DINING REVIEW: Thoughtful delicacies at Conscious Table

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because our regular critic is known to Conscious Table chef Brent Beavers, we enlisted dining team member Tracy Mobley-Martinez to write the review.

Restaurants open. They close. The divide between them is often just buzz.

Conscious Table, which opened downtown three months ago, has got that in spades. And for good reason, it turns out.

Chef/owners Brent Beavers and Aaron Retka have created a special food experience: inventive farm-to-table menus that also wow the palate, casual table chats with the chefs and an affordable late-night haven for the hungry.

Still, some niceties in the front end of the house need a little work.

Ambience
Tucked in a little storefront on Kiowa Street between a Chinese place and a men’s clothing store, Conscious Table is modestly sized: Perhaps 10 tables radiate from a lovely flagstone fireplace. Beyond a large community table at the back is a pantry of sorts, where wine is stored and poured and some plates are assembled. A warm brick wall lines the east side of the restaurant and there, an outsized blackboard sports the specials of the day.

Good bones, but in the face of the TLC applied to the food, the dining room feels disconcertingly anonymous. The exposed brick is appealing, but ho-hum; 8-by-10 photographs of food dominate the other wall. The fireplace is decorated with ... well, nothing, unless you count the two elderly poinsettias and giant wine glass filled with corks.

That feeling is compounded by an odd lack of dining room essentials, such as creamers (on my several visits, I received cream in various containers, including a champagne flute and a metal gravy boat) and sugar bowls (a ramekin with pure cane sugar and a large spoon).
Granted, that’s small stuff, but it sends an unintentional message to guests: “Sure, you might have to pay $32 for a little culinary genius, but you’ll just have to overlook the infelicities of setting you’ll eat it in.”

That’s not their thinking, I’m sure, but I yearned for the total experience to reflect the excellence of the back of the house.

Highlights
The food, hands down.

Beavers was owner/chef of the legendary Sencha and even more recently, was chef at Giuseppe’s, where he endeavored to bring the cuisine into the 21st century.

He brings his beloved Sencha salad ($5 for small, $10 for huge) to this menu. That’s field greens dressed with crisp slivers of local apples, candied walnuts and tight knuckles of Gorgonzola, and a smoked tea vinaigrette. It sounds like yet another over-accessorized offering for the ladies who lunch, but there’s a mysterious perfection in the combination — inspired, I suspect, by a vinaigrette with Beaver’s well-known penchant for Asian flavors.

At lunch, which they began serving a few weeks ago, I fell in love with the wild buffalo Jucy Lucy ($12). It’s Retka’s riff on the burger with a molten cheese center that was created in Minneapolis. Happily, Retka serves it with a better class of cheese — aged white cheddar and cream cheese — and a solid artisan bun. A note to the buffalo-averse: Yes, it usually makes for lean burger, but here, the cheese and fine condiments help generate a really succulent bite. It’s served with an Austrian potato salad that was fine, but hardly up to the artistry of the burger.

For dinner, I tried the chef’s table ($65), which amounts to three wine pairings and five courses of the chef’s conjuring. I was thrilled that a few items — including a luscious squash, chili and mushroom Napoleon — were off-menu items made just for me. Both were sized for one person with more courses coming. The American catfish with hints of vanilla, bacon and caramel was well-cooked, moist and surprisingly well balanced.

My partner got a lamb skirt steak and cellophane noodles in a savory broth. Tasty. He also ordered what turned out to be a huge portion of short ribs (Callicrate beef, of course) braised with a tamari-red wine sauce. Both were excellent, although the latter was fatty, wonderful and still surprisingly nuanced. He barely let me have a bite.

I’d also throw some love at the late-night menu. You’ll find the Jucy Lucy, the Sencha salad as well as a Colorado Sloppy Dog and Toad-in-the-Hole French Toast with a Hatch chili-maple syrup. Everything is $8, including the deal of the century, the Fruit de Mer du Jour. That night it was tender shrimp, a split wild-caught scallop and clams in curried broth. My partner chomped down on a Tic Tac bit of clam shell. Due to preparation, they can’t be strained out.

Drawbacks
I’d love to see a few more choices on the menus. Lunch offers seven, plus a few specials, all of which are priced $5-$12. Dinner, which can run to about $32, is about the same number.
The wine list is thoughtfully chosen and many of the wines are available by the glass. More variety in the flavor profiles and mouth feel would be welcome, though; if you have a hankering for a creamy chardonnay, you’ll have to wait until you get home.

Beavers and Retka take the farm-to-table model seriously. Ask him and Beavers will wax on about plans to have an in-town farm plot as well as 100 or so chickens to supply the restaurant eggs (right, he’s not sure he’ll do it, either).

I love the attitude — until you get to the Splenda. I’d like to sweeten the deliciously dusky French press coffee. Forget a Diet Coke, although they do have soft drinks made with pure cane sugar. Although Beavers takes the topic up with passion (“We shouldn’t be eating that stuff anyway”), I found it a little annoying.

Service
The staff has friendly down; they recognized me as a returning customer after only one visit.
But it’s consistently disorganized when it comes to serving the needs of the tiny dining room. Simple requests are often fulfilled piecemeal. Coffee repeatedly fails to come with a spoon. A search for a ramekin of sugar can take 10 minutes. On one occasion, I could hear the servers joking with a table across the room better than my own conversation.

And in the effort to be welcoming, the servers sometimes cross that hard-to-define line between staff and diners. Calling a table of women “dearies” for example, or touching a customer during conversation might be fine in a diner, but here.

A restaurant aiming this high in the kitchen needs to reflect the same unique, competent voice in the dining room.

The good news: Conscious Table has the hardest stuff — the food — well in hand. The rest should be an easy fix for this glorious work in progress.