BEST OF RELISH 2015: What happens when a 4-year-old and a restaurant critic review the same meal?

Bennett
After the hour-plus drive from Bennett’s home to The Garden Bistro, he’s still getting settled into the scene. He eats two slices of bread spread with blackberry jam. He doesn’t say much, though he notes the jam tastes likes raspberries, which he likes.

“I think it’s Caribbean,” says Bennett, between bites.

“What’s Caribbean? asks Ann.

“It’s a cruise.”

Mostly, he’s excited about the upcoming octopus dish. “I want to eat it now!” he says, shifting back and forth in his booster seat like it’s a rocking horse. 

Stefanie
In this carb-hating world, bread baskets are always welcome on my table, though I wish the spreads better matched the particular bread choice.

Bennett wasn’t bothered by the lack of bread plates, but it concerned me, especially when the server didn’t clean the crumbs before the next course.

Bennett
“It has deer,” says Bennett, after a sip of soup and directly following a conversation about animals seen on the drive to the restaurant, including Bennett’s imaginary animal, the wightford whiteland. After Ann explains Yelp-style ratings of 1-5, which is how he judged each dish, Bennett gives this mug of soup “one thousand stars! I really liked it.”

Stefanie
This gift from the kitchen arrives lukewarm—a trend for the night—and while soup is appreciated on this cold night, the liquid was all squash with no pop of flavor.

Bennett
“Does this taste like green fudge?” asks Bennett.

He gives this dish, what he calls “the puree,” five stars. Individual ingredients within the soup receive lower marks: one star for the “croissant” (gourgere) and one star for the carrot ribbons. A few weeks later, Bennett is still thinking about the dish. He tells his mom, “Can you tell Miss Stefanie that the next time we go to that place with the white tablecloths that we need to order the broccoli warm?”

Back at the table, he calls out “broccoli crowns!” But instead of referring to the alternate name for broccoli florets, which is what I thought he meant, he points past the soup and to the paper and crayons the server gave him. “We’re eating crayons!”

Stefanie
“This is not soup,” I say to the group. “This is baby food. This is a puree.” Bennett agrees it’s a puree—“I still eat purees!” he says, not seeming to like the baby food analogy.

It’s missing more stock and a body of richness to calm the crowded cruciferous punch. Also, it’s not served hot.

Bennett
“How many times have you eaten octopus before?” I ask Bennett. “Forty-seven.”

The plate is decorated with much more than the octopus, and Bennett is not into the adornments.

“Sauce is one star. Sour cherries: one star. Sour. They lost. They’re bad guys!” Over all: “octopus … mmmm.” He gives the dish five stars.

He calls the minced pickled pears gross, and when Ann tells him that isn’t appropriate to say, he changes his verdict to: “bluuuugh.”

Microgreens sit in the white spaces between the octopus and pomegranate seeds, and Bennett picks up one leaf. “It’s like a net. I pretend they got the octopus,” he says as he casts a curly, lacy little green to capture an octopus sliver.

“Why is there seaweed?” asks Bennett. “Moray eels eat octopus. They’re electric.”

Stefanie
The dish is visibly beautiful, and the tentacles are sweet and tender. But there’s too much on the plate; an edited version would have let the octopus star.

While the sourness didn’t offend me like the young taste buds of Bennett, the pickled pears did overpower.

Bennett
“Tastes like squid,” says Bennett about the bass, though he gives the protein five stars.

“Baby squids don’t drink their mother’s milk. Because they’re fish. They have gills.” He adds: “The fish is salty but totally good.”

Bennett crosses his fingers at the mushrooms to signal how much he doesn’t want to give a star to the maitakes. “Mushrooms just look like they’re dirty. They’re covered in dirt. They don’t even wash them.”

He moves on to the grits: “Mom, did you know grits have bones? Are grits animals?”

Tasting the fish again, he says, “They took the bones out but put the salt in.”

After a few bites, he’s still confused about the grits’ texture, and asks: “Was it sand? Did it have popcorn?”

Stefanie
While Bennett is right about mushrooms being dirty in nature, they certainly weren’t on the plate. In fact, the mushrooms were my favorite part of the dish. Although they were cold—and much of the dish was served barely lukewarm—the seared maitakes brought much-needed texture to the cold and limp piece of kale draped next to it.

As a deconstructed reinterpretation of the classic, fantasies of a heaping bowl of creamy grits with plenty of plump fish atop evaporated upon the dish’s arrival.

What was there was good—two pieces of bass, fried and pan-seared, plus cheesy, coarse grits (see Bennett’s bone comment)—I just wish there were more.

Bennett
“I like chile!” screams Bennett as we read him the description of the dessert.

He quickly adds, “You’re not supposed to put spice in a cake! It’s gonna taste like a light bulb! It’s gonna taste like a bug!”

Upon tasting, he says: “Is it slimy? There’s spicy stuff on the bottom.” Bennett gives the cake four stars.

Stefanie
Its hard to find fault in the creamy center of a molten lava cake, which is why it’s been a menu staple (cliche?) for almost three decades. Chiles’ subtle heat sneaks in at the end of every bite (or what Bennett refers to as “the bottom”).

A scoop of sassafras ice cream is pure root beer, with a slight herbal finish, and brings cool refreshment to dessert. The tartness of gooseberries smothers the mellow chocolate while the candied kumquats would have been better paired elsewhere.

But the cake? You can’t be mad about warm, gooey chocolate.

Bennett
“A few of it was bad, a lot of it was good. Can we come back? You don’t know where I am? There’s a rocket ship coming!”

Stefanie
The kitchen clearly has talent and quality ingredients—it sources from its own organic farm and is starting an orchard later this year—it just needs to better edit dishes.

Every month the restaurant scraps the menu and starts over with a new slate of dishes and, sometimes, will change methods or ingredients mid-month. With that high turnover, it must be hard to figure out what works and how to keep it working.