Thursday, June 21, 2012.
Eat Club At Dakota.
It's so long since the last Eat Club dinner at Dakota that I am not sure we ever had one there. Owner Ken Lacour says we did, but it was a free-form event without a special menu, before the creation of the Eat Club.
The people who show up for these dinners are always pleasant. (We've only had a handful of cranks in nineteen years of weekly eat-togethers.) But few groups were as much fun as tonight's was. An unusual number of former regulars were here, and it was nostalgic to see them again.
We had a lively radio show first. Both owners of Dakota--Chef Kim Kringlie and manager Ken Lacour--are good, funny conversationalists. As I expected he would, Ken wet down the menu with some offbeat wines. One of them was an Oregon white called Chemistry. I can't remember which grapes went into it, but it was a lot of them, and involved some combinations I never heard of before. "It's sort of the same idea as Conundrum," Ken said.
We started with torchon of foie gras, made by wrapping the duck liver in a towel and poaching it. The firmness of the foie disappears, replaced by an almost spreadable quality, surrounded by the rendered duck fat that migrates to the surface. This was the first time the torchon concept moved me, but it was spectacular.
Then a salad of heirloom beets in several colors and striations. The presence of crispy slices of Serrano ham set the flavors off. A third cold dish (!) followed that: small slabs of seared rare tuna, about twice the size of Scrabble tiles, were seasoned with the smoked paprika called pimenton. Chef Kim brought some of that out with a matching dishlet of regular paprika, and asked if I could tell the difference blind. Boy howdy! The pimenton's smokiness was obvious in the smell alone, while the paprika was spicier.
The fish changed from the original menu's grouper to redfish. This was an improvement, I'd say. (I find grouper inconsistent.) The fish was seared inside an herbal crust, nice and buttery. Counterbalancing the fish was a single large raviolo stuffed with a slightly-thickened (as if that were needed) version of Dakota's famous crabmeat and Brie soup. Wonderful!
Dakota's track record with me is that their steaks that look and sound good, but rarely are anything special. I seemed to have been the only one of the forty people in the room to think that tonight, I found the beef tenderloin--roasted whole then sliced, with beautiful red faces--just okay. I liked the sauce, though, made with oysters and tarragon. Oysters and steak are such perfect flavor partners that it's a wonder we don't see it all the time.
Good wine with that: a big, rustic Cotes du Rhone from the estimable house of Delas. Vintage 2010. Needs ten more years in the bottle.
The dinner finished up with a pavlova, which I'd forgotten is a hard-baked meringue. In this case it was covered with berries and chantilly creme with mascarpone cheese whipped in. A tang from cardamom was in there, too.
So convivial was the crowd that many of use adjourned to the bar for an after-dinner libation. I had a glass of port, and almost asked for some cheese to go with it. But I truly didn't know where I would have put it.
Dakota. Covington: 629 N US 190. 985-892-3712.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
