Review: Finale in Clayton

Valentine’s Day, whether you embrace it with every fiber of your being or you espouse it as a Hallmark holiday, is about intimacy. It’s not a communal holiday like Thanksgiving or Festivus; heck no, this is one-on-one street-ball romance, baby. You have no help from family or friends; it’s just you, your significant other and, no doubt on Valentine’s Day, a tasting menu. You know, the ubiquitous “set” menu that every restaurant seems to offer on this day.

A chef’s tasting menu is normally THE most intimate of meals, the meal when chefs lay bare their souls. The chef, in effect, is saying to the diner, “These are my ingredients and this is my vision of how they should be prepared and presented: Judge me.”

While looking for a nice dinner-and-a-show evening for V-Day, I was somewhat shocked to stumble across an excellent tasting menu at Finale that exists year-round. The six-course chef’s menu on Friday and Saturday evenings, priced at around $48, is a pretty fair bargain. Executive chef Chris Holmdahl changes this menu often based on his whims and available ingredients, so the dishes I wallowed in might be different on your visit.

My tête-à-tête with Holmdahl began with an amuse-bouche, a roulade of subtle crab mousse and spinach with beet sauce. Next, Stilton played the starring role in a winter-harvest spinach salad. Where the cheese’s distinctive flavor could have easily run off the sweetness of the apples and candied walnuts or the latent tang and definite maple tones of the vinaigrette, it instead offered just a trace of sharpness as a counterpoint.

A Provençal-style sauce with tomato, garlic and pepper atop a mix of wild mushrooms, artichokes, spinach, fennel and prosciutto offered an earthy contrast to the dense, moist texture and mild sea flavor of pan-seared swordfish. The artichokes and spinach offered themselves as accents to the sauce and mushrooms and little bits of prosciutto added a textural component, but the fennel was just out-muscled. The dish appealed to me as an unexpected take on surf ’n’ turf.

When I initially read the tasting menu, I thought the bacon-wrapped quail stuffed with black currants, poached pears and duck confit served with wild-mushroom rice and natural jus would be a study in refinement, but the stuffing was always out-punched by the other flavors on the plate. However, a bite of the tiny, juicy fowl, about the size of a dinner roll, with the rice, salty bacon and savory jus proved quite pleasing.

My favorite dish turned out to be the simplest: braised veal atop roasted garlic-and-herb whipped potatoes, haricots verts (tiny French green beans) and a red wine-veal reduction. The only reason you would need a knife for this fork-tender dish would be to fend off fellow diners. The green beans could have been cooked a touch longer, but the potatoes were superb, especially when dipped in the savory reduction. The final course, Kaldi’s espresso crème brûlée, served in an espresso cup under a nice-sized dollop of hazelnut whipped cream with house-made apple jelly donuts on the side, was easily the most playful presentation of the menu, re-imagined coffee and donuts. The crème brûlée tasted like a creamy espresso with a touch of vanilla, while the teeny sugared donuts were light, fluffy and delicious.

Finale timed the meal on this visit pretty well, considering I had six courses and others at the table only ordered appetizers and entrées. When I had food and they didn’t, they were brought small nibbles. An optional wine pairing for $14 to $24 offers a 4-ounce serving with each of the four main courses. Although a nice touch and appropriately priced, the pairings seemed fairly mundane on the whole. There are some exquisite wines on the list that might pique a wine-lover’s interest more. Additionally, portions could have been a bit smaller so that I didn’t end the meal quite so stuffed.

If this feast is not up your alley, the regular menu is also chock-full of delectable fare. On the starters portion, a thick hockey puck of tuna tartare arrived sitting in a shallow sea of salty ponzu sauce with three large chips extending from the tuna hub to the edge of the bowl like spokes. Not the prettiest presentation I have ever seen, but very tasty. If you like smoked salmon, you’ll dig it on the bruschetta. Of the dish’s poached pear, goat cheese, balsamic-glazed shallots and port syrup, only the goat cheese and port syrup offered more than an accent against the salmon. A Southwestern Caesar with fried tortilla strips pleased with distinct flavors of traditional Caesar and mild pepper.

Entrées were solid and uniformly properly cooked. Roasted pork tenderloin wrapped in pancetta paired excellently with a roasted pear-vanilla bean risotto. Medium-sized, sweet, tender pan-seared diver scallops with warm linguini and vegetable salad were delicious with their sweet and softly spicy Thai sauce.

I am sure that the roasted chicken was just dandy, but I was exuberant over the black truffle sauce that accompanied it, at one point promising that if a fellow diner didn’t finish it, I would take it down like a tequila shooter.

I am glad I rediscovered Finale. Service danced with a friendly air, all the while delivering culinary hits. Sure, the adjoining club won’t be open on V-Day – it is only open Wednesday through Saturday, and V-Day is a Tuesday – but if you elect to eat at the end of the bar, you’ll have a great view of the kitchen, and that is a fabulous show in and of itself.