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Nicki Pendleton
The Eat Beat
Nashville Banner
1100 Broadway
Nashville, TN 37203
| "Apples in the Field: Hotel eatery reaps raves for some dishes, not all"
By Nicki Pendleton,
Banner Food Writer(pub. March 5, 1997, Nashville Banner)
I could smell the seared exterior of the veal chop before they even set it in front of me. The grill marks and golden crust outside held a beautiful, pink, moist interior with a spinach stuffing flavored with Pernod. It was an elegant thing, and every bit the esculent morsel it sounds.
When my eyes slid down a wine list full of interesting wines far beyond the usual suspects, with a much more modest markup than the norm, I thought, ``This place is the best-kept secret in Nashville.''
Apples in the Field, the restaurant in the Sheraton Music City, has had a pretty good reputation for years. When it hits a high note, you find yourself cheering it on. Unfortunately, the low moments are as dull as the high ones are brilliant.
It's not polite to gawk, but it's hard not to gawk at the lobby's interior. Plush carpet is under your feet, and as you stroll past the plinking fountain, the carpet turns to shiny marble. The walls are gleaming wood, punctuated with cushy couches and overstuffed chairs.
The menu offerings match the decor in elegance - a day's salad of pear and watercress with goat cheese, shrimp lasagna, seafood in puff pastry, Southwest salmon, veal chops. There are Southern touches, like the Coca-Cola marinated chicken breast.
When Apples gets it right, the food lives up to its stately surroundings. A boule (round) of crusty, chewy bread arrives warm, to tear off in rustic chunks. At dinner, besides a mound of butter, the bread comes with dishes of deep emerald spinach pesto and the best tapenade I've ever had.
A demiglace of beef pulled together our appetizer of plump, tender oysters, meaty portobello mushroom and braised onions appetizer ($7.95). A luncheon serving of fettuccine alfredo ($7.95) is touched with nutmeg. A dinner entree features a side of fresh, creamy mashed potatoes light enough on butter to let a bright, strong potato flavor through.
The grill's the thing at Apples. The surprise hit of our lunch visit was a Coca-Cola marinated chicken sandwich ($7.95) that was grilled dark outside, pink and moist inside, with the smoky flavor of near-charring that's a real accomplishment to get right. A deeply seared salmon fillet sits on a bed of red chili linguine with roma tomatoes and cilantro cream ($9.95).
Frying is also a specialty: An entree of Jack Daniels fried shrimp at lunch is gorgeous golden outside, still tender under the crust. An evening entree of fried shrimp and scallops with a horseradish-lime cream sauce finds perfectly fried seafood in a puff pastry shell. But for every high point it attains, another dish flops.
The shrimp lasagna ($10.95) would make a great Seinfeld episode: they only make 12 of them a day. Did we arrive early enough for one, we asked breathlessly. Yes, the server told us, three servings remained. Huzzah!
Turns out, the shrimp lasagna is a solid block of brie the size of a transistor radio studded with shrimp, and with a noodle over the top. ``The consistency of beige tar,'' said one guest. We sent back this poorly conceived dish and ordered a burger. Neither item appeared on our bill.
There's worse to the menu than bad ideas. There was no lime, and virtually no horseradish, in a horseradish-lime cream sauce. A mushy mound of limp, flavorless watercress and elderly brown pears in a salad special ($6.25) looked as if it had been made very early in the day (or even the previous evening), then primped with a little fresh watercress. Did anyone look at this before it was sent out?
At lunch, I was understandably the restaurant's sole visitor to the salad and sandwich buffet's woeful lineup whose only acceptable offering was mixed baby greens. The rest ranged from so-so (macaroni salad) to not appealing (stale bread, featureless cold cuts) to a carrot salad that I longed to spit into my napkin.
For desserts, we ate our way through a series of dry cakes and misnamed sweets. Forest berry tort implies chocolate, as in Black Forest, but there's none. Pear charlotte implies no chocolate, but there's some.
The homemade ice creams are the exception, with a good French vanilla and an excellent Irish cream concoction.
But a kiwi champagne sorbet tasted just exactly like a metal spoon, so exaggerated a flavor that, like the carrot salad, I wondered if anyone had bothered to taste this combination after dreaming it up. Our bill for dinner, including two cocktails, two starters, a bottle of wine, two entrees and two desserts, was $111 including tax.
location:
Apples in the Field
in the Sheraton Music City, 777 McGavock Pike, 885-2200.
Nicki Pendleton's "Eat Beat" is a regular feature of the Nashville Banner's Friday Backbeat section. All reviews are based on two or more visits. The Banner pays for all meals. We welcome your comments.
Copyright 1997, Nashville Banner |
