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Dine

Taste teams with variety

 North side, south side, all around downtown. The artistry that has come to symbolize the city's own style is inspiring new dining adventures and late-night amiability that often reflect a neighborhood's personality.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published August 17, 2006

	[Times photos: Bob Croslin]
	Offerings at Derek’s Culinary Casual in the Rosemary District include fish tacos and foie gras ice cream.
	At the Red Peruvian Restaurant, in Southside Village, the accent is on authenticity. Try the ceviche.
	Saturday in Home & Garden Sarasota Architectural Salvage is part treasure trove, part junk shop. It’s this old house — and that old house, and many others — in parts and pieces. Doors, windows, flooring, tiles, lighting, there’s something here for everyone.
	New on Sarasota's menu Here are some of the newest restaurants in Sarasota, many of them open less than a year. Please call for days and hours of operation. An emerging enclave Greene Contemporary is just one sign that Sarasota is taking steps to revive its identity as an artists colony. Sarasota by night After exploring the attractions and dining, what's the rush to go home? Designate a driver or book a room and check out these popular hangouts. You'll find something fun here for liquor lovers, coffee drinkers, winers and, dare we say it, teetotalers.

SARASOTA

Over the bar in the Rustic Grill, as in many restaurants, there’s a big plasma screen. But the camera’s not on an NFL game, CNN or a soap.

It looks over the shoulder of chef Clinton Combs as he plants pea shoots in a mushroom risotto, places a New York strip over grilled spinach and hollers down the line for “more panis,’’ the little loaves of chickpea bread he bakes in-house.

This heady stuff for foodies you might expect in a top-end gourmet restaurant on St. Armands Circle or in a ritzy hotel kitchen. Instead, Rustic Grill sits three tough blocks on the opposite side of Fruitville Road from high-rise downtown and its latest boom.

This is the Rosemary District, a once-neglected neighborhood halfway into a stylish revival by hip developers, bohemians and entrepreneurs with a hunger for contemporary food as well as trendy furniture, day spas and centuries of architectural remnants.

On another block in Rosemary, Derek Barnes is serving wonders such as foie gras ice cream — you read that right: Think luxurious texture and very cold — at Derek’s Culinary Casual.

And they’re only part of a restaurant and grocery boom rejuvenating Sarasota’s downtown and other close-in neighborhoods.

Sarasota County has long had a reputation for gourmet dining as well as high art, architecture, music and theater. It has nine restaurants in the 2006 Zagat survey of top U.S. restaurants, despite being much smaller than Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, which combined had 11.

And that’s not counting the fresh new jolt of culinary energy. More than a half-dozen new restaurants and young chefs are filling big plates, little plates and bowls with cool fusion food, and often a hot club scene on the side.

Combs, who started at Saddlebrook Resort in Pasco County, says the chefs are close-knit and excited. “It’s very dense here . . . and we’re always finding new places to grow,’’ he says.

 The stalwarts are still cooking: Cafe L’Europe, Michael’s on East, Yoder’s Amish restaurant, the grand Ritz-Carlton. So are more recent favorites, such as the nuevo Peruvian Selva Grill and cutting-edge Zoria.

Yet there’s so much more.

Downtown

That food matters in Sarasota is most obvious in the core downtown, south of Fruitville Road. Downtowners started a farmers market 25 years ago that draws thousands every Saturday year-round (and Wednesdays in season).

Today, a half-dozen cranes hover over condos in the making, while at ground level the crews build independent restaurants.

A decade ago, downtown boosters installed a movie complex with faux deco lines and a parking garage.

The city courted and won Whole Foods, the big, upscale grocery store, to be the centerpiece of the other end of Main Street.

“The mix is critical,’’ says Sarasota City Manager Mike McNees . To support retailers and restaurants, downtowns need residents, and residents need groceries.

Since late 2004, foodies have been streaming into Whole Foods for top-dollar groceries, takeout and sidewalk snacking and schmoozing.

Within a block of Whole Foods, there’s Pino’s, a grand new Italianate home for swordfish carpaccio and veal chops on white tablecloths; the first Florida branch of the Grape wine-tasting bar; and, of course, another Starbucks.

Farther down Main, Esca Restaurant and Bar features Italian in a two-story showcase with a gleaming open kitchen and a rooftop bar. The menu runs from pizza and pasta to “turbans’’ of wrapped zucchini, all lubricated by a smart bar.

Farther out, where downtown drifts into U.S. 41, is one of the most intriguing experiments in food and community: Metro Coffee & Wine is the non-Starbucks of tea and more. It started a year ago as an independent coffee bar, with extra shots of hipness and comfort.

Coffee, macchiato or americano, straight from an artisanal roaster, shade-grown and bird-friendly, and pumped with a waterfall of Torino flavors.

Better, for the forlorn tea lover, there’s a choice of a dozen fine teas, with proper service, teapots of truly hot water and solid cups.

Add stouter beverages from a short but smart beer and wine list and solid food, too: paninis, burgers and salads, with greens, focaccia bread and, for fun, an update of the infamous Fluffernutter, with bananas on whole grain bread, pressed. Make that for two.

Whatever you eat or drink, Metro makes you glad you stopped; warm service welcomes everyone, cool decor refreshes them. Seating and art are retro and futuro, generous and sleek.

It is casual and low-key, yet carefully planned to showcase diversity in more than the drink. One night septuagenarian bluegrass musicians from Ohio stop in; another night it’s a club of gay high school students. In between are chess players, laptoppers and plain old book readers.

That’s what bar owner and psychotherapist Betsy Nelson wanted: what urban reformers call a “third place,’’ where a community can gather between tension of the workplace and the isolation of a home cocoon. Sarasota calls it Metro.

Rosemary District

In another century, when the big brick building was the Citrus Exchange, it was the bustling landmark of the district. Today, as the Rustic Grill, it is again, renewed with artistic and culinary energy.

Antiques impresarios Al and Monika   Tomlinson  have the subtlety of Ringling or Barnum. They brought an entire train station down from Pennsylvania for the Sierra Station restaurant next door and gave the Exchange supersized sculptures and ornate oils.

They shored up the balcony over the trading floor for private parties. The best seating is deeper in the old warehouse, where high Tuscan walls hold a 15-foot 18th century painting of a frolicking Flemish town. The focus is on a very modern open kitchen and wood-fired grill with a huge hand-built copper hood and horseshoe counter.

It’s a great spot to watch Combs plate a nonstop flow of  meat and fish from the grill with uptown trimmings of artichoke, olive ragout or port syrup. These juicy, crusty cuts with modern sides and sauces of beets, tobacco onions or mushroom hash they rightly call “big plates.” Little plates can be hearty, too: crab cake with fried green tomato, pea shoots and corn milk.

On a Tuesday night in the dead of summer, the place is packed:  Young cooks and staff from other restaurants fill the chef’s table for a birthday. The special is red snapper with a very crisp skin, surrounded by clams in a fresh corn cream and a hash of artichokes and fingerlings.

Good choice.

A block away, in a plainer storefront in the old Central Avenue business district, the decor is milder, with high ceilings, butcher paper, long curtains and an open kitchen where the cooking is wilder still.

Derek Barnes calls it “culinary casual”; you can get pulled pork, fish tacos and oyster stew, but he’ll throw in crunchy chorizo corn bread, peanut slaw and apple-celery puree.

Most dishes are all Derek: a sweetbread club sandwich, a surf-n-turf of pork, and monkfish with pears and watercress. Exciting and risky. A “palmier’’ pastry fashioned of roasted zucchini with fruit compote is heavy and can’t fly. A double hit of veal, sweetbreads and braised shank with gnocchi and grilled asparagus flies higher. Poached pear with goat cheese ice cream and a sauce of black caramel soars for the heavens.

Southside Village

This once-languishing neighborhood south of Sarasota Hospital and a mile from downtown landed on gourmet maps six years ago.

Entrepreneurs revamped the old Morton’s grocery with sun-dried tomatoes, triple-cream cheeses, prime steaks and take-home meatloaf. Next door they built Fred’s chophouse and the wine-savvy Tasting Room. Down the street were sushi and curry uptown taverns.

Now it sports extra helpings of Peruvian cooking, Sarasota’s unexpected signature accent.

At Red Peruvian Restaurant the cooking is traditional Peruvian, from potatoes in egg sauce to bowls of seafood chupe, served up in red and gold and white tablecloth formality.

Yet the ceviche has the authentic bite of that from a sidewalk stand in Lima: extremely fresh shrimp and fish set off with sweet potatoes and Peru’s fat corn nuts. Red makes robust anticuchos, skewered beef heart popular on Peruvian streets and uncommon elsewhere.

Next door at the Table, ceviche has gone way uptown to hang with sashimi and seared foie gras, tricked out with lemony granitas and cinnamon plantains and peppered with amarillo, pasilla, poblano and rocoto chilis.

In truth, the food on the Table is more than Peruvian. Chefs Rafael Manzano and Pedro Flores rework an entire continent of Latin flavors with figs, olives and albarino grapes. They brand it “Atlantic rim.’’ Clever, even if Peru is on the Pacific Coast.

Who cares when Manzano and Flores season chicken with lemon verbena and stuff it with duck confit? Or garnish steak salad with watermelon? They have more fun with vegetables — citrus cabbage slaw, black lentil stew and chayote puree, ugly tomatoes and queso blanco — than a country diner.

The constructions are modern, yet the depth of flavor is old-fashioned, like short ribs simmered forever in Cuban spices. Try it in spring rolls or a club sandwich, even better as an entree. That entitles you to best-ever gnocchi dumplings made of boniato instead of potatoes, and barbecue sauce of ginger and root beer. Oh, and warm zucchini salad for your vitamins. It’s home cooking with world-class imagination.

Decor is sharp, all white and gauzy with fresh art and glitter and a curtained booth bed a la South Beach.

Toast this kind of food with a punchy caipirinha  from Brazil but not an ordinary one. Have Table’s version, with cucumber: clean, crisp and delicious.

Refreshing and inspiring, it’s a taste of something very different, yet not too far away.

Chris Sherman dines anonymously and unannounced. The St. Petersburg Times pays for all expenses. A restaurant’s advertising has nothing to do with selection for a review or the assessment of its quality. Sherman can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 16, 2006, 21:02:03]