Love to Love Ya, Baby
Oh Christine, will you be my Valentine?
New Times - Broward-Palm Beach
By Gail Shepherd
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The last time I'd stepped through the
door at 2671 E. Oakland Park Blvd., I'd skirted
under a neon martini glass and around an
ashen-haired biker hobbling gamely on metal
crutches. The biker, not as tough as he looked, was
one of the trio of big shots who owned Ruggero's
Italian restaurant. Ruggero's served Sunday gravy
every day and also a dish I still crave: chicken
livers with hot peppers in Madeira sauce. The place
was typically haunted by bottle blonds and guys who
made a living moving electronics in Queens. Friends
of the maitre d' at Ruggero's called him Joe
Cadillac. That suave old cat knew how to take care
of a girl who wanted her martini dirty and her
noodles al dente. The aesthetic was red and plush
like the interior walls of a beating heart. Somebody
was always crooning "I've Got You Under My Skin" at
the piano bar.
It was sexy in its way, but that show has moved on,
taking with it the heavyweight boxing champs and
Harley kingpins, the ironic and courtly servers, the
flocked wallpaper and velour upholstery. Packed
away: sheet music for "My Funny Valentine" and
recipes for Nonna's meatballs and ricotta cake.
Joints like Ruggero's don't so much close down as
they get temporarily absorbed back into the
invisible mycelium of Italian restaurants. Like one
of those gigantic funguses that stretches
underground for thousands of miles, sending up the
occasional fruiting body under a tree or a rock,
Ruggero's, or something very like it, survives
forever.
Christine's, the restaurant that replaced my old
hangout, couldn't be less like its predecessor. If
the old was a fleshily perspiring mushroom, the new
is a tropical lily, hothouse-cosseted. Imagine
brassy cousin Nencia from Long Island with her big
mouth and loud hair going in for a makeover and
emerging as Gwyneth Paltrow: Such is the magic
that's been wrought at Christine's. The gleaming
wood floors are the color of sun-burnished clouds;
the décor, white, silver, and palest gray, as
understated as a strand of heirloom pearls. Cool,
WASP-y, translucent, subdued, this is a restaurant
gliding around in velvet Prada slippers, batting its
white-blond eyelashes.
A sculptural wine rack undulates along the back
wall, and floor-to-ceiling glass with brushed metal
accents divides the dining room from the upper-level
bar. There, a jazz group called Lyfe (sax player
Lawvawn Emunah and his slinky-voiced wife, Precious)
plays '70s gold-standards: Chaka Khan, Donna Summer,
Tina Turner, Patti LaBelle — voulez-vous cucher avec
moi? At least twice during dinner, I put down my
Villeroy & Bosch salad fork and stood up to take a
gander at Precious as she spun out "What's Love Got
to Do With It?" or "Sweet Thing." And Precious is
only one jewel in a trove of treasures at
Christine's.
I'd grown so jaded! When a press release arrives in
my inbox these days, it seems to do so with an
audible sigh. More "New American Cuisine" from
someone who'd worked someplace. A chef sure to pull
from his or her culinary bag of tricks corn crusts,
key-lime glazes, chorizo, and goat cheese. "If there
is something on the menu not positively delicious,
we have yet to find it," brayed Christine's P.R. "Oh
yeah?" I said aloud. "Let me have at it." If there's
a food critic alive who wouldn't blow coffee through
her nose reading this kind of drivel, I have yet to
find her.
But I here report glad tidings just in time for
Valentine's Day. Love is in the air, and Christine's
has totally stumped me. Not a single undelicious
dish arrived from Chefs Bill Bruening and Tom
Repetti's kitchen the night we dined there. Nothing
even remotely less-than-spectacular, in fact. Their introductory amuse-bouche,
a "crouton" of polenta topped with crab salad, was a
mouthful that slowly rifled overlapping leaves of
cream, buttery crunch, and clean, muscular
shellfish; sensations that followed one another like
pages turning in a beloved book. The flavor
lingered, refusing to be absorbed — I literally
closed my eyes to savor it.
"If the rest of the food is as good as this bite,"
we mumbled to each other, barely able to mouth the
words for fear of jinxing it.
Restaurants like Christine's don't come along every
day. Hard as I worked, rolling my critical eye this
way and that, fingering the linens and
cross-examining the waiter, I couldn't unearth a
single flaw. The napkins were spotless and the
server exemplary, the wine glasses clear as bells.
When we showed up on Saturday night, the place had
been open only a month, and just four or five tables
were full, plus a handful of drinkers at the bar —
the staff had the leisure to be perfect. They're
clearly on their best, new-restaurant behavior. If
co-owners Gregory Rhatagen (who owned the Grateful
Palate on 17th Street Causeway) and Daniel MacMillan
lose their vision or stamina or money, they'll have
plenty of time to slide into mediocrity. But at
least for this week and maybe next, Christine's is
one of the best restaurants in Broward County.
If we all go now and drink their lovely Antinori
Chiantis and single-aged malts, if we spoon up their
truffle butter and lemon-thyme jus and shrimp grits
with the enthusiasm they deserve, maybe Christine's
will remain one of Broward's best restaurants
indefinitely. Valentine's Day is upon us, gentlemen.
Might I suggest...?
Being very good, even great, of course, isn't enough
in the restaurant business; sometimes, it's no asset
at all. But in a fair world, the service alone at
Christine's would guarantee its fortunes. Our waiter
was handsome, though not handsome enough to distract
us. He appeared and receded as necessary, neither
nervous nor intrusive, replacing silver and pouring
water. He was so graceful that we barely noticed him
except as a sort of reassuring background presence,
and when we asked dumb questions about the food —
What was the green stuff on our kampachi? These
round blue things with our foie gras? — he didn't
puff up or condescend or fumble: He knew what the
hell he was talking about. Have I ever had service
that made me this comfortable?
Excellent service converges with familiar dishes
that are in fact wildly imaginative. A Creole crab
cake ($15) of hefty lump crab is made strange with
applewood smoked bacon, caramelized onion, and
wilted escarole in a pool of tasso gravy. You may
have eaten 10,000 crab cakes, and God knows you'll
find one on every menu from Key West to Seattle, but
you've never tasted one like this, with its Deep
South registers. I'd forgotten that pig and crab
loved each other so devotedly; I thought of
soft-shell crab and bacon sandwiches and was glad
for the memory.
Our silky, fatty, farm-raised Hawaiian kampachi (the
appetizer is $13, entrée $28) had been quickly
pan-seared, then sliced nearly transparent, arranged
around a hot-sweet, pleasantly musty spinach and
shiitake salad in a bisque-colored kimchee sauce,
like Korea-inflected sashimi. Chefs Bill Bruening
and Tom Repetti take a
different route with their kampachi entrée, tossing
the grilled fillet with shiitake mushrooms, sea
beans, and soy broth. An appetizer of seared Hudson
Valley foie gras ($18) came perched over a sour
green apple slaw on brioche toast, surrounded by a
candied pool of purple berry gastrique; this goose
got loose in the forest and force-fed itself
huckleberries. Our server recommended a honeyed
French sauterne to drink with it.
I had what must have been the pork chop of a
lifetime, courtesy of Niman Ranch ($25) — a couple
of inches thick on the bone, grilled medium rare. It
came crosshatched, beautifully seasoned, and oozing
smoky juices alongside a timbale of tiny cubed sweet
potatoes, wilted Swiss chard, and sautéed onion. We
ate a wahoo fillet ($25), a long, fast-swimming
local fish that was paired with celery root purée —
halfway between sweet and tart and wonderfully
earthy — and drizzled with truffle apple brown
butter. I'd thought wahoo was good for nothing but
sashimi because it dries out so easily when cooked;
this one was moist and flaked gently. A beef
tenderloin fillet ($31) from Harris Ranch, a
single-source beef company that processes meat on
its own feed lots, turned out to be yet another menu
standby that Chefs Bill Bruening and Tom Repetti had turned on its head: a thick
fillet doused in Maytag blue-cheese butter and
served with fluffy roast garlic mashed potatoes and
sautéed spinach.
Chefs Bill Bruening and Tom Repetti's bittersweet, excessively rich chocolate
soufflé ($8) dissolves on the tongue the way you
hope your darling's heart will melt in your hands on
February 14 — if you aren't much of a poet, I
suggest you let dessert speak for you. A
banana-layered cheesecake ($8) with a cookie-crumb
crust is romantic in a homier vein, but its essence
is all American. "New American" cuisine is the
slipperiest of culinary monikers: A chef can
translate as he pleases, but often he's just
mouthing a gibberish of international methods and
ingredients. Chefs Bill Bruening and Tom Repetti
focus themselves by drawing on
Southern and Southwest traditions and buying from
respectable American farms and fisheries — goose
liver from New York; Florida wahoo, shrimp, snapper,
and clams; farm-raised pork, chicken, and veal. He
drizzles these basics in sauces, butters, gravies,
reductions, essences, and broths that read as fun,
improvisational, and wide-ranging within our
borders: tomatoes, corn, beans, berries, peppers,
potatoes. The results are as smooth as the jazz
playing on the mezzanine. And love's got everything
to do with it.
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| ©2008 Christine's
Restaurant - All Rights Reserved. |
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