Black Salt

You know you have made it big with your friends when they take "amateur food critic" to mean "knowledgeable, competent entertainer and dinner administrator." Despite my advancing age, I still feel like I should be seated at the kid's table (or a fine restaurant's equivalent). The fact that I can order unlimited alcohol and dessert (oftentimes the latter is more tempting) is still astonishing to me, particularly as it's not tied to any vegetable consumption.

I'm afraid I'll never be a truly good food writer if I have little interest in the specific differences between tuna and swordfish (how do you really explain that in an intellectual fashion to apprise someone of their abstract difference?).

I've mastered dining wonderment though, particularly at a place like Black Salt on Macarthur Boulevard. I was very good at admiring how clever the restaurant was in putting its actual fish market at the front of the restaurant and how the kitchen had sliding doors to simultaneously block noise from entering the dining room but allow plates of food to reach their destination more quickly. To prove, however, that I'm not universally effusive, the service was a bit scholastic (our waitress demanded uniform table attention and answers to her questions), the acoustics made us all feel like we were hard of hearing, and my peanut butter and chocolate cake could have used more parts peanut butter to chocolate (now I'm reaching).

Black Salt is part of a series of restaurants, the Black Restaurant Group, that are featured on the top 100. Thankfully their names all hover around the letter A or B, permitting me to exacerbate the top-heavy achievements of my list conquering. Like Black Market Bistro, Black Salt's menu is creative and novel with innovative combinations (maybe I do sound like a snappier amateur food critic when I decry ubiquitous yet unoriginal dishes like beet salads with goat cheese fondue that appear universally now).

Since I eschew pretentiousness, I of course had a glass of Cotes du Rhone (served from a beaker-like carafe). I like it when there are names for otherwise quotidien processes: my wine wasn't sitting there in a glass container, it was decanting.


As it decanted, the bread was served with Black oil (I can only assume the B was capitalized), a rich olive oil served with pieces of diced olives.


Eric, a quietly loyal reader of the blog, ordered the tuna tartare, a refreshing mix of minced tuna atop avacado and served along with toasted cashews, framed in chili aioli and topped with "citrus ponzu" (which I thought were just fresh orange slices). It was an exquisite, complicated, and appetite-building dish.


I, on the other hand, ordered the cornmeal fried oysters with tartar sauce. Who would have thought I'd prefer slimy, gritty, briny oysters sliding down my throat to fried oysters, a non-appetite building dish. There's something degradingly incongruous about frying a beautiful oyster, like black lipstick on a priest's wife.


Things looks up with my appetizer, the wood grilled baby octopus with fennel sausage, cherry tomatoes, arugula and balsamic vinegar. The arugula and vinegar added bite and the octopus and sausage rounded out the dish by making it rich. With bits of fennel, the great flavor equalizer, it became a perfect yet satisfying summer dish.

Since I write this, I can complain about whatever I want and in true unsatisfying waiter form, when asking for advice about what dish I should order, I received a litany of traits of each dish, but no actual rankings. Using my imagination, I had already come to the same conclusions and what I was seeking was her take on the most unique. Anyway, I ended up with the swordfish (with fat juicy slices of grilled eggplant, English peas, olives and pine-nut anchovy butter) more out of blind guessing than anything.

The only logical termination of a three-course dinner accompanied by two baby wine beakers was dessert. I'm powerless to resist any combination of peanut butter and chocolate, so had the chocolate peanut butter crunch cake served with caramelized bananas and peanut brittle. I've admittedly had better (higher ratio of peanut butter to chocolate) but this still looked good when we all wondered why there were scallops on this plate.

We also had the banana coconut cream pie, whose deliciously dense cream was stressing its pastry frame. The Blacks are worth their salt.