In these days of Mclogged arteries and doughnut-induced diabetes, renting out digestive real estate shouldn’t just be about finding a healthy tenant, it should also be about interviewing applicants that are freakin’ fabulous.
Ingredients can be free-range, hormone-free, organic and unadulterated, been fed nothing but higher-consciousness-aware corn grown by virgins, watered with the tears of Montessori-educated children and harvested in a stress-free environment with monks chanting in the background, and it can still taste like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe.
Sometimes that’s the fault of an ingredient, a rotten seed, a genetic flaw or being the last tomato in the vine pecking order for chlorophyll. Or it is a systems error: picked at the wrong time, left to sit on a truck past its prime, badly butchered. But the last person who touches the food before it hits a diner’s lips is the one ultimately responsible for what it tastes like, and that person has to decide if it is the best it can be.
Chef Tyler Wiard at the Fourth Story gets it.
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He’s the sixth chef in seven years in the classy, book-lined restaurant at the top of the Tattered Cover Cherry Creek, and he’s not likely to be the last. Chefs who offer the true taste of ingredients unapologetically, letting their innate flavors stand on their own and pairing them with complementary components, rarely stay anywhere long. Someone always snatches them away.
Most recently Wiard, whose eclectic but well-thought-out combinations have been featured over the last decade at Cliff Young’s, Q’s in Boulder, Zenith American Grill, Napa Cafe and Mel’s Restaurant & Bar, snatched himself away to California last year to try cooking on the bay near San Luis Obispo, but it wasn’t what he wanted.
Now he’s been given carte blanche to try to satisfy the wide range of tastes and backgrounds that frequent the Fourth Story, a unique clientele because of the popular bookstore below that spits a captive audience into the restaurant’s natural-light ambience from a pair of elevators each day.
Wiard’s a world-eats kind of guy, a thoughtful cook who likes to point and counterpoint his ingredients so that each one gets the chance to show off while still working as a team. And so a sweet, warm crab cake ($12) made from the juicy, soft flesh of the blue-clawed of the species comes paired with the sharp tang of icebox-cold, pickled vegetables and a red wine-sharpened aioli with the texture of a cream puff.
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And that’s the way it is with every dish. Savor duck ($14) braised until it has the sweetness of candy, served over gemelli pasta (fat and curly enough to catch the juices), or foie gras ($13) seared and placed atop a tooth-achingly sweet huckleberry tart. Tuna ($23) that tastes just caught is flash-seared with a dusting of porcini powder and a salad of fall apples and earth-infused celery root, with young cauliflower on the side that’s been roasted to bring out the sweetness that steaming cannot.
Where Wiard really shows his stuff, though, is in dishes that contain ingredients not everyone eats daily. For instance, grilled mahi-mahi ($14) – with its plush interior flesh is the give that comes after the lubricated crunch of the charred exterior – is served atop shredded escarole. Who eats escarole? And maybe you don’t like escarole, but this is the best way to find out if you do: The pale, bitter endive is still at its peak at the beginning of November, and it’s wilted down from a crackly crisp freshness in a sage-perfumed butter and paired with a rich, oily fish.
And because of his commitment to quality flavors, Wiard even gets a lot of mileage out of the ordinary. Try not to swoon when biting into a grilled pork chop ($21) and then wonder why you haven’t swooned over one before, and then realize that it’s because the kitchen leaves the center just under medium (which means moist) and makes sure each chop has a crunchy edging of grill-charred fat. And while few people in this country yet appreciate the lowly monkfish ($23), Wiard pokes fun in a way only food nerds would get, by pairing this poor-man’s lobster with lobster-studded lentils.
Only two glitches marred our meals. One was the grilled chicken calzone ($12) that came cold in the center and needed more of the “two cheeses” for moisture; it had to be sent back for reheating. And while four out of five desserts were spectacular (from pastry chef Syd Berkowitz), including an artfully presented, not-too-sweet maple flan ($7), the chocolate sampler ($8) made no sense. Where there should have been three exquisite examples of what brown can do for you, there were haphazardly tossed chocolate chunks with apple slices and figs.
We turned down the application on that one. But the rest of the fare at the Fourth Story has a place on my palate – as long as Wiard’s cooking.
Denver Post Restaurant Critic Kyle Wagner reviews restaurants Fridays in Weekend Entertainment. You can contact Kyle at 303-820-1958 or at kwagner.
