I was recently interviewed, along with a few other writers, by a veteran radio host of a certain age about the state of the restaurant scene. Among this older gent’s complaints was the prevalence of what he charmingly referred to as “science food.” This subject arose with the inevitable invocation of the groundbreaking work of modernists like Grant Achatz and Homaro Cantu, specifically in the context of the opening of Baume & Brix by two veterans of Cantu’s restaurants.
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And so the & goes to Bowman, the longtime chef first at Otom, then at Ing, and Roche, the supertalented pastry chef from Moto. They’ve named Baume & Brix not for Dickens characters, or hobbits, but for the scales used to measure the density and sugar content of liquids. Yikes! That sounds sciencey. That radio host surely wouldn’t be happy here. The music is loud, the restaurant is staffed by plaid-clad Portlandia extras and patronized by imbibing youngsters, and the food—while not a full-on expression of the contemporary modernist’s foam-filled, vacuum-sealed bag o’ tricks—is just overmanipulated enough to fall into the generation gap.
But in the context of the entire menu, dessert for dinner isn’t so strange. Bowman and Roche, along with chef de cuisine Nate Park, also late of Ing, are attempting to integrate sweet and savory flavors across the menu, which is divided into sections titled “Explore” (shareable appetizers), “Summit” (entrees), and “Divide” (a dozen chocolate-chip cookies)—which is somehow conceptually separate from “Conquer” (dessert). The radio host didn’t like the sound of that conceit. Not. At. All.
Conversely, savory elements are incorporated into desserts. For now there are just three dishes on the “Conquer” menu (though on occasion Roche appears in the dining room to bestow a trial dish on guests). Brunkow Brun-uusto cheese (a farmers’-market favorite) is grilled until melty and affixed to a wet rectangle of brown-butter almond cake and topped with slices of quince, alongside a rooibos-tea-flavored ice cream. This could have been a remarkable cheese course, but in my case a runner made it all the way across the dining room before mysteriously returning the dish to the kitchen. By the time he’d come back with it the cheese had congealed to rubber. There’s also a dessert meant to mimic the time-honored practice of dipping french fries in milk shakes—a deposit of potato-flavored ice cream sprinkled with potato stix—but the star element on the plate is a plank of banana shellacked in caramel.
351 W. Hubbard 312-321-1351baumeandbrix.com
