Dinner at 1509, with a critic across the table
Saturday night my wife and I had dinner at 1509, the rooftop restaurant at 1509 Newcastle Street in downtown Brunswick. There was no occasion. We just weren't cooking. The place bills itself as the only rooftop restaurant in the Golden Isles, with small plates, steaks, and seafood, a full bar, and a cigar lounge tucked off by itself up top. We split the smoked local fish dip to start. She had the summer shrimp sofrito and I had the shrimp and grits. We both drank water and skipped dessert, and the bill came to $77 before the tip. The short version is very good food, made with care, at a price that surprised me in the right direction.
The rest of you should know who I brought.
My wife is Polish, blonde, smart, and better dressed than me on any day of the week you care to name. We've been married thirty-two years, which means she has had a long time to study her subject, and the subject is me. Every restaurant review needs a critic. I brought one who walked in with her material already sitting next to her.
We went up to see the roof first, because the roof is the whole pitch. The wind had other plans. I've been married long enough to know that a stiff breeze and a woman who just did her hair settle the seating question between themselves, and nobody asks my opinion, so we came back down and took a table by the west windows. I told her she was the best view in the house. She said that was a nice line and asked how long I'd been practicing it in the car. Since the driveway, if you want the truth.
The dining room isn't large, and it doesn't try to be. It's cozy and simply decorated, done well, the kind of room that leaves the talking to the plates and the people. We sat down while the light was going from day to evening, and for a while it was dim enough that I read the menu mostly on faith. My eyes are old and take their time about these things. By the time the sun had finished, they'd caught up, and the low light was doing what low light is supposed to do in a restaurant, which is make everybody at the table look good. My wife needed no help there. I'll take all I can get.
Neither of us ordered wine. We wanted to taste the food without anything getting in the way, and I'll stand by that as a serious critical decision, though it wasn't an easy one. I grew up in Napa, from second grade until halfway through my junior year of high school, and spent a good part of my boyhood stealing some of the finest grapes in the world straight off the vine. I've enjoyed the local product ever since, including a stretch before anybody said I was old enough to. So my wife would like the record to show it was the first time in our marriage she has watched me sit within sight of a full bar and a hand-picked wine list and ask for water. She wasn't sure whether to be proud of me or check my temperature.
Splitting an appetizer with my wife is a negotiation with long-settled terms. She sets the pace, and I get whatever remains when she announces she's done, which is never quite as much as it sounded like when she said it. The smoked local fish dip tested the terms. Fish dip goes wrong easily, and I've had plenty that tasted like a mayonnaise picnic salad or a can of onion dip with a rumor of fish in it. This one tasted of the fish, without the fish shouting over everything else. Then there was the toast. I had never once considered that toast could be done wrong, let alone right, and 1509 set me straight. It was seared hot and fast, so only the surface crisped, never burnt, and the middle stayed soft as if it had just come off the loaf. You'd never stop to think about toast like that. That's the point of it.
Then the entrées came, and here is where a man has to be honest about himself. Two people handed a whole menu of steaks and seafood and small plates, and we both ordered shrimp. She says she ordered first and I copied her. I said great minds think alike. She said one of them does.
Both plates came out looking like somebody in the kitchen cared how they looked, and both ate the way they looked. Her summer shrimp sofrito is a pasta dish, and a simple one, which is harder to pull off than it sounds, because simple food has nowhere to hide. Every ingredient on that plate kept its own voice. You tasted each one in turn, instead of one sauce cooked down until everything agreed with everything else. My wife has eaten her way through Kraków, Warsaw, Paris, London, and New York, and she had no notes. Coming from her, that's a standing ovation.
My shrimp and grits passed the test most kitchens fail, which is the shrimp. They were firm, done right, and off the heat before they turned to rubber. The surprise was a chutney worked into the dish that ran a sweet note right through the savory one. I didn't see it coming and I liked it. Shrimp and grits is the dish every kitchen on this coast thinks it already has figured out, and 1509 found something new to say about it.
I'll admit what I noticed first, though, before I took a bite. I've been tying flies for thirty years, and on this coast a good shrimp pattern is worth its weight in redfish. I have spent whole evenings at the vise trying to make feathers and fur look like a shrimp, and I'm sorry to report the kitchen at 1509 did it better on the first try. A redfish would have eaten what was on my plate without a second look. My wife pointed out that redfish have passed on a good many of mine, so that's not the compliment I think it is.
The service was the kind you don't notice until you think about it later. Our server was efficient and kept out of the way, there when we needed something and gone when we didn't, which is exactly what you want when the conversation at the table is mostly your wife explaining your shortcomings to you. Over at the bar, the bartender was having a great time with her customers. There was laughing. My wife looked over there more than once, and I believe she was scouting for a better table.
Driving home, it struck me that most of what made the evening good was stuff I never noticed while it was happening. The toast that wasn't burnt. The shrimp that weren't rubber. The sauce that didn't turn to mud, and the server who was there before I had to look up. You only notice those things when somebody gets them wrong, which may be the real test of a kitchen. The mistakes announce themselves. The things done perfectly just disappear into a good night out.
We passed on dessert. At my age, which I'll describe as well past teenage, sugar after dark and a nightcap don't share the bed well, and I had a bottle of Oban waiting at home. You may judge which of us won that argument. I'm writing this over a glass of it.
Now about that bill. Everybody knows what food costs these days. I sat down braced for the check to be the punchline of this piece, and it wasn't. Seventy-seven dollars for two, a shared starter and two entrées at a rooftop place downtown, and we both walked out satisfied. Nobody is going to mistake 1509 for a Michelin-starred room, and it doesn't pretend to be one. It's a very good restaurant that charges like a good restaurant and not like a famous one. I expected to pay a good deal more, and in this economy that's worth saying out loud.
1509 sits on Newcastle Street in the middle of downtown, a few doors down from On The Fly Outfitters at 1501. I want it on the record that this is a coincidence and has nothing to do with why I suggested the place. A married man keeps a couple of safe houses in town, and I'd appreciate it if nobody pointed out to my wife how close together two of mine are. You can book through OpenTable, and if you're the cigar type there's a lounge on the roof with its own sofas and the full menu, assuming the wind lets you up there. Places like this are how a downtown stays alive, one ordinary Saturday at a time.
So go. Take somebody who will tell you the truth about yourself, sit by the west windows if the wind is up, and order whatever you want. Odds are it'll be the shrimp.
My wife says she'd go back. That's the real review. Mine just runs longer.