a.kitchen is still a stupid name. Besides that, it’s hard to find fault with Eli Kulp and Ellen Yin’s reboot of the Rittenhouse eatery. The new menu is a canvas for Kulp’s custom built hardwood charcoal grill, with every item incorporating some grilled or smoked or charred element.
Our first course, smoked beets in a beet gribiche ($13), downplayed the smokiness by using beets that were first pickled, then smoked with the grill. Instead of weighing down the already rich gribiche, the beets cut tart against creamy, with the background charcoal smoke deepening the flavors of both.
On the other hand, our grilled cucumber gazpacho ($17) with peekytoe crab and succotash put the charcoal flavor front–and–center. Cold soup has always given me the willies, but the grilled cucumber and slightly–sweet crab together gave the dish a heartiness hard to find in gazpacho.
More within the regular purview of charcoal was the American Wagyu steak ($28), four small cubes grilled to medium rare and flanked by charred onion cups carrying the steak’s au jus. Great steak is great steak, but this was probably the least interesting part of the meal. But the fried cauliflower that followed (compliments of the chef) triggered a low–key fork fight for the last piece. The taste of cauliflower is easy to overpower, especially when frying or grilling. But these were so delicately fried that the added texture only enhanced its sweet, nutty flavor.
Rounding out the night was a whole grilled Atlantic sea bream ($46), with lime, greens and an eye looking up expectantly. Eating a whole fish takes effort, but as any fishmonger will tell you, a fish is most flavorful when cooked with the bones and skin. The tender, flaky meat that tastes like fish without being “fishy” makes it all worth it. For the more adventurous, the cheek meat is a burst of flavor hiding behind a disapproving face. The eyeball, however, which I nibbled on to satisfy my curiosity, is probably best left with its owner.
For a restaurant without horns on the mantle, a menu built around charcoal is definitely a calculated risk. Thanks to a culture of summer cookouts and holiday grilling, the domineering nature of charcoal grilling is familiar to most diners. But the menu Kulp has masterminded succeeds in exploring the subtleties of a cooking method too often dismissed as one–dimensional. Charcoal is now gourmet.
