Table Talk With Jeremy Wayne : A restaurant and town made for each other
If you could take the prettiest towns or villages of Connecticut’s Gold Coast, pop them in a blender with a drop of sugar syrup, some top-of-the-line botanicals and a powder-blue sky and pour out the contents, Southport is what you’d get.
A town as enchanting as this one deserves a fine restaurant and in Artisan, at the Delamar Southport hotel, it has one.
If the name sounds familiar, that’s because this Delamar is a sister hotel to the Delamar Greenwich Harbor. Indeed, their restaurants, which include L’escale in Greenwich, share the same executive chef, Frederic Kieffer, whose commitment to using the best local ingredients in a reworking of traditional French – and,for that matter, American – dishes, informs the menu at both venues.
At Artisan, which unlike L’escale is not on the water but so close to it you can almost smell the salt-tang in the air, you have a choice of three dining spaces. The first is the tavern, informal and fun. The main dining room, with its heavy white tablecloths, is still relatively informal and fun, too. And then there is the terrace – perhaps the most appealing place of all to sit on a warm and sunny day.
We will get to the food, of course we will, but first let me tell you that service at Artisan doesn’t miss a beat. Restaurant manager Curren Nelson patiently let me inspect all three dining areas before seating me (in the main dining room) and within seconds, one of the restaurant’s headwaiters, Vicente, was at my side asking if I had thought about a drink.
Of course, I had. I am always thinking about a drink. On this occasion, it was a gin and tonic I was musing on, with Hendrick’s gin for preference. Vicente wondered whether I would prefer it with a slice of lime or lemon, a subtle courtesy I don’t often experience but coming originally from England always appreciate. (Fun fact for all you bartenders out there: Brits always favor lemon over lime in their G&T.)
Artisan’s daily-dated menu generally includes soups and salads at lunch with more substantial entrées at dinner, the two menus bridged by a tantalizing “All Day Bites” section. This typically features Noank Mystic oysters, cheeses, charcuterie and Artisan’s (cod) fish and chips, which along with its superfood chopped salad is something of a signature dish.
Regardless of the time of day, though, the first thing to get stuck into is the fabulous, warm sourdough, brought to the table in a balsa-wood basket with “Artisan” in gold lettering on the outside. And I do mean fabulous. It’s the sort of bread that makes you wish you were at Artisan every day.
New England seafood chowder may be unlike any chowder you have previously had. A white soup of shrimp, clams and lobster, with the addition of mushrooms and the teeniest, tiniest potato slices, it was made fragrant with preserved lemon, which to me tasted like lemongrass, giving it an almost Thai twist. Catch of the Day Cioppino, meanwhile, took the classic San Francisco Cioppino stew and adapted it, using local ingredients – shrimp, mussels, chorizo and fingerlings – anointing it all with a rich lobster sauce.
In an entrée of prime hanger steak, the steak – a beautiful cut of beef, cooked rare as requested but just charred at the edges, served in the “modern” way, which is to say sliced – was presented with a fast-wilting watercress salad with horseradish and homemade French fries.
Throughout lunch there was the soothing, low-level hum of other guests chatting, interrupted just occasionally by the warble of a saxophone from the unobtrusive background jazz or the encouraging, cheery sound of a cocktail being enthusiastically shaken. Lovely grown-up sounds, I call those.
Chef Kieffer, who briefly joined me at the table, told me his definition of sustainable was “to do the right thing at any given moment,” and when he says “farm-to-table” he means it. He really takes pride in discovering local suppliers of the best produce, sourcing as much as possible from New England. He explained how he doesn’t change dishes just for the sake of doing so but to improve them – even on “the classics,” like the Cioppino, say, by making them more relevant to where they are being made and served.
My server stopped by the table to check on me often but was never obtrusive. “May I refresh, honey?” she asked on one occasion, pointing at my now empty cocktail glass. Sadly, I told her, she could not. Although on paper I’m a fully signed-up member of the two martinis (or G&Ts) at lunchtime club, those cocktails don’t really sit well these days, especially if I have postprandial work to do. I ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio from my beloved Friuli region in Italy instead and admired the large mural of bowing tulips on the back wall.
For dessert, I devoured a lemon verbena crème brûlée, an unbelievably smooth-set custard with a wonderfully brittle top, which shattered like glass when I hit it with the back of my spoon. In my experience of dining out, many crème brûlées are called but few are chosen. I wholeheartedly choose this one. And the gluten-free cheesecake, served in a miniature Kilner jar, whipped yet still somehow dense and served with a chocolate madeleine, which Chef generously sent along as a treat, would also get my vote.
A soot-black espresso and a short walk along the beach concluded a visit to Artisan and beautiful Southport, a “village” and a “village inn” clearly made for one another.
For more, visit delamar.com