Café Nordo is back with a return to its origins. Four years ago, Terry Podgorski and Erin Brindley’s first pop-up restaurant took a stab at a different kind of theatre and a different kind of dining. The success of The Modern American Chicken led to a string of productions melding food with theatre, inlaid with a preaching-to-the-choir didacticism.
While later iterations of the café have struggled to achieve a dramatic arc, this first script has no such problems because it has no such aspirations, to either drama or didacticism. What drama one finds in this production is delivered by individual storytellers, or rather essayists. These essayists aren’t fixated on preaching the anti-Monsanto gospel. They come to praise, instead. There is a vague attempt at making a chicken archetype (dubbed Henrietta) into an anthropomorphized protagonist. Thankfully, this unprofitable strain is overwhelmed by gorgeous prose, placing the chicken at the center of the human universe, or at least the Western European culinary universe.
Podgorski’s set design reinforces this notion with tables arranged in rays around a yolk of a central table with a corona of light around its shadow on the floor. Shadow screens surround the loges of Washington Hall’s main performance space, set off by jagged structures that could be tree limbs or veins on a yolk. The lecture format is highlighted by a prominent lectern.
The acting is as lush as ever with the familiar cast including Opal Peachy, Maximilien Davis, and Carter Rodriguez. Peachy and Davis do the heavy lifting in the essay declamation department, while the rest have the more challenging and intimate role of providing table service in character. The servers all claim names of chicken breeds such as Andalusian and Wyandotte.
The whole cast joins in for Annastasia Workman’s musical numbers. Becky Poole, as Silkie Bantam, is the stand-out on these, with her musical saw on the bluegrass flavored Hot Little Bird. As Andalusio, Carter Rodriguez brings the heat with his electric guitar licks on songs including Homage to Henrietta.
Sadly, the heat was lacking from the food at a recent performance. Whereas most Nordo evenings have featured well-meaning but lackluster theatre performed with excellent and adventurous food, this performance was accompanied by key dishes served lukewarm that would have been nicer hot. The roasted chicken soup with chopped liver dumpling and wild seasonal mushrooms was tasty, but on the cool side. A roasted chicken with house-made sumac chicken sausage and habanero cherries was less than sufficiently hot, and seemed a bit undercooked.
A chilled parsley shot with savory lemon curd and crème fraîche was more in line with Nordo standards. The highlight of the meal was a spinach salad with poached egg served on a shredded parmesan and phyllo nest with goat cheese béchamel, served in an egg shell. This assemblage of textures and flavors was perfection. The accompanying wines were also excellent, though a final dessert wine came at an extra charge and Nordo does not do extra charges well (including cash-only tips); payment was slow and laborious.
It wouldn’t be Nordo without a dish with a theatrical twist in the plating. This time, the prize goes to a Theo Chocolate panna cotta with marionberry coulis, made to resemble chicken livers on a plate splattered with blood. The disconnection of the ghoulish visuals and rich, sweet flavors made for a suitably spooky end to a mid-October evening.
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