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The Broken Tulip
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David Crabtree-Logan and Sariann Lehrer of The Broken Tulip
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White Stone oysters from the Chesapeake with lemon and house red wine vinegar
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Sariann Lehrer of The Broken Tulip
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Dishes on the line
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Inside The Broken Tulip
The Broken Tulip is a new venture — it feels wrong somehow to call it a restaurant — from first-time owners (and new life partners) Sariann Lehrer and David Crabtree-Logan. It is more personal, more idiosyncratic and even more anti-corporate than most small independents. The space, which looks out on a newly bustling stretch of Cary Street, isn’t so much sparely appointed as un-appointed (less a statement of aesthetics, it would seem, than a reflection of the financial straits of newlyweds fresh from a honeymoon in Israel). There is no menu. If you want to know what you ate, you’ll be walked back to the kitchen, after dinner, for a look at a dry erase board scrawled with dish names.
Lehrer is the host, but that word feels somehow wrong, too; she’s too self-effacing for that, and the relaxed air she projects on the floor calls to mind a cookbook author (which she is; she co-authored an accompaniment to the TV series “Game of Thrones”) presiding over the chillest of dinner parties.
The open, L-shaped room is dominated by three communal farmhouse tables — there are no two-tops or four-tops. The goal here is not merely to bring strangers together, but instead to create a kind of insta-community through the shared pleasure of food and drink.
If you live to meet new people, if you’re energized by free-ranging chitchat with total strangers, then you’re likely to be charmed by the conceit. If you’re not a smooth social animal, then listening to your table mates talk about hot yoga and skiing for two hours is likely to leave you feeling (as it did me at times) as depleted as if you’d just spent a few hours networking at a conference.
This isn’t the fault of Broken Tulip. The fault lies in my stars. But it does speak to the risk that is at the heart of a venture like this: Can connection be manufactured?
Lehrer and Crabtree-Logan are anomalies among the recent crop of outsider restaurateurs wanting in. They’re not empire-extenders, like D.C. chefs Mike Isabella (Graffiato) and Enzo Algarme (Pupatella), nor do they belong to the growing cohort of return-homers, like Brittanny Anderson (Metzger and Brenner Pass) and the trio behind Longoven. They left Connecticut, where Lehrer is from and where Crabtree-Logan had been cooking, sustained by little more than the belief that the food scene here — its energy, its sense of community — was a lot like that of Portland, where they once lived.
That earnest yearning animates Broken Tulip, a heartfelt attempt to turn what so often is a cold and impersonal undertaking, the tasting-menu dinner, into an “authentic experience,” to use the term so beloved these days by millennials and restaurateurs (and especially millennial restaurateurs).
The cost ($50 per person, for six courses), the appointment nature of booking a meal and the absence of a menu all set you up to expect a kind of command performance, with one show-offy, boundary-defying plate outdoing the next. But that is not what you get.
What you get is a progression of dishes that, like the speaker in the open kitchen blaring Dusty Springfield one moment and Edith Piaf the next, cover a lot of ground stylistically, and range just as widely in their conception and execution, from the simple and assured to the ambitious but fumbling.
On this night, the best dishes came early, in an opening salvo of courses — sweet, crunchy carrots with carrot-top aioli; a beautifully crusty sourdough baked hours earlier and flanked by two spreads; a delicate duck liver pate; and a too-spiced labneh. These broke the ice and got us talking and sharing, and heightened the anticipation in the air.
But the air of quiet confidence in those dishes didn’t last long. Next came a tomato-saffron soup that might have won praise and admiration at an actual dinner party, but that lacked pop and depth, and a hand-rolled pappardelle that I had hoped would take my mind off the talk of “bucket lists” and dream vacations; but the noodles were underdone and the kale sauce clinging to them was more interesting than it was delicious. An intermezzo — fresh, tender bok choy coated in an anchovy-and-bread sauce, and splashed with carrot-ginger vinaigrette — was diverting mainly for its brightness and zing. A roast pork courtesy of Polyface Farms, with glazed plantains and fermented collards, seemed, at a glance, to be a refined, contemporized version of a Southern meat-and-two. What a shame that the meat was dry and thready, rendering all the effort and expense moot.
By dessert, a delicate cranberry curd tart, the young couple across from me was sliding their bottle of wine across the table to share, and others were exchanging emails. If the conversation had been, at times, grating and performative, I thought, slipping on my coat, it was also true that I had had, yes, an experience. Even if I were to come back (and I might), it would never be these same people, it would never be this same meal — only this once, only tonight.
2.5 out of 5 stars
3129 W. Cary St.
804-353-4020
Hours: Dinner, Thursday to Saturday: 4 to 11 p.m.; Brunch, Sunday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Prices: Six-course dinner set at $50. Four-course brunch set at $35.
Handicapped-accessible
