Local 121 in Providence

[Chris Amirault]

My wife and I had an achievement to celebrate last night, and after a frustrating attempt to dine at Loie Fuller on Westminster (we left after wrestling unsuccessfully with a bad menu and sheer lack of understanding from FOH staff about basics), we wound up downtown at Local 121, still in soft-opening at 121 Washington Street.

The central dining space is designed with quasi-French postmodern touches (oversized lights, white-leather-framed mirrors with massive rivets), which, to our surprise, we both liked. The bar is fantastic: lots of dark wood, fantastic multi-colored stained glass, and a friendly bartender, Richard, who's promised me that he'll be tracking down Fee's and Regan's orange bitters, Maraschino, and Peychaud's bitters.

The menu design focuses on local and sustainable, as the name suggests, and they seem pretty insistent about it. FOH manager Bryan talked with us quite a bit about refusing to serve "NJ tomatoes," and we have a friend of the family who is sourcing in NH and VT for meat and cheese possibilities. I think the menu itself looks outstanding: lots of small plates, good wines by the glass, and both safes and quirks that should please the Trinity gang and foodies both.

We started with some wonderful housemade pickles and vegetable chips (sort of fresh Terra Chips, with a few soggy beet slices but overall very strong). The highlight for us was the dandelion salad with a great smoked bluefish. It's the sort of salad that most places would bury with a cloying dressing to play down the bitterness; here the kitchen let the rich bluefish play off the dandelions -- and added some radishes as a mark of confidence. No chicken caesar here.

For mains my wife had the burger and fries (burger had pretty good flavor but there wasn't enough fat in the ground beef for me; the fries were great), and I had the special: fresh pasta "ravioli" in broth with a poached egg, some green onions, goat cheese, and slices of pickled beef tongue. It needed more salt and I had to ask for pepper, but as much as I liked the dish, I can't believe the item is being served on a menu in this town.

This is as exciting an opening as we've had around here in a long time, and it was relatively cheap: with three glasses of wine adding $22 to the tab, our meal totaled $64 before tip.

I'm all for local, artisanal, sustainable, but it's gotta work on the plate. Before it's even officially open, Local 121 seems to be getting it.

[michael_g]

My girlfriend and I went two nights ago after having tried to go on the Sunday before Memorial Day, when they were closed.

I liked the decor, but found it a bit intimidating. (Full disclosure: we're recent college graduates.) We sat in the main room -- the bar looked more comfortable. Even with two thirds of the tables filled by the end of our meal (around 8pm, maybe?), the noise wasn't bad. They've clearly learned from the mistakes of Red Stripe.

We ordered small plates and split the dandelion greens and spinach salad.

First was the roasted garlic. A little plain, with a mayonnaise-based bleu cheese dipping sauce. The roasted garlic had neither salt nor pepper, but was otherwise fine. The dipping sauce was, well, meek -- would have been better with a riper cheese and a cream-based sauce, I thought.

The salad came out next, and it was delightful. A nicely poached egg on top of greens (dandelions perfectly wilted); the dressing was very mustardy, with bits of seed hull left in. (A few too many stuck in my teeth, which doesn't seem to happen to me with whole-seed mustard usually.) I was surprised they resisted the urge to throw in lardons or some other bacon, but the salad stood on its own without it.

The last two small plates were the best, I think. The spicy fried smelts were great -- a simple spicy batter and some sort of home made tartar sauce. The corned beef was incredible. It tasted fresh and very un-watery, with a really good meaty texture and pepper flavor. They were served with crostini that were so toasted we could barely break them with our hands or teeth.

Dessert was the brownie parfait -- really good ice cream, a nice brownie. The only problem was that the chocolate sauce was slightly grainy.

My favorite part of the whole evening was at the end, when the waitress asked how the meal was. We told her it was good, mentioned the (fairly small) problems we ran into. She nodded and mentioned how everyone had been so honest about their meals. It only makes sense, though: it's certainly the sort of place I'd like to see succeed. We'll definitely head back later this summer to see how they're doing.

[Chris Amirault]

Have they formally opened now?

[michael_g]

Have they formally opened now?

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Well, they were fine for a walk-in dinner on the 5th, but not so open that the menu on the door matched the menu inside precisely. (The only difference that sticks out in my mind is that the burger went from $8.50 to $10, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were others.)

[Chris Amirault]

Formal opening is tomorrow (Wed).

[michael_g]

Formal opening is tomorrow (Wed).

←

Ooh: I happen to be in town tomorrow. I wonder if it's too late for reservations...

[Chris Amirault]

Went last night for dinner and had a disappointing experience across the board.

The menu (click) has become very conservative, with a pork shank the only moderately unusual main protein and few compelling small plates left. But even more troubling -- and odd -- was the lack of care seen throughout the meal.

We started with the root crisps, half of which were soggy and/or greasy. Once the prep cook has mandolined them out, that's just about execution at the proper time and temp, so it's hard to understand it as anything other than laziness. Ditto the rainbow smelts, half of which arrived stuck together in a clump. The fish themselves were great, but that's a sourcing triumph.

One main was a pork chop with mustard spaetzle. The sides were great, but the pork chop was less than one inch thick. Not only did that mean an overcooked chop. The cheap butchering job underplays the very ingredient featured and makes you feel like you're eating at your thrifty aunt's house where she's demonstrating a new method to make one chop serve two. This dish would be a marvel -- and worth the price tag -- if it was a thick cut prepared properly.

Our other main was "chicken pot pie" using a chicken leg confit, the same leg, I'd imagine, that's featured in the menu's "tagine." The sauce and vegetables for this dish were solid, and the confit was pretty good, though a tad overcooked (and I'd have served two, not one, of the smallish legs). But the "pot pie" part consisted of a literally inedible lump of dough that had been beaten to a tough mass and baked. It was so terrible that we grabbed the server and insisted that they stop bringing it out. "Just call it crustless!" It was the sort of thing you should never see in any restaurant, let alone one aiming as high as Local 121. Bizarre.

Dessert was also uneven: a great rosemary ice cream next to a lousy apple cider sorbet; a solid brown butter ice cream with a dry oatmeal cookie.

As you can tell from the first post above, I have very high hopes for this place, but a few months later all the appealing aspects -- careful preparation, interesting menu choices -- seem to have evaporated. More troubling, all four dishes had elements that shouldn't have left the kitchen in their state. Someone back there wasn't paying much attention.

This bodes very, very ill.

ETA the dessert sentence.

Edited October 14, 2007 by chrisamirault (log)

[michael_g]

Service that bad on a Friday night...were they really busy?

It's a shame that they're not living up to their initial promise. I was looking forward to going back the next time I'm up there -- if only for the smelts -- but now I might skip it.

[Chris Amirault]

It wasn't a service problem at all. Our servers were great, in fact. The dining room was full, the bar was pretty active, and about a dozen folks were downstairs for a function, yet we had consistent attention from three different people on the floor.

The problem was that every dish left the kitchen with something significant wrong. That's a back of the house issue, not a service issue. Whoever was sending out dishes from the kitchen was either committed to cutting corners at the diner's expense or didn't care.