Spoon & Stable - November 28, 2015
(I think there’s an adage, and if there’s not there should be, that says catching up is harder than staying caught up. True for work, sleep, fitness, and hobby writing. I find it hard to believe that I’m still writing things for the weekend after Thanksgiving. There were a few nights I didn’t write, and a few more nights I went out. Then there were the nights I was so engrossed in reading a terribly inspiring book that my fingers were too busy turning pages instead of striking keys. But save volunteering, I’m off the rest of the year after Friday at noon. I’ll be writing a fair bit of that time.)
Speaking of time. Spoon and Stable does something cool if you’re in the bar and lounge area at a specific time late on a Saturday night. They do ramen. I’m not going to lie and say it’s great ramen, but it’s good, and always creative. If you’re looking for great ramen that is also creative, definitely hit up Zen Box Izakaya on a Friday or Saturday night, that’s when Chef John Ng does his weekly specials. I’d recommend Friday if you want to try Spoon & Stable’s ramen. I don’t know if you can actually get ramened out by having it twice in one night, but I’m not going to test fate.
Before I get into what this ramen was, I should give a little backstory as to why I was so excited for it this night. I’ve been using Twitter for almost seven and a half years, and in that time, through a confluence of conversations, retweets, and follow Fridays I’ve ended up following quite a few great people. I’ve wrote a bit about some of the awesome people I’ve met over the past half year, but I’m also quite fond of some of the people I’ve met over the years. Sanden is an NPR science guy out in Southern California now, Jordie is in Portland doing some awesome ad and branding stuff, Ren is a fellow IT worker that does a lot of awesome photography. I met all of them when Ren, who I’d been following for sometime, announced she had an extra ticket for the upcoming Wits show. I’d never been, but after listening to NPR for quite a while, I knew that I wanted to experience it, so I took up her offer and that’s when I met the aforementioned. Though some of us have moved away, we tend to keep in touch occasionally via Twitter and the rapport seems as good as ever.
And sometimes you start following somebody a fourth of the way across the country and they follow you back and they and their spouse are into a bunch of the same nerdy stuff you are, and then they open a pie shop. A friendship develops and suddenly there’s invitations to come eat at restaurants in each other’s towns. That’s how I ended up working a few days in a pie shop in Cleveland in November of 2014, and dining at a little restaurant called The Greenhouse Tavern. Jonathan Sawyer, owner & chef, won the James Beard Award for Best Chef Great Lakes for 2015. This is tangentially related because one of the dishes I had at Greenhouse was probably one of my favorite dishes ever. On the menu Greenhouse has an ever changing dish called “The Fifth Quarter” and it’s generally made of the parts of the animal that aren’t traditionally eaten in the general United States food culture. On the night that I was lucky to dine there with my friend Beth, it was a crispy pig ear salad, such good flavor and textures. It will probably be on my list of favorites for a long, long time.
Back to Spoon and Stable. I live in the northern suburbs, and not one of the ones with a lot of infrastructure and a good walking score. It’s pretty barren for food options if I don’t want bar food, fast food, or mediocre Vietnamese. Thankfully I live very close to an interstate exit, so getting downtown isn’t too much of a hassle. That being said, it has to be a good reason for me to head downtown for food after 8pm. The ramen that night, so reminiscent of that night at The Greenhouse Tavern, was more than enough reason.
But before the ramen, I had some meatballs.
Turkish Meatballs with carrot hummus, eggplant sugo, and grilled bread: Great. Good flavor and texture on the meatballs. Interesting take on hummus, I’m really picky about hummus and usually not a fan, but this was good, I liked carrot being the primary vessel. The eggplant added a great flavor. Charred bread is almost always a winner in my book, a slight amount of oil left over in the crumb, a crunchy crust and surface, great.
Crispy Pig Ear Salad Ramen with poached egg and smoked pork tare: So good. This is entirely hyperbolic, but there’s some truth to it, if I had access to a time machine, and I’d already somehow fixed a lot of the world’s ills, I’d probably use it to try and sneak into Spoon and Stable this night and sit as far away from my past self as possible so I wouldn’t recognize my future self and I’d order another bowl of this. The pork tare was nice and smokey, with a distinct barbecue flavor. Eggs were good. Noodles and broth, good. The pig ear though? So good, so crunchy and great flavor, I still can’t believe most of this wonderful piece of meat go to dog treats. It’s like a more dense and amazing chicharron.
It was definitely worth the drive in, the cocktail wasn’t bad either.
Grasshopper: Spoon and Stable has a spot on their drink menu that just says “The Daily” and it’s usually what I go with. This time it was their rendition of a Grasshopper. This satisfied a craving that I usually don’t realize and indulge until mid-February, namely a Shamrock Shake from McDonalds, I go to McDonalds once or twice a year, and it’s only in February and March. When I compare this to the Shamrock Shake it would only be fair if the Shamrock Shake was boozy and way more tasty.