Are Northampton Restaurants Overrated?

I was sitting in SD26 in Manhattan with my cousin and her husband.  Mitch started by saying that although it was a good restaurant, SD26 probably wouldn’t make the list of the top 50 restaurants in New York. He compared the restaurants in Connecticut where they have a house to those in Manhattan.

“In Connecticut, they want to see meat, plenty of pasta or potatoes and a vegetable for $19.95.” He indicated our dishes, expertly composed roasted squab, boned guinea hen or a very rare lamb chop, with accompaniments like two perfectly cooked chestnuts, mint couscous or braised escarole. Small portions, well-reduced sauces, and less common ingredients, all aimed for an audience that expected more than veal saltimbocca.

Several weeks ago, our friends Bill and Bobbie took us to Il Casale, the restaurant in Belmont on Esquire’s list of 15 Restaurants to Watch. We ordered the four-course tasting menu. Nothing on it was less than good and several items were amazing. The burrata, a fresh mozzarella stuffed with cream and mozzarella curds was milky and luscious. The candied, lightly salted pistachios elevated it to greatness. I make mozzarella and with each bite, plans formulated to make my own buratta. A side of grilled radicchio was sweet, slightly charred, softened, and, again, overwhelming in the way technique blended with ingredients to make something more than the sum of its parts.

Again, despite the quasi-suburban setting, Il Casale is clearly catering to a knowledgeable audience who arrives expecting something special. Entrée costs are in the $17-26 range, comparing with SD26’s average of $27-36.

I’ll put Il Casale’s roast chicken, a juicy, lemony semi-boned half chicken against Ristorante DiPaolo’s equally juicy, ginger infused pork chop. Both meats—chicken breast and pork chop—are almost always dry and chewy in the average restaurant. In the two restaurants’ hands, these were moist and well-flavored, with the seasoning complementing rather than obscuring the flavor of the meat. Now, DiPaolo’s is in Turner’s Falls, 20+ miles north of Northampton, so perhaps the comparison only reinforces the question. I’ll take Northampton to mean Pioneer Valley for the purposes of argument.

There are many restaurants in Northampton, as in any city, that do not aspire to the heights of the above restaurants. I often describe such places as where you go to have someone else wash the dishes. There are ethnic restaurants where you go for dishes you can’t make as well at home, although the same differences exist between Zen and the many other Asian restaurants in the area, where Zen serves a more refined version of Chinese restaurant staples and other Asian fare with some imagination and skill. Too often, you would think that snow peas, bok choy, broccoli and canned water chestnuts are the only vegetables available to the mainland Chinese. When more varied ingredients are available, the restaurant is content to let them stand on their own without more seasoning than a splash of soy sauce.

So are Northampton restaurants overrated? Do they think more highly of themselves than their offerings warrent? Take Venus, in Easthampton. To my mind, it’s one of the best restaurants in the area. When I called for a reservation, they wouldn’t take a 7:30 res, either 7:15 or 7:45. Something about balancing the load. We took the 7:45, showed up early, were seated almost immediately and for the next hour and a half were completely taken care of with dishes that I’d place against any anywhere. No attitude from our server, no arrogance in evidence, just some pride in the menu. I generally don’t get a lot of attitude in Northampton, at least from its restaurants, and when I do, I pretty much ignore it. I do not need to prove myself to my server—I know what I know.

Restaurants like Circa, Bistro Les Gras, or Zen aim for a higher standard than meat and potatoes, and generally hit their mark. The clientele is often knowledgeable, but not always sophisticated. I can’t tell you how many restaurants I’ve been recommended based on the quantity of their food rather than anything else.  

In these days of local sourcing, I’d say Pioneer Valley restaurants have a leg up over Manhattan or even Boston. We can host a burger place that offers a local grass-fed burger for $6.49. In the summer months, restaurants can host ingredients whose carbon footprint might be less than those of the diners.

Sarah and I have spent several trips to New Orleans with Bill, who blogs about food and knowledge management with equal abandon. Bill grew up in New Orleans and we split our time between the 3-stars and places like the now defunct Bruenings, where Bill had gone for family dinner every Sunday night for years.  A simple Chicken Creole at Galatoire’s still stands out as strongly in my mind as the red beans and rice we had for lunch at a corner restaurant.  I can’t make either as well as the originals. The “worst” dish I had there was a roast duck with cherry sauce at one of Emeril’s restaurants—a well-cooked bird with a sauce that seemed a clone of Open Pit despite the quality of the ingredients that went into it. It’s not always the high-end places that you remember or the high-priced dishes.

The Pioneer Valley just cannot support the kind of restaurant traffic that a major city, and especially Manhattan can. I rarely see tables turn more than once during the week, and few higher-end places are open past 9 or 10 on the weekends.  Northampton is not the major eating city that New York, New Orleans, Las Vegas, etc. are. You can’t get amazing meals at a different place every night for a month. You can’t get the trendy ingredients, molecular gastronomy, or pristine sushi you can get elsewhere. There are more diners who care more about meat and potatoes for $19.95 than about ramps, reductions, or homemade ravioli. Even our top restaurants are hampered by the lack of expense account dining that fuels the Manhattan scene. I don’t think our dining scene is overrated. I think it’s sized for our region and I think it’s a damn sight better than some.