We spent an afternoon wandering around Charleston in a sort of dazed
contentment: A strong spring gale raced through the tree-lined streets
like a child running ahead of its parent, and the lengthened hours of
light (now daylight savings time) gave us an opportunity to pause and
look at many of the town’s fine, quietly proud houses. Like all good New
Yorker, we speculated about how much property went for, and much Charleston
house could be bought with Manhattan co-op.
We left Charleston about 4 in the afternoon. We had plans for the evening — Dinner
and a sleepover at a top-rated hotel not too far off: Woodlands Resort and Inn,
in the town of Summerville.
Woodlands, built some two decades or so after the Gilded Age, is the former
winter home of a rich Pennsylvania railroad man, and it felt suitably deluxe and
relaxedly clubby. Our room was decorated with an eye to a certain type of detail:
comfortable, slightly more masculine than feminine, as if designed for a respected
middle-aged literary novelist with better than middling sales under his belt. And
the bed was enormous, rising up and up like the steps of an Aztec temple. Outside,
the property was leafy and for the most part deserted, which poetically speaking is
how a property should seem at sunset as the spring air chills. We walked to the
outdoor pool, and it all felt a bit like a small Southern Garden of the Finzi Continis.
But the chief draw to this place had been the hotel’s dining establishment, and we
arrived famished. There was a small bowl of M&Ms in the room, and Aldo wolfed them
down like Patty Duke swallowing pills in Valley of the Dolls. Meanwhile,
I reviewed the large wine list on-line to move the dinner along. The list was varied
with wines reasonably priced and not so. Within a half-hour, I settled on a couple of
interesting whites and reds.
The restaurant is presided over by a young chef named Tarver King, a name that
sounds like a character out of a Robert Penn Warren novel. He has a very impressive
resume that included a stint at the Inn at Little Washington. (We ate there many
years ago, by the way. It was scrumptious and only slightly more expensive than the
budget to build the Chicago World Exposition of 1893.) Chef Tarver’s food was of the
“dazzling” sort that’s probably necessary to get your name on the map outside a
big city. It was probably also unavoidable that the woman who waited on us, while
friendly and pleasurable, would smilingly, insistently ask us how we liked the food.
(The implied answer: Bowled over, toots!) We were given an amuse bouche on a
spoon that produced a flavor and texture approximating blueberry soda, which is not
really all that much of an amusement, but the food that came after was very, very
good—if a bit too thought out. An endive salad, for instance, was a painstaking
construction, its leaves carefully planked end to end almost like a galley ship. We
looked closely to see if tiny slaves were rowing it.
That, actually, was the only objection either of us had to the food: The composition
and colors weren’t very attractive, and the light of the day in pretty Charleston
had made us receptive to pretty food on a pretty plate. I don’t say it wasn’t
delicious – loved the foie gras — only that it didn’t seduce the eye.
With this we were drank a bottle of the 2004 Ostertag Pinot Blanc. Not among
my immediate choices, despite the prep work down in our room: the on-line wine
list was out of date. Why does destiny toy with us this way?
Ah, but now came Aldo’s entrée, scallops. One side of the plate was coated with
something that looked unappetizingly like the loden-green algae that typically
grows in the spring on a garden’s steps. Aldo almost ignored it, the stuff, until
he scraped a little onto a scallop and ate them together. The puree was deeply
satisfying: a robust flavor of herbs and garlic that was, in fact, a superb
complement to the scallops. It was like a pesto from the stratosphere.
And you know what it was made from? Aldo asked our server, and she of course
obligingly informed us: stinging nettles.
Isn’t there a Tanizaki story with that title? If there is, and anyone has read it, can
he please let us know if it’s wonderfully perverse and kinky?
The stinging nettle is a common plant with spiky little needles on the leaf,
used for centuries for medicinal purposes and soups and, I suspect, practical jokes
by peasants. This puree was one of its more sublimely civilized uses. The chef, when
he visited the dining room at the end of the evening, was disgustingly young – no,
that isn’t what I was going to say, not “disgustingly.” Audaciously young. Yes, let’s say
that. He also presented us with small glasses of a nonalcoholic stinging-nettle
beer he had been developing: It was a sweet, gingery tonic.
At any rate, it was nice to know that something as simple as a stinging
nettle could, with a little culinary ingenuity, be elevated into something that, for
the space of a meal and then in memory, created one additional moment of
happiness on a very good day.
