Finding a Refuge -- Two Chapel Hill Bars

One of the great things about getting to know an area is finding your own ways to escape. It requires time — the sort of thing you can't rush or fake — but it's important.

It's taken me about nine months of living in the Carrboro/Chapel Hill area, for instance, but I've finally found two bars where I feel comfortable - places that stand apart from everything else around, not-so-hidden gems in a bustling commercial corridor. They are vaguely surreal, as if they don't belong, both unique and stylish along a stretch of Franklin Street that is otherwise pretty standard.

No disrespect to Orange County establishments (many of which I like), but these feel vastly different from other offerings.

The first is Roberts, in the Franklin Hotel. This is a hotel bar in every way - piano in the corner, plush couches, tall stools and a view of the front desk. If this place errs in any way, perhaps it could be called a cliche of a hotel bar. But still, I like it (I have an odd affinity for hotel bars, both in theory and practice).

There is a decent selection of bourbons, good bartenders and live music Thursday thru Sunday. They have a relatively uninspired beer selection, which is odd for the area, but frankly this doesn't bother me. And they close too early (midnight on the weekends, according to their web site), but somehow I suspect that's by design.

The bar has a subdued, calm atmosphere: quiet enough to talk, a muted television behind the bar, comfortable chairs and a view of the street. Beers run $5 or $6, bourbon starts at around $7 and goes north from there. Not an every-night place, but a great once-in-a-while escape.

Roberts at the Franklin
311 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, N.C.

The second spot is the bar at Lantern.

When I first visited Lantern for dinner, I noticed the sign indicating their bar was open until 2 a.m., while the kitchen stopped serving at 10 p.m. And yet as much as I looked around the dining room, I didn't see a bar.

It took another trip, and a more pointed exploration, to find Lantern's bar tucked down a hallway beyond the bathrooms. It's a dark room with red lights, dominated by a stylish bar and ringed by small tables. It's tight but not suffocating, and immediately feels far more urban than you expect.

I'm not typically the kind of guy to order specialty drinks. A vodka tonic is about as complicated as it gets for me - mostly I drink beer, bourbon or wine. But the mixed cocktail seems to be what Lantern is all about, and so I'm happy to oblige.

Frankly, anywhere else and I'd be embarrassed to order a "Windy Village" or "Hibiscus Petal." But Lantern's drinks are really, really good - infused liquors, interesting flavors, nothing too sweet. They're all light and crisp, even understated (forgiving the names), if that makes sense given the alcohol involved.

Lantern is probably the best bar on Franklin Street, depending on what you're looking for. Especially if you're looking for something on Franklin Street that doesn't feel anything like Franklin Street.

My previous review of Lantern can be found here.

Lantern
423 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, N.C.
919-969-8846

Soup — the Culinary Superfood

While quinoa, soy, flax seed and wolfberries have all been called “superfoods,” (along with plenty more, of course), for my money the true culinary heavyweight is something else: Soup.

I love making soups for several reasons – they're simple, healthy, hearty, filling, tasty, rustic and pretty damn cheap. You can make soup out of just about anything, it stores easily and you can reuse it plenty of ways. I’ve turned leftover soups into sauces, braised meats with them, and mixed them into rice dishes for a little extra flavor.

In fact the only downside is that making a good soup actually takes some time and patience. If you need to put dinner on the table in under an hour, making a soup from scratch may not be the way to go.

What follows is an illustrated guide to making a soup. It is not a recipe, merely one method of making one soup. You can improve on it in a thousand ways, I’m sure, and I’d love to hear other versions, suggestions and tips.

So here we go…

First off, making soup is cheap. It’s almost free, really, depending on what you put in it and what you already have on hand. Consider this: my girlfriend likes to cook with boneless, skinless chicken breast. I consider this a flavorless, dry item, but she’s a nutrition student and I suspect that drives some of her choices.

Your basic, boneless, skinless chicken breast costs about $5 a pound around here (and of course you can get air-dried, free-range, life-is-heaven chicken breast for $10 a pound, if you want). That’s an absurd amount of money, especially when you consider a whole chicken costs about $1.30/pound. Most other cuts fall in that range – leg quarters, thighs, drumsticks, whatever, they’re all somewhere around $2 to $3 per pound, I believe.

So if you’re going to buy any chicken at all, make it whole chicken. My girlfriend gets the breast meat and I get, well, free chicken. That’s how I like to think of it, anyway.

I like to use a potato to thicken the soup and give it some body. A potato runs about 80 cents. A couple of heads of garlic will run you a little over a buck. Now we’re talking flavouring – whatever you want, pretty much. I found a bag of random peppers at the supermarket. They were ugly and on the verge of going bad, but it’s a soup so we don’t need to worry about that. I also used a leftover onion I had in the fridge.

That’s pretty much it, aside from some seasonings at the end.To start with, break down your chicken. It may take some practice, but eventually you can become pretty efficient and quick

You’ll be left with this…

And this …

I take the carcass, neck and those little wing tips and toss it into a pot of water. If we were making a more classical stock we’d also throw in everything else we could find (traditionally carrots, celery and onion). But frankly when I’m making soup I just use the chicken, unless I have scraps I want to get rid of anyway.

The chicken will simmer in this pot for about three or four hours, essentially until it breaks down. I just get it to about a boil and then reduce the heat to medium. If you’re making a stock, traditionally you don’t want a real boil going because everything breaks down and it’s harder to clarify. I don’t really care, because I’m making soup.

You should skim, however, as it simmers. Fat and impurities will rise to the top, and you can just skim them off with a spoon. If you put a lot of skin and fat into the pot you’ll be doing a lot of this. But if you spend just a couple of minutes cleaning some of the fat off the bones you’ll have a much easier time. As the chicken simmers and the water level drops, add some water back in so that the chicken is just about covered.

Now I roast the peppers.

I give them a very light coating in oil, crank the oven to about 400 degrees and let them go for about 40 minutes. I’ll give them a turn about midway through so they cook more or less evenly, but you’re making them ugly on purpose so it doesn’t really matter.

I also cut the top off of a head of garlic, drizzle on a little oil, wrap it in foil and toss that in the oven. That will roast for about 90 minutes or so.


Once the peppers are out, let them cool in a bag or in a bowl, with the top covered in plastic wrap. The idea is that the trapped steam will help the peppers separate from the skins and make them easier to clean. Some people say this works, some say it doesn't. I figure I have to let the peppers cool anyway, so I might as well try it.

When they’re cool, just peel off the charred skin and discard, along with the seeds. The roasting process adds a nice flavor, accents the sugars in the peppers and mellows some of the heat.

After three or four hours the chicken will have pretty much done its thing. I just drop a colander on top of a bowl and pour my broth into it, trapping all the chicken parts. Do not discard them.

You should have about six cups of broth. If it has a lot of fat in it, you can spoon most of it off or even chill the broth until it congeals on top. Once the layer of fat is solid it’s easy to remove in chunks, either with a fork or you can strain it. I usually just spoon it off as best I can so I don’t have to wait.

The broth goes back into the pot, along with our roasted garlic, some raw garlic, the onion, peppers and a grated potato (skin and all).

I then take a few minutes to pick meat off the chicken carcass.

No matter how many chickens you take apart, there’s always going to be some meat left on the bones – don’t waste it. I pulled this small pile of meat off the bones, and I actually thought I’d done a pretty good job with the chicken this time. Whoops.

I dump the chicken meat into the pot with everything else, but you could save that step until the end if you wanted the chunks in the soup.

Now, to pureeing/blending. I do this in batches, moving a few cups at a time into the blender and then into a bowl. If you have an immersion blender, well, I’m jealous.

Once you’ve blended the soup, return it to the pot. Time to taste and season. I typically add cumin, maybe a touch of cinnamon, anise and honey. A couple tablespoons of honey can go a long way towards brightening up a soup. And while I usually season a little as I go, save most of your seasoning for the end – as the soup reduces the seasonings become more concentrated. It’s pretty easy to season a soup well, let it simmer a while and then find out it’s too salty.

That’s about it. I’d say I got about a half gallon of roasted pepper and garlic soup out of this process. And depending on how you want to price the items, I’d say the soup cost about $3 to $5 to make.

Carrots in the Dominican Republic

When I think about Dominican Republic trip, I think of crystal-clear waters and white beaches. But now I can't help but also think about carrots.

I spent a week there recently, renting a house with some friends on an isolated beach on the Samana Penninsula. We ate a lot of rice, a lot of grilled fish and a lot of eggs.

One night we ate dinner out in a nearby town, at a restaurant run by an Italian family (homemade pasta with shellfish, not bad). But most of the food we either cooked ourselves or ate in seaside shacks where the fish was freshly caught and simply prepared.

On our last night we were cooking at home, trying to use up everything left in the fridge. I'd bought a couple of chickens earlier in the week and had braised one for some kind of pulled chicken dish or stew.

(As a side note - when you travel, you see plenty of new dishes and styles and brands and pre-packaged products and even new vegetables. So it was very comforting to buy these two chickens and break them down. A chicken is still a chicken, everywhere.)

Anyway. So we had these carrots, these gnarly, huge carrots we'd bought but not eaten because vegetables need to be cooked really thoroughly there. I hacked up the biggest carrot and tossed it into the pot along with the chicken, beans, tomatoes and so on.

Now, I've never been a huge fan of carrots - maybe it's the fibrous texture, the chewiness, the earthy flavor. My mother, at the height of my food pickiness, once bet me $5 I couldn't eat an entire carrot. She won, when I couldn't make it through the first bite.

Of course I cook with carrots; I'm just not a huge fan. But eating this stew we made on our last night, I bit into a carrot and was amazed. It was so sweet, so clean, unlike any carrot I'd ever eaten before. I was really floored because I felt like I was tasting a carrot for the first time.

I suppose it's an obvious revelation, one of those things that you know academically but maybe don't quite emotionally realize until you experience it — food tastes different in different places. More or less chemicals, better or worse soil, farther or nearer farms; there are plenty of factors.

Whatever it was, that carrot was amazing.

Perfectly Unbalanced

Much of good cooking — of good food — is about balance and harmony. Most of the time, anyway.

That's an obvious-sounding statement that in reality takes time to learn. Because when you start learning to cook, how to manipulate flavors and use different products and how to create, it all begins rather simply. As with everything, you learn a piece at a time.

Your first recipes are basic, not too many moving parts, not too many different flavors, and it develops from there. It's one thing to make a rich chicken stew, for instance. It's another step, a real epiphany, to realize that the rich flavor needs something to lighten it up, to balance it all out. To make it better.

But because we strive for balance and harmony, this is why giving in to decadence can be all the more satisfying sometimes.

That was all a long introduction to this: I ate dinner at Acme the other night, a wine-pairing dinner they hosted with Ridge Winery. And it was unbalanced and heavy and rich and perfect. It was a celebration of weight, an abolishment of light, the regalement of staying power. Effervescent flavors were not on the menu.

Ridge is a fairly significant winemaker in California. They do a lot of bigger wines, mostly Zins, high-alcohol monsters that pair well with meats and (frankly) not much else. When I think Ridge, I think Steak.

There's been plenty of backlash against wines like these — the big, jammy, alcoholic wines that many people think symbolize California have been demonized by some food and wine writers. And they're not entirely wrong: while these wines have a place (and I'm certainly not just talking about Ridge here), they are heavy and ripe and you can't drink too much because with alcohol contents around 15% it's starting to resemble a bottle of port.

I like these wines, just not all the time.

But when I heard Acme was hosting a dinner with Ridge, in conjunction with Chapel Hill Wine Co., I immediately called for reservations. I've mentioned before that I have doubts about Acme and its food, so I was hoping for the best. And I was not disappointed.

I'll include the menu below, but here's the short version: After a smoked-trout salad we had three meat courses that included veal chops, pork belly, duck confit, venison and boar. And then dessert, a butterscotch pudding. What's not to love?

Acme, I must say, did a great job. In a way, it made me even more irritated for all the other times I'd been. They had disappointed me in the past with under-seasoned, bland dishes and spotty service, but everything this evening was solid. Even the service was prompt and efficient, a noticeable improvement over past visits.

Acme put on a great meal, which only confirmed my suspicion that Yes, they can cook when they want to.

I would like to see Acme cook like that more often. Not necessarily the over-the-top richness, or the all-meat, all-the-time zeal. But certainly with the flair I saw in that meal, with the solid dishes, spot on seasoning and overall freshness. I would gladly eat there more often if the Acme of that dinner would be cooking all the time.

And frankly, at $80 (not including tax and tip), I found this to be a pretty good value. We tasted six wines with solid pours, and all six retail over $25 per bottle. They were good wines, the kind I would like to drink more often if they weren't a little pricey. No complaints on the price of the meal.

I think the Geyserville Zin (2005) was my favorite overall, but at about $37 a bottle it's tough to justify. The Chardonnay was amazing, more like drinking a red wine than a white - textured and rich, but at $45 I'll probably never have it again.

So here's to a little unbalance once in a while. ...

Ridge Santa Cruz Chardonnay

Mache Salad with Curried Cashews, Mint,

Goat Cheese, and Champagne Cured Mountain Trout

Ridge Paso Robles Zinfandel and Ridge Ponzo Zinfandel

Slow Cooked Eco Farm Pork Belly,

with Black-Eyed Pea Cochon and Sweet Mustard Reduction

Ridge Santa Cruz Cabernet and Merlot blend

Pan Seared Veal Chops with Porcini Mushrooms,

Thyme Spaetzle, and Green Peppercorn Gastrique

Ridge York Creek Zinfandel and Ridge Geyserville Zinfandel

Venison, Wild Boar, and Duck Confit Ragout,

with Handrolled Egg Noodles,

Parmiggiano Reggiano, and Small Farm Olive Oil

Butterscotch Pudding with Whipped Cream and Toffee

Acme Food and Beverage Co.

110 E. Main St.

Carrboro, N.C.

919-929-2263

Chapel Hill Wine Co.

1229 Airport Rd.

Chapel Hill, N.C.

(919) 968-1884

Salt

If there is one thing that will improve your cooking, it's learning to properly season your food.

Back in culinary school, we had everything in volume. Dozens of eggs, gallons of oils, pounds of butter, cartons and cartons of cream ... everything you would have in your own kitchen, we had five or ten times over.

Except salt. For some inexplicable reason, the one ingredient that can make or ruin a dish was hard to find. We had one carton of kosher salt, exactly the same amount that I have in my kitchen now. And we had 25 people all trying to use it.

Salt, for all the warnings you hear and all the "healthy" low-sodium products out there, is absolutely essential. It's the one thing you should learn to control as well as possible, the one thing that will ruin a dish by adding too much, that one thing that leaves a food flat by leaving it out.

Learning to use salt means learning to understand flavor. And while it's infinitely simple, it isn't necessarily easy. Different people like different amounts, and some foods require little while others need a lot.

What salt does is make foods taste more like themselves - more intense, vibrant and textured. It's like taking a magnifying glass to your tastebuds. Without salt, flavors are muted.

One of my biggest pet peeves in a restaurant is poorly seasoned food. Sure, plenty have a salt shaker right there on the table but if I wanted to season my own food I would have stayed at home. And generally I thinkit's a sign of a a kitchen unsure of its own dishes, or just technically off, when a plate comes out that is not seasoned properly.

A few tips for using salt:

Taste as you go. I think this is one of the biggest keys to cooking well - you must taste your ingredients, taste the dish while you're cooking it, and taste the final product. If the first time you're tasting your dinner is when you sit down to eat it with the family, then it's a crapshoot. Maybe it tastes right and maybe it doesn't. By the time the food hits the plate you should know.

Use kosher salt. The reason is simple really - bigger granules. The larger salt crystals allow you to better control how much salt you're using. Some people say there is a different flavor in kosher v. table or iodized salt; maybe, but the real reason is the coarse feel. You can evenly season an area with kosher salt, letting it come off your fingers a little at a time. With the much finer table salt, you're more likely to end up with some spots heavily salted and other spots with none.

Know what you are cooking. Some foods take a lot of salt, while others take very little. It's easy to oversalt eggs, for instance. Potatoes, on the other hand, require a ton. Starchy, creamy foods in general are going to taste bland unless they get a fair bit of seasoning.

Season as you go. If you spend an hour in the kitchen without touching the salt and then try and season the final product, it's not going to come out quite right. Season as you cook, adding a little to each step.

Start small. You can't take the salt out, so add a little and taste. Not enough? Add some more. By adding salt gradually and then tasting, you can witness the flavors start to meld and really understand what the salt is doing, how it's bringing a dish together.