By Ann Heller
Elizabeth Wiley, long-time partner at the Winds, says she didn’t want to leave that premier Yellow Springs restaurant. She just wanted to add on something different.
She took the plunge and now is on her own in the Meadowlark, a new restaurant in Dayton’s south suburbs. It is an unpretentious place, focused on what she calls comfort food.
What distinguishes the restaurant are the high-quality ingredients and decidedly moderate dinner prices. The excellent bread, the chicken and the Coleman beef all come from Dorothy Lane Market, the local mini-chain .Even condiments such as mayonnaise, pickles and catsup are house-made (the latter from a recipe with 19 ingredients). And the dinner entrees, except for beef, are priced from $10.95 to $16.95. All wine, from a small list, is $5 a glass.
It is an eclectic menu that wanders from an upscale appetizer of roasted beets with feta, pecans and thyme to grilled cheese sandwiches in three variations to the requisite steak and salmon.
Given the comfort-food theme, it makes sense that presentation here is homestyle, meaning that the kitchen is not infatuated with stacked towers from the stuff-on-top-of-stuff school of eye appeal. But there are occasional nods to the visuals, starting with the appetizer of two long, skinny spring rolls artfully crisscrossed on a serving plate from Yellow Springs potter Michael Jones. The spring rolls are filled with a mixture of ground beef with a note of orange that you can detect. The dipping sauce is slightly sweet and slightly spicy, so try it with a glass of the Hazard Hill Semillon/Sauvignon Blanc.
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to put chicken thighs on the menu, any menu, in a country where chicken breasts reign supreme. So hats off to Meadowlark. For my money, the thighs are the only part of a chicken with any inherent flavor.
These are antibiotic-and-hormone-free thighs, which is an added attraction. They are smeared with two mustards — one a little sweet — and roasted with crumbs for crispness. The night I tried them, they were served with a mixture of fall vegetables, including squash and rutabaga. The meal came complete with fragrant Jasmine rice — and a bone dish for the chicken bones!
The owner’s years in Yellow Springs are evident in the number of vegetarian offerings. Ricotta tacos managed to be bland despite the incorporation of green chiles and homemade tomato sauce. The best thing on that plate was the chunky pinto beans.
A better bet might be the Vietnamese Noodle Salad, rarely found outside of small ethnic restaurants. This one is expertly done; the nuoc cham dressing is right, and only the radishes sound an unusual note (radishes may be a signature in this restaurant, recurring in numerous dishes).
The noodle salad is available at both lunch and dinner, as is the bodacious, chunky Chopped Salad, which would easily get you the recommended Five-a-Day. A drizzle of homemade mayonnaise adds interest, and so does the grilled bread.
Also on the lunch menu is a grilled-cheese sandwich, in variations that might be fontina with golden bits of toasted garlic and fresh sage leaves, in crusty bread. On a rainy fall day that sandwich might be just right, though we were left wishing for the other half of the comfort-food image — a cup of homemade tomato soup.
The dessert list is limited, and that may be just as well. A warm apple crisp did have the desired crunchy topping, but the apples had cooked to mush. A nonfat dessert of angel food cake with nonfat frozen yogurt with caramelized pears might suit a diner looking for something sweet, but the intense spicing on the fruit overwhelmed the taste of pears. They could have passed for apples.
There’s a hint of promise in the Chocolate Cream Pie. The filling is intensely rich, a deep, dark chocolate, topped with a float of unsweetened whipped cream as a contrast. The crust, however, was anything but flaky — it was difficult to cut with a fork. Do as we did and scoop the wonderful filling out of the crust. Or hope that they switch and offer the dessert in a cup as pudding.
That would be perfect comfort food.
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