Brix and Beasts

My esteemed colleague and I usually become somebody else's tourists the last weekend in May rather than staying here and dealing with our own. The siren song of steak frites at any one of several French bistros in Chicago sounds better to us than the whine of 200 laps at 200+ miles an hour and out-of-staters who didn't know you can't buy alcohol on Sundays in Indiana. This year, though, the race caught us without a getaway plan.

We did what we usually do. Sit around reminiscing about meals in other places, dishes most restaurants here would never serve. Until I suddenly remembered Brix in Zionsville. The menu is funky, the wine list interesting, and it's technically out of town. Off we went.

It's Zionsville, so do I need to bother mentioning that Brix is hiply adorable? We even had a Provencal moment when we witnessed the owner's fluffy dog being led back home because he was getting friendly with the sidewalk diners (someday I will tell the story of Jean Paul the bulldog begging at our table in Les Baux de Provence). We perused the menu holding a couple of glasses of something called Love Juice (a wine glass of Prosecco and pureed strawberry. Not exactly an ideal dinner aperitif, but it would have been fabulous before breakfast). We started with the flatbread pizza special – Traders Point Creamery's fromage blanc, smoked tomatoes, and a balsamic reduction on crisp flatbread. I also had the roasted corn chowder. Chowder was good, but seriously overpowered by the flavors of the scrumptious pizza. Even though they tried to jazz the soup up with what looked like chili oil, the overall taste was delicate to bordering on bland, more cream than corn. I think we had a salad, but honestly all was forgotten when the entrees arrived. I had the lamb shank with a mole sauce and poblano corn polenta. I love mole and I really loved this. I'm not a huge fan of polenta and I really loved this. Spicy but not to the extent that you couldn't taste the lamb, the corn, or the polenta. My esteemed colleague satisfied his lack of steak frites with a NY strip and fries. The "fries" were done in the style of most tapas restaurants – sliced thin on a mandoline to form flat strips versus fat rectangles, then served in a salty tangle next to the beef. It was so good that we kept feeding each other bites and exclaiming, "this is really good!" in a surprised way that I'm sure really annoys the chef. A chef that, we heard later that night, has only been the chef since the abrupt departure of the previous chef a few short weeks ago. So our hats were even further off. Sure there were some rough spots (a server who can't open wine, for a minor one), but we'll be more than happy to go back in a few weeks and see if they've been smoothed out. More than happy.