Friday Food: McEwen's

Here we are, Rebels, with installment #2 of our Oxford food blogs, and this past weekend, we ate at McEwen's on the Square!

McEwen's is a relatively new addition to Oxford's restaurant line-up, having opened in 2011, but the owners have ample experience, considering their success with the original McEwen's in downtown Memphis.  We hope they can break the apparent curse that has plagued the location of its Oxford outpost; both Madre and Waltz (restaurants with strong promise) couldn't make things work there.

The restaurant itself retains virtually all the modern design elements (including pretty cool light fixtures) left by Waltz.  The only real change was to essentially convert the bar into all dining space; they did keep the actual bar itself, but they removed all the bar tables and almost all the stools!  And, just as a sidenote, I do think this hits at the dilemma of this particular location.  Whereas McEwen's' neighbors (Old Venice and City Grocery) get the benefit of two floors, where the bar can be completely sequestered from the restaurant, McEwen's has to fit it all into one.  That forces the owners into a delicate balancing act, because fine diners don't want a boisterous bar drowning out their conversations, and bar patrons don't want to feel cramped into a tight space, particularly when you're having to pay restaurant prices for alcohol.  This is very similar to the situation that 208 has to balance also.

McEwen's choice to go all-in on the restaurant side of that equation means that their success relies a lot on turning tables efficiently, since it won't get the profit lift you'd normally get from solid bar traffic.  Unfortunately, turning tables was a bit of challenge on the night of our visit.  We arrived for our reservation at 8, only to find that our table was not yet available.  Now, in all fairness, this kind of thing happens, particularly for the later reservations on a crowded night.  The restaurant has little control over how long it takes folks to eat; we understand that.  Of course, normally the restaurant would say "please have a seat in our bar while you wait," but since there was no place to do that, we walked over to The Blind Pig to kill time.  Fast forward 45 minutes, and our table is still not available, but we did have the option of squeezing into another table, so we took that opportunity.

McEwen's has a cocktail menu built with the aid of the highly touted mixologists at Alchemy in Memphis, and the drinks indeed were tasty.  The flavors on the menu are perhaps not as diverse as one would hope, but that's a minor quibble.  Here's a pic of one of their drinks, Daddy's Little Princess, with our blog's own version of Vanna White, the incomparable Beverly Hankins.

The wine menu is more mainstream than what we saw at Ravine last week, but there are some unique options to be found.  Our bottle of 2009 "Petite Petit" Petite Sirah was fun.  A fairly bold wine, with a good dose of acid to help it along with food.  The tannins perhaps linger a bit long, but still a good choice.

We did get ample time to enjoy our tasty beverages, because we learned first-hand why we were met with such delays early on: the kitchen was clearly backed up.  It took us over an hour to get our food.  The wait staff seemed a bit haphazard, but honestly, that's to be expected when the kitchen's taking forever to turn out the food.  After all, such a scenario makes all the tables antsy.

Once we did get the food, it was good, but most dishes missed out on being great.  For my appetizer I chose the saffron lobster risotto, which is a tricky dish to pull off.  The rice was cooked nicely, but the lobster had a tough time coming through the saffron and the parmesan.

Another appetizer, warm hazlenut crusted goat cheese salad, suffered because of its name.  When the salad came out, the goat cheese wasn't warm.  So, an otherwise enjoyable dish doesn't measure up just because of the expectation set by the menu.

When it comes to main courses, the McEwen's menu has a generous mix of meat, seafood, and vegetarian offerings, all with thoughtful sides to accompany each.  A number of the entrees are signature dishes also found on the menu at the original McEwen's.  Everyone at the table seemed pleased with their entrees. There's definite skill in the kitchen; where we found things lacking were in the details, in the things that require a bit of finesse.  For instance, my entree was the signature sweet potato crusted catfish.

The fish, the greens, and the mac-and-cheese were all delicious.  But as you can tell, my fish was doused in potent creole honey mustard.  That caused a problem on two levels: first, that great sweet potato crust turned to mush.  Second, until I removed the entire crust/sauce mixture, all I could taste was sauce.  Think of a superb steak...drenched in A1.  It was very close to being amazing, but a technical error caused it to miss the mark.

The pastry chef at McEwen's, Burton Webb, has a number of tasty sweet treats to close out the meal.  We noticed that the dessert menu seemed like a cousin of the one we saw at Ravine, and we later found out that Burton does double duty at both restaurants.  So, last week's brown-sugar bourbon creme brulee meets its match with this week's Wild Turkey creme brulee. :)

But don't worry.  There are plenty of other choices for anyone who feels like neither creme nor brulee. And we promise not to mention creme brulee in next week's blog. ;)

Overall, the experience was good.  In spite of the issues that we noticed, the restaurant is still worth going to.  On a less hectic night, reservations wouldn't be delayed, and the kitchen would be able to handle the traffic, hopefully to the point that the dishes could be finished with polish.  And all of these are common problems of a restaurant that begins to branch out to multiple locations.  The owners in Memphis clearly have a vision that works; they just haven't been able to translate the details of that vision to their Oxford location quite yet.  We remain optimistic.

This coming weekend, we'll be at Snackbar to celebrate the craziness that will be the Texas game.  And since John T. Edge announced on Twitter that Snackbar was an excellent place for visitors to eat at, I'm sure it'll be packed.  Thank goodness we have reservations!