When I ate at Scylla almost
two years ago, I wrote a typically discursive, in-depth report, only to have G Wiv nail exactly what the vibe was in two lines:
Quote:
Grilled baby octopus w/watermelon balsamic glazed watermelon/shaved red onion/fresh mint/pecorino cheese was good, but needed a few more 'cool/hip' ingredients. Maybe they could borrow mission figs or basil gelee from another dish.
and
Quote:
restaurants such as Scylla are where chefs... who are just out of the umbrella of an established restaurant... test both ideas and boundaries. In other words at Scylla, by design, the staff, both front and back of the house, are ever so slightly out of their depth.
Both of those things suggested to me that Scylla was likely to be short-lived, a trendy Bucktown step in its chef's path to bigger and more assured things, quickly only a memory like Okno or Mod or the previous tenant in its building, Glory. Somewhat surprisingly, instead it has lasted and the reviews, here and elsewhere, suggested that chef Stephanie Izard has come into her own from the early days when, based on my meal then, I felt she had an eye for interesting combinations and striking flavors which only worked about half the time.
The food at Scylla seems more solid and assured now-- but unfortunately, I felt like a lot of the excitement and experimentation was gone. Her food doesn't seem to be about wow flavors, more about subtle harmonies, but where the earlier part of the meal delivered on that quite impressively, the later dishes, even dessert, seemed like bland country-club food, extremely capably prepared, but restrained to the point of dullness. In the end, I missed the uneven Scylla of two years ago for at least trying more novel things than we had.
I don't normally order big pink drinks like the ones above but the idea of a strawberry-basil cocktail brought back memories of a basil gelato I'd liked there the other time. This seemed to promise the same sort of meal ahead-- strawberry puree and vodka with just a slight tomato-juice note introduced by the hint of basil in the puree. My wife's was a pomegranate cocktail.
We started, somewhat unusually, by picking from the middle of the menu (things which could be either appetizer or entree sized) for a starter. She had a risotto with roasted grape tomatoes (making the most of a middling winter foodservice ingredient), shiitakes, vidalias and "English pea pistou," a description which evoked G Wiv's menu-trendiness comment above. Very nice in a subtle, veggie-woodsy way. I had baby octopi stuffed with wild boar sausage, which likewise I ordered mainly because the description was so over the top. It was terrific, the strongest-flavored and the best thing we had all evening-- although it introduced something I would notice more of later: the use of potato to self-defeatingly damp down the flavors of many of the dishes.
Since the portions were on the smallish side, we worked backwards to soup and salad from here. She had a lump crab salad atop a savory fennel creme brulee (but of course!), which was easily the other best dish of the night, beautifully proportioned contrasts of flavors like fennel, aspargus, preserved lemon. I went for a lobster bisque with a potato-sweet onion base-- and would that it had tasted of onion, or much of anything, rather than be smothered by the pillow of potato flavor.
We both went for seafood entrees, remembering that that had once been Scylla's specialty, though now I wish one of us had tried a meat dish for contrast. My wife had diver scallops with (alleged) serrano ham, white asparagus, goat cheese-yukon puree, and sorrel vinaigrette. As Pauline Kael said of a movie once, "It's well made. You're also in no danger of becoming overexcited."
I had pan-fried trout with the almond streusel mentioned above on top, kind of dried-out-seeming lump cab meat below, asparagus and preserved lemon and three very out of place and confused blueberries scattered about. This was like a dish on Gordon Ramsay's show, not one where he rips it apart and screams at people, but close to the end where he takes something that's
almost working and starts tearing it apart, challenging them to really taste it and figure out what is and isn't working, lose the fookin' blueberries, do something about the fookin' Grape Nuts on top of the fish, get more of the fookin' preserved lemon in there so they taste some in every bite because
that's what makes the fookin' dish work, mate.
Dessert had been a highlight then but it wasn't much of one last night, alas. Hers was the chocolate gianduja above, a bit heavy but at least interesting. Mine was the "sundae" (no idea why that's in quotes on the "menu") consisting of three homemade ice creams-- and memories of basil gelato vanished as I was treated to very standard chocolate mousse, vanilla pecan and, with only the tiniest hint of an unusual flavor, vanilla with ground sesame seeds in it. (Tahini ice cream?) We might as well have gone to Margie's afterwards.
Service, which had been memorably snooty and inept two years ago, was much better, although the host handled a request for a better table clumsily ("Hey, you can see the whole room, that's what we got") and we were subtly, but quite unmistakably, being pushed along to enable them to turn the table for the night. (I accept that this always happens when you dine early, but I want to be allowed the illusion it isn't happening.) As far as recommending dishes went, the waitress scored with pointing me to the strawberry-basil drink and the calamari, fumbled with the lobster soup (though I guess I could have read more into the fact that her response began with "A lot of people order that"). A recommended wine (a summery French muscatel) was decent, Jazzfood brought a ten times better bottle in the same vein to TAC the other night, but it was also only $7 a glass, so I give them points for not taking the opportunity to stick us there. Overall, if still not the most polished place in the world, it is vastly improved over my comical experience two years ago.
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