Audio By Carbonatix
Kevin Taylor has a challenge on his hands: filling one of the most gorgeous, but difficult, restaurant spaces in town.
When Taylor first took on the elegant old 17th Street bank lobby back in 1997, he turned it into Brasserie Z, an upscale French bistro that served Mediterranean-inspired New American dishes. Two years later, Taylor replaced Brasserie Z with a reincarnated Zenith, bringing back the name and Southwestern fusion foods that first put him on Colorado’s culinary map fifteen years ago. (From its start atop the Tivoli, Zenith had moved to 1735 Lawrence Street, an address it gave up in 1997.) But last summer, after Sean Yontz — Taylor’s partner and Zenith’s chef — moved on (he wound up at Tamayo), Taylor finally put Zenith to rest. Maybe.
He replaced it with Nicois, a restaurant that features foods from the northern Mediterranean coast — specifically Spain and southern France, with a particular emphasis on Basque fare. (Initially, the name was Nicoise, but Taylor changed the spelling because he wants the place to be known as “nee-swah,” not “nee-swahz” – although there’s no cedilla on the “c” in either version.) Taylor had done some traveling over the past few years in the region and fell in love with the food; at Nicois, he wants us to experience it, too.
What’s not to love? Culinary creations from this part of the world are simple in their sophistication, with few fat-based sauces or slyly layered flavor structures. Instead, they rely on clear-cut combinations of basic ingredients: lots of seafood, including many incarnations of cod, as well as sausages and ham, potatoes and beans, fennel, garlic, olives, tomatoes, almonds and cheeses from the Cantabrian mountains. Some regional classics, such as bouillabaisse and shrimp-stuffed squid, have been passed back and forth between the ports of the two countries; other dishes, including pissaladiera and the pesto derivative pistou, started in Italy, then moved into France and over to Spain.
Taylor has worked with many of these ingredients before, and he’s always had a light approach to his cooking. In fact, some of Nicois’s dishes aren’t all that different from what he’s offered at Brasserie Z or Zenith (or, for that matter, other Taylor-made ventures such as jou jou or Palettes at the Denver Art Museum). Nor has Nicois’s setting changed much since the Zenith days. The Punchinello-style wall murals still dominate the bold, cavernous space, and a few attempts to alter the decor seem downright cheesy: blood-red linens, which evoke either bull-fighting or a post-Christmas sale at Bed, Bath & Beyond; lame bowls of fake fruit on the tables; foliage that looks like it was stolen from Caesar’s Palace. The service, on the other hand, is stiff and stuffy — which puts it at odds with Nicois’s casual-eatery prices (only one dish rings up over $20). The servers all wear white jackets and hold their arms bent at an awkward angle, as though they were late for a J.C. Penney ad shoot. Watching a waiter unload a plate can be distracting — and that’s too bad, because nothing should detract from what’s on those plates.
Nicois’s appealing, truly wonderful food is cooked by Michael Wood, who’s worked at Restaurant Kevin Taylor and Palettes. What’s new at Nicois is tapas, luscious little tidbits that showcase two or three ingredients at their most flavorful. Although the tapas lineup changes slightly every day, you can count on finding fois gras — just $3.50 buys a portion slightly smaller than normal appetizer size — in two heavenly forms: a smooth, creamy, chilled terrine, and a seared slip sunk with an apple wedge in a caramel sauce made from cider.
Other recent options, all distinctive and interesting, have included tender rings of squid stuffed with oven-sweetened shrimp meat, awash in a good-quality sherry vinegar; two slices of serrano, the Spanish ham, so thin they were almost translucent, topped with a pile of manchego cheese tiles and sided by a lime whose liquid sharpened the richness of the ham and the buttery taste of the cheese; moist chunks of flaky fish coated in semolina and served with a small bowl of romesco, a garlicky take on the classic Spanish sauce whose grainy texture comes from almonds; and a small mound of bright-green garlic ravioli swimming in a thin, grassy parsley juice. Sitting at the bar ordering several tapas along with a glass of champagne proved a remarkably pleasant way to spend an evening.
But if we’d left it at that, we would have missed more substantial dishes that also boasted substantial charms. The chilled gazpacho with avocado, spiced almonds and croutons, like the rocket salad with crisp serrano, shaved manchego and melon slices, could not have tasted more authentic had it been served on a balcony overlooking Concha Bay. As with the tapas, the key to each dish was the freshness and careful handling of its ingredients. The salad, for instance, included serrano that had been gently fried until the leaner-than-bacon meat curled up and became crackly. The word serrano means “from the mountains,” and curing in the cool mountain air of Spain creates a very different ham, with a less chewy texture than Italy’s Parma and a lot less salt than the hams we produce in this country.
Unlike restaurants that try to overwhelm diners — and often overwhelm dishes — with their important ingredients, Nicois doesn’t feel the need to pile serrano on everything. So we were able to enjoy other Spanish and provincial French treats: fennel cooked until nearly caramelized with oven-roasted tomatoes and roasted potatoes, all sitting in a heady sauce of oranges and saffron; Cabrales cheese — an interesting blue mix of goat’s, cow’s and sheep’s milk that possesses an intense flavor that tastes almost like a moister, sweeter version of a good Stilton — mashed into potatoes and napped by a minimalist reduction of beef juices and Barolo wine. Although the fennel came with two beautiful trout fillets that had sat too long under the heat lamp while I ate my salad, the beef tenderloin that arrived atop the Cabrales-enhanced spuds was flawlessly grilled to our requested medium rare.
Nicois’s entrees are structural, with the elements piled on top of each other in a logical way — with one exception. The roast chicken started out with a heavenly combination (half a chicken cut into two pieces and stacked atop olive-studded mashed potatoes and citrus-tangy artichokes), but the physics were off. As the server set down the plate, the chicken fell off the potatoes, forcing him to abandon his J.C. Penney composure for a moment and making the meal look like a shoebox funeral for a pet bird. The tuna “Nicoise” managed to stay erect, though, and the soft, supple piece of fish was a nice counterpoint to a mixture of sharp olives and oily Yukon golds.
Taylor has won raves for his finales before, and Nicois does desserts right, too. A chocolate ganache cake, sitting in a milky pool of chocolate, was as gooey and rich as we had hoped it would be, and the lemon tart had just the right balance of creamy and tangy. Also successful were two more unusual offerings: crepes with caramelized apples and a soothing apple butter, and a Sangria-poached pear sided by a sweet, nutty pistachio mousse. And the wine list is an interesting collection of vino from all over, with enough variety in style and pricing to make everyone happy.
Everyone who comes to Nicois, that is. Although this is Taylor’s most cutting-edge concept for the 17th Street location, I’ve never found the dining room particularly crowded. That deserves to change — as long as he gets rid of those red tablecloths.
