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By Nathaniel Glen
THE GAZETTE
It’s fitting that the Fine Arts Center’s new restaurant, Café 36, is named after the building it’s in, not the food it serves.
The museum, built in 1936(hence the cafe’s name) has always been one of the most brilliant in Colorado Springs. Even the most enticingly elegant dishes would be upstaged by this classic space, and the tired salads and trying-to-keep-up lunch and brunch entrees at Café 36 have more the feel of a gaudy teal pants suit.
The building, designed by Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem, blends the cutting-edge electric sleekness of Art Deco with old as earth Southwestern pueblo designs. The dining room, just off the museum’s theater, really is stunning. It will never go out of style. You feel rich just walking in. Geometric cloud chandeliers that look like riffs on Hopi rain symbols hang from the ceiling. Tall, gracefully-lined aluminum doors swing open to a long, breezy balcony that overlooks the junipers of Monument Valley Park and the purple silhouette of Pikes Peak.
All the best parts of Colorado Springs are right there: the timeless mountains, the foresight of park-building city founders, the populist cultural gifts left by wealthy benefactors. All it needs is a fitting culinary tribute.
And Café 36 ain’t it.
The menu is vapidly fashionable. It has all the things it’s supposed to have for the ladies who tend to lunch here: a Caesar salad, a wedge of iceberg lettuce with blue cheese, a chicken sandwich, a portobello mushroom sandwich, a chicken breast, a salmon fillet.
It even has annoyingly coy names for perfectly ordinary plates. The menu calls appetizers “preludes.” The daily pasta special is called the “pasta of the moment” as if ordering 30 seconds later might mean a totally different dish.
The stuffy lack of originality would be fine if the food could stand up to it — if, for example, the pasta was packed with fresh, seasonal, local goodies.
After all, many art museums have restaurants, and few of them earn rave reviews. No such luck. Even though prices are pretty steep, the food cuts corners. The rolls taste pre-made and frozen. The fruit salad is dominated by cheap, sallow honeydew.
Twice I dined with different women on the balcony. Both ordered the “pasta of the moment.”
The first received cheese ravioli ($12 need to check) in an ordinary marinara with a ridiculously long cheese cracker hanging off the plate like a diving board. I suspect it was there to distract diners from the fact that there were only four ravioli.
My companion took a bite.
“It’s OK,” she said. “But it’s pretty much the Olive Garden.”
The second, a few days later, had a fantastic-sounding champagne and herb beurre blanc over penne($13).
“It’s OK,” she said. “but it tastes like those instant pasta packages.”
“Or like the Olive Garden?” I said.
“Now that you mention it, yeah!” she said.
Every meal tends to leave the same impression. Is the seared tilapia sandwich ($9) with Edam cheese and a fines herbes citrus mayo that bad? No, but a friend described it as “Holiday Inn-esque.” Is the Chicken Forestiere ($12), a breast sautéed in mushrooms, shallots, garlic, herbs and white wine so terrible? No, but it felt like the main dish at a low-end retirement dinner for someone. We expected more since Chef Bruce Calder has been doing high-end catering and country club kitchens (most recently Cheyenne Mountain Conference Resort) for most of his career.
Is the desert, excuse me, the “encore,” of raspberry Grand Marnier white chocolate bread pudding ($6) so bad? Yes. It looks gorgeous piled in a tall martini glass, but the red drizzle tastes like fake fruit flavor and the whipped cream is canned — the ultimate sin.
The dish tells you everything you need to know about Café 36. It’s all description and presentation and no love for real ingredients.
The service is also clunky. Everytime I’ve gone, the servers have forgotten to bring part of the meal, and they have a distracting habit, when clearing tables, of chucking left-over water over the balcony.
Making a go of the dining room at the Fine Arts Museum isn’t easy. No one in recent memory has done it well enough to last, or even be widely mourned in passing.
But sooner or later, let’s hope the right chef will see the potential. The inspiration for truly great food is screaming from the lintels: Art Deco and Anasazi, sophisticated new metropolitan style, fused in seamless, timeless brilliance with traditional, from-the-earth southwestern cuisine.
When the comes, there will finally be a menu fitting of the museum.
Cafe 36
**
(superficial)
30 W. Dale St.
Phone: 477-4377
Hours: 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday
Entrees: $5 -- $12
Vegetarian: salads and sandwiches
Alcohol: full bar
