Audio By Carbonatix
The word that invades the mind after visiting The Silver Room is disparity–or maybe it’s dissonance. This dynamic starts with the room itself, which started out as the defunct 8.0 in the Quadrangle and ended up as 8.0 bereft of charm, or maybe interior decorating. The Silver Room simultaneously flirts with effective minimalism and stark edgeless monotony, leaning like an old car with busted leaf springs toward the latter. The walls are vast expanses of silver and gray-blue. Metal frame chairs, spray-painted silver, have dull blue seat cushions. Silver bars impregnate the black tile floor. The only bumps in this flatness are the tightly elegant Silver Room logo, the cheesy glitter sprinkled on the ventilation ducts and the corrugated steel ceiling, and the strings of tiny white lights snaked under the bar.
Service is another piece of disparity. It could be considered attentive and gracious, if a tiny bit intrusive, though on one visit it was mostly flawless. But on the subsequent visit, we were seated at an obviously soiled table with frightening brownish stains and flecks of black pepper speckling the white tablecloth like silver glitter on an air duct. Several minutes after placing an order for a calamari appetizer, our server came back and said the squid was all out, or it wasn’t ready, or the chef didn’t feel like cooking it, or something. It seems with such a small menu and an equally small lunch crowd (there were four people in the restaurant including us), that the chef could have briefed the service staff before lunch began. But maybe not.
The food wasn’t left out of The Silver Room karmic experience either, displaying its own stabs at dissonance. On the first visit, everything was within sniffing range of flawlessness. Tempura fried chicken skewers with “smoky dipping sauce” arrived as a trio of golden and skewered chicken strips laid across a carpet of arugula and radicchio speckled with diced green, yellow, and red bell pepper. The tempura coating was perfectly crisp without a hint of greasy sheen. Inside, the chicken was beautifully succulent, straddling that fine line between undercooked pinkish mush and parched fibrousness. Yet the runny dipping sauce didn’t do much for the chicken. A thicker, richer peanut sauce, or perhaps some exotic variation on barbecue sauce or even ponzu sauce would have perhaps been more interesting.
Fire-grilled Chilean swordfish was another lunge in the right place. The moist fish, crowned with a seasoned tomato slice graced with a trio of drooping and wilted basil leaves, was on a mattress of gooey shitake risotto with cheese tendons that stretched with each forkful. It was smooth and tasty, embracing lush earthy tones. This layering was surrounded by a pool of gutsy yet understated saffron tomato sauce that successfully wove through the flavors above it without marring their resonance.
Other selections didn’t come off quite as well. Tempura fried catfish fillet, a small curled strip of crisp tempura gold, was a bit bland and mushy, as if it were fried too quickly, leaving the core a bit undercooked. A generous pile of fries, seasoned with a dusting of paprika and too little salt, was dry, mealy, and stripped of potato taste. The menu stated this number came with Asian slaw, but it was nowhere to be found on this plate, save for a small heap of greens.
Bacon, shrimp, and smoked Gouda cheese-jalapeño poppers were good, with fresh crusted and fried green jalapeño torpedoes filled with sticky Gouda goo. The coating was thick and stiff and a little dry. And despite the name, there was not a bit of shrimp or shrimp flavor to be found here, although a slight smokiness was clearly evident.
Apricot Dijon chicken salad was even more disappointing. It comes on a plate carpeted with a trio of bib lettuce leaves upon which are piled pieces of dry, diced chicken flesh speckled with flecks of scallion and bell pepper. A creamy dressing, void of even a ghost of apricot or Dijon flavor, served as adhesive. Around this dish were a quartet of oval cucumber slices, a pair of avocado wedges, plus a tomato wedge. Yet except for an occasional tiny sting from a juicy scallion shard, the chicken was relatively tasteless.
Mango Grand Marnier crème brûlée approached harmony though. It had a warm crisp crust and a thick, rich, smooth custard.
The Silver Room is a lunch/brunch-only extravaganza launched by caterer Jim Lee of Gourmet Dallas. The kitchen, once handled by chef Bryan Chambers, is now under the purview of Venustianu Cardoso. But if the inconsistency of the menu and the sparse lunch population are any indication, The Silver Room might become a feather in the kaput side of his toque–instead of a silver medal.
