Photo by Isaac Harrell
The air may be turning cooler, but some of Trevor Knotts' ice creams and sorbets will warm your palate. Served in a "flight" of six different scoops at the recently renamed EAT Oregon Hill (626 China St., 644-3474; formerly called Pescados China Street), those include inventive ice cream flavors such as tamarind-and-brown-butter and sorbets like guanabana-apricot or ginger-plum.
When I visited during the summer, the sampler's sorbets were tomatillo-peach, grilled tomato-and-serrano, and cocoa-beet-cinnamon, along with ice cream flavors of maple-bacon-chipotle, toasted coconut-and-lemongrass, and avocado-buttermilk. It was fun tasting and re-tasting each one to try to pick out the ingredients.
Though not on the printed menu, the sampler is a continuing special that's become the restaurant's best-selling dessert, says Knotts, who has been executive chef since April. Not every flavor is universally popular — take the dark chocolate and Cabrales blue cheese ice cream, for example. But "the overall response has been overwhelmingly positive." Rather than using an ice cream machine, Knotts prepares his concoctions in a Kitchen Aid mixer, adding crushed dry ice while it's running. "The advantage of doing it with dry ice is that ice crystals don't have a chance to form, so you end up getting a nice, smooth product."
