50. Cork
When I got back from dinner at Cork, a friend asked me if it was a good first date kind of place. My first thought was, “obvs. There’s lots of booze and sharing food is kind of cute.” After further though, also after hanging up with this friend so I hope they’re reading my actual opinion now, I decided it was probably a pretty bad choice. Yes, it’s cute to share food, but before you get to that stage you have to do that awkward picking-shared-food dance. In my mind, it goes something like this:
“So…uh…anything look good?”
“Well, yeah. The duck confit looks promising. But we don’t have to get it.”
“No, that’s fine. I mean, I don’t eat food with a face, but thats fine. How about the brussel sprouts?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s good. I always tell people I’m alergic to brussel sprouts, but I actually just think they taste like soap. I can just eat the bacon in the sauce though.”
“Hm, okay. How about the leeks?”
“Whats a leek?”
And so on and so forth until you can’t stand the sight of each other anymore. So, perhaps not the best place for a date. But for eating with folks you aren’t trying to trick into thinking you’re not crazy, I think it’s great.
Lucky for me I ate at Cork in a non-date sort of way with Mike and Elizabeth from Capital Spice the other night. Having been to Cork before, I knew that waits can be obscene, but we were lucky to score a table in the back right away. Different seating areas at Cork have their plusses and minuses—the front room is airy but incredibly loud and you kind of get slammed into when people try and scoot by, while the back room is quieter but pretty much in the kitchen so it gets a little hot back there. We were seated in the back room, so I ponytailed up and was perfectly content.
We thought we better order wine, lest the chefs at this wine bar spit in our food, so I dug into the wine list. It’s incredibly overwhelming for those of us who aren’t experts, so I ended up picking a white at random that turned out to be delicious. I thought it was strange at such a hip restaurant that most of the wines are French and Italian, with the big South African/New Zealand/Australian kick these days, but classics are classics for a reason.
Though the menu consists of small plates, it’s not quite as overwhelming as the wine list. There are about 10 cold dishes and 10 hot dishes, and unlike tapas, they are more than just a few bites though one dish would not be nearly enough for this eater. For cold dishes we tried the avocado on toast, which due to lack of salt or acid tasted a little like baby food, but love bread and I love avocado, so whatever dude. The rest of our choices were from the hot side of the menu (it was the first rainy fall day after all). First we had the branzino—seared to crisp-perfection and served over a bed of lentils. Next to come rolling out of the kitchen was the roasted leeks, which were nice and creamy and served with two big slabs of burrata. Then came my favorite, the duck confit. As I’ve said before, I am a gal who can’t pass up anything duck or anything confit, so if the Capital Spice gang had a problem with ordereing this one, I was prepared to come to blows. Luckily they’re not fools, so our came the duck. It was a pretty large portion, but the flavor—ohh the flavor. Truthfully, I like it so much that I don’t know how to describe it. Just order it, K?
After such a great showing with our first four choices, we decided to order just one more. We went with the lemon and pepper dusted rock shrimp and calamari, which was fine but Elizabeth put it best when she called it “just fried seafood”. It was way salty (even for me) and I didn’t get any lemon or any pepper from it. Not a total waste of calories, but I would have rather had 2-4 more servings of the duck.
Cork is a quintessential neighborhood restaurant, or at least what I would like my neighborhood restaurant to be. It’s got a lot of great things on the menu and it’s lively and friendly even on a week night. I won’t be taking my hard-of-hearing friends there anytime soon, but that’s just more duck for me so that sounds just fine.
