a chef who aims for simplicity, and gets there with the most complex and nuanced of dishes. Imaging molecular gastronomy using the tools and techniques of the 19th Century; If Escoffier and Ferran Adria had a love child, it would be  Chef Andrew Wood. I also know he will hate that comparison, but it fits.

It’s difficult to outline dishes, as the menu changes radically every week. However, for a wonderfully lyrical description of the dishes, no one does it better than Craig Leban.

The bones, meanwhile, are steeped into the foundation of a bouillabaisse turned black with cuttlefish ink, then tossed with orecchiette for one of the more stunning pastas, whose earthy, almost truffle-y sea-flavored gravy is offset by pristine ivory scallops and the sweet tang of slow-cooked Jersey tomato fondue.

Honestly, holy shit. The guy can  turn a phrase.

Bottom line: this is a restaurant that should be on everyone’s short list.