Sunday suppers at The Tribune in Northport host culinary journey
Photos by Jessie Zevalkink, www.jzevalkink.com
By Susan Ager
Sun contributor
On the early evening of a spitty, sleety, slush-gray Sunday, 23 people gathered at a tiny Northport eatery for a feast.
Three cooked it. One served it. One washed its dishes. And 18 were there only to drink their BYO wine and eat— not food they chose from a menu but food chosen for them, and prepared in an open kitchen no bigger than a bathroom.
The occasion? A Sunday supper, an almost-weekly event at The Tribune for each of the past three winters.
“First, we do this to keep ourselves from going crazy,” owner Eric Allchin told the diners before the food was delivered to a big long table made from all the tables that fit in the 22-seat restaurant. “Second,” he said, “It allows us to play with food.” To have fun, in other words. To stave off the gloom of a small village, population 650, in the winter months when a good proportion leave for sunnier climes.
In the past, meals have been themed by cuisine: Italian, Cuban, French, Thai, Ethiopian, Southern Creole, etc. All featured foods the team had never cooked before, and yes, mistakes were made and tossed or cleverly prettied up. But oh, the highlights! The Sunday before diners raved about a Korean specialty, duck tongues, harvested from local foul slaughtered for duck meat, then skinned, brined in a three-percent solution for 12 hours, rinsed, and slow cooked for eight hours.
Tonight was different. No ethnic theme, “just things we like to eat and cook,” said Eric, flanked by Paul Carlson, former chef at 9 Bean Rows in Suttons Bay, who helps with Sunday suppers. At this time of year, Eric explained, the menu had everything to do with what produce they could get from Loma Farm, a local CSA: “It’s all about availability.”
The menu on our night:
• Sweet potato fritters (from shredded Cajun king sweet potatoes, pine nuts, sesame, anchovies and dates) with a dipping sauce of sheep’s milk yogurt blended with local dried sumac (made by and gifted to the Tribune by a regular).
• Gnocchi made from house-made ricotta and local oyster and shitake mushrooms, in a brown butter and sage sauce.
• Roasted rainbow carrots with shallots, toasted caraway (seed) dressing and herbs.
• Salad of pickled butternut squash, fresh cranberries, apple, celery, toasted hazelnuts and greens.
• Brisket slow-cooked with spices for about 30 hours, served over polenta and topped with daikon radish gremolata (a fine-chopped condiment).
• Shortbread with lemon curd, citrus brulee (carmelized with a torch) and persimmon.
Eric, who is 34, started The Tribune in 2014, after driving a U-Haul with all of his belongings through a blinding snowstorm from East Lansing. He had vowed that by 30 he would leave his job running a 10,000 square foot student hangout near Michigan State University, where he had earned a degree in civil engineering. He was lured to Northport by the promise of a fresh enterprise in a renovated building that housed the Northport Tribunenewspaper a century ago and, more recently, the Ships’ Galley pizza and ice cream joint.
Having grown up in Suttons Bay he knew the little burg at the tip of the Little Finger and saw it coming back. The building was renovated by locals Ray and Thea Kellogg, and Eric bought the business with their son Mark, also a builder, and his then-wife Megan Kellogg, a designer. From the start they decided to focus on just breakfast, lunch, and summer ice cream, all from local sources.
And, of course, the winter Sunday suppers.
My husband and I came to one awhile back, focused on Spanish Basque food. We made the mistake first-timers do, gobbling too much of the early courses, too full to enjoy the final ones. This time we “paced ourselves,” the motto of the entire table, it turns out. We chewed more slowly. We savored. And we listened more closely to the conversation of those around us, both strange and familiar.
“I love it,” said first-timer Barbara Stark-Nemon, “when the conversation with strangers slides easily from the flash-fried sage-infused sauce to the adventures of a young person’s consulting job.” Indeed, the diners ranged in age from 37 to 77.
“Oh. Em. Gee!” Northporter Silvia Gans cried after her first bite of the gnocchi. “They melt in your mouth!” Then she described making them decades ago with her mother.
One guy described mushroom hunting. One woman talked of her travels in Cambodia. Two women bonded over having worn the same coat. Diners debated the sexy cover of Michelle Obama’s new book. Other topics: firewood, family, and food, always the talk came back to food—the joy of it, how it brings strangers and friends together.
I found myself using my forefinger like a hunk of bread to sweep up every bit of a sauce.
I found myself scooping a bit of my dessert on a teaspoon to feed to my husband.
The man sitting next to me filled my wine glass from his own bottle when ours was empty.
Eric told me that because of the Sunday suppers he has purchased many new things: a dimmer for the lights overhead, blinds for the west-facing windows so sunsets don’t blind the kitchen staff, wineglasses to replace juice glasses, big white platters and bowls to serve everything family style, and bistro-style napkins, replacing the home-stitched chintz napkins he otherwise uses.
“The suppers have stretched us,” he says. And diners are stretched, too. Said local Will Harper: “They challenge your palate and they encourage you to eat things you’d never order off a menu. But you wind up saying ‘Oh my God.’ It’s always a happy ending.”
By 9 p.m., two hours after the meal began, everyone had dug out their down coats from a pile near the door and stepped out into the night. Some drove 45 minutes home to Traverse City; some walked around the block to their beds.
All was calm. All was bright. The spit had turned to snow.
Friend The Tribune on Facebook for details of upcoming dinners. For reservations contact Eric at 231-386-1055 or eric@northporttribune.com. Dinners are typically $40 or $50, and drinks, including alcohol, are BYO.