"A cat will look down to a man. A dog will look up to a man. But a pig will look you straight in the eye and see his equal."
-- Winston Churchill
Tuesday night, Harvest Restaurant hosted a 4-course NABC beer dinner, with the delectable theme being Chef Coby Ming's “snout-to-tail” pork dishes, sourced from Red Wattle hogs raised at Barr Farms.
See Colette Henderson's review at Louisville.com
I'll remember this farm-to-table-with-beer dinner because of its sheer excellence, both in concept and execution. There is something elemental about meat and beer, and in the current age, it is useful to recall the bulk of human history, wherein there was no squeamishness in the notion of eating the entirety of an animal and appreciating what it means to be carnivorous without the attendant hypocrisy.
Coby's beer pairings were spot on, too. When pork roast met Bonfire, palates in Munich undoubtedly started quivering.
Unfortunately for Harvest, there was an epidemic of last-minute cancelled reservations, the bane of restaurants on normal evenings and even worse when so much effort goes into a special event.
Ostensibly, these fair-weather cancellations arose from the imperative of viewing the U of L women play in the final game of the NCAA basketball tournament, although it is more likely the no-shows were suffering from the previous evening's celebrations after the men's team won its tournament, and probably didn't even know the women even had a team until it was mentioned on the men's telecast.
Either way, they missed it, didn't they? It's why we have words like "wanker."
They missed hog jowl scones, pretzel crostini, smoked rib jam, and an open-faced pastrami tongue & cheek Reuben as appetizers.
They missed posole, beer-brined head, trotters and hocks, hominy, toasted garlic-coriander broth, cabbage and grilled rapini, porchetta, baby salad greens, Blue Dog Bread crostini, pickled ramp relish and crispy ears.
They missed pork roast, boulangerie potato cake, crispy pork rillons, carbonnade jus, crispy sweet potatoes and a dessert of Old 15-B chocolate ganache truffle, torched malted marshmallow, sugar-spiced pork rinds and coffee gastrique.
The author shrugs. It only meant there was more for me. Harvest is a treasure, and you need to eat there.
