There’s a dish on every menu that can explain an entire restaurant. At Red’s Table, the fried chicken plate illustrates how the new Reston restaurant fits into today’s dining scene.
Let’s diagram:
• Fried chicken, once a Southern staple of the church crowd, is now a mandatory menu item. Its presence is a nod to the South’s dominance in restaurant culture across the country and plays into comfort food turned into something more refined.
• Instead of pork-pocked collards, Red’s Table pairs the fried bird with kale, the green epitomizing the farm-to-table obsession (and so widely employed that it’s now mocked).
• An accent to the dish is a pile of housemade bread-and-butter pickles because granny’s method of preservation is as chic as needlepoint these days.
• One more element of edge: black garlic (scored its own trend page in last month’s Bon Appetit) and miso (read: hipster Asian) aioli.
The plate is more than its on-trend parts, of course. The chicken is terrific with crispy skin and juicy meat. The kale, braised for too many hours, is unfortunately almost mush. The pickles are on point with a great burst of brine, and the aioli is a nice touch, adding that promised umami flare. (Though instead of drizzled on top of the crispy skin, it’d be better on the side as to not turn the skin prematurely soggy.)
Red’s follows the template with the right food (beets, Sriracha wings, a raw bar) and the right look (open kitchen, bare wood, mason jars as a chandelier) and the right story.
The Tracy family turned the former divey Lakeside Inn into a really beautiful space. The Reston natives most recently lived in Florida, owning numerous Five Guys, but after almost a decade in fast food, they sought advice from their cousin John Jarecki, owner of The Light Horse in Old Town Alexandria. He tipped them off to the available space. “It was unbelievable timing,” Ryan Tracy says, “because we lived 20 years of our lives right down the street” and it was exactly where they once dreamed of opening their own restaurant. Their cousin also led them to Red’s chef, Adam Stein, who also runs the kitchen at The Light Horse.
For his new position, Stein moved from an up-and-coming neighborhood in D.C. to the Virginia suburbs. He has an eye for the ingredients of the moment and how to put together a menu. And a lot of what makes it to the plate is good, like that fried chicken and a clam chowder that masterfully mixes New England and Rhode Island styles with a soup both brothy and creamy and adorned with housemade oyster crackers.
The housemade charcuterie plate plays into our caveman desires: lush, fatty and smoky delicate strands of speck and a creamy, cognac-spiked chicken liver mousse under a pure white blanket of duck fat.
Sometimes, though, there’s a lack of finesse at Red’s, like the roughly shaped steak tartare, a patty that looks like it was manhandled by a drunk dad before a backyard grilling party. The additions of Grana Padano and Castelvetrano olives (a true olive-oil tasting olive that can turn olive haters into lovers) to the tartare are like adding Julia Roberts, Kathy Bates and Jamie Foxx to the cast of Valentine’s Day: sometimes too many stars clutter the production. In this case—and this is the first time I’ve ever thought this—there’s too much cheese; the extras overpower the meat.
But another hunk of beef, the burger, must have received more attention from the kitchen. Stein prides himself on his sourcing but knows former Lakeside Inn regulars will grumble about prices. “If people don’t care to understand why we charge $14 for a burger … ” he says, ticking off the premier components: housemade bread, housemade pickles and grass-fed cow, with all that funk and minerality. (There’s also a smaller, quarter-pound version, $7 at happy hour, which I fully endorse.)
Other dishes are mixed. Scallops are cooked perfectly but are paired with over-soft sweet potatoes and undercooked white potatoes. A play on steak frites, a bison hanger steak is seared just right, and that leaner, chewy meat makes you work for its charms, but the accompanying fries are either soggy or dry. (And where’s the sauce?)
Acorn squash over creamy butternut and beet farrotto (farro cooked like risotto) is a well-intentioned meatless dish that is certainly more than a compilation of sides, but when the squash arrives more raw than roasted, it defeats the creativity. Cranberries and pepitas, however, add a fun textural pop.
This is not to say Red’s Table isn’t of value to Reston. With the town center packed with chains, it offers an enviable level of ambition and personality. Red’s Table has the template down; it just needs a little more refinement behind the words on the page.
NOTES
Red’s Table
11150 South Lakes Drive, Reston
Open for lunch and dinner daily, brunch on the weekends
Entrees $14-$27