A Gastronomic Retrospective

DON’T WORRY: IT SOUNDS WAY MESSIER THAN IT IS

By Sara Sullivan

Posted: December 18, 2009 at 5:21 a.m.

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By J.T. Wampler
The red velvet cupcake at Bliss Cupcake Cafe in Fayetteville is almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

The world of restaurants is an ever-changing one, in which the landscape constantly morphs and turns as eateries endlessly open, close, relocate and change ownership or menus. It is a tough business for owners and a surprisingly emotional one for customers, if you think about it, as food and the ways it is prepared can enkindle a borderline-obsessive devotion or a bitter resentment - usually based on as little as one dining experience.

But even in what has unarguably been a tremulous year, restaurateurs have continued the shapeshifting, striking out with the goal of feeding people for a living.

And several of them, we’ve noticed, are taking a chance on a specialty niche.

“Everybody does burgers, everybody does steaks,” says Rob Cork, who with his wife, Dawn, runs The English Tea Room in Siloam Springs.

The Corks, who moved to Arkansas from England a little over a year ago, decided to open an eatery that offered about a dozen different hot teas along with dishes likesandwiches, quiches, Yorkshire pudding and scones, all of which are served on china (pronounced “chiner” in Cork’s splendid accent).

“For some reason, America’s got really a fascination with everything English.”

The tea room has been doing well, especially at lunchtime, since it opened in July. The menu’s tea combinations vary from Tea and Dessert, which for $8 will get you a pot of tea and a slice of the specialty cake of the day, to The Windsor Tea, which requires 24-hour advance reservations and comes with a pot of tea and a selection of finger sandwiches, quiches, fruit flans, individual cheesecakes and scones with cream and preserves, for $19.95.

A wide range of teas by themselves cost $1.85 per cup or $3.50 per pot.

So there can be a big plus to doing one thing extremely well. And, really, when that one thing becomes the center focus, it has the opportunity to become far more than one thing.

Take, for instance, the grilled cheese sandwiches at Hammontree’s Take Home Gourmet in Fayetteville. “It’s not really one item (that the restaurant has tooffer) because we have lots of different kinds,” says owner Chad Hammontree. Its menu off ers 15 diff erent sandwiches using blends from 26 kinds of cheese.

You can have a Hammontree’s Ham-on-Cheese, which is the house cheese blend on marbled rye with smoked ham, for $5.75; the $6. 50 Parmageddon, with Parmigiano-Reggiano, prosciutto, mushrooms and ricotta onParmesan-crusted sourdough; or The Scarlet Cheddar, with three kinds of cheddar, smoked turkey and herb mayonnaise on sourdough for $6.25.

“It was just a diff erent way to kind of be creative and have something unusual,” Hammontree says. And the restaurant, which opened in mid-June, is doing great, he adds.

Some eateries offer a variety of dishes in order to appeal toa greater number of people, but most follow some sort of tailored theme - a pizza parlor, a Chinese food place, a barbecue joint.

It’s just that some driven restaurateurs narrow their sights more, specializing in one product - and its countless variations.

It ce rtainly can’t hurt, Hammontree says, “if there’s nothing else out there that’s like it.”

Whats Up, Pages 21 on 12/18/2009

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