When Jeremy Barlow announced this spring that tayst, his restaurant in Hillsboro Village, had become Nashville’s first certified green restaurant, two questions surfaced inside many folks’ minds. First, would the prices on the menu grow wings. And more important, would the certification mean anything for the taste buds?
No and yes, as it turns out. The restaurant hasn’t inflated its prices for a green premium; indeed, you get very good food and service for your money here. And at tayst (Barlow prefers the lowercase “t”), a dedication to local ingredients showed in bites of nearly everything I tried on the menu. Across a wide spectrum of dishes, I found no single ingredient that was a letdown; no lame, out-of-season vegetable; no inferior cut of meat. In fact, my experience was one of the most memorable of the year. And as always, tayst’s dedication to the perfect wine pairing for every dish, printed right there on the menu, is admirable.
Barlow has worked hard to get tayst up to snuff; he’s had to prove to the Boston-based Green Restaurant Association that he’s reduced kitchen waste through creative cooking and recycling, conserved energy via faucet aerators and light bulbs, and slashed the waste stream by paying a company to pick up his glass and other recyclables. On top of that, he juggles relationships with dozens of local farmers and artisans for his vegetables, fruits, cheeses and meats. You can keep abreast of who’s shipping what on a chalkboard by the front door.
Local ingredients, Southern touches
Heavy breading is usually a bad thing, but the crust on the fried green tomato appetizer ($9.50) was so herbally appealing that my table couldn’t get enough of it. The tomatoes themselves were tart little jewels. We also tried a ceviche appetizer ($11.50) that openly confessed its far-flung provenance (Hawaii), but Barlow seemed determined to shoehorn it into a Southern linen suit with fresh cantaloupe and blueberries. The overall effect was delicious.
Southern through-and-through was the plate of smoked pork with corn pudding and pepper coulis ($19.75). When we hear the word “pork,” we’re conditioned to expect a loin or chop in the tier of restaurants tayst inhabits, but here you get a rich, smoky berm of pulled meat, somehow lathering equal dollops of sweet and savory into your consciousness.
The local steak ($32), which on my visit was a filet from West Wind Farms in East Tennessee, came drizzled with an astonishing blackberry sauce that, of course, used local berries in season. Its sweet pucker was an ideal match for the steak, which was cooked perfectly medium-rare. The attendant potatoes, carrots and green beans were over-salted, though, as was the otherwise phenomenal trout dish ($25).
Funny thing about that trout. The flesh was such a ruddy pink that my friend did a double take and asked if he’d been served salmon. The taste of the fish was also stouter than you’d expect, but tayst serves a unique stripe: red trout from Sunburst Farms in western North Carolina. They’re fed a solution of red algae composted from their farm habitat, hence the richer taste and unusual color.
The restaurant reaches out to vegetarians with open arms; there’s an evergreen plate of tofu, black-eyed peas, tomato and squash ($17) that sacrifices nothing at all in terms of taste and quality, plus an ever-changing chef’s meatless special. Sampling the tofu dish, I never got the impression I was giving anything up, which is really the magic of the restaurant at large. It’s more sustainable and conscientious than your average kitchen, yet as a diner you don’t necessarily notice that unless you investigate the green label on the front door. No preaching, no excuses. Just how it should be.
Heed the wine suggestions
One of the things that’s always distinguished tayst is a devotion to wine and food pairings, and that hasn’t changed a bit. My group stuck with the suggestions on the menu, and without exception found them to be excellent. There aren’t as many wines by the glass as I’d like on the list, and the selection on the whole trends rather high, but you can still easily find good bottles under $40. The list also includes a few selections of biodynamic and organic wines.
Service is casual but very sharp; a hurried request for a salad, after appetizers and entrees had already been ordered, was filled at just the right point in the meal, and checkups on wine, water and dessert were well paced. As a result, my table had one of those wonderful experiences where you lose track of time over a meal, lingering for hours.
And tayst is indeed an easy place to linger; the wine-colored walls and seductive lighting are chic enough without being annoying, and the volume level never threatened to drown out conversation. I would avoid the patio out front unless you really dig 21st Avenue traffic.
As for dessert, a trio of sorbets ($7) was unremarkable, though refreshing enough; the real star was the signature Krispy Kreme bread pudding ($7). Through deft temperature alchemy, the kitchen managed to re-infuse the delicious discs with the same brain-melting appeal they have straight off the assembly line. Compressed and further massaged into bread pudding, the doughnuts are flanked with a dollop of coffee ice cream. Try it if you have room.
But what’s this, you say? A mass-produced corporate product, masquerading as haute cuisine -- and eco-conscious haute cuisine at that? Well, sure. But hey, what fun is being green if you’ve got to be so serious all the time? Barlow gets this. It’s why his restaurant’s name, and not solely its green aesthetic, says everything about why I’ll go back.
What other people are saying...
MartinMoshe from Brooklyn New York - November 27, 2008 at 1:30 PM
WHere is the address and phone listed?
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