Frog n Snail | Restaurant review
Dale Levitski’s new bistro reopens the debate about his food.
The restaurant came out of nowhere, but it wasn’t a surprise. Nothing from Dale Levitski comes as a surprise anymore. When a chef jumps from making fruit sushi at Orange to succeeding Grant Achatz at Trio to almost winning Top Chef to running a popular (if kidphobic) brunch at Sprout, a Lakeview bistro-by-night, crêperie-by-day just kind of fits. At this point, what wouldn’t?
And yet no matter what Levitski comes up with, it’s going to be divisive. His is love-it-or-hate-it kind of food, which people find either blunt and falsely sophisticated, or flavor-forward and creative. I’ve been in the latter camp. When, on an early visit to Sprout, licorice root was shaved over my salad tableside, I didn’t think it was gimmicky. I thought it was…cool. And I thought the naysayers were just being overly hard on a guy who’d been on TV.
At Frog n Snail, though, I began to understand the haters. My defection started small. After a pretty good meal of anchovy crostini (with the inspired addition of slivered lemon), rich housemade ricotta and overly salted chicken, I experienced a lingering disappointment. I chalked this up to Levitski’s use of big, easy flavors. Salt. Oil. Bread. Cheese. Mix these in a bowl and you can please anybody, I reasoned. But the truth was I wasn’t pleased—I was just making excuses.
Later, there would be dishes I just couldn’t excuse, like the dry and dusty carrot-curry cake, or the ferociously underseasoned beef Stroganoff. A pile of brandade “stix” had almost no flavor and did nothing to repair the reputation of fish sticks. And what should be the restaurant’s signature dish—frog legs with a snail ragout—should instead be removed from the menu entirely. At least until the kitchen can learn to cook frog and snail right.
Here and there I found traces of the Levitski I could appreciate: a strawberry snuck into the bottom of a very pretty, very good garden salad; French gnocchi paired with luscious bites of lamb; some lovely pieces of fish. Though simple and big, the flavors of those bites reminded me how winning Levitski can be. But when a chocolate cake with potato chips and pretzel sticks thrown haphazardly on the plate arrives at the table, the Top Chef loses his lead.
Share with your network
Comment
It's okay to be a show-off.
With social reading, seamlessly share your favorite TOC articles, reviews and more with your Facebook friends, and check out what they're reading as well.
Share what you want, when you want: Once you've enabled social reading, easily enable/disable sharing anytime.
See what others are reading: With our new social activity feed, don't miss out on what your friends (and others) are reading.