Critics’ choice: Small restaurants, big flavors

The Shack Staunton, Va.

The Shack is a food writer’s dream come true, said Josh Ozersky in Esquire.com. Located in the proverbial “Middle of Nowhere,” it’s “the Incredible Restaurant That Nobody Knows About,” and I happened upon it within weeks of its opening. The meal I had that night was “the best I’d eaten all winter” and the most interesting too. Run by Ian Boden, a nomadic 35-year-old chef, The Shack is a one-story brick building that masquerades as a burger hut. Skip the burgers: “The action here is in the short but spectacular tasting menu, which is generally three or four courses at most, and the steal of the century at $60.” My dinner began with a butter lettuce soup “as intense as a quasar.” The next dish was far uglier, “but my God, what opulence!” It was a bowl of “pea-tender” gnocchi with diced chunks of “the sweetest sweetbreads you can imagine” along with “dirt-fresh” yellow-foot chanterelles. The catch in all this? The closest big city to picturesque Staunton is Charlottesville, and even that’s 40 minutes away. 105 S. Coalter St., (540) 490-1961

42 Grams Chicago

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It takes guts to open a $204-a-head restaurant far from the money, said Amy Cavanaugh in Time Out Chicago. But getting tickets to dinner at Jake and Alexa Bickelhaupt’s 18-seat space in a former Uptown fried-chicken joint will soon be impossible, because Jake, formerly of Alinea, is that brilliant. The couple’s goal is to make every night feel like a higher-end dinner party, and it does. Thanks to the show in the open kitchen, there can be little talk as the 15-course tasting gets started. After a snack of salmon-skin chicharrón and an edible cocktail featuring jellied Hendrick’s gin, Jake will often send out his “outrageously decadent” pureed potato soup, then a seafood medley (caviar, sea grapes, salmon nigiri) that’s an homage to his former mentor Charlie Trotter. Edible flowers add a sense of playfulness to most every dish, and the pop soundtrack playing in the background “adds to the dinner-party vibe.” When the last plate had been cleared, all eight of us strangers at the counter stuck around for another hour of drinking and chatting. 4662 N. Broadway St., 42gramschicago.com

Barnacle Seattle

Don’t let the tongue-in-cheek name fool you, said Allison Austin Scheff in Seattle magazine. Barnacle may be a sort of waiting room for Renee Erickson’s The Walrus and the Carpenter, its perennially packed sister restaurant down the street. But chef Erickson’s small, modest add-on venture would have no problem attracting an audience if left to its own devices. Erickson, who also runs Boat Street Café and The Whale Wins, is a woman of many talents, including creating chic spaces that “make diners feel soigné by association.” The short menu at Barnacle is rich in “salty, savory, hedonistic” snacks meant to pair with amari (herbal liquors) and Italian wines. “A gorgeous leg of Spanish ham” sits on the copper counter ready to be carved, and you’ll be planning a return visit the first time you try the anchovies stewed in a Calabrian chile salsa. But nothing tops the pork tongue tonnato (pork tongue in tuna sauce), a variation on my favorite veal dish in the world. Like everything else at Barnacle, it punches above its weight. 4743 Ballard Ave. NW, (206) 706-3379