PHILLY
EVENTS
Review: The Farm and the Fisherman
Joshua and Colleen Lawler press the reset button on Philly's whole animal trend
- Slow-cooked New Jersey bluefish // Photography Jason Varney
1120 Pine Street, 267-687-1555.
Cuisine: Progressive American
Entrées: $14 to $32
Three stars.
Four stars signifies an "extraordinary" restaurant, three stars is "excellent," two stars is "good," one star is "fair" and no stars is "poor."
Perhaps, as you’ve bitten into lamb’s tongue at Amis, cockscombs at Blackfish or duck testicles at Zahav, the thought has occurred to you: It costs a pretty penny to eat poor folks’ food these days. Gone are the evenings of filet mignon on starched linens. Every chef worth his fleur de sel has spent the past couple years spinning offal into gold. So at first glance, Joshua and Colleen Lawler’s menu at the Farm and Fisherman looks pretty familiar. Pork snout and belly over farmer’s-cheese spaetzle? We’ve been eating low on the hog for a while now, thanks. Beef heart with borscht sauce? Sure, and what can a fella do to get some trotters with that?
But in a city where organ meats often come with a heaping portion of machismo, there’s something gentler and more challenging—contrarian, even—about the cooking at this 30-seat BYO. Look past those snouts and you’ll find roasted celery hearts served over cracked-rice grits flecked with black quinoa. Or a terrific beet steak, parbaked under bricks to break the root flesh down to a baked-potato consistency, then seared like a New York strip. And when Lawler isn’t hunched over his cutting board using vegetables like they were bloody meat centerpieces, he’s serving fish that his high-priced peers hardly dare to touch. When’s the last time you saw croaker in an upscale restaurant? Or porgies? Porgies!
The menu changes daily at the Farm and Fisherman, and I didn’t get a shot at either of those species (which are as local and sustainable as seafood gets around here), but Lawler’s bluefish, laid over cold potatoes and balanced by the clean and quickly vanishing flavor of celery leaves, had the impeccable freshness that such a delicate yet powerfully flavored fish demands. His rockfish tartare showed a knack for idiosyncrasy—mounded up and glowing like translucent ivory atop lemon-tossed spaghetti squash with orange mint, then circled by a foamy moat of stock-thinned goat’s milk yogurt in a Lancaster-dairy take on leche de tigre.
Diaphanous bronze curtains flutter against copper-toned walls, and meals in this warm and understated space are lollygagging three- and four-course affairs. Lawler was most recently chef de cuisine at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, whose lauded seasonal fare requires the efforts of 10 or 20 cooks all working in concert, but at the Farm and Fisherman, he cooks only with Vetri alum Pat Szoke, while Colleen, his wife, floats between the dining room and kitchen. The pacing could be swifter, the lag between courses less aching. But in trade, the wine glasses couldn’t be much bigger, so bring the good juice, settle in, and just enjoy watching Lawler’s high-wire act unfold. Because when you’re cooking without a walk-in cooler and your meat dealer drops off a whole hog one day and seven extra heads the next, that’s exactly what it is: a high-wire act.
I can’t speak for the pig snout—Lawler’s crisp and surprisingly light spaetzle featured loin and jowl the night I tried it—but his pig cheeks were too good not to have twice. Buttery and impossibly tender, they had a juicy sweetness amplified by cranberries and currants. But their richness was reined in both times: once by the mild astringency of shaved purple turnips and, better still, on another night by Cameo apple slices, starting out crisp and then soaking up the sweetened stock until they drooped with the weight of it.
As good as Lawler’s kitchen can be in the nose-to-tail style, the Farm and Fisherman is every bit as compelling in the root-to-leaf department. There’s parsnip in the clove-perfumed crème brûlée, and it’s better (and less bitter) than you’d expect. For dessert there’s grapefruit soup, its tartness mellowed by a featherweight island of curd. And while I wouldn’t bother twice with the celery heart (watery rice grits have their place, and that place is in a Dickensian orphanage), even that misfire was more stirring in its contrary edginess than the direct hits of many other restaurants. It takes bigger balls to center-plate roasted celery in this marrow-crazed city than it does to serve actual gonads.
Nevertheless, the sweet spot here lies somewhere between that California-style eco-austerity and the pig heads on the cutting board. There’s been stuffed quail with duck liver and ramps over a cleansing puree of stinging nettles, and a bowl of kale and civet mushrooms cradling a single poached farm egg. And while it’s still too early to know whether the Farm and Fisherman can sustain this elegant balance between head-to-tail sumptuousness and hedgerow-to-hedgerow wholesomeness, there’s no doubt that this is a gutsy debut.
But in a city where organ meats often come with a heaping portion of machismo, there’s something gentler and more challenging—contrarian, even—about the cooking at this 30-seat BYO. Look past those snouts and you’ll find roasted celery hearts served over cracked-rice grits flecked with black quinoa. Or a terrific beet steak, parbaked under bricks to break the root flesh down to a baked-potato consistency, then seared like a New York strip. And when Lawler isn’t hunched over his cutting board using vegetables like they were bloody meat centerpieces, he’s serving fish that his high-priced peers hardly dare to touch. When’s the last time you saw croaker in an upscale restaurant? Or porgies? Porgies!
The menu changes daily at the Farm and Fisherman, and I didn’t get a shot at either of those species (which are as local and sustainable as seafood gets around here), but Lawler’s bluefish, laid over cold potatoes and balanced by the clean and quickly vanishing flavor of celery leaves, had the impeccable freshness that such a delicate yet powerfully flavored fish demands. His rockfish tartare showed a knack for idiosyncrasy—mounded up and glowing like translucent ivory atop lemon-tossed spaghetti squash with orange mint, then circled by a foamy moat of stock-thinned goat’s milk yogurt in a Lancaster-dairy take on leche de tigre.
Diaphanous bronze curtains flutter against copper-toned walls, and meals in this warm and understated space are lollygagging three- and four-course affairs. Lawler was most recently chef de cuisine at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, whose lauded seasonal fare requires the efforts of 10 or 20 cooks all working in concert, but at the Farm and Fisherman, he cooks only with Vetri alum Pat Szoke, while Colleen, his wife, floats between the dining room and kitchen. The pacing could be swifter, the lag between courses less aching. But in trade, the wine glasses couldn’t be much bigger, so bring the good juice, settle in, and just enjoy watching Lawler’s high-wire act unfold. Because when you’re cooking without a walk-in cooler and your meat dealer drops off a whole hog one day and seven extra heads the next, that’s exactly what it is: a high-wire act.
I can’t speak for the pig snout—Lawler’s crisp and surprisingly light spaetzle featured loin and jowl the night I tried it—but his pig cheeks were too good not to have twice. Buttery and impossibly tender, they had a juicy sweetness amplified by cranberries and currants. But their richness was reined in both times: once by the mild astringency of shaved purple turnips and, better still, on another night by Cameo apple slices, starting out crisp and then soaking up the sweetened stock until they drooped with the weight of it.
As good as Lawler’s kitchen can be in the nose-to-tail style, the Farm and Fisherman is every bit as compelling in the root-to-leaf department. There’s parsnip in the clove-perfumed crème brûlée, and it’s better (and less bitter) than you’d expect. For dessert there’s grapefruit soup, its tartness mellowed by a featherweight island of curd. And while I wouldn’t bother twice with the celery heart (watery rice grits have their place, and that place is in a Dickensian orphanage), even that misfire was more stirring in its contrary edginess than the direct hits of many other restaurants. It takes bigger balls to center-plate roasted celery in this marrow-crazed city than it does to serve actual gonads.
Nevertheless, the sweet spot here lies somewhere between that California-style eco-austerity and the pig heads on the cutting board. There’s been stuffed quail with duck liver and ramps over a cleansing puree of stinging nettles, and a bowl of kale and civet mushrooms cradling a single poached farm egg. And while it’s still too early to know whether the Farm and Fisherman can sustain this elegant balance between head-to-tail sumptuousness and hedgerow-to-hedgerow wholesomeness, there’s no doubt that this is a gutsy debut.
Originally published in Philadelphia magazine, June 2011
