Catbird’s highly curated cocktails and small bites have attracted every bon vivant in town to its gleaming art deco dining space on the ninth floor of the Thompson Hotel. Starting September 21, boulevardiers will have a reason to rush back to the terrace every Thursday night when the restaurant debuts Leave It To Catbird, its exclusive weekly tasting menu with a carefully crafted cocktail for every course.
Jeramie Robison, the hotel’s director of culinary and executive chef, knows there are a lot of tasting menus out there, but one with a specialty cocktail created in tandem with each dish isn’t common in Dallas. He worked with the director of food and beverage, Jared Givens, to design a menu of food and drinks inspired by countries such as Japan, France, and Mexico.
“We’re very cocktail-focused, and we have a lot of young chefs on the team,” Robison says. “We needed a way to inspire them and for our chef team to be creative. I called [Givens] and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about a cocktail omakase?’ And he said, ‘Yes, this is awesome.’”
Leave It to Catbird is not for the faint of liver. The menu will change every few weeks and range from eight to 10 courses. In a preview, we savored bites of A5 wagyu paired with a cabernet sauvignon-topped whiskey cocktail. We sipped on freshly brewed tea with herbs and flowers plucked straight from the restaurant’s garden. Then there was the king crab, steamed, shucked, and drenched in creamy sabayon.
Expect drinks to be different for each course, with no restrictions on how many spirits are mixed in your stomach by the end of it (don’t worry: there are non-alcoholic drinks, too). We even recorded a podcast during our time at the restaurant, which you can listen to below.
$125 per person. 1401 Elm St.
Here is one of the courses that was on offer during our visit:
Dish: King crab with lemongrass butter, Asian pear, and sabayon
- Alaskan king crab: steamed until it’s perfectly cooked and then shucked.
- Crab butter: The crab shells are tossed into hot clarified butter with lemongrass, ginger, lemon and lime leaves, shallots, garlic, and lemon peel. After an hour, it’s strained through a cheese cloth and chinois. The shucked crab is slow-poached in the butter.
- Sabayon: Champagne, sugar, lime leaf, and egg yolk are whisked until fluffy and frothy. About half a cup of crab butter is added, and the entire mixture is strained and placed into an iSi cream whipper.
- Asian pears: Korean pears, to be exact. They’re skinned, diced, and topped with a cilantro stem relish. The relish is made with cilantro, lemongrass, lemon zest, brunoised shallots and garlic, and yuzu olive oil.
- For plating: smoked salmon roe is added to the plate for salinity.
Cocktail: Cervacarita (Clarified Margarita)
- A stick of butter is browned on medium-high heat and added to a bottle of tequila. Once shaken, it’s placed in a freezer overnight. After the butter has collected at the top and solidified, the tequila is strained through a coffee filter.
- The brown butter-washed tequila is shaken with Bauchant orange liqueur and Supasawa mixer and then poured into a chilled Tajín-rimmed glass.
- The drink is topped with a pineapple foam made with pineapple juice, egg whites, and simple syrup.
This story originally appeared in the September issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Smashing Crab.” Write to [email protected].
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