Commerce Kitchen Huntsville Alabama

Commerce Kitchen in Huntsville, Alabama offers superb food, in a bistro setting.  That’s really all I need to say, but then what the hell, maybe I’m being a little hard on myself.  The first question, followed by a bunch more:  Why would you want to eat there?  Why would you want to drive eight hours to eat there? What kind of food?  What’s the atmosphere?

I’m so sorry I opened this up to questions.

I’ll fling a name out.  Jimmy Boyce.  Learned the restaurant business across the county.  Le Cirque in New Yoak.  Years in L.A. and that doesn’t mean Lower Alabama.  Opened Cotton Row in Huntsville in 2008 and has a pizza joint in the Huntsville Art Museum.  High end.  Low end.  Commerce Kitchen, which Boyce owns with his wife and a business partner, fits in the middle.  He said he wanted the feel of a 1950’s steak house.  I think he missed the mark there, but that’s a good thing.  I strolled through the doors, into a dimly lit tangle of patrons clustered at an intimate bar.  Crowded, but not noisy.  This was a 1950s steak house all right, but one designed by a French bistro chef. 

Into the small, but inviting bar

Even the floors sport a casual elegance

Just the time and place for a bit of Jameson

Living in Europe, as I do, I immediately felt at home.  Comfortable.  Ready for a pre-meal libation and a chat with folks who might have something to say.  Europeans are like that.  They have not lost the art of conversation, nor the ritual of easing into a slow evening of dining.

To Europeans, dining is a sacred respite from the cares of the day.  Relaxing.  Catching up with friends and family.  It doesn’t end there.  What’s different about bistro fare in France, Italy, Spain, or Germany?  Freshness of ingredients.  Care in preparation.  Attention to detail, whether it’s the placement of silverware and glasses, or the lighting, and the way the attentive staff is not only well dressed, but knowledgeable.

It's the small touches

Commerce Kitchen fits solidly in the bistro world.  You want to ease in.  You want to linger.  Also this is Alabama, the heart of Dixie.  Life slows down. Commerce Kitchen is not only bistro in ambiance, but southern in charm.

Boyce wanted it that way.  He got it.  As author Steve Doyle quoted Boyce in AL.com, "It's not going to be duck liver and caviar. "It's going to be very familiar foods with our twist on it."

Here you find shrimp and grits, grilled salmon, rib-eye steak, and grits with short ribs.  But, always with a twist.  Our waiter knew all about it.  He’d worked in the kitchen and could describe the recipes to a T.

At 7:30 p.m. the crowds had yet to arrive

Nice touch, that.  I’m a fan of everyone in a business knowing all about that business.  I asked him about the glassware and it wasn’t a test.  I liked the glassware.  He knew the style and the company name.

“Ok,” you’re thinking, “enough of the small talk.  Give me a few hints about the food.”

Shrimp and Grillades

Gladly.  I started with the grits and short ribs, or Grillades as they’re called on the menu.  The name comes from New Orleans and means meat, usually beef, slow cooked with stock and vegetables until the meat falls into shreds, resting in a dark, indescribably delicious sauce.  The waiter recommended the dish and as soon as I bit in, I wanted to kiss him.  This was stewed meat over creamy grits taken to the level of angels.  The sauce was so rich I still dream about it.

What followed was a medium rare, blackened steak, with tender-crisp vegetables and a stack of crisp onion rings.  The steak was so tender no knife needed.  Yes, you can get steak practically anywhere.  No, you cannot get it cooked to perfection everywhere.  This was special.  A steak worthy of the name.

Tender, tender Rib-eye

The Kitchen's take on Pork and Beans - Pork Belly and Blackeyed Peas!

Smooth and creamy shrimp and grits

Dessert?  Are you kidding?  Of course!  You’re only fat once!  Absolutely decadent.  Chocolate Pecan Pie. A dollop of luscious whipped cream on top.  I’m still ashamed of myself.

How long were the five of us there?  Beats the hell outta me!  We talked of food and family and the pleasures of life.  Our waiter had a sixth sense about appearing when we needed him.

People often talk about a ‘feeding frenzy.’  You don’t go to Commerce Kitchen for that.  You go to slow your life down, chat with friends, and ease your way through an evening meal you will never forget. If you wannta try and beat Commerce Kitchen, buy yourself a ticket to France.  This was the best meal I’ve had in the U.S.A.

La Mort Subite - Maybe the Best Beer Bistro in the World

Step Back into 1928

Even the entry is original

What you come for....

Bustling!

But, there's always a quiet spot

Professionals

     

In the heart of Brussels, you take a turn down a small street.  Not an alley, but not a thoroughfare either.  Light lingers on the sidewalk in front of a tucked away bistro that looks like something off a Woody Allen set.  La Mort Subite glares in comfortable neon and hangs like a banner over a 1920s building, bursting with people in animated conversation.  “Hey, waiter!  Another beer and some cheese and sausage!”  But, it’s said in French so it sounds like a seduction.  Maybe it is.  The beer is that good.

You walk inside and the nearly century old décor amazes.  You’ve crossed the time barrier and stepped back into Brussels’ glory days, when beer flowed from the fountains of a hundred breweries, when men dressed in stiff collared shirts and women traipsed about in ankle length furs.

Sadly, that’s no longer true, but we live in hope and dreams.  Still, the old wooden tables are there, the high ceilings, tall, square columns, and soft, cream colored overheads that deck the room in graceful light.  The beer still flows and it’s still brewed by the folks who sell it.

These are the good old days, after the First World War and before the Great Depression.  1928.  You can feel it in the air.  Enjoy the evening.  This is the place to forget cares, savor the flavors, and pretend you know what you’re talking about.  Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald would have loved it.

La Mort Subite really began about 1910, in an establishment called La Cour Royale.  As the story goes, tellers from the National Bank of Belgium came to drink and play a game called 421.  Before they left to ease back into the monotony of work, they’d rush through just one more game, la mort subite, or sudden death.  The name took to the streets.

When in 1928, the owner and proprietor, Mr. Theophile Vossen moved his business to the current location, he changed the name to match what everyone already called it, La Mort Subite.  Mr. Vossen’s progeny have carried on and today the fourth generation continues to serve those Gueuze beers that have slaked the thirst of locals and visitors for almost a hundred years.

What is a Gueuze beer?  Catch my next blog and I’ll take you to the last old style brewery in Brussels.  Until then, here are a few teasers:  Top fermentation, from naturally occurring yeast.  Years of aging that blur the line between wine and beer.

Hey, that’s enough.  If you get to Brussels, go in and sip a cool one.  As well as beer and atmosphere, there’s got to be a novel brewing in a one-of-a-kind bistro like La Mort Subite.

A Lunch to Remember

St Étienne rises from the center of Metz

St 

Inside the cathedral

A little Alsatian beer to whet the apetite

From inside Le Bouchon

Garlic butter at its best

A helpful staff member

In the confectioner's

Can't be lunch without dessert

I love Italian food, especially the cream dishes from the north.  Also fond of German, Japanese, Spanish, and … to save time, just glance at a map of the world.  But, as I’ve said before and will say again, until a court order shuts my blasphemous mouth, the French could teach anyone how to eat.

To make my point, I need only mention bread.  The baguette is so simple even a simpleton, or a vicious ex-wife could make it: flour, water, salt, yeast.  Lots of people, including the Germans, do a fair job.  But, for my taste buds, if it ain’t French, it ain’t a baguette. Nowhere else is the golden crust so wonderfully crunchy and the inside so delightfully chewy.

            After a tour of Saint ´Étienne, the Metz cathedral, it was time to put aside the political differences between the French and the rest of the world, break a couple of those baguettes, slosh some eau de grape, and spend what’s left of our shrinking American dollar. 

            What’s the difference between a bistro and a restaurant?  To my ever so humble eye, a restaurant is a self-contained, sit-down, eating establishment, while a bistro sells coffee in thimbles, and has a bar you can lean on when you see your bill.  Also a bistro’s the tables spill out onto the sidewalk like the pedals of a flower, where clusters of women in high heels and men with scarves gather to look down their Gallic noses at the rest of us.  Busy, obnoxiously well-groomed waiters flit about with martial like efficiency, delivering cream softened coffee, beer, wine, and full plates of things you can’t for the life of you find on the menu.  The beer in Alsace, by the way, is exceptional.

Bistros are quite the experience, but today we settled on Le Bouchon, a restaurant in every sense of the word, tucked into a corner of the bustling downtown.  Elegant tablecloths and napkins, glistening goblets, polished silverware, waitresses in black and white ensembles that make a man fidget and pray.  With my French pretty much limited to bonjour, au revoir and de la bière pour les chevaux, I had to be careful with the menu.  Once before, my arrogance led me to hastily call for rognon de veau, which turned out to be veal kidneys in a sauce far too mild to overcome my gag reflexes.

 This bright, sunny, hopeful day I went for the escargot, salade, entrecote avec béarnaise, pommes au gratin, and hericots vert.   For the uninitiated, or those who refuse to learn French because it makes you sound like you’ve got a serious sinus problem, I’ll offer a fighter pilot’s translation.  Snails, salad, rib steak, mayo with tarragon, toasted potatoes in a cream sauce and some green beans.  Again, it all sounds simple, but a French chef has that magic touch that channels the simple into the sublime.  Maybe it’s the creamy mixture for the potatoes combined with delicate browning, or the freshness of the eggs for the béarnaise.  Maybe it’s the rigid standards for culinary perfection in everything, from meat to the greens, to the politely wrinkled silk tablecloths?  Beats me, but it also beats most anything, anywhere outside of France.

The French do not eat, they dine, meaning unhurried conversation and unhurried consumption to the point of idle dawdling.  Dine we did, for the best part of two hours…actually the best part of any two hours you’d care to name.  I could go on about the food, the superb garlic butter on the escargot, the crisply tender green beans, potatoes that praised themselves, and the perfect doneness of that steak, but the photos do a better job.

After a meal like that, it was time for a short walk to a confectioner’s for coffee and dessert with the very young and beautiful.  Unfortunately, I stood out.