Feast
Monday, May 6, 2013 at 07:33PM 
You know what a prix fixe menu is, right? And you know what a “small plates” menu is, right? If the two get married and have children, what do you get?
Meet Feast, a prix fixe restaurant with menus structured like a sequences of small plates. We loved it. To us, it was the best of both worlds—though others might not be so fond of it. Such is the case when a restaurant tries to fiddle with tradition.
The main menu offers a choice of three “feasts.” As of last week, the options were the Farmer’s Market Feast ($38), the Scallop Feast ($49), or the Nose-to-Tail Lamb Feast ($48). According to a recent email from the restaurant, the scallop feast will shortly switch to soft-shell crabs, and lamb will morph to pork. And so on.
Each feast consist of an appetizer course with four plates, an entrée course with another four, and a dessert. All prices are per-person, and the entire table must order the same feast. There’s also a separate (and small) à la carte menu, which the restaurant is clearly trying to downplay. Most tables seemed to be ordering feasts, which is the whole point of the restaurant.
So you get nine plates, served as three courses, at a pretty damned good price. Unlike a tasting menu, it doesn’t go on for hours. Unlike a small-plates restaurant, there’s no guessing how much to order, nor upselling from servers trying to entice you into ordering more than you need.
The chef is Christopher Meenan, a former chef de cuisine at Veritas. The food is not as ambitious, but it’s pretty good, and you get dinner for just about the price of an entrée at Veritas. It just might be just about the best meal for two, under $100 (before tax, tip, and drinks), that we’ve had in quite a while.
