Gerard Metz Gewurztraminer: Wine List as Reading Material at T.W. Food, Cambridge

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Gerard Metz Gewurztraminer: Wine List as Reading Material at T.W. Food, Cambridge

Posted 08/24/2008 at 09:28 PM by Cathy

(Originally published on June 21, 2008)

There's an awful lot of focus at T.W. Food restaurant.

Partly the focus is a question of square footage. Three cooks manage their choreography in a kitchen that looks to be smaller than my first studio apartment in Manhattan. (Trust me, getting three people to move about comfortably in that space was a feat of admirable coordination.) And diners, despite the loft-ish, lifting décor and well-spaced tables, are aware nonetheless that they're taking up a very limited number of seats. For cooks and for diners, the focus shifts to the privacy of their own undertakings.

Partly the focus is a question of concentration. What's clear is that the people responsible for the food and the wine at T.W. Food (and there are not many) are very much within themselves in a refreshingly un-far-reaching kind of way. Using locally-sourced ingredients has become, happily, standard operating procedure for most self-respecting chefs and restaurateurs. But there's a thoroughness to it at T.W. Food that is practically tangible. You get the sense that these people wake up in the morning thinking about the locality of their food and go to bed at night thinking about the same thing. That it carries over onto the menu is only natural.

It's the same with the wine list. By "the same" I don't mean that the wines are locally-sourced. They aren't. What's "the same" is a very concentrated, very thorough attention to each item on the list. This is not a large wine list by any measure (10 whites and 9 reds, with a number of other wines on a reserve list). But you know you're in thoughtful territory when the list is organized by producer, only eight of them in total, rather than by region or varietal or any other expected method of categorization.

About half of the wines are available by the glass but the one that sounded like the most appealing match to my food – the 2005 Kientzheim Gewurztraminer Grand Cru "Schlossberg" from Alsace – was not. This particular wine was so in line with my personal preferences for an Alsatian white (off-dry, floral, exotic fruits) that I asked if there was any way I could get a glass even though it's only offered on the menu by the bottle.

It's a cheeky thing to do, I admit, but our server and her supervisor handled it like the pros they are. No, they can't offer me a glass of the Gewurztraminer but what they'd like to do instead is offer me a glass of a different wine they'd opened earlier in the evening for their tasting menu. The 2006 Gewurztraminer from Gerard Metz, also from Alsace, is very similar in style to the Kientzheim, they told me, and would I like to try that instead?

I certainly would like to try, it certainly was a similar style, and I certainly enjoyed it very, very much.

There was nothing I didn't enjoy about the evening or the meal. When a wine list is so intriguing that you ask for a copy of it to take home as bedtime reading material, you know that the enjoyment, like the focus at T.W. Food, is thorough through and through.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

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