New Haven Restaurant Week, April 2010, 3A—Caseus

Caseus was the destination for my third New Haven Restaurant Week lunch.

Over the years, the location at the corner of Trumbull Street and Whitney Avenue has been a favorite destination of mine for Japanese food, most recently Haya Japanese Restaurant and, back in the 1970s, Hatsune. Fashionista, a vintage clothing shop co-owned by Nancy Shea and fellow food writer Todd Lyon, is located upstairs.

And across the way is one of those forbidding, tomb-like, secret society buildings.

Street parking is usually easy to come by—just make sure you remember to feed the meter.

Caseus, a cheese term pronounced with a hard “a”, bills itself as New Haven’s premier cheese shop and bistro. It offers tempting patio seating

and a popular bar area.

However, my pretty wife

and I desired the downstairs seating. We wound up next to this stray cheese case

in a cozy little space we shared with these folks.

I wandered into an adjacent room to check out the actual cheese shop.

This cheese board

and cheese labels festooning the walls hint at the richness of the selection,

but you can see that the selection of gourmet delights isn’t strictly limited to cheeses.

Since its inception, Caseus has featured a quirky and appealing menu, with a few bistro standards like onion soup gratin and steak and moules frites. It even uses Painted Hills all-natural beef in its burgers. (This former Oregonian can tell you that the Painted Hills are a beautiful exposed rock formation in the central Oregon desert with different colored sedimentary layers reflecting different geologic periods, and that the nearby ranch that bears its name produces some of America’s best beef.) Caseus always offers a couple of unusual items, like its poutine (a Québécoise dish combining French fries, cheese curd and velouté). But for me its greatest drawing card is its macaroni and cheese, its vibrant salads and its chocolate. More on those later.

We were well received by genial manager Tom Sobocinski,

whose brother, Jason, is Caseus’ chef-owner. Also taking good care of us was our handsome waiter, Tim.

For dinner, Caseus’ Restaurant Week offerings included first-course choices of beet salad, onion soup gratin or poutine; second course choices of macaroni and cheese, mussels frites or steak frites; and dessert choices of chocolate pot de crème or the nightly special. For lunch, its offerings were much more limited, with just three first course items to choose from plus the pot de crème. However, I knew that two people could make one helluva great lunch from those selections, because I had visited the eatery before.

So let’s take a look at the food now! We had the Cubano sandwich, with house-brined-and-smoked ham, roasted pork loin, house pickles, Swiss cheese and yellow mustard.

The sandwich was accompanied by a housemade mojo sauce and nicely dressed greens. The sandwich wasn’t salty or nitrate-tasting. How often I have pointed out that a sandwich can only be as good as the ingredients it uses!

We also had the macaroni and cheese—orecchiette pasta in a béchamel with Gouda, Comte, Raclette, Gruyère, Provolone, chèvre and other cheeses topped with brioche bread crumbs and accompanied by a side salad.

What I admired most about the macaroni and cheese was its restraint. There was no added truffle oil, ham, prosciutto, lobster or other over-the-top ingredients (not that I don’t enjoy such things). The dish was barely salted, probably drawing only from the natural salt inherent in the cheeses. As a result, the flavors of a dish made with superior ingredients could shine through. That’s confident cooking.

Although it was only offered as a dinner option for Restaurant Week, we made sure to try a terrific salad of organic beets, chèvre, rocket arugula, pistachios and orange supremes in a cured lemon dressing.

My immediate reaction was: this salad is going to be tough to beat for our Best Salad award.

Well, our awards don’t close until all twelve restaurants have been visited, but one restaurant that could beat such a salad turns out to be Caseus itself! When it comes to salads, I’m a believer that simpler is better. The organic salad of the day proved to be rocket arugula, jícama, radish and corn shoots lightly dressed with fifty-year-old Pedro Ximénez sherry vinegar and a hint of salt.

I believe you can tell the extraordinary freshness of the salad just from looking at my photo. The only Nutmeg restaurant that I can remember producing a salad that could compete with this one is Still River Café in Eastford.

And finally, we came to dessert—the chocolate pot de crème.

This time, my photo doesn’t begin to do justice to the rich chocolatey flavor, the restrained sweetness and creamy texture of this lovely dessert. My wife was taken back to the freshly ground cacao of her native land “while it’s still melty.”

Caseus is not only a very good restaurant but one that’s quite different from any other in the state. Just about anyone should be able to find something to like.

Caseus, 93 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, 203-624-3373