Dish Bar & Grill
cuisine: Contemporary American
entrées: $18 – $40
address: 900 Main Street, Hartford
phone: (860) 249-3474 (249-DISH)
credit cards: All major
4 1/2 stars… Special
It’s an exciting time to be around Hartford these days. Our capital city has made great strides of late, and with a little more work on parking and other issues, seems poised to make that quantum leap forward. Evidence of a maturing restaurant scene, I see more people staying in town after work, coming in from the suburbs at night, even filling living spaces right downtown. Judging by New Haven’s renaissance to the south that has turned it into the state’s top dining destination, these are signs that Hartford is turning the corner. Hopefully, our slowing economy won’t erode the progress I’m witnessing.
One of the leaders in Hartford’s recent restaurant rebirth is Dish Bar & Grill, which is rapidly becoming a favorite of mine. Dan Keller and Bill Carbone, savvy veterans of the Hot Tomato’s group who were most recently associated with Glas, have combined their considerable talents in the creation of this venture. Carbone serves as the executive chef.
I’m not normally one to dwell on décor and ambiance, but Dish, which is located in the old Sage-Allen building, deserves special mention for its inspired modern industrial look. All too often, that style of décor produces a restaurant that’s a little too naked, a bit cold and unfeeling—like a late night Elliot Spitzer tryst. But Dish’s interior details are so absorbing that I’m going to subject readers to a blow-by-blow account. Hit the fast forward button, if you must.
The energetic bar area is sufficiently segregated that the sound it generates doesn’t reach the main dining room. The space is modern yet cozy, the seating arranged around the bar in a hexagon that’s open at one end. Its back wall is devoted to circular wine cubbies of artistically varying sizes. Muted televisions are strategically placed so they don’t intrude much but are easily followed, especially with closed captioning. On Thursdays and Fridays, live music is set up in a corner of the bar.
The bar crowd tends to be youngish, well-dressed and quite “hot.” Despite my obvious failures on all three counts, I returned with a friend a few days after my review visit to explore the bar menu. Our barmaid, Sara, took good care of us while we watched the UConn women’s disappointing loss to Stanford. I was particularly intrigued by Dish’s selection of burgers, some of which—like a short rib stuffed burger ($12) with crispy onion strings and sautéed mushrooms—stretched the definition but sounded great. The chophouse beef burger ($9) made with house-ground certified Angus beef was a robust, flavorful patty, while the nicely seasoned salmon burger ($12) was delicious gussied up with roasted tomato and a lemon-dill mayonnaise. Both were served on good buns that could stand up to punishment (fill in your own punch line). Bar patrons are allowed to order from the regular menu, so I also sampled Dish’s macaroni and cheese ($8) made with rigatoni and diced ham in an intoxicating cheese sauce.
Near the entrance, there’s a raw bar and even a dessert bar at which one can sit in stylish tall chairs. The chairs have a circular cut out in the back of each, sending my runaway imagination to a scene of Odysseus in disguise shooting an arrow through a row of these chairs to win back his faithful Penelope. If a couple of her suitors get skewered in the process—shish kabob. Through no great stretch of my overly fertile mind, the dining room’s huge modernistic hanging lights are converted into campy UFOs worthy of Plan Nine From Outer Space, or better yet, slowly spinning space stations. I can almost make out scores of small people walking on their decks. Beam me up, Scotty.
Of course, circular decorations should come as no surprise in a restaurant called Dish, and indeed, a significant design element is pretty rising glass columns composed of stacked dishes, small lights trained on them perfectly. There’s a large room in the back of the restaurant which looks out over a concourse to Market Street and can handle dining room overflow or private parties. But our favorite design feature, located near the whimsically outfitted bathrooms, is the tinkling waterfall wall, a lovely touch, we joke, just as long as you’re not forced to wait, resisting the power of suggestion.
The attention to detail seems to extend not only to the table settings—white tablecloths, attractive well-balanced flatware—but to all aspects of the operation. On each of our visits, we observed assistant general manager Janet Martucci making sure things ran like clockwork. Our server, Gary, was friendly and attentive. We would never have learned his or Sara’s name had we not asked—servers are instructed not to volunteer their names.
Dish sports a nice global wine list ($24-$275), including eleven half-bottles ($12-$36) and thirty-two wines by the glass ($6-$15). A separate page of reserve choices would make a nice wish list. Monday is wine day, when everything not on the reserve list is half price. The three of us nursed a 2004 El Coto Crianza, Rioja, Spain ($32), a well-structured Tempranillo with concentrated fruit flavors from a highly regarded bodega.
Dish’s food is every bit as much fun as the setting. Instead of the usual bread, Dish tempts diners with complimentary housemade biscuits that are brushed with a little honey before and after baking. We couldn’t resist a second round of the peppery, slightly sweet biscuits, but also felt we should investigate two starters that fulfill roughly the same role. One was Dish’s wonderful bread ($5), a partial loaf spread with garlic herb oil and melted Boursin cheese. We could have been happy with just the bread and wine. The second was Dish’s addictive kettle-cooked potato chips ($7) served with a farmhouse Cheddar fondue, an idea that seemed obvious only after the fact (as great ideas usually do).
The regular menu fits under the broad rubric of contemporary American, but I would describe it more narrowly as an upscale comfort food menu with plenty of creative flourishes. I can’t say for sure if that description will hold, because menus tend to change around this time of year and become healthier and less comforting. What I can say is that Carbone displays a sure hand that inspires total confidence in him.
Increasingly, I see the restaurant critics of this state reviewing restaurants when they may not yet be ready for prime time, a disturbing trend. Restaurants used to be able to have “soft openings,” but between bloggers, who may post amateur reviews complete with photos within hours of a restaurant opening, and publications that increasingly aren’t giving restaurants a reasonable grace period, restaurants are thrown to the wolves practically at birth. Both practices are unfair to restaurants, the former because initial negative comments linger on the Internet interminably, whether or not they continue to be applicable, the latter because most publications won’t return and re-review for several years, if ever.
For these reasons, I try to give restaurants a reasonable grace period. I may visit restaurants which especially intrigue me early on, then return later to review them. When I first checked out Dish, it was quite good and clearly a major new player on the Hartford scene, but when I returned, I noticed a number of adjustments that raised it a half star over what I would initially have given it. I liked Dish on the first visit—I loved it on the second.
We began with raw bar offerings, to which I’m often drawn because they don’t seem to endanger one’s appetite nearly as much as one might expect. Dish’s were terrific, the raw bar treats available individually or as single-, double- and triple-tiered platters ($40/$70/$100). Bluepoint oysters, littleneck clams, jumbo shrimp and king crab legs (cracked for easy access) were all scintillatingly fresh and accompanied by snappy housemade cocktail sauce, a red vinegar mignonette and a roasted tomatillo sauce spiked with horseradish.
Still in a seafood mood, we followed with Dish’s jumbo lump crab cake ($12) and duo of tuna tartare ($14). The perfectly browned cake was crunchy on the outside, crabby on the inside and escorted by a lovely sweet corn relish. The twin tartares were quite nice. A raw quail egg topped the first, a round mold of coarsely chopped ahi tuna flavored with soy sauce, macerated pear and pine nuts. The second was a more amorphous mass of finely chopped hamachi (a.k.a. yellowtail), with grated bell pepper a milder substitute for the usual jalapeño. My only quibble would be the mislabeling of hamachi as tuna, a common misconception due to the similarity of the names yellowtail (a member of the jack family) and yellowfin (a member of the tuna family).
Continuing the sushi theme was Dish’s king crab oshizushi ($10). Resting in a pool of sweet gingery sauce, five squares of rice were pressed between sheets of nori and then topped with spicy vegetables and king crab. At a sushi bar, I might have considered this dish a bit over the top; as a modern riff on sushi, it was a blast.
In similar fashion, surf and turf dumplings ($16) were a fun knockoff of Chinese pot stickers. The seafood dumplings were stuffed with Maine lobster and assigned a ginger-lemon-butter, while the meat dumplings were filled with short rib and paired with a delicious “natural jus” the consistency of apple butter. I have no problem with poetic license taken with culinary nomenclature when the results are so uplifting.
I applaud Carbone for creating food which, from appetizers to desserts, is as fiercely flavorful as it is fearlessly fun. One of his more spirited creations is the New England clam chowder ($8) with root vegetables, bacon and seared razor clam, an empty shell balancing, like a Survivor eating utensil, on the brim. Mashed potato, sometimes used as a soup thickener, was instead cleverly deposited in the incredibly rich broth as an added ingredient. I especially applaud the use of razor clams, which have a nicer texture and sweeter flavor than regular clams. So underutilized by Americans are they that one of my companions actually asked if they can be found anywhere but Spain. Heck, I answered, Connecticut’s teeming with them.
Another starter with a high fun quotient was Dish’s wedge salad ($8). A retro treat, four small iceberg lettuce wedges were hunkered down in a row like nervous people about to be stunt-jumped, then drizzled with Russian dressing and bacon bits.
Of course, Dish patrons have absolutely nothing to be nervous about, with special sections offering chophouse and seafood selections played relatively straight in addition to the imaginative main entrée list. The chophouse section includes 6- and 10-ounce filet mignons ($26/$35), a 14ounce New York strip ($32), a 20-ounce, bone-in cowboy rib-eye ($40) and a 42-ounce porterhouse for two ($68). The cowboy steak was great—perfectly seared, nicely marbled, blushing pink and juicy—causing me to exclaim: Now, that’s a steak! It came with a nice housemade steak sauce, somewhat fruity in the Peter Lugar’s vein. Good dining could also be had from the seafood section, which included a roasted swordfish chop with lobster butter ($24), seared salmon à la plancha with tartar sauce ($17), seared ahi tuna with wasabi, soy sauce and pickled ginger ($20), and a one-pound roasted lobster tail with drawn butter (MP).
But we directed most of our attention to the regular entrées, each of which exhibited some of Carbone’s culinary cleverness. A Maine lobster pot pie ($34) was deconstructed, the head and tail displayed at opposite ends of the shallow plate purely for decorative purposes, a round pastry with a thumb hole (that could have been turned into a painter’s palette with the addition of three pools of color) where the crustacean’s body should have been. Concealed beneath the pastry were choice pieces of a one-and-a-quarter-pound lobster and sautéed seasonal vegetables in a sumptuous sherry cream sauce. From a list of sides ($5-$10), lobster mashed potatoes ($10) were not only a perfect match but pure decadence.
Rack of lamb ($28) was another high-concept dish, with roasted Australian lamb rib chops cradling as good a shepherd’s pie as one could possibly ask for. That’s one cradle I’d be happy to rob. But the best main dish of all was the crispy Kurobuta pork shank ($23) served over a smoked ham hash (sort of a julienned potato risotto) in a cider-mustard jus that was a nice counterpoint to the dish’s richness. It’s tough with mere words to do real justice to this incredible piece of meat. Lettering on a page touches only one’s sense of sight, while this pork shank impacted not only our sense of sight but taste, smell and touch, and even hearing as we chewed the deliciously crunchy meat.
If we thought Carbone would chart a more conservative course with desserts, we were wrong. Each a flight of fancy, the pie o’ my du jour ($9) featured an array of apple filling, shortcake wafer, vanilla cheddar crumble, housemade vanilla ice cream and crème anglaise. Or something like that. We had great fun reassembling the ingredients in our mouths where, as some people like to point out, it’s all headed to the same place anyway.
The chocolate-covered strawberry ($8) was also high cuisine masquerading as high art, an irresistible combination of honey-marinated strawberries, a chocolate sabayon with quite a kick, a crumbly chocolate soil and quivery white cubes of vanilla gelatin. I had lower expectations for a deconstructed and reconstructed carrot cake parfait ($9), but alternating layers of star anise-braised pineapple, cheesecake custard and graham soil proved inspired. Dish also offered a tasting of artisanal cheeses ($16), which included generous servings of Great Hill Dairy blue cheese paired with honey-macerated strawberries, Manchego cheese with membrillo (quince paste) and Humboldt cheese with a vivid cranberry tapénade.
It’s easy to serve what everyone expects, harder to construct a menu that’s genuinely original, and harder still to make a genuinely original menu appealing to everyone. Succeeding on every level—ambiance, service, and above all, food—Dish is shouldering its way toward the top of a Hartford restaurant lineup that seems to grow stronger with every passing month.