Urban Farmhouse

Emmer and Rye’s farm-to-table menu begins with pure ingredients and ends with reasonable prices.

By Kathryn Robinson

Photo: Lindsay Borden

The prices are right Chef Caswell makes brilliant use of natural, sustainable ingredients such as fiddlehead ferns or wild nettles.

These dishes and others like them are soaring successes, fixing Caswell alongside the fraternity of Northwest chefs who comprehend the vagaries of our microseasonality and extemporize brilliantly within it. One whimsical starter, grilled sausage lolling on crostini with an herbal salsa verde and bits of rapini, looked like an open-face hot dog but featured an elaborate interplay of flavors meaty and brightly vegetal.

Turns out the rapini were the thinnings of overwintering broccoli Caswell sought from one of his organic farmers, rather desperately, when that winter week was yielding precious little in the way of produce. The guy knows how to shoot from the hip.

This spontaneous culinary style is not without its perils, however: Experiments sometimes falter. A few dishes lack virility, like the underflavored black truffle aioli for the homespun plate of sunchokes and potatoes, or a halfheartedly butterscotched pot de creme dessert. (If the apple galette with housemade brown butter ice cream is on the card, order that and thank me later.)

But the bigger pitfall for ingredient fetishists like Caswell is execution. Don’t get me wrong: Caswell’s obsession with and support for the pristine produce of small, organic farmers and foragers reflects the most radical and thrilling trend in restaurants today. But purity of the product alone isn’t always enough to carry the meal. Presentations can be homely: The pork belly with heirloom beans and the cauliflower toss with mushrooms and wild greens both tasted swell, but looked like things I might smush together in my own kitchen. Otherwise great dishes were marred by carelessness, like the burnt pancetta in an exquisite, chili-fired Penn Cove mussel dish. And consistency is a bugaboo. On our first visit we were served rubbery, desiccated farro “fries.” Those same polentalike rods of cheesy grain were delectable the second time we ordered them—properly crisped, benignly flavorful. It shows what Caswell can do—and that he isn’t always doing it.

This amounts to a petty quibble against the overall skill and vision in Caswell’s house. The skill extends to the servers, who, though seemingly overtaxed on both of our visits, work hard and know a lot about the food. And, most miraculously of all, to the tabs—which ought to be exorbitant considering the boutique farms Caswell sources from. Somehow he keeps his price tags in line with the frugality of the current moment, with no entree costing above $19 and most well below.

For this we can, ironically, thank the recession, which kept Caswell out of high-overhead downtown and plunked him smack in an old-fashioned house in a residential neighborhood. Kind of like Grandma’s.


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