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If you concluded that the New York Times has a thing for the Lady of the House, a Corktown restaurant that opened last year, you wouldn't be off.
For the second time in less than a half year, the paper has written glowing things about the restaurant at Trumbull and Bagley.
The latest review comes from Pete Wells, who gushes about the carrot steak, writing:
Selling a vegetable as a steak is asking for trouble, unless your customers have never eaten a steak. Even the finest kohlrabi shouldn’t have to pretend it’s a rib-eye. But if any slab of plant matter can survive the comparison, it’s the carrot steak at Lady of the House in this city’s Corktown neighborhood.
Kate Williams, the chef and owner, learned the blueprint for this recipe a few years ago while cooking at Restaurant Relae in Copenhagen, known for teasing great performances out of vegetables. In her restaurant, which opened seven months ago, each steak is made from about a half-pound of carrots, uprooted last fall. After slicing on the mandoline, they are rolled up to look like a big orange cinnamon bun.
Cut into it (with a steak knife, naturally), take a bite, and it’s smooth but firm all the way though — no mush, no crunch. And while the flavor isn’t meaty, exactly, it is very full and also rich, for which some of the credit should go to the pool of hollandaise on the plate and some to the rivers of butter the carrots swam in as they cooked.
In January, Rebecca Flint Marx wrote about owner Kate Williams and the restaurant in the Times:
And, indeed, her focus is local: Much of Ms. Williams’ produce comes from urban farms, her house gin was created in collaboration with Detroit City Distillery and her tables and bar shelves were made by a local artist. A sense of resourcefulness pervades her cooking, which incorporates so-called ugly foods — ingredients that would have otherwise been discarded for purely aesthetic reasons — and whole-animal butchery. “Chef is passionate about no waste,” our server informed us. “You’ll notice at the end of the night that we only have one compost bucket.”
