DINING REVIEW: Amuzé Bistro is why humans have taste buds

I will never eat at Amuzé Bistro again.

The service was too good.

The room was too charming.

The wine list was too creative and well-priced.

The hot, fresh cornbread madelines shaped like elegant shells, laced with rich, ground pine nuts and set on the table next to marble-size globes of soft, sage-flecked butter shortly after we sat down, were too humbly, deliciously brilliant.

So was the rest of our three-hour meal, from the tiny cups of vanilla-infused cream of tomato soup to the seared wild duck in huckleberry habanero pan sauce. I'd rank it in the top 10 dinners I've ever had.

Anywhere.

So I'll never eat there again - not because I'm not dying to or because I haven't been gushing randomly about Amuzé's sauces while driving with my wife or folding laundry.

I'll never eat there again because the tiny Palmer Lake bistro has only four tables, and once I'm done spilling my guts about how fantastic it is, I'll probably never be able to get one of them again.

The restaurant opened quietly this fall in an old stationmaster's cottage in Palmer Lake.

The somewhat ramshackle exterior explodes as you open the door into bright red walls splashed with contemporary watercolors, framing four impeccably set tables. (This is one of the few bistros in town with a decent wine glass.)

To the right, a swinging door leads to the kitchen, where you'll find the owner and chef, Bill Sherman.

For most of his life, Sherman was a closet chef. An engineer by training, he spent 18 years designing parts for fighter jets, but he found himself increasingly sneaking off to do food. His kitchen was cluttered with more than 300 cookbooks. He catered the company picnic every year. He quietly snuck in vacation time to go to cooking school.

"Finally, I realized I had to become a chef and quit," he told me recently.

To hone his skills, he then worked at The Broadmoor's Charles Court for a year, then opened a tiny catering business, Front Range Epicurean.

In 2007, he came out of nowhere to win the chef's competition at Colorado Springs' Glass Slipper Ball against some of the best chefs in town.

In the kitchen, Sherman hasn't been able to shed his engineer habits. The menu has been relentlessly tested and tinkered with. Each ingredient is there because it made it through rigorous trials.

The chef knows his duck breast (Wild Carolina duck from a farm in Indiana) is the best he can get; he has tried a dozen others.

Get Sherman talking and he'll start detailing the difference in lanolin content in New Zealand and Colorado lamb, and how it affects flavor. (Colorado lamb is milder.)

The precision and careful pairing of flavors is obvious in every dish. I don't have room to go on as long as I would like about the one-page, bistro-style menu. Suffice to say there isn't a thing I tried that wasn't excellent.

Blue crab toast points ($8), which won Sherman his chef's competition, are a good place to start. Rich, lump crabmeat is piled on a light, crispy, English muffinlike triangle, then drizzled with bright balsamic and a peppery sambal sauce.

It's hard to choose between the crab and perfectly seared diver scallops with a cauliflower purée and crispy, gorgeous homemade potato chips ($7). If someone else is paying, get both.

The bill at Amuzé can definitely add up. It may be the most expensive bistro in the region, and easily vies for top tab with places at The Broadmoor, but the prices are fair, and in some cases a steal. If you're shooting for high-end, Amuzé is one of the best values in the region.

The Colorado Lamb shank ($35), slow braised in red wine, looks like the kind of meal Fred Flintstone would order. The femur of the tender lamb juts a good 8 inches above the plate and must contain a full pound of meat, but the flavor is delicate and delicious, especially with its excellent escort of saffron-infused mint and pea risotto.

The dry-aged rib-eye ($45) with New Mexico chile-dusted sweet potato frites (a Western take of French steak frites) is cut from gorgeous, prime beef and comes with astounding, from-scratch horseradish and caramelized onion jam.

Nothing on Amuzé's plates feels phoned in. So often, even at high-end bistros, the sides are a lame afterthought - dull retirement home vegetable medleys and mashed potatoes with way too much cream and salt. But the aircraft engineer in the kitchen here has designed every piece to make the whole plate soar.

Side vegetables come perfectly blanched, cut long-ways, and neatly bundled and tied with a cute green onion sash.

The white truffle oil in the mashed potatoes served with the prime filet mignon ($48, ask and he'll tell you the Kansas ranch it came from) is designed to bring out the flavor of the delicate steak and its light, lively pan sauce made with local choke cherries.

The perfectly cooked, crispy duck ($32) is sweetened with real huckleberries that Sherman cached in his freezer this fall during the Montana huckleberry season. The moist breast rests on a cot of real wild rice - not the mostly white rice mix restaurants tend to call "wild," but rich, chewy wild grains from the marshes of Michigan, spiked with wild mushrooms. It may be the best thing on the menu.

The menu just changed for the season, so the entrees may be tweaked a bit, but I'm confident they'll be just as alluring.

Dessert also changes constantly. Pumpkin ice cream so fresh you could taste the sweet cream was a favorite at the table.

Sherman has built a "wine garden" patio behind the tiny house, where, this summer, he plans to offer a cheaper, tapas-style menu focused on local farmers market fare. We can't wait to try it.

Maybe with the expanded outside seating, I'll have a better chance of getting a table.

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Contact the writer: nathaniel.glen@gazette.com  

AMUZÉ BISTRO
***** (precision and beauty)

Address: 292 Colorado 105, Palmer Lake
Phone: 440-2410
Entrees: $18-$48
Hours: 5-9 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
Vegetarian: Yes
Alcohol: Nice beer and wine list
Plastic: Yes