Auburn is a new tasting menu restaurant, recently opened in the space on Melrose that used to be Hatfield’s and the legendary Citrus before that, giving it much to live up to. But with good buzz, I thought it would be a fitting place for an anniversary dinner. The space harkens Citrus in its balance of stylish refinement and California patio casual. Done in modernist Scandinavian tones (light wood and glass), the main dining room has an open skylight in the center with an acacia tree and live greenery, and other skylights keep the room bathed in beautiful natural light. The kitchen is wide open so you can see the woodfire stove in one corner and you can watch the bustling team of molecular gastronomists not only cooking the food but arranging it artistically so that every dish is perfectly Instagrammable. (George noticed that their aprons had little breast pockets for three different sizes of tweezers.) Rather than completely dictate your meal, as tasting menus usually do, Auburn lets you chart your own course by offering twelve dishes on any given day and letting you choose your own way through four, six, or nine courses from the twelve on offer. We opted for the six-course, which felt about right (and ended up being an enjoyable 3.5 hour dinner). Of course there are wine pairings, with a curated option or a more adventurous private sommelier consultation option. We just went for the curated option, which was a plenty interesting array of wines thoughtfully chosen to pair with each course.
We began the meal with two amuses bouches. One was a tiny corn tartelette in a little buckwheat crust (or a gluten-free lettuce wrap for George) topped with microgreens and tiny flowers. The other was essentially chicharrones (cracklings) made from pork rind sliced very thin so that they came out crispy but light and delicate. Bread arrived shortly after, a beautiful artisanal sourdough small round for me and gluten-free bread specially made by the pastry chef for George, along with a delicious avocado butter with a tart pool of minced shiso in oil. Our first wine came, a crisp minerally vinho verde which conjured a memory of a seaside cliff top in Portugal where we dined on freshly caught fish. Vinho verde is a lovely fish wine, but here it was complementing our first cold starter, a bowl of julienne curls of cucumber and nectarine with oxalis leaves, wetted with verbena kombucha, and with lightly set curds. The mild tartness of the curds set off the cool freshness of the cucumber. Our second wine was a white garnacha with a fruity floral nose from the bit of viognier blended in. Our second course was a cold stone bowl holding delicate hiramasa crudo with thin slices of purple radish, mulberries, and tiny sprigs of citrus fern, swimming in a pool of bright green cold celery broth. After the fish was gone, I spooned up every drop of that celery broth. On the third course we diverged. George took another cold dish, Brandywine tomatoes and Santa Barbara box crab meat with nasturtium leaves and a seaweed lemon granita, paired with a getariako txakolina, a lightly effervescent wine with green apple notes from the Basque coast near San Sebastian. Meanwhile I moved on to warm dishes. Black cod fresh from the Channel Islands was cooked in brown butter, giving it a light butter-browned crust, served in a sauce made from butter and stock of the fish bones smoked over embers, topped with watercress microgreens, matched with a chardonnay from Chablis with round acid and fruit. I was glad to have a hunk of bread to soak up every last bit of that sauce. For our fourth courses, George had the cod while I took a succulent koji-aged Liberty duck breast with large grilled cherries, their sweetness offset by mustard seeds and a bed of mustard greens, nicely complemented by a Langhe Nebbiolo with its own cherry notes. For our fifth, we diverged again. George took a dry-aged ribeye steak, plated in a rich dark pool with morel mushrooms, kombu, and Australian black truffle, with a glass of deep fruity reserva rioja. Me, I was intrigued by a savory cheese course: Époisses, a very soft and pungent cheese from Burgundy, was warmed a poured over roasted sunchokes, a brilliant pairing further enhanced with a microplane shower of black truffle. Sunchoke, like artichoke, can be a challenge for wine pairing, notwithstanding pungent cheese and truffles, but this was beautifully solved with an Arbois vin jaune, an unusual wine from the Jura mountains between Burgundy and the Swiss border, matured under a yeast film, giving it its distinctive amber color and a flavor like a dry fino sherry. We converged for our last course, a dessert with some unexpected savory elements that worked well: a dollop of fresh tart yogurt in a shallow pool of dark caramel, the syrup deglazed with mushroom stock and a splash of pernod, and garnished with tiny delicate candied fennel fronds. With this, we imbibed a ratafia champenois, a fortified wine made from Champagne must, with raisiny notes that complemented the mushroom caramel nicely. Finally, as I sipped an espresso, we were brought mignardises of little candied rhubarb batons with tiny yellow flower petals to close our grand celebratory meal.
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