Review: The Tasting Menu Still Shines at Zero Restaurant
Serious fun
Posted September 12, 2021
09-12 2021
Two courses into the tasting menu at Zero Restaurant, I found myself thinking, “Is this format still relevant?”
The thought wasn’t triggered by anything wrong with the meal. Quite the opposite. I was utterly enjoying the experience, and I started tallying up how long it had been since I had last ordered a tasting menu. (Well over two years, I determined, long before the arrival of Covid-19.)
Fixed-priced menus with six or more courses, each paired with wine, were all the rage back in the 2010s, but few restaurants offer them as an option these days. Even fewer offer a tasting menu as the sole choice, as Zero does ($145 with wine pairings, $200 with “elevated” ones).
Some of our fellow diners seemed to struggle with the concept. While awaiting the melon course, I looked around the room and overhead a few of the questions being asked to servers. A younger couple didn’t quite grasp the mechanics of not having to choose anything, that all twelve items would be brought in a series of eight courses. A table of forty somethings had to ensure their flexitarian member could be accommodated and so could their paleo one. (Apparently they could.)
It’s hard to cede control, I suppose, but what wasn’t to like so far? Flutes of crisp Krug champagne open the evening, accompanied by two pristine Beausoleil oysters perched in their shells atop a most dramatic platform.
Chef Vinson Petrillo and his team fashion those platters from melted beeswax dyed with activated charcoal and poured over ice cubes to harden. When I called Petrillo a few days after my visit to ask him about the details, he said it creates “a bottom of the ocean look.”
To my eye it’s more like two rafts bobbing on a black, angry sea, but regardless of your metaphor, it’s a splendid opening bite. The oyster’s sweet brininess is offset by cool, citrusy notes of jellied sea buckthorn and tart little pops from beads of horseradish-laced gelatin.
“This is fun,” I thought, and that was before the “snacks” arrived.
Each of those four small dishes are a playful delight, offering a dose of much-needed whimsy in these serious times. “We try to make everything fun,” Petrillo says, “and bring back memories from when you were kids.”
They succeed. A surberly crisp wagon-wheel fashioned from buñuelo pastry looks every bit like a giant piece of Honeycomb cereal. A single walnut-sized tomato, peeled and placed atop a red plastic pedestal, invokes a piece from the boardgame Sorry!
The snacks may be “kid-inspired,” but there’s nothing childish about the flavors. The buñuelo honeycomb sits atop a layer of luscious foie gras, each spoke dotted with a soft, tangy orb of fermented black garlic. That bright red tomato is hollowed out and filled with—well, I’m not sure what, but it explodes with cool, sweet, and tart flavors. When you tug the bright green leafy stem from the soil of the “potted plant”, a pink radish awaits on the end of the stalk, daubed with soft butter and ready for a crisp, fragrant bite. (The “soil” in the little clay pot is actually quinoa and other grains.)
Cigars are traditionally saved for after dinner, but at Zero they come first, and it’s a clever bit of wizardry. Yes, they look every bit like the nubs of cigars resting in an ash tray, complete with a layer of powdery gray ash, but then you pick one up and bite into it. A crunch of crisp shell is followed by an explosion of soft umami from beef tartare and the smooth richness of the buttery ash.
Here are the technical details: a sheet of feuille de brick pastry is brushed with butter, rolled around a cylinder, and baked till crisp. It’s filled with a Japanese-style tartare laced with umami-rich XO sauce, and the ash is composed of brown butter blended with smoked mushrooms that have been transformed into a powder and colored with activated charcoal.
At the table, though, none of that matters. It’s a tartare cigar! Like the rest of the snacks, it’s just plain fun—and exceptionally delicious, too.
The snacks are the most whimsical, but that sense of play and novelty carries through to the larger courses. A jet black plate holds five cylinders of sweet, fresh local watermelon. Three of them are wrapped in soft green shiso leaf and two in thinly-sliced ibérico ham. They’re dressed in herbal, earthy green peanut milk and XO sauce and topped with rings of mildly tart pickled yellow peppers. The cascade of complementary flavors light up every part of the tongue with each bite.
Petrillo’s penchant for layering contrasting textures shows in a single “barely cooked” scallop, which is presented deftly in the well of a black domed plate. The buttery soft scallop rests atop a bed of tart diced kiwi and crisp puffed rice and capped with a thin disc of passion fruit and an arc of foam. A small mound of powdered nduja sausage is scattered to one side, and that pale orange powder melts with savory richness amid the soft, crisp, and chewy bits, rounding out an impressive plate.
Somewhere around the scallop course our server appeared with a large honey-colored candle, a strip of white paper secured around the middle with a cream-colored ribbon. “It will make sense later,” she said cryptically, then lit the candle, placed it at the side of the table, and walked away.
We forgot all about it once the fish course arrived: sublimely tender halibut with a beautiful smoky sear on one side, peeking out from beneath a crisp, golden tostada made from puffed corn. The heavier beef course that follows is not the most lovely of plates—a single greenish-black beet leaf draped over a rosy wedge of tenderloin, a few bright purple blobs of beets atop a pool of cream-colored cheese sauce on the side. But, boy, does it deliver a wallop of flavor, the candy sweetness of the beets and the rich beef offset by the sauce’s sharp, earthy horseradish and Taleggio cheese.
All of these elements—the global flavors, the sleek stoneware plates, the tall, slightly tapered glasses for the paired wines—are fresh and contemporary, but the meal takes place inside a three-story house built in 1804. The room has a soothing old Charleston feel, with high ceilings and tall windows, old wooden floors, and ornately framed mirrors hung above white mantels. The fireplaces below are filled with a dozen burning candles instead of logs.
That brings us back to the candle waiting at our table. The server blows out the flame and lifts the top half, revealing a cache of now-melted Snow Camp cheese inside (a creamy goat and cow’s milk blend from North Carolina’s Goat Lady Dairy). She then shaves what seems at first an excessive amount of summer truffle right into the soft, gooey cheese—excessive, that is, until you spoon the mixture onto a dark benne-laced cracker and revel in the pungent richness of it all.
Such delights, like the seasons, are fleeting, for Zero’s menu continually evolves. “I don’t change every part every week,” Petrillo says, but once a dish is swapped out, it’s usually gone for good. “We don’t believe in moving backwards.”
Some elements will resurface in future dishes, though. The crisp buñuelo pasty wagon wheels from the foie gras snack reappeared a few weeks later, this time dyed dark greenish-brown and topped with poached monkfish liver, dots of lime gel, and tiny edible flowers.
One constant is the last of the two dessert courses, which presents sweet, creamy tres leches inside a small coconut-like wooden bowl, with young coconut shaved into a white snowy powder on top and shards of sweet honey-laced wafers balanced on the rim. It’s a nice, light touch that brings the evening to a satisfying close without overwhelming your belly.
I suppose the evening wasn’t flawless. There were a couple of too-long pauses before the scallop and then before the beef course. Timing is tricky, though, when it comes to tasting menus. You want an ample pause between plates to reflect on what you just finished, to sip your wine, to let the conversation drift away from the food. And to eavesdrop on your fellow diners and reflect that, in these days of dietary anxiety and entrenched opinions, it’s nice to not have a single decision to make.
Is the tasting menu still relevant? Absolutely. Or at least it is to me. We are inundated with choices these days. We argue and shout about them, transforming what should be seemingly mundane decisions into defining markers of identity. What better escape than to let a talented chef and his team not just cook you a dish but craft your entire evening?
A full year away from fine dining tables only heightened my appreciation of pristine, finely composed plates. You can enjoy for only so long a steady parade of spicy fried chicken, beefy burgers, and platters of slow smoked brisket.
The tasting menu at Zero Restaurant is the perfect antidote. It plucks elements from around the globe—from Mexico, from Japan, from France—and spins them together in creative new ways. It deploys a few flashy touches from the old molecular gastronomy days—gels, foams, deconstructed powders—but they’re subtle and supporting elements. Ultimately, the plates seem fully grounded right here in Charleston, asserting the pristine flavors of exceptional local produce within an elegant setting you’re not going to find in Chicago or New York.
More than anything, the curated dining experience is fun, and that’s something we could all use a little more of these days. Amid the recent upheavals in the city’s restaurant scene, perhaps it’s Zero’s moment to step up and assume its place as one of Charleston’s top fine dining destinations.
About the Author
Robert F. Moss
Robert F. Moss is the Contributing Barbecue Editor for Southern Living magazine, Restaurant Critic for the Post & Courier, and the author of numerous books on Southern food and drink, including The Lost Southern Chefs, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, Southern Spirits: 400 Years of Drinking in the American South, and Barbecue Lovers: The Carolinas. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.