The Joy of Eating

OAKHART SOCIAL

We sat at one of the high-top tables on the right. Photo: oakhartsocial.com

I ate a meal last night that was so good it launched me out of my writing slump like a rocket. We went to a restaurant called Oakhart Social that must be a kingpin of the Charlottesville hipster scene. It’s on a stretch of West Main Street, halfway between downtown and UVA, that can only be described as happening. Tony and I don’t go into town to eat as much as we used to because it is outside the 15 minutes it usually takes for us to get anywhere, and it’s a pain to park. Once you hit 60, ease of parking outranks the quality of the dining experience by about 10 to 1. But we were lured out last night by our thirty-something friends, Ashley and Mark, along with the promise that Oakhart Social takes reservations. After you have spent fifteen minutes finding a parking space, the last thing you want to do is stand in line for 45 minutes waiting for a table.

THE CLIENTELE

When we arrived we were seated immediately at a high top table and, once I had inelegantly mounted the hip-high seat, I had a good view of the other diners. Oddly enough, we were not the oldest people there, which is how it always is when my daughter/blog coach, Lawler, takes me to hipster restaurants when I visit her in New York. We were a little surprised to see a long table filled with a bunch of UVA students and mused that we certainly could not afford to eat like that when we went to UVA.

COCKTAILS

When I go out to eat I like to order things I consider too much trouble to bother making at home. BLTs have always fit into that category for me. Think about it - at a minimum you have to have a ripe tomato, crisp lettuce, cooked bacon, mayo and some decent bread. That’s a tall order for a sandwich. You need to recognize that my description of the BLT is a tangential reference that has nothing to do with anything on the menu at Oakhart Social, but my stories are nothing if not tangential, so deal with it. I started out by ordering a cocktail that was definitely something I would never make at home, although I used to think that of ginger martinis and somehow I have figured out how to make them without a lot of trouble. First of all, this cocktail was made with gin and I rarely drink gin because, as I always used to say, gin makes me mean. Now that I have perfected my resting bitch face, and am fairly mean all the time, I don’t think a little bit of gin could possibly make much difference, so I’m happy to drink it when I go out. They have the good sense to serve smallish drinks at Oakhart Social, and their $10 price tag is a welcome surprise if you have just returned from 10 days in Manhattan where the eponymous cocktail can cost about $20. I don’t actually drink Manhattans, but really wanted to use the word, eponymous, because I think it is a great word. Almost as good as penultimate (which was actually uttered not once but twice during choir practice last Wednesday, of all things).

Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of this epic cocktail because, at the time I was drinking it, I had no idea that the rest of the meal was going to be so good that I would be spirited out of my writing funk and would need pictures to illustrate. Besides which, I find it really irritating to see people taking pictures of every course of their meal. As if anyone else really gives a shit what you ate. I am therefore very self-conscious when I take pictures of my food, so you just have to use your imagination to conjure up an image of a slightly creamy looking gin martini flavored with grapefruit and some hipster liqueur I have never heard of, with a bit of foam and a sprinkling of smoked chipotle powder on top. It smelled so good I don’t think I even tasted it for several minutes, then I lovingly sipped on it for another twenty minutes before wanting to burst into tears when it was gone.

PLATES

oakhartsocial.com

Theirs is a small plates menu, but the title of the menu just says Plates, because I think the terms small plates and tapas went out with mullets. Also, if you are going to say they are meant to be shared, you shouldn’t make them sound too small. We had the shaved salad (fennel, carrots, tokyo turnips, endive, medjool dates, honey crisp apples, creamy parmesan dressing, crumb) followed by two orders of the ricotta toast (english & sugar snap peas, pickled shallot, charred asparagus vinaigrette). At this still-early point in the meal, the tab is exactly $75, so you see why we thought it unusual to see that table full of students? Next we had an order of their fried chicken (herb salad, spicy chili sauce, garlic mayo, fish sauce vinaigrette), for which I think they must be famous, because everyone else was eating it too. Talk about something you aren’t going to make at home! We finished with a sausage pizza which was perfectly good but paled in comparison to the audaciousness of the other dishes.

DESSERT

That little cube is the bread pudding. The other stuff is toasted marshmallows and the graham “puppy chow.” The pot de creme is in the background, where it should be.

It was the dessert that sugar-shocked me out of my writing coma and made me decide that it was time to talk to you all again. We ordered the bread pudding and a citrus-y chocolate pot de creme. The bread pudding was described as deconstructed s’mores with graham puppy chow, which was sort of crumbled graham crackers with chocolate. I’m not much of a collector of stuff, but I have made it my business to collect food memories over the years and I happen to be a bread pudding aficionado. When you order a grilled steak, it is reasonable to assume you have a very good idea of what you are going to get. The quality and type of sauce may vary, but a grilled steak is a grilled steak. But there are thousands of varieties of bread puddings and those from different restaurants are similar in name only. If you don’t believe me just search for #breadpudding on Instagram. They can be flavored with chocolate or cinnamon or (heaven forbid) citrus. They can have raisins or not (I prefer not), and the sauce variations are endless. Sometimes you can appreciate the texture of the bread and other times you can’t even tell it is made from bread (I prefer the former). The bread pudding we ate last night was cut into little chunks that were then FRIED and, as everyone knows, everything is better fried. It was crispy on the outside and creamy delicious with just the right amount of bread texture on the inside. I tell you, I took one bite and, BOOM, I woke up like one of those catatonic people who comes back to life after Robin Williams gives them an injection of L-Dopa in that movie Awakenings. Who knew the cure for the writing doldrums was bread pudding? Oh, and the espresso martini might have helped too. I did take a picture of that:

Espresso martini with three coffee beans. And I slept fine. (Thanks for asking).