Review: Even chicken soars on eclectic, delectable Black Bear menu

Victor Matthews vowed he would never serve chicken at The Black Bear Restaurant.

Chicken is boring. “It’s been so Americanized and industrialized that it can be really bland,” he said recently on the phone.

Chicken is something most chefs throw on the menu not out of love, but as a lifeline for the timid or the cheap.

Matthews doesn’t play by most chefs’ rules. His restaurant in Green Mountain Falls is a riddle wrapped in a mystery stuffed with foie gras. It is known to be one of the most unusual gastronomical adventures in the Rockies. People drive from Denver to eat here. Matthews can whip you up a 10-course feast from scratch, made with the best local, organic ingredients. On the other hand, the person at the next table might be munching on burger. It’s is probably the only restaurant on earth that serves both foie grasstuffed quail and hot wings.

Matthews says he needs both. Wings and burgers attract steady local business, fancy stuff draws diners from Colorado Springs and beyond. Together, they keep the doors open.

Matthews is as wacky as he is shrewd. He once cooked a seven-course dinner using breakfast cereal in every dish. The monkfish came with a Lucky Charms beurre blanc.

But chicken? Come on, this is a guy who won’t serve crême brulée because it’s too trite. So it was surprising, about two months ago, when a roasted half chicken ($24) appeared on his menu.

I couldn’t believe it. The menu just said “Half an organic chicken.” No sauce. No culinary frills and bobbles. Had the region’s most eccentric chef finally gone totally batwing crazy? I had to order it to find out.

When I did, I had the best chicken of my life.

It came completely unadorned: a bonein half bird sprinkled with salt and pepper, with a crackling bronze skin and a light pan sauce drizzled on the plate. The meat, which steamed up when I broke through the crust, hit with an unexpected richness. It was just chicken, but it was just chicken in the same way a Mark Rothko painting is just a square.

And it turns out it isn’t just chicken. It’s Smart Chicken — a free-range organic bird from Nebraska that is cooled with cold air during processing (instead of the standard practice of letting thousands of carcasses soak in a tank of non-potable cold water.) The result, Matthews said, is a bird that needs no adornment, is clean enough to be served on the edge of rare, and isn’t saturated with excess water.

“It’s madness. I don’t even need a flour dusting to get that golden crust. When this stuff hits the pan,” he said, “it sears like a dry-aged beef and seals in the juices.”

Delicious madness of this kind is what you can expect at Black Bear. The little, rustic log cabin is odd in so many ways it’s hard to know where to start. If you’re looking for drippy candles, fine linen and a general feeling of smugness, this isn’t it. The cabin is divided into a very dark bar room with a pool table, and a somewhat spare dining room focused on a grand petrified wood fireplace.

The dining room’s backwoods shabbiness suggests a menu of possum pot pie and squirrel where you have to eat quick so cousin Jethro doesn’t get it all.

Servers push the chef’s tasting menu (four to six courses for $55; $85 with wine pairings). On a recent night it included an awesome Cajun-style crawfish soup, squash salad with a tarragon-and-citrus dressing, house-made orecchiette with fennel, and a petite fillet of Kobe beef over mashed potatoes with a sweetbread demiglace. The whole meal was phenomenal and rare: great ingredients presented in simple, well-planned splendor.

Diners who ask for the à la carte menu get rewards like the Smart Chicken over a fricassee of eggplant, fennel and wild mushroom, New Orleansstyle barbecued shrimp swimming in a light roux littered with cayenne and fresh rosemary ($21), or a delightful foie gras-stuffed, balsamic-glazed quail ($9), which arrives on the table with its little legs politely crossed, hiding a belly of foie gras so sweet, soft and creamy it almost feels like you’re eating Ben & Jerry’s.

The restaurant has about 85 wines, but no wine list. Tell the servers what you like, they make recommendations. A friend complained that it feels like a guessing game, but if you hate trying to concentrate on a wine list, it’s a nice break, and our server managed to pick a bright, minerally and inexpensive sauvignon blanc that was a perfect match for the chicken.

On Fridays and Saturdays, Matthews runs the kitchen. On Sundays, students from his Paragon Culinary School run the show. I had a seamless night with them. Apparently, Matthews is as good a teacher as he is a chef. Others have warned me it’s best to stick to the chef’s tasting menu on Sundays. But who knows?

On most days, Brooke Ash is doing double duty as maitre d’ and creator of luscious, outof-the-ordinary desserts. On a recent evening it was dainty ginger cake with a riesling reduction, white chocolate caramel, pecans in apple caramel, and an ingenious whipped cream spiked with freshly cracked cardamom seeds.

Her talent is complemented by a Black Bear-style lack of pretension. When we got into a conversation comparing favorite local ethnic markets, she ran to the back to get spoonfuls of her latest find: Mexican caramel made from goat’s milk, which, she said with a shrug “I found at Wal-Mart.”

It’s this searching for the right ingredients, the talent to spot them, and the brass to not care what the rest of the restaurant universe is doing that make Black Bear such a treasure. To succeed in such a weird, excellent place, you can serve chicken, but you can’t be one.

details

THE BLACK BEAR RESTAURANT

**** 1/2 Out of five (fantastic and quirky)

Address: 10375 Ute Pass Ave.

Phone: 684-9648

Web site: blackbearrestaurant.com

Entrees: $9-$40. $55 for tasting menu

Hours: 5 p.m.-close

Vegetarian: To order

Liquor service: Full bar

Plastic: Yes