Fruit salad 🍽
Woodland Park's Boards & Barrels shows a creative, eclectic mix of whiskey-backed, sweet-tinged proteins that sometimes works wonderfully
Boards & Barrels is a new finer dining spot in Woodland Park, located in the former Swiss Chalet, which exudes a cozy wooden mountain cabin vibe throughout.
My longstanding presumption (or bias) regarding gourmet eateries in the cozy mountain town of Woodland Park is that they’ve never been truly so. Attempted, though rarely executed to a level of satisfaction.
Red Diamond Gastro Pub defies the norm, even if its owner James Deimling told me earlier this year that he thinks of it as “elevated stoner food.” And TAVA House, as I noted in my Sept. 20 newsletter, is aiming for the high end once it opens sometime next year.
Meanwhile, Boards & Barrels has characterized itself around whiskey and charcuterie as far as branding goes. But that’s only part of their story, more defined by an electric menu that ranges from dolled up comfort food favorites (like wings, duck mac & cheese and bison nachos) to homespun traditional items (like a smoked salmon Salade Niçoise, beef Oscar and a Twisted Cobb). Of the three offered charcuterie boards, the outfit seems to perpetually run out of the most interesting sounding, the Farmhouse, with a pork terrine, chicken roulade and chicken liver pate with smoked gouda, cheddar and goat cheese plus accouterments. A friend couldn’t get it when they went and neither could we, told it was sold out.
Regarding the whiskies, true aficionados might lament a lack of allocated bottles, with a middling and not terribly expansive list of brands available. That same friend who preceded me with a visit found the banana bread Old Fashioned undrinkably cloying, and our smoked cherry Old Fashioned with Old Forester Kentucky Straight Bourbon for $13 is also rather on the heavy-handedly sweet side with more than a hint of cherry cough syrup in the finish.
With that stage set, the rest of our meal presents hits and misses that show flashes of effective creativity and overly ambitious experimentation. The coffee-rubbed beef bacon lands in the former category, tender and smokey with thin bark edges and flavorful veins of rendered fat, served with a few pickled blueberries and micro greens for garnish and a warm, lightly vinegary blueberry barbecue sauce as a tangy dip. It satisfies and sets expectations the watermelon and beet salad can’t live up to. That’s because the salad fails to gel, with too many disparate flavors. History bears out the wisdom of a watermelon and feta salad as well as a beet and goat cheese salad, but never had we tried watermelon and pickled beets together, in this case paired with gorgonzola cheese, sunflower seeds and berry vinaigrette. Whether they are or not, the beets taste and feel of the canned variety and hold a hint of distracting clove in their finish. The sunflowers make us want pistachios instead, perhaps to add the salt of the missing feta, whereas the gorgonzola adds a funk versus a tang that’s just not as complementary to the beet earthiness. The creamy but thinly flavored berry vinaigrette adds another layer of sweet-laced confusion that ultimately leaves us feeling like a child came back from a buffet line having built a whatever-the-fuck salad kinda like how we as kids used to run through the fountain line putting just a bit of each soda in the cup to create a suicide.
Anyway, Boards & Barrels clearly loves to play with fruit and proteins in often unconventional ways that defy nutritionist’s sensible food pairings and classic cooking. We have to find out about their blueberry barbecue glazed meatloaf after hearing it’s a bestseller, and the spiced watermelon pork belly just sounds sexy, even if we’re totally being redundant from our appetizers selections with the melon too. (Side note: there are appreciably some vegetarian/vegan options such as a spicy cauliflower sandwich and a roasted mushroom and snap peas polenta dish.) Thanks to an incorporation of bacon, the meatloaf’s juicy and super rich, surprisingly good as it crumbles delicately under a light fork touch. The blueberry sauce’s acidity (with a whisper of Worcestershire sauce we think) cuts the fat well and pickling the garnishing blueberries leaves them a zingy sweetness. They make me think of bursting boba texturally. Underlying mashed potatoes are standard good but the side “charred carrots” have no remaining natural sweetness and taste over-smoked, with some edges burnt a little past desirable.
The spiced watermelon pork belly is less of the gooey variety of pork belly and more accurately a “house made pork belly steak” as described on the menu. Meaning it eats more like a juicy chop with a fat cap and requires a steak knife, which we have to request. The flavors, enhanced by a lightly sweet spiced watermelon glaze, are great even if some of the fatty bits require excessive chewing (leading me to coin the term “fat bubblegum” to honor one chew of the moment). Again I taste a little faint clove in the spicing and the meat’s topped in a few pretty, opaque, somewhat gelatinous cubes of pickled watermelon that make for a dramatic, colorful garnish with microgreens. They’re eye-catching and awesome. Smoked gouda polenta rounds out the dish with a creaminess and fire flavor that acts as a welcome reinforcement to the meaty pork.
We finish with what we’re told is a homemade rum-mango ice cream with toasted coconut lime zest, but don’t detect any booze signature and not much mango either. It actually tastes mostly like a store-bought commercial French vanilla flavor, like a Dreyer’s. It underwhelms and disappoints from what reads amazing.
On the whole, our experience shows some tightening could bring the low points more in line with the high points. We appreciate the more-affordable menu prices —the apps for $10 and $12; the meatloaf for $18, the pork belly at $22. And the staff deserves a call-out for their warmth and attentiveness; we’re surprised at how many bodies we see in the front-of-house, including a dedicated hostess and bartender for the relatively small dining room. (It does make me wonder if that high labor, at these reasonable prices, will bear out as longer-term sustainable.)
But the staff too aren’t perfect; we aren’t told the specials before we order and only mid-meal do we spy a daily special board that describes a cassoulet with bourbon smoked wagyu brisket and cowboy candy that we would have ordered (assuming it was still available). The decor of round whisky barrel lids with imprinted brands like Jameson and Guinness is fine but the random Star Wars Death Star one is, well, random. The music too, like Lizzo at one point, doesn’t quite match the finer dining aspirations for another odd or off note. All of which leads us back to remembering we’re in Woodland Park, which always manages to Woody P itself somehow in the end. Still, Boards & Barrels does a pretty good job overall and for the area manages to excel in enough ares to be worthwhile.
