is offal really awful?

April 8, 2009 from the CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK, New York Times British Derring-Do, Innards a Specialty By FRANK BRUNI As if a menu with lamb’s tongue, calf’s heart, rabbit’s kidney and pig’s foot left any doubt about their whole-hog approach to food, the three proprietors of the restaurant Feast recently went out and branded themselves, more or less. They got matching tattoos — three little pigs, each spotted, with an upturned snout, just like the adorable oinker on the restaurant’s logo. These fanciful brands were statements of culinary orientation, opportunities for epidermal advertising and, most of all, celebrations of a milestone. Feast, which opened in late March 2008, was about to mark its first birthday. It had survived a year, despite its owners’ occasional doubts. “It was an enormous gamble, doing this kind of restaurant in Houston,” said Richard Knight, a British ex-pat who owns Feast with a fellow ex-pat, James Silk, and Mr. Silk’s American wife, Meagan. He and Mr. Silk got their tattoos on their right forearms, while Ms. Silk opted for her left hip, where it wouldn’t be so readily visible. “I’m still trying to be a little feminine,” she said. Feast would, in fact, be a gamble anywhere in America, because the menu doesn’t just slip in a little tongue here, a little liver there. It’s a full-on, extended ode to offal that has no real peer in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities that pride themselves on their epicurean adventurousness. Feast (219 Westheimer Road, 713-529-7788, Houston, Texas feasthouston.com) embraces nose-to-tail cooking so thoroughly that when I ordered amberjack, what I got was the fish’s severed head, not much smaller than my own, with an unblinking, accusatory eye staring right at me. If “The Godfather” had been set at sea, this is what the potentate who displeased Don Corleone might have found under his sheets. With nimble fork work I had to burrow into dark recesses for the amberjack’s cheek and neck flesh, expertly roasted and more delicate than anything the rest of the fish might have yielded. It was splendid, like many dishes I tried during a recent dinner whose pleasures went beyond the plate to the restaurant’s setting in a Craftsman-style house with gorgeous wood trim and an old-fashioned, musky languor. Those pleasures also included the way Mr. Knight and Mr. Silk, who do the cooking while Ms. Silk runs the front of the house, dart from the kitchen in their chef’s whites to see who has had the temerity to order up their organ meat and to watch those diners’ expressions when something especially strange lands on the table. They themselves look a little disheveled, a little frantic and more than a little mischievous, in a very English way. What they’ve fashioned in a foreign land of big steaks and bold Tex-Mex is a restaurant that’s not just offbeat and challenging but also serious and enormously enjoyable. It’s one of the country’s outstanding newcomers. As it has evolved over 12 rocky and rewarding months, it has become more broadly accessible. Its menu has expanded to include some less adventurous fare, though what hasn’t changed — and won’t — is the restaurant’s intense devotion to its cooks’ motherland, evoked in an array of rustic classics. One of the newer, tamer specials on the night I went was chicken potpie, and what I found when I tunneled through a hood of pastry as broad as a beret wasn’t giblets but white meat. Although I felt somewhat cheated, my rattled friend Barbara, eager to move on from the rabbit’s liver in front of her, let out an ecstatic yelp of relief. On most nights there is also braised chicken, though it goes by a name that’s not familiar to most American diners: cock-a-leekie. That’s a British staple on a menu rife with such terminology and fare: haggis, tatties (mashed potatoes) and neeps (turnips); cullen skink (a Scottish seafood stew); bubble and squeak (a potato hash of sorts); black pudding (a kind of blood sausage). To dine at Feast you need not just courage but a glossary. Mr. Knight and Mr. Silk, both 40, met as teenagers in the southern English town of Bognor Regis, and they’ve entered into many a misadventure together over years. For a short while they played in a rock band whose failure, Mr. Knight says, may have been sealed by its name: the Pelican Retorts. They separately drifted into cooking, each of them pinging from restaurant to restaurant and Mr. Silk landing in one that, more than any other, inspired Feast: St. John in London. St. John and its chef, Fergus Henderson, are to nose-to-tail eating what El Bulli and Ferran Adrià are to molecular gastronomy. Mr. Silk worked at St. John on and off for six years, in a range of roles including waiter and butcher. He took a special shine to the butchering. Mr. Knight immigrated to America about 13 years ago; Mr. Silk moved here about three years ago. Both ended up in Houston because of the American women they’d married or were about to. Mr. Knight and his wife have since divorced. Before Feast, the two men cooked together at a restaurant just outside Houston, in Conroe, though they didn’t go as gonzo with the innards there. Then they took over what had been a French place in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston, and decided to pull out all the stops. “There was nobody at all doing anything in this direction,” Mr. Knight said during a telephone interview after my meal at Feast. “I mean, you’d see the odd belly,” he added, referring to pork. “But no one was doing the tongues and tails and testicles we’re doing.” And certainly no one was indulging in the kind of naughty nomenclature the Feast proprietors favor. “With some of the things we’ve done, there’s schoolboy humor involved,” Mr. Silk conceded. He was referring to a dish they called (accurately, as it happens) tongue in breast, and to another they called tongue in the hole, because it was a riff on the British classic toad in the hole. After a while, they calmed down. “We had some ladies phoning us and saying, ‘I’m coming in today, but I’m afraid — what can I eat?’ “ Mr. Knight said. “And we thought: that’s not right.” Now there are dishes like cassoulet, lamb shank and scallops on the menu, along with dares that even the restaurant’s most loyal diners won’t take. “I’m just throwing one of them into the trash this morning,” Mr. Silk said. “Eel pie. We got a beautiful conger eel from our fisherman, a many-toothed conger.” The fisherman who supplies Feast knows that Mr. Knight and Mr. Silk will take and cook critters from the Gulf of Mexico that are hauled in accidentally (the by-catch) and might otherwise be thrown away. Last week Feast smoked and served footlong baby barracudas. On several occasions they’ve served an odd-looking Gulf fish whose real name they don’t even know but whose nickname greatly amuses them. The fish is gray in color, has an enormous gaping mouth and is referred to as a “mother-in-law.” But Mr. Knight and his co-conspirators say they’re not just trying to be eccentric and cheeky. Their use of unusual creatures and innards, they say, springs from the same sensibility as their insistence on free-range chickens: a deep appreciation of animals. Ms. Silk, 30, who’d never eaten organ meat before meeting her husband, said: “I could be a vegetarian if I let my conscience guide me. But another way of giving an animal the respect it deserves is using as much of the animal as possible.” There is an economic advantage to that: Feast is able to keep most of its appetizers under $10 and most of its entrees under $25, in part by using less widely desired cuts of meat. The restaurant has never served filet mignon, and while there was pork belly, pork cheek, pig’s tail and pig’s head terrine the night I dined there, there wasn’t anything like a pork chop. But it’s clear that passion more than thrift drives Mr. Knight and Mr. Silk to cook what they do. The more conventional fare on the menu at Feast doesn’t reflect the same sort of commitment and pack the same kind of excitement that other dishes do. The Spanish-style meatballs I had were unexceptional, and that spectacular-looking chicken potpie was a spectacular bore. But there were irresistible crunch and funk in the restaurant’s black pudding, made from imported morcilla that Mr. Knight and Mr. Silk slice, pan-fry and then serve with a fried egg, English peas and mint. They’ve cinched the appeal of crispness with funkiness and of crispness with fattiness, the latter combination manifest in an entree of pork belly served with a thick layer of skin, the way suckling pig often is. The restaurant’s salad of pork cheek and dandelion may be a direct crib from St. John, but that didn’t make it any less terrific, the bitter greens offsetting the richness of the meat. While that salad strived for a balance of effects, the rabbit’s liver, pan-fried with rabbit’s kidneys and served in thick gravy over toast, was a flat-out revel in gamy richness — and my favorite dish of the night. The all-European wine list emphasizes zippy and weighty reds that are wisely chosen to complement the food, and few bottles are over $75. The short list of desserts includes an outstanding sticky toffee pudding that screams Englishness in the loudest but sweetest of ways. Why, then, were only 2 of the restaurant’s 14 tables occupied when I was there? That was partly because it was Monday. But also, for all its menu concessions, Feast remains a dicey proposition for its owners. “We still worry,” Ms. Silk said. “It’s a constant worry.” In fact they got the tattoos, she said, only after they realized that one of their regular customers was a tattoo artist and successfully proposed a barter: cooking for inking. That regular, Gabriel Massey, said that when he redeems his credit, it will be for fish. He described himself as a “semi-vegetarian” who sometimes eats seafood and goes to Feast for the freshness and the finesse of theirs. “They have this fish pie that’s amazing,” he said. I asked him what was in it. “I don’t know,” he said, then fell silent for a few freighted beats. “I trust they’re not putting some kind of entrails in there.”