Oak Park

 

Sometime in the spring of 2023, I heard about a new farm to table restaurant opening up in the fall of 2023 in our state capital. According to the writing about it, they were going to grow their own vegetables to cook with behind the restaurant. It really didn't get much more farm to table than that and I knew that it would be my wife's jam so I cut out the above emblem from a webpage and gave that to her as a birthday gift in September when the restaurant still wasn't yet open. In late October of 2023 it opened up for online reservations and I immediately logged on only to see it was booked for every single night from their open date through the end of February. Not wanting to count on traveling in the dead of winter, we just put off making a reservation for the time being.

Sometime after Christmas, I got to thinking about the fast approaching 2024 and how in May it would be a milestone anniversary for us. I logged onto the website to see if I could book a reservation for the date of our anniversary. It was fully booked through mid June. So I picked a date that was exactly on month past our milestone anniversary and made a reservation.

Six months later, it was the date of our reservation.

Even when I had booked this reservation back in December of the year before, the only time slots available were the really early or the really late ones. All the prime eating time ones were still booked a lot further out. So when we arrived, as you can see from the above photo I took, we largely had the place to ourselves. By the time we paid our bill two hours later, all the tables were full. Another oddity was that there wasn't a single sign advertising it out by the road. The above plaque can only be seen as you are walking from the parking lot to the side doors and it actually is facing away from the road. I guess it is one of those place that "if you know, you know."

I won't bore you with photos of all our dishes that we had. We both ordered separate appetizers to share, we ordered one salad to split and then we both ordered entrees and desserts. By far, and yet all dishes were extremely tasty, the best one of all is the one above which was one of our appetizers that we shared. It is the "crudo" dish which is an Italian term for a dish consisting of raw fish and ingredients. The raw fish was Japanese Tusk fish and was spectacular. It even came with tree little scoops of caviar, two of which are missing from the photo because we had already taken a couple of bites before thinking about documenting it. So I turned the plate and cropped the picture but the ring of fish and caviar originally went all around the plate in a circle.

Although many of the ingredients were "locally" sources from areas around our state according to our server, I was starting to come to the conclusion that the growing the food in a garden out back was a myth. At some point, we just flat out asked about the garden and were told there was one out back and we could walk through it after our meal if we liked. And so we did. From what I could tell, it was mostly an herb garden and sparse at that for the volume of traffic they get every night they are open. Having just consumed Tusk fish from Japan, some Wagyu meatballs that were part of my appetizer and some scallops that certainly didn't come from Iowa, I guess I have to conclude it isn't exclusively a farm to table restaurant but there were aspects that were, kind of like most of our meals that we prepare at home daily. 

Despite this, we had an excellent meal and it was well worth the wait. However, we probably won't be returning anytime soon, perhaps for some future special occasion as it was quite pricey. We walked back to our family hauler, the oldest and least shiny car in the entire lot now packed with shiny expensive cars, and made our way back home. The following day our meal consisted of some peas from our garden. Much more locally sources and a lot less expensive.