There is a garden off the side of Bistro on the Brandywine. It’s where head owner and chef, Dan Butler, grows fresh fennel and tomatoes for some of his dishes. But I only hear about the garden from Butler himself; seeing as it’s November, tomato season has long past and the freezing rain lapping the front porch is not conducive to horticulture.
This is the only restaurant I’ve been to (not counting suburban bed-and-breakfasts) that has a front porch. And this front porch rivals any I’ve seen in Chester County, Gettysburg or other couple-destination inns, complete with wicker tables and wood rocking chairs. Inside, the bistro is a vision of comfortable modernity. Butler hired Linda Quinlan to design the space, which was originally a general store, once the center of the then-small town of Brandywine. Quinlan gutted it completely, but kept those sweet details like the original porch and the main dining room's 17th-century stonewall. A white-paneled to-go bar looks too beautiful to be just that, complete with a limestone top and flat-screen computers. Galbraith and Paul pendant shades are cream colored and stamped with green leaves. There is a gorgeous original 1800’s stonewall, and its complementary walls are painted a light shade of sage (even the ceiling is painted--albeit a different hue of sage, to give the space depth). The whole restaurant exudes a warmth you’d expect from a bistro and the enviable look of the Pottery Barn homes you drool over in those catalogs they keep sending you, mocking your obvious lack of décor sensibility.
As I sit envying the perfect balance of the space—the décor, the stonewall, the sweet conversations of locals, Dave Brubeck playing from the speakers—I start realizing just how much attention has been paid to the menu and the beer and wine list. With Seth Harvey in the kitchen (Butler's sous chef at his previous endeavor, Deep Blue) and Paul Buchard alongside as his managing partner, Butler's carefully chosen trifecta of trusted peers is foolproof. There is no denying everything here has been carefully selected: instead of a wide area of menu items, there are a few well-executed pieces; instead of a copious list of beers, there are a few excellent microbrews that beer connoisseurs would approve of—the Benoni California Cabernet was also one of the wine choices, a structured wine from Napa that, with its hints of plum, would have been perfect with a butternut squash risotto.
All the appetizers are served with house-made crisps, so I settle on the roasted cherry tomato hummus, which had a sweet and fruity flavor, and the tempura-battered Brie that was served with a spicy berry confiture and minted herb chiffonade—it calls your name from the menu. Luckily, the Brie was served with apples and I was able, with the help of the Bistro’s golden crisps, to finish the whole wedge by myself. I have no regrets.
My waitress was sharply dressed in a green-and-white striped man-tailored shirt. Everything she recommended exceeded my expectations, including the braised beef short ribs, that fell apart at the touch of my fork. The braised beef sank into the bowl of soft potato gnocchi and raw-sienna-colored Gorgonzola cream sauce--a rich, warming dish that, despite my best efforts, I could not dent. (I’m not sure if the aforementioned wedge of brie had anything to do with it.) Dark-meat chicken was served on the bone with potatoes and red wine, a hearty dish for colder nights, but not altogether noteworthy. The steak frites, however, showed off the chef’s mastery of simple, classic dishes: the steak’s medium-rare pink core melted on the tongue, its outer edges perfectly seasoned with a shallot demi-glaze.
Some dessert menus list ice cream, sorbet or even cheese plates as options; I always thought those additions were vapid, a kind of joke. Who even orders ice cream when you could have lavender-infused crème brulee, massive pieces of chocolate cake or other pastry delicacies? But Butler was beaming about the homemade ice creams here, and Victoria Carpenter as the dessert chef did not disappoint with flavors like gingersnap, buttermilk, ginger-caramel, cinnamon and wild blueberry (when in season). So while the pumpkin bread pudding disappeared off the plate and the chocolate cake with marinated cherries elicited a silence only precipitated by a good meal, the ice cream took the cake (and the bread pudding). It was only a small porcelain bowl full of three scoops of house-made vanilla ice cream, the absolute ying to my usual affinity for fancy, complex, exotic and/or showy yangs of menu choices. Each scoop was like pure cream from a farmer's glass milk bottle. The ice cream by itself was an obvious product of a team who put together the whole restaurant—menu to bathroom fixtures—the same way: flawless and balanced.
Visit Bistro On The Brandywine
