Covington has some terrific restaurants. If we didn’t do this for a living we might never cross the lake to eat. One of our longtime favorites is right downtown, not five minutes from our house. Del Porto is a stylish place with delicious Italian food.
A few years ago the owners of Del Porto branched out and opened The Greyhound, billed as a gastropub. Okay, if you say so. A gastropub is a hip pub, and there is nothing publike about The Greyhound. It belongs in Napa, which is where owners Torre and David Salazzo worked before returning home nearly twenty years ago.
The menu at The Greyhound has always puzzled me, but we deal. I just want to sit in the place, and so we do, but mostly to eat the fabulous Neapolitan pies from the wood-burning oven. At the 5-7pm Happy Hour they are half price, and this is a fantastic deal. But lately, I have noticed some tweaks to this menu, and that is very welcome. We went back recently to eat some of these new menu items.
Del Porto has its own version of hummus using white beans and artichokes, whipped into a puree that is served with caper berries, a puddle of great olive oil in the middle, and housemade focaccia crostini. No visit to Del Porto is complete without this. At The Greyhound they were offering it with shrimp. Why not? Well, this is The Greyhound, so the tweaks didn’t stop there. The shrimp were placed atop the puree and were accompanied by bits of curried cauliflower, pickled onions, and cucumbers. None of this was bad, but it didn’t compare at all to the simple goodness of the original down the street.
Tom had an “oyster loaf” which I foolishly imagined as what we know of an oyster loaf. That’s on me. I should have expected a twist on it. The smallish oysters were not from here, were Tempura-battered, and served not on local French bread but on a buttered and toasted pain de mie, with lettuce, tomato, and housemade pickles. This was served with their fabulous housecut fries, which today were not so fabulous.
The Greyhound has such great fries it is worth a trip here just for those. They are served with three interesting and delicious dipping sauces.
I got something weird, and it was weird. The giant confit turkey wing served Buffalo-style. I love confit anything, so that word caught my eye, and the large turkey wing seemed interesting. It was indeed. A massive thing came bright orange; this was arresting to behold. It had been deep-fried after the confit process and then drowned in Buffalo sauce.
The meat beneath the crispy shell was really tender, but not braised like I usually see with this method. That was not a problem, just a surprise. The Buffalo sauce fatigued my palate after a while, but it was a fun and interesting dish. There was a pile of celery and nice Bleu Cheese dressing.
But the thing that I was most interested in was the classic Chicken Pot Pie, which was so “normal” I was surprised to see it as a menu item here. It’s pretty expensive at $25, but I love pot pie and I knew it would be great. The pot pie was not especially large, baked in a soup crock with a handle. The crust was not pie crust as I hoped, but puff pastry, which I love. This crust vexed me a lot. It was toasty and crisp but practically impenetrable. I had to saw it with a knife. This was a mild inconvenience for something this sublime.
When I finally removed the crust the inside was piping hot, revealing large tender chunks of white meat in a luscious sauce, dotted with the requisite peas and carrot cubes and little white onions. It did not look that large but was so filling we both shared it and it was enough. This was so superb I have been thinking about it since and will return before long to have it again.
The Greyhound mystifies me. The menu is all over the place, and I don’t want to eat global food. I want to eat great American food like this killer pot pie. I hope more of this will turn up on the menu.
