I ate my way through chef Randal Jacobs’s crispy-pork-and-peach flatbread, a thin, crackery thing with notes that were fatty (pork), sweet (peaches), peppery (arugula) and creamy (feta). I gorged myself on too many balls of his fried dough, dipped into a thick pesto that offset their yeasty, sourdough flavor. I cut into his smoked chicken again and again, because the sweet corn panna cotta it arrived with almost convinced me that summer actually existed this year.
None of those dishes held a candle to the spinach salad.
You don’t have to tell me how stupid that sounds. I never order spinach salad. I like sexy food, and spinach salads are about as sexy as a geriatric math teacher. Or Glenn Beck. But my eyes lingered on its listing on the menu, especially the words that described it: Molten egg. Crema. Chicharrones. Skewer. I didn’t (and still don’t) understand why the salad would arrive on a skewer, but I went with it. I slid the greens off their stick, broke the egg and started mixing. There were crunchy bits of pork rind in every other bite or so, and as a whole the thing was richer than a bowl of chowder. Or Glenn Beck. It was the best salad I’d had in a long time.
In other words, Jacobs—who used to be the executive chef at DeLaCosta—made me a believer. And that wasn’t the only time. At first I thought his deconstructed plum-and-goat-cheese tart was too sweet (the shards of pastry on the plate sparkled with sugar crystals). But with the tart plums, rich goat cheese and astute use of parsley and tarragon, the dish balanced out.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the watermelon carpaccio, which was dotted with pieces of merengue that overwhelmed the dish with sickliness. And Jacobs failed to make me a believer in Elate’s odd menu format, which is divided into seven categories, the most confusing of which is simply called “plates.” These are the entrées, it turns out—the rest of the menu is just for preludes. There’s a short-rib plate, which is tender and exhibits serviceable flavor, and a halibut plate, which is flaky but also merely fine. Both would have been better in smaller doses. Because there’s too much going on here, too much good food that shouldn’t be ignored. So by the time you get to the entrées you’ve had a flatbread, a plate of bold but tiny hibachi chicken wings, a slice of savory pâté, a rich salad. And after so many small plates with huge flavors, a big entrée with small flavor can’t compete.