For just a moment, I was stunned.
Location Info
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Venue
Tomato soup $5
Clams $16
Agnolotti $16
Striped bass $20
Pork tenderloin $17
Chicken $18
3609 West 32nd Avenue
303-477-0477
Hours: Lunch and dinner daily, closed Tuesdays
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It seemed so simple, so harmless: a lumpy mound of milk-white grits on a white plate. Grits — the ultimate comfort food. So poverty-simple and, like Britney Spears, so trash-gone-superstar. The American polenta, the best thing to happen to high-end food costs since wasabi mashed potatoes. Just about every chef cooks grits these days, and just about every chef cooks them poorly. This is outside of the South, of course, since nearly every chef there cooks them spectacularly well. But around the rest of the country, cooks seem consistently flummoxed by grits. They know all their buddies are cooking them, and they know they ought to cook them. They know that a whole bag of them — even a good bag — costs about a nickel. So they put grits on the menu and then proceed to do everything possible wrong to them. Yellow corn, white corn — doesn't matter. They don't understand the power of grits for absorbing, translating and subtly — oh, so subtly — altering the flavor of anything put close to them. This is the magic of grits — like a simple starch, only better. They cook them too long or too hard or too soft or too quickly. And then they top them with a sauce, the apex of foolishness. Because once cooked and plated, grits become recalcitrant. They refuse to absorb sauce, refuse to even mix well — becoming clotty and stained rather than blended, ugly and foul and (if any food can be) ill-tempered. Grits are tough. They have very specific ideas about their proper employment on the plate and will brook no fucking around.
I had good grits in New York City — shrimp grits at Bobby Flay's Bar Americain when Rebecca Weitzman was still cooking there. I could get good grits at a couple of places in New Mexico and, while employed in my last-ever cooking gig before coming here, got to know grits pretty well myself because I worked the night shift at an Albuquerque Waffle House, and one of my many responsibilities (along with tossing the drunks and cooking the hash browns and cleaning the grease traps) was fixing grits for the morning shift. These were plain grits — yellow corn, very cheap even by grit standards — and we did nothing to them but cook them. But even that was a process, like making perfect risotto. They needed to be rinsed and rinsed again. They needed to go into a hot pot with water; to boil and then be backed down; to be fed little sips of water here and there as they plumped and drank in the liquid and grew soft; to be buttered in the pot (or occasionally creamed, if I was feeling frisky); to be turned over and over again as delicately as a soufflé so that they didn't burn or stick.
I liked cooking grits. I screwed it up constantly, but I never minded starting over. It was something to do in the quiet hours between four and six in the morning — something to focus on. Sometimes my grits were good. Sometimes they were terrible. And since the day cook was a big Southern man with the classic, pear-shaped Southern sheriff body held up on skinny little legs, he knew good from bad and never hesitated to tell me which was which. Grits were the last real lesson I learned in the kitchens, the last bit of knowledge I took with me when I left.
And at Venue, I learned something new about grits. I learned how truly great they can be, how powerful, how dangerous.
The mound of white-corn grits was studded with preserved cherries, surrounded by a slick, golden tarn of maple-pork jus and topped by a giant portion of pork tenderloin, pan-seared, oven-finished, cut into huge whacks of beautiful porky goodness. But I went right for the grits because they looked so innocuous, like chunky clouds: white on white. I took a big forkful and crammed it into my mouth — where it immediately went off like I'd eaten a hand grenade.
Bacon. Concentrated essence of the concentrated essence of pork. These were bacon grits, made by a kitchen that understood implicitly what grits could be made to do if you followed the grits' rules and played to the grits' strength. Infused with bacon fat and bacon flavor and bacon's salty, earthy savor, this was like eating a pound of bacon in a single bite — the entirety of all that fat and all that flavor exploding inside my head with an almost audible boom that, had I not been conditioned to this kind of thing and prepared for it by years of rigorous professional training, might just as well have been my heart blowing up from joy.
Sure, the pork was good, and the expertly prepared maple jus had been added with a deft hand only after everything else was on the plate so as not to disrupt the balance — or sully the perfect whiteness of those amazing grits. The dried cherries were another smart addition, cutting the richness of the bacon and the weight of the white corn with a little zing of tart and sweet.
