Every season, Herb and Omni’s Executive Chef Earl Reynolds sits down with his previous menu, a few inspiring cookbooks, a large notepad, colored pencils and even crayons, and develops a new set of culinary selections for guests.
He lists the ingredients he wants to highlight, and those that will be assuming supporting roles, drawing as much inspiration as possible from the local area. He winnows those down to keep it from being too busy, then draws out techniques, leaning on skills to make the food dynamic rather than an overwhelming array of ingredients.
“Then, when you’re eating the dish, it doesn’t really seem noisy. It’s still focused,” Reynolds said of his method for muting the mayhem of a menu reboot.
At this point in the process, he makes a mess. Offloading all his ideas onto the page, Reynolds draws the dishes as he would plate them and eventually mocks up an entirely new menu.
“I don’t really like to keep dishes on the menu season after season, or year to year, but if there’s something that’s special, I really like to tell a story,” he said.
Enter the Foie Gras Pie, a personal take on the French delicacy made from fattened duck liver, which has evolved through several iterations across his menus. In the past, Reynolds drew inspiration from mimosas, smoked black tea, and Flathead cherries to highlight the foie gras. They were all successful, but sitting down last spring, he decided he wanted something more personal this time.
“My family would camp on the Hungry Horse Reservoir, all summer long, and most of late summer there’s huckleberry bushes wherever you camp,” Reynolds said. “My brothers and my sister and I would just hang out in the huckleberry bushes. You get bored, you walk into the woods and eat huckleberries by the handful. So, after camping for two or three days, our fingers and our mouths were just stained purple. We’d drive back to town and without fail, my siblings and I would start chanting, ‘root beer floats!’ to try and get my parents to pull into the A&W on the way back.”
“We would chant it and, you know, sometimes our persistence would pay off,” he continued. “That was back when they had the old school drive-up and someone would come out to your car with a tray. I just remember looking down at my hand. It was half purple with huckleberry juice and I’m holding a frosty root beer float.”
Once he had the visual, something in his brain clicked. “I was like, all right: huckleberry, root beer, vanilla.”
So, with this simple origin, the James Beard-nominated chef played around and manifested something opulent and refined. Plated and presented, the Foie Gras Pie features a root beer gelee with sassafras, sarsaparilla, fresh ginger and clove sitting atop a molded slice of foie gras bedded on a broad green leaf. A free-form quenelle of huckleberry jam topped with a single citrus lace leaf sits next to a fine vanilla parsnip puree flavored with lemon and local honey, topped by a browned parsnip curl, and another citrus lace leaf. Lastly, there’s a slice of freshly baked brioche, adding textural contrast and a vehicle for the components.
Herb and Omni is a nice restaurant. It’s sparkling and classy, and everyone working there is crisp, friendly and good at their job. But to attempt to describe the Foie Gras Pie in a serious way just seems kind of absurd. It’s obviously fine dining and certainly worthy of it, but any elevated talk of notes or accents or lingering profiles, while completely valid, would sort of miss the point. This is akin to having your own root beer float at an A&W Drive-In. It’s supposed to be fun.
So here goes my honest attempt: The Foie Gras Pie is simply awesome. The foie gras itself is buttery and rich, and absolutely melts on your tongue like ice cream. The gelee tastes like the first time someone gave you a root beer that needed a bottle opener. The huckleberry jam is both delicately tart yet sweet — if there was a jar full of it, you’d want to just dig in with your hand. The parsnip puree and its curl are like swinging your legs in a lawn chair, with a snack pack and a box of Nilla Wafers while wearing a cowboy hat in the sun. The brioche is soft but crisp and you want to eat it by the loaf, but it complements everything evenly, like a watchful steward making sure everyone makes it out of the woods safely.
And if that sounds ridiculous, there’s more: the mysterious broad green leaf underneath the foie gras? It’s a root beer leaf, a Central American green named for its peppery-licorice flavor. And yes, it absolutely does taste like root beer. The final Easter egg in this artfully crafted dish comes when one notices that the citrus lace on the huckleberry jam and parsnip puree resemble tiny Christmas trees, invoking the fir and larch that surround Hungry Horse Reservoir.
The whole thing feels like smiling and skipping in the sun. It feels like root beer running down your chest on a hot day. It’s sepia-toned ecstatic joy meticulously crafted to culinary transcendence.
“When I can hit nostalgic notes, or a dish just hits nostalgic buttons for me, it feels good. And usually, when something feels good to me, it translates to the guest and it just kind of works.”
The menu will be ever changing, but the Foie Gras Pie will continue in its present iteration as an exception to Earl’s rule.
“I don’t feel like many modern chefs have signature dishes,” Reynolds said. “I kind of think that’s an old school sort of thing. I don’t feel like I’ve ever had a signature dish per se, but I think the root beer and foie dish will be as close to a signature dish as I’ll ever have. It sings, you know, sometimes when you hit the final form of a dish, and it’s just humming it’s like, why change it?”