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Dining & Spirits
New College Try: Dining in Gainesville, Tallahassee
A look at some tasty restaurants near UF and FSU.
A few blocks away, the Paramount Grill has the smart bright whites of a big-city boite. It too features the decal of North Florida Local Produce, an experimental green alliance of farmers, chefs and state ag folks a few years ago.
Salmon and Granny Smiths aren’t local, but the organic herbs, grouper, mahi and Cedar Key clams and Vidalia onions are close to home. "We’ve got a nice variety of heirloom tomatoes, fennel and beets," says chef-owner Clif Nelson, and oh yes, blueberries and Japanese eggplant, and in the fall pumpkins and Florida’s own Seminole squash. Still he admits, "I don’t feel it’s at the point where you can get exclusively local."
 Lobster shitake mushroom pancakes at Urbane in Tallahasse |
Local ingredients luck out if they enter Nelson’s kitchen, where they meet cumin potatoes, cheddar polenta, curried cilantro aioli or apple cider spiked with lemon and thyme.
In Tallahassee, new tastes are newer for big-spending lobbyists and pols, as well as the mandarins of FSU, FAMU and state government.
The flashiest is Urbane, where Bruce and Pam Pollett installed thoroughly modern cooking — and drinking — in a sleek downtown restaurant with crisp lines and hip colors. Cocktail nibbles of duck spring rolls and tuna tartare and big plates of sea bass, elk chops and lamb T-bones all get smart sides. Updated from the farmhouse, there’s wilted chard, blue cheese fritters, cherry cornbread, watermelon vinaigrette and bushels of roasted corn. From the outlands come plantain hash, mango slaw and chile ponzu sauce.
Farther out, Sage strikes a retro pose in black and white lino tiles, between country and "Happy Days” before TV dinners. The menu’s homey and far-flung, from saffron mussels or escargot and fennel to fried catfish (with baby green beans and Anson Mills grits) and curried chicken salad (free-range, natch).
Vegetarian fricassee is earthy and exotic, turnips, ramps, ferns and wild mushrooms and hearty red meats are enhanced with the likes of bacon-sweet potato mash, fava beans and artichokes as well as Worcestershire made in house.
That’s modern taste moved up from South Beach to campus towns closer to the beans and greens bounty of north Florida. Savvy diners and chefs want recipes with a bit of country and a lot of the outside world. And cooked from scratch.
