Audio By Carbonatix
Jeff Cleary is in the house. Seen through the swinging doors leading into the kitchen, the chef-owner of Intrigue appears calm and entirely collected. There are seated tables — a few two- and four-tops waiting for dinner — but Cleary seems strangely unmoved. He’s not smiling, he’s not frowning, and he’s certainly not running around screaming, throwing pans or crouching down in a hot sweat at the expeditor’s post, obsessively detailing a plate. He just stands quietly, looking like a disaffected college chemistry professor with his neatly trimmed beard and glasses, standing there like he’s waiting placidly in his lab between classes, dreaming of mysterious exothermic reactions. All he needs are a pocket protector and suede patches on the elbows of his chef coat to complete the look.
Out front, a valet sits behind his podium, staring at the traffic passing by on Logan Street. Inside, the servers are like amoebas: moving in groups, splitting and clumping together. A tangle of them huddles at the door, looking out at the empty patio. They break up, and one seats a party of four while another checks in on her table. In the kitchen, Cleary takes an order from a third server, nods, nods again, says one word to someone over his shoulder, and goes back to staring a hole in nothing.
The servers re-form at the bar and start chatting. Intrigue is loud even when it’s only half full (and I’ve never seen it more crowded than that), but the noise is diffuse — a babbling background clatter of voices and silverware scraping china that seems to rise straight up to the high ceiling, then fall down again like rain. From fifteen feet away, I can hear the servers at the bar perfectly. They’re talking about wine and a restaurant in Boulder that recently got trashed (by me). But I have to keep asking my dining companions to repeat themselves, and they’re sitting right across from me.
Our waitress stops by and touches each of our glasses with a complimentary splash of champagne — just enough for one bright, sweet swallow — then walks off. This time, the floor staff regroups just inside the kitchen doors.
For Intrigue, Cleary took over the space abandoned last year by Nate’s Contemporary American Cafe. It’s been repainted, softened around the edges, opened up with a skillful reorganization of tables, but it retains a casual, earthy bistro feel, just on the comfortable side of high-end. The tables have cloths and the crystal sparkles, but each place is set with only two pieces of silver — a simple knife and fork. The wine list consists of one easy-to-navigate page, but each bottle is served with all the formal flourishes of old-school French service: the announcement of the label, the presentation of the bottle for inspection, the taste of its contents, and then the pour. It’s a little over the top — especially considering that such service is generally regarded as the last job out there solely reserved for snooty, aging Eurotrash — and it becomes more so when the server presenting the bottle for inspection is a young woman who looks like she might be doing this gig part-time until she really starts making money in her day job as a telephone psychic.
She’d seem much more at home at Cleary’s much-loved-and-lost Cafe Bohemia, whose eclectic atmosphere and offerings lived up to that restaurant’s name. When Cleary was at his best behind the stoves there, his menus were hard to classify. So, too, are Intrigue’s side-by-side carnivore/vegetarian offerings, with their apparent emphasis on Kinda-Classy-Euro-Farmhouse-Comfort-Food-With-a-Frenchy-Mid-American Twist. What makes things tougher is that Cleary tinkers with his menus constantly. Like a mad scientist endlessly refining the equations sketched inside his head, he makes small changes and adjustments almost every day. And each week, these small changes become big changes as entire dishes are added and dropped in accordance with what’s good and what’s fresh in his suppliers’ warehouses. A couple of months back, I had a nice quail salad at Intrigue. A couple of weeks ago, no one at Intrigue even remembered it, and a server explained that sometimes a menu in place on the first of the month is unrecognizable by the thirtieth.
Which would be fine if each menu were better than the next. But so far, all of Cleary’s lab work hasn’t come up with a recipe for success.
On a Saturday night at 7 p.m., Intrigue has a respectable number of tables — mostly middle-aged couples conforming to that well-to-do Denver endotype of skinny, tan, athletic women with frosted blond hair on the arms of investment bankers and actuaries ten years their senior — all tucked in along the exposed brick walls. From our table, we watch as their bone-in lamb chops, artfully plated over soft, pale-yellow mashed Yukon Golds, come out of the kitchen, along with small plates of butter-leaf salad and roasted quail and medallion-sized veal cutlets snugged up close against a pile of potato gnocchi. The portions are perfectly sized for reasonable appetites. Any bigger and they’d no longer seem so pretty; any smaller and they’d be too precious, too artsy, like doll food.
As we watch the passing parade of food, we gulp the free swallow of champagne (okay, sparkling wine), as well as the three tiny amuses laid before each customer at the start of the meal. There’s a toast point topped with tomato brunoise and a microscopic dot of sour cream which — for one bite — is an excellent showcase of competing flavor and texture; a tiny biscuit the size of a Lilliputian hamburger bun filled with Virginia ham and gruyere; and a single wonton strip topped with a cold-beef-and-carrot salad carefully speckled with sesame seeds.
Unfortunately, that wonton twist carries more flavor in its single mouthful than does the entire plate of rabbit tortellini that follows.
The problem isn’t the homemade pasta, which is fresh and well put together. But the stuffing — the alleged stuffing of shredded rabbit meat and mascarpone cheese — is a mystery. The one or two kernels of sweet corn inside each bundle are the only thing I can taste — and that’s saying something, since rabbit is a fairly gamy meat, and you really have to mess with it to get it to taste like nothing at all. On the plus side, the thick, smooth cream sauce those tortellini are swimming in has been bulked up by thick slices of mushroom, and the base has a strong woody flavor that’s so good I mop up every drop before the waitress can sneak up and remove the plate.
A salmon tartare works better, with about a thousand small, perfectly geometric cubes of silky-smooth fatty salmon molded into a squat pillar atop a carefully laid bed of leaf spinach. The salmon is surrounded by a fan of fresh mango slices, which are surrounded by a mango sauce, which is surrounded by squiggles of something that tastes like lemon Pledge. The plate is a flower sketched in food, rather beautiful with its matching textures (soft mango and salmon) set off by complimentary flavors (mild salmon, sweet mango, spinach and salt). You can’t fault Cleary’s knife skills: His brunoise is perfect. Time and again, I see plates decorated with simple ingredients that have been reduced to hundreds of flawless cubes, no more than a couple millimeters to a side. The man can brunoise an achingly fresh tomato without squeezing all the juice out or just squashing it to a pulp, and that’s deserving of respect.
But even a beautiful brunoise can’t save a dull entree. A sprinkling of the tomato brunoise looks pretty on a double-fist-sized portion of tagliatelle, but the otherwise excellent homemade pasta in what’s supposed to be a parmesan cream is clumped up in a sad wad, like day-old Alfredo rewarmed in the microwave. Equally disappointing is the veal involtini, a cruise-ship classic intelligently deconstructed at Intrigue by the inclusion of veal sweetbreads, but dumbed down again with a simple — and weak — Marsala reduction.
Half a dozen Malpeque oysters, cold but not icy, served with a dollop of horseradish, tomato and lemon, are fine, if not exactly groundbreaking. And then the striped bass arrives, the dish smelling wonderfully of meaty fish, fresh herbs and sweet lemon, the plate dotted with fava beans, a tarn of tomato-thyme vinaigrette shimmering around the edges of a fan of blood-red tomato slices, and the sauce so light it’s almost like water.
I peel back the skin and dig into the steaming, delicate white flesh, fork off an edge of paper-thin tomato, swirl both together into the emulsion, and close my eyes. The interplay of flavors — sweet with sour with meaty and deep — works beautifully, with an understated sense of savory luxuriance. For that one bite, everything is wonderful as each of the flavors steps forward, bare and plain. But as the fish cools, as the delicate tomato slices start to come apart in the tart, bittersweet vinaigrette, each succeeding bite becomes less and less wonderful.
The downhill slide continues with dessert: a bland blueberry cobbler, chocolate pot du crème that tastes like pot-du-Hershey’s-lowfat-chocolate-pudding, and strawberry shortcake — short on the chantilly cream and long on the unripe berries — sandwiched between dry sable cookies.
I look around the room again. The other tables seem as unimpressed with their meals as I am. No one is sharing food, no one is forking up a mouthful of his companion’s entree, no one is calling for more bread to sop up that last bit of sauce. What’s missing from the room — what’s plainly, painfully absent from the core of the meal — is a pulse, the thrum and rush of an excited heartbeat. There’s just no buzz — that freaky, electric vibe generated at the intersection of art and cuisine where the entire experience of sitting down to dine comes together in one visceral, messy hubbub of emotion and impression. Buzz can’t be engineered, can’t be faked, can’t be bought for all the foie gras and frisee in the world. It’s weird science: all memory, sight and smell, a physical expression of the mathematics of luxury and desire, a charged reaction to blood, beauty and passion as infectious as the plague when it’s there, coldly obvious when it isn’t.
In the formula that Cleary keeps working and reworking, he’s somehow misplaced that vital component, neglected to account for its chemical reaction, failed to create his buzz. On the surface, everything at Intrigue looks and feels so nice, but that’s all there is. The restaurant is all surface with no depth, all equation with no guts. It’s too little, too late. These days, every new restaurant seems to be doing amuses of varying sizes and complexity, and everyone is bringing truffles with the check. Although these touches — these brief suggestions of something finer, of something more honest and ardent lurking beneath all this languid sobriety — hint that Intrigue could be so much more, if they’re the best that Cleary offers, the place will be interesting only for shut-ins who haven’t had a meal out since the last Bush presidency.
On the other hand, if Intrigue were to dump the rest of the dining experience — the dull progression of plates, the done and overdone flourishes — and focus only on these little things that it does well, it might have the start of a great restaurant. Cleary could rename it Frivolity or The Trifle and feature nothing but truffles and a hundred amuses. And buzz.
Buzz happens when everyone — staff and customers alike — are so in love with what they’re doing that their excitement can’t help but rub off on anyone who gets too close. But right now, there’s nothing intriguing about Intrigue. Whether because of a mistake in timing, a miscalculation of the market, or something less tangible — something like a simple lack of fire in the belly — a meal at Intrigue is just a meal, the food only food, and dining little more than the act of feeding yourself.
