Audio By Carbonatix
Duke’s Place, 7210 East First Avenue, Scottsdale, 970-4484. Hours: Lunch, Tuesday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Dinner, Tuesday through Sunday, 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Remember the movie The Crying Game? It was basically a formula flick: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. But the twist–girl is actually boy pretending to be girl–gave the story an attention-grabbing edge. On one level, perhaps, the movie took the audience out of its comfort zone. But at its heart, The Crying Game was really just a variation on the traditional love story, an effective crowd-pleaser.
Some restaurants, hoping to stand out in the Valley’s fiercely competitive eating-out market, use that same, old-wine-in-a-new-bottle technique. Places like Duke’s and the Impeccable Pig lure patrons by packaging familiar menus in an offbeat way. They give customers a sense of novelty, but never get too disorienting.
Can the technique work? Sure it can, as long as the meals are solidly backed up by informed cooking, top-quality ingredients and smooth service. But this is precisely where, in varying degrees, Duke’s and the Impeccable Pig fall short.
It’s not quite clear whether Duke’s, which has been open about six months, is merely offbeat or genuinely weird. Seven tiny, marble-topped tables and a small bar are crammed into a space not much larger than a department-store fitting room. I’ve never seen a place that has more beers and wines on its beverage list than it has square feet. And unless they ride horses at the racetrack for a living, guests will have to watch out for the undersize chairs–they won’t work if you are derriäre-challenged. (Test yourself at home. Can you sit comfortably on a pad the size of a pie tin?) Fortunately, human-size seating is available at the patio tables. According to the spacy tale on the back of the menu, Duke is actually a basset hound, a dog “far ahead of his pears.” (Bosc? Bartlett?) His portrait appears on the wall, showing him decked out in a Chicago-style gangster outfit. The menu flummery continues with an inadequate description of the fare, calling it “Native American with a Cajun flair.” No, that doesn’t mean blackened Navajo tacos or Indian fry bread po’ boys. It seems to mean that the chef here considers it his merry duty to shovel on every herb, spice and seasoning at his command on various forms of beef, chicken, pasta and fish. The chicken wings, for instance, are hailed on the menu as a “house specialty.” Why? Because the chef uses “37 different seasonings resulting in the best wings ever.” Yes, the wings are tasty, but, after all, they’re only wings. I can’t imagine a significant diminution in quality had, say, 34 or 35 ingredients been omitted. This is culinary overkill, not balanced cooking. According to this mentality, if 37 seasonings make great wings, 38 should make them even better. The indiscriminate fascination with flavors pops up everywhere. Sometimes, almost randomly, it works, as with the starter of bay scallops blended in a creamy maple Dijon sauce boosted with basil. Sometimes, it doesn’t, as with mushrooms presumably stuffed with clams, bacon and cheese, but totally overwhelmed by enough lemon to make your toes pucker. And sometimes, it doesn’t matter, as with the fresh, fiery jalapeo peppers, filled with seasoned cream cheese, then deep-fried. Forget about flavor. These peppers are hot enough to cause not merely pain, but true anguish. Main dishes get down the runway fast enough, but they never quite take off. Fettuccine Duke is the best of the lot. Although the platter was fashioned with regular fettuccine, not spinach fettuccine as the menu promised, a creamy mushroom sauce sprinkled with spinach and Parmesan cheese made the switch easy to overlook. So did the pasta’s unexpected Cajun seasoning bite, which kicked in about five seconds after each swallow. A generous portion and the friendly $8.95 tag also contributed to our satisfaction. Cajun chicken cordon bleu, however, is less than the sum of its parts. It’s chicken breast dusted with lots of red chile pepper, and topped with ham and cheese. Unfortunately, the chef also decided to add a big squeeze of lemon, a flavoring that simply doesn’t belong here. This dish needs to be rethought. The Chteaubriand doesn’t need to be rethought, just improved. Duke’s version is more like a kebab, peppery chunks of marinated fillet bathed in a distinctive, snappy raspberry sauce. The marriage of flavors here is right on target. But the dish was done in by tough and chewy meat. And after he finds a supplier with better quality beef, Duke might also consider adding a bit more of it. I doubt if there were even eight ounces on the plate, which seemed a bit chintzy considering the $15.95 price. The swordfish suffered from the same impediment that brought down the Chteaubriand. In this case, a mild jalapeo jelly coating, strips of red pepper and a small lake of lemon butter couldn’t compensate for a rubbery slab of fish.
The main dishes also suffer from loneliness. I can’t understand why no starch or veggies come with them. Duke’s more or less forces you to shell out an extra $1.75 for excellent mashed potatoes, or $1.50 for seasoned rice or steamed broccoli. There seems to be only one dessert, and, like everything else here, it’s just a bit daffy. It’s homemade cheesecake, covered with chocolate sauce juiced up with a heavy dose of Rumplemintz, a peppermint schnapps. A little of this odd sweet–it’s garnished with lettuce–goes a long way. Along with the food, the service also needs some fine-tuning. It’s sweetly ineffectual. Give our friendly waitress points for remembering us on a second visit. But at both dinners, we had to beg for bread, and both times our side dishes came out a good ten minutes after our entrees. Duke’s unpredictability has a certain charm, but Duke’s raggedness doesn’t. At this point, the act needs more work. The Impeccable Pig, 7042 East Indian School, Scottsdale, 941-1141. Hours: Lunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., seven days a week; Dinner, Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m.
The Impeccable Pig has had a long time to work on its act, about 16 years. It could use some freshening up. The dining area is set in the back of an antique store and clothing boutique, and it’s an appealing spot. There’s mixed and unmatched furniture, good-looking breakfronts adorned with all sorts of collectibles, decorative porcine figures that play to the restaurant’s swinish name and an open kitchen at the back. There’s no menu. Instead, the staff brings around a marker board detailing the fare, which changes daily. The whole funky scene seems to say, “Prepare yourself for some interesting food.” The problem is, most everything here is profoundly dull. Maybe this kind of fare seemed zesty during the last days of the Carter administration. Not anymore. And sometimes the fare is not only dull, it’s downright off-putting. Check out the Burgundy garlic mushroom appetizer. These days, even neighborhood supermarkets routinely carry what used to be considered exotic, gourmet fungi: shiitake, Portobello, porcini, chanterelle. What you get here, though, are unimaginative button mushrooms in a snoozy sauce, served, bizarrely, over rice. And if you want to mop up the sauce, you’re compelled to employ sponge-textured dinner rolls flavored with vanilla. Mushrooms, garlic and vanilla–it’s a wretched combination of scents. A ridiculously large slab of Brie, drenched with pine nuts and honey, is another starter that’s as dated as the Impeccable Pig’s antique furnishings. The kitchen apparently expects you to spread the cheese on garlic bread, because that’s what came with it. Garlic? Honey? Brie? Bleh. Meals come with soup and salad. Both provide the same high level of excitement a guy gets from kissing his sister. Trying to recall anything distinctive about the Southwestern tomato broth or the thin cream of mushroom is a useless waste of brainpower. Don’t expect any long-term memories from the greenery, either. Main dishes benefit from quality meat, fish and fowl, along with competent preparation. But if I’m spending 15 to 20 bucks for an entree, I expect it to do more than simply keep me awake. After all, this is about the same pricing territory as Eddie’s Grill, RoxSand and Rancho Pinot Grill, whose inventive fare always has me licking my chops in anticipation. But the Impeccable Pig’s entrees, solid as they are, won’t set any pulses racing. Rack of lamb came closest to bringing my heart rate up. It features six dainty chops, exquisitely tender and coated with an unobtrusive, mustard-tinged crust. At $19.95, it’s the most expensive platter, as well as the most satisfying. Like the lamb, crispy-skinned roast duck glazed with honey provides tasty, no-frills nourishment. So does the smallish Angus filet mignon, a juicy morsel of beef lined with a straightforward barnaise sauce. The kitchen tries to get a bit cutesy with the salmon, but can’t carry it off. That’s because the moist fish gets done in by an out-of-balance lemon basil Dijon sauce that goes overboard on the mustard. Don’t look for something different in the way of side dishes, either. On both visits, they were limited to rice pilaf, baked potato and butter-swathed mixed vegetables. Desserts, made out-of-house, are overpoweringly sweet, strictly one-dimensional. Neither the peanut butter torte nor the chocolate mousse crunch should detain your departure. Neither should the perfunctory service. It seems to me that spending $70 on dinner for two entitles you to a fresh set of silverware for each course. But over two evenings, I lost every round of the silverware game. After each course, I’d lay my used knife and fork across the plate; then, the busboys would remove the plate and lay the cutlery back down in front of me. Meal pacing could use tuning up, too. I suspect our grimly efficient servers used to work hotel banquets, since the interval between courses came to about ten seconds. It’s not unusual for a place that’s been around as long as the Impeccable Pig to operate sometimes as if it’s on autopilot. But if it wants to stay airborne in this market, it had better wake up and smell the competition.
