“Caramelized pork belly is really just caramelized bacon.
Who doesn’t love bacon?”
The young chef prepared to whip the ends of the plastic wrap around his rabbit roulade to create a tight cylinder before poaching the mixture in water. He rolled his wrists forward and, in that instant, realized that television studios don’t stock commercial plastic wrap. The centrifugal force of the spin propelled the rabbit straight up in the air, and like some misguided magic trick, he made a rabbit explode on live television.
“I was just glad I didn’t curse,” chef James Landis says, “but I finished the segment.”
That was probably the moment that the chef at Blue Grotto knew he wasn’t destined for a career in television.
Still, that doesn’t stop him from entertaining diners every night from the open kitchen of the Brookside restaurant where he has worked for the past 14 months. But it’s not patter or showmanship that Landis uses to lure in an audience; it’s a straightforward approach to cooking that has subtly expanded the menu beyond pizza at Blue Grotto. Well, that and his use of bacon.
“Caramelized pork belly is really just caramelized bacon. Who doesn’t love bacon?” Landis jokes about one of the restaurant’s popular starters.
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… Since I was last there, chef James Landis has replaced the tomato-prosciutto-and-spinach strata with a frittata baked with bacon and spinach. More changes are ahead, our waitress told us, but the best-selling items, such as biscuits and gravy (there’s nothing Italian about the Blue Grotto’s countrified version of the brunch staple) and the vanilla-scented French toast (griddled with a center of fluffy ricotta and doused with honey-pecan syrup), seem destined to survive the cut.
I loved the “Pizza Benedict,” a multicultural fusing of prosciutto, poached egg and soothing Hollandaise sauce perched on fresh-tasting flatbread. A Mediterranean-style omelet, folded around artichoke hearts, peperonata and a dusting of Asiago cheese, was a shade salty but satisfying. The roasted potatoes that came with the dish were worth protecting from the forks of curious tablemates. I should have known better than to reach for Martha’s. It doesn’t take a churchgoing bruncher to remember the eighth commandment: Thou shalt not steal roasted potatoes.
Blue Grotto on the Pitch.com
NOVEMBER 25TH……………………………………………4:OOPM-1:30 AM
DECEMBER 24TH…………………………………………….11:00AM-6:00PM
DECEMBER 25TH……………………………………………..CLOSED
DECEMBER 26th……………………………………………..OPEN AT 10AM
JANUARY 1ST…………………………………………………OPEN AT NOON
New Year’s Brunch 12-4
