I started worrying about Wine Experience Cafe the moment I stepped inside. The place was empty, completely deserted on a day and at an hour when the eighty-seat dining room should have been packed. I was thinking that in this neighborhood (Southlands, another one of those commercial/residential, new-urbanism developments that seem to be growing like kudzu out on the plains, springing up and spreading with a fierceness and hunger that borders on the supernatural), where there's still some money and the competition is twenty national chain restaurants, a Chipotle and a bunch of places to buy cookies, a place like this would kill, drawing down the foodies like a magnet.
Wine Experience has the credentials. It's got a hook and a location that isn't great (not exactly on the Southlands main drag, instead facing out into one of the dozen labyrinthine parking lots in the back), but isn't bad, either — plenty of parking, lots of windows, a corner lot on one of the side streets. The chef is Matt Franklin, ex of San Diego and Taos, a modern chef with a French nouvelle mindset and some California chops. He was top dog at 240 Union for a long time and created menus there that were almost too Californian for Colorado but definitely too Coloradan for California. They were both classical and borderless, jumping around among French, American, Italian, Asian and Mediterranean — sometimes all on the same plate. And, yeah, I hate that shit, but what saved it was Franklin's impeccable technique and an understanding of the interplay of ingredients that sometimes seemed almost molecular. Lobster corn dogs? Goat-cheese-stuffed French toast on a dinner plate? It was gimmicky and goofy and shouldn't have worked in a million years — and yet, if I were to make a top-ten list of the most memorable single bites I've had since coming to Denver, that goat toast would be on it. It was awesome.
For Franklin, the Wine Experience Cafe concept was a perfect fit. It's a wine shop with a restaurant attached. (Or, in my world, a restaurant with a wine shop next door.) All of the bottles and glasses served in the restaurant are available for sale in the shop; most of the bottles in the shop can be cracked and poured in the dining room. All of the cuisine (and there's a lot of cuisine here, an almost incalculable amount) is keyed to the wines and is designed by Franklin, with his weird, six-way sense for ingredient combinations, to complement the bottles or be shocked against a certain pairing. He does wine dinners; he does tastings. He does the whole chef-plus-wine-guy shtick. And so the Cafe would seem to have everything going for it.
But still, it was empty when I walked in for the first time — and worse, the floor staff was whoring it up to raise a little trade. Whenever anyone would walk close to the doors, peek inside, stop to glance at the menu, they'd rush the front like Marines trying to take a machine-gun position bare-handed. They'd talk and chatter, invite people to come inside for a drink, do everything short of beg. And seriously, that kind of thing will put anyone off his feed.
It almost scared me away, but I'm stubborn and I was very hungry. I'd had a look at the menu — a great menu, in its way, and broadly engaging by any measure. And then I saw Franklin, standing in the kitchen (not sucking up drinks at the bar, not chilling in the cool of an office somewhere), surrounded by his crew. I was thinking, "Okay, brother. You look ready to cook. Let's see what you've got..."
What he had was crab cakes — really good ones, fat with lump crabmeat, golden brown, not gunked up with bell pepper or filler, and touched with a harissa aioli and a cucumber raita. For those of you keeping score, that single plate has the signal elements of three different and widely varied world cuisines, each of them working in perfect concert: luxurious Americana, fever-hot North African and cooling, soothing Indian. Not a bad start.
I asked for a cheese plate and got a generous cutting of three different cheeses (plus points, plus figs and wrap) off a lineup that changes weekly, daily, occasionally just by whim. Then it was back to the grills for a hanger steak — a real hanger steak, the butcher's pride, plainly differentiated from the shell or culotte, because Franklin also has a shell steak on his menu — crowned with a drooling blob of compound maître d' butter and kept company by a mound of pommes frites. The steak came sliced (hatchet steak, in the patois of my own days as a grillardin), a perfect medium rare. And the frites were excellent — twice-dropped, gently seasoned. Steak frites is a simple plate, but as with so many simple plates, it's simple to do well, extremely difficult to do better. Franklin and his crew did better simply by performing every single step in the construction with a single-minded rigor and a veteran skill.
I spent two hours on my dinner — and the whole time I was there, I was the only one there. I was half convinced that the next morning I'd find an e-mail in my inbox: "Sad to say, Wine Experience Cafe is no more..." But that's not quite the way things worked out.
Me, on the following Friday night: "Reservations? Are you kidding me? How long is the wait?"
The host assured me it wouldn't be too long, just a few minutes, maybe twenty. But I looked around that room — fully committed, or very close, and two-deep at the bar — and knew that these people were camping. No one was going anywhere for a good, long while. Apparently, my solo meal had been a fluke, a quirk of timing and traffic flow. And the desperate tap-dancing of the floor staff? Shock more than anything else: They just didn't know what to do with an empty room.
I returned on Saturday night, arriving late, post-crush. Franklin was in the slot again, standing center post on the line, sweating. Even at nine o'clock, there were tables just being seated — a lot of couples, spaced out by eight- and ten-tops that choked the floor. The room is comfortable, casual, with brick and leather banquettes, a fireplace, simple bistro decor. Some people bring their kids here. Others drop hundreds of bucks on a bottle of wine. It's a uniquely Western construct of neighborhood restaurants: upscale casual, something that only we can do well, or at all.
I started with a sizzler of Littleneck clams, fatty discs of chorizo and fingerling potatoes cut in rounds, all swimming in a garlic and lemon broth with sticks of thyme. It was pure pleasure, comfort squared even on a night that was hot as balls. I went through three plates of bread just to get all the sauce — and my server, laughing, was more than happy to oblige.
My entree — duck breast in a Chianti-cherry reduction with haricots verts and assorted greenery — wasn't quite as successful. Saturday night, under the gun, the grillardin (my little buddy from the last time through) either had his grill cranked too high or had been fighting fat fires all night. The quadrillage on my duck was excellent — a perfect crosshatching of grill marks, no doubt precise to the micron — but burned in there like my duck had said something nasty about his mother. It was charcoal, third-degree burns and then a little extra just for vengeance's sake. And the sauce, in a strange and inexplicable departure from Franklin's "Don't screw with the food" nouvelle ethos, was completely overpowering. Not just sour, but bitter — and mean, to boot. And the veggies were undercooked, which pretty much gave the kitchen a fuck-up trifecta. The only saving grace to the entire plate was a mascarpone polenta that was just dreamy, creamy and wonderful. I scraped up every bite like a starving man with no other options and then tried to hide the duck in my napkin.
Feeling generous (and confused by the near-complete failure of my main), I re-ordered, making some excuse about my appetite and asking for the Kurobuta pork loin. It, too, was grilled. It, too, showed faultless control on the grill. It, too, was burnt savagely, but saved by its own merit: Kurobuta is so good, it's virtually indestructible. You could drag it through a puddle under the lowboy, give it ten minutes in the microwave and then serve it under a Kilimanjaro of salt, and it would still taste wonderful. But the delicious romesco potatoes were no accident, dressed in a romesco sauce that actually tasted like a romesco — hot, but spiked with notes of citrus and herbal sweetness — and studded with good chorizo and split black olives that gave them a nice, astringent bite.
By the time I was done, I'd overstayed closing time by a half-hour — and I wasn't the only one. The restaurant was still half full, even as the staff was stripping tables and having brief drinks at the bar. While I'd once watched people afraid to come in, now it seemed as though they were afraid to leave. One more glass of wine, one more bite of dessert (wild-berry bread pudding for me). In the kitchen, Franklin stood with his arms folded, overseeing the floor while his crew knocked out last orders and first breakdowns behind him. He looked pleased, confident, comfortable. He'd been a lifer at 240 Union — a decade-plus behind him. Here in the exurbs, he's still new, with not even a year under his belt. But he's got the magic, that sense of complete command and control. I don't think he needs to worry too much about the place closing around him.
And neither do I.
