“I knew we needed someone who could combine an American culinary sensibility with ingredients that reflect Palette’s exploration of the three regions known as the Americas,” Nyman said. “I felt he fit the bill. His food is creative, yet understandable and accessible.”
That doesn’t mean Clark’s cooking isn’t sophisticated. Take, for example, his luncheon version of the aforementioned club sandwich, which Clark has reinvented as an open-face sandwich of Ahi tuna with fried green tomatoes, lettuce, wild-boar bacon and roasted red peppers ($12), served with sweet-potato fries.
Or his offering of seared rockfish served with a ragout of spring ramps and morel mushrooms, spiked with Smithfield ham ($23), which I had at dinner recently. My guest, Werner Peters, a German political scientist and Expressionist art aficionado who owns the Chelsea Hotel in Cologne, was impressed with his roasted saddle of spring rabbit, accompanied by the uptown grits and caramelized baby vegetables ($28).
All three of the dishes exemplify Clark’s approach of focusing on a half-dozen fresh seasonal ingredients prepared so as to enrich their flavors, not unlike the approach of his mother and grandmother, who, when they made shrimp Creole, were careful not to deviate from the traditional recipe. “They didn’t use spicy tomato sauce but enriched tomato sauce that paired nicely with the sweet shrimp,” he explained.
Clark, whose hefty frame signals his love of food, said he tries to replicate food “that people grew up eating at home but with a white tablecloth, food that doesn’t look like their mother or grandmother fixed but doesn’t taste like it either.”
Clark demonstrated his talent for using fresh seasonal ingredients last week, when he showed The Hill’s photographer Patrick Ryan and me how he prepares Chesapeake Bay soft-shell crabs. Working over a stove in his superheated kitchen, he cooked a pair of newly molted crabs in a pan with olive oil and butter, then set them aside while he cooked morel mushrooms, smoked tomatoes and fava beans, which he topped with the crustaceans and presented for our tasting. Delicious.
Clark said he hasn’t had time to invent a signature dish but is working on several.
One is a rack of veal from Virginia’s Summerfield Farms, served with rum-glazed onions and warm chayote fennel slaw ($38). The latter is a type of squash that has the texture and sweetness of a pear or apple. Because the veal is from free-range calves instead of milk-fed, it is red rather than white.
Another is even more ambitious. It’s roasted Columbia River sturgeon served with braised ox tail and fried Savoy cabbage ($28), and even though Clark admits it’s not selling well, he’s confident it soon will.
More power to him. He and his kitchen staff of 15, including pastry chef Jean Louis Brocardi, a native of Marseille, are turning out truly impressive food, but the service needs a tune-up. Still, it’s better than in February, when The Hill’s associate publisher, Fran Chervek, and I waited 10 minutes at lunch for our order to be taken, even though there were fewer than a half-dozen other diners, and 20 minutes longer for our orders to arrive.
But I’m impressed with Clark’s intelligent and imaginative effort to appeal to the tastes of Washingtonians, who tend to be less adventurous than their New York or Los Angeles counterparts. I’m also impressed with Palette’s sleek avant-garde d
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