Chambers Walk Café and Catering

For dinner, the chefs pull out all the stops with ambitious, complex creations in a former Lawrenceville hardware store.

By: Pat Tanner

   Chambers Walk has been around in one incarnation or another since 1986, first as a café and take-out shop on Palmer Square in Princeton, then as a catering business based in Trenton and, as of a year ago, a restaurant and catering operation in the village of Lawrenceville on Route 206. Based on two meals I had there recently, I can only say I hope the peripatetic Chambers Walk has found a permanent home.
   And not just because of the food, which manages to be simultaneously comforting and exciting. Owners Laura and Mario Mangone have completely transformed the long, awkward space — for many years the town hardware store and, more recently, a gourmet produce and take-out shop — into a modern, beautifully appointed space. The irregular ceiling is painted deep blue and terra cotta, and it hovers over old brick walls and smooth, cypress wood features. A focal point is the funky black-topped counter that faces the open kitchen, where chef de cuisine David Ercolano and sous chef James Matticoli put the finishing touches on what Mangone calls "creative American" dishes.
   Until recently, Chambers Walk served lunch only, but now offers dinner on Friday and Saturday nights. Having found the lunch menu enjoyable — interesting soups made with seasonal produce, sandwiches on artisanal breads with mostly Mediterranean fillings (but also one of Carolina pulled pork) — I wasn’t quite prepared for dinner, wherein Chambers Walk pulls out all the stops with ambitious, complex creations, which with few exceptions are highly successful.
   Many have classic Italian or French underpinnings that are given a modern American or global spin. Take, for example, the chicken scaloppine ($20), which on the face of it could have been the menu’s most boring offering. But a creamy, tangy goat cheese sauce boosted with fresh marjoram took the dish to new heights, and sun-dried tomatoes and cipollini onions helped give it heft. Pleasantly surprised, we mopped up every bit of sauce with excellent Italian bread that had replaced the rosemary focaccia served with appetizers. Several kinds of focaccia and Italian breads are offered, all expertly made on premises.
   The scaloppine and other dishes were satisfying on so many levels that we didn’t notice until the next day that several of the spring menu’s six regular offerings lack a starch component. In fact, a starch-of-the-day and a sautéed-vegetable-of-the-day are offered separately, for $4 each, which would move the restaurant’s moderately priced entrées, which run between $19 and $26, into the expensive range. They may well be worth it, though, for such things as roasted salsify or red crescent potatoes roasted in top-grade olive oil. Really, though, the entrées are so well constructed that starch and extra veggie are superfluous. Many entrées come with a good handful of greens, while others have a bed of beans.
   Even when they don’t, like my pan-seared red snapper ($24), the protein portions are so generous, and the accompaniments so flavor-packed, nothing is wanting. The nutty, sweet flesh of two thick, meaty slabs of snapper is expertly teased out by lots of caramelized fennel, mushrooms and radicchio, the whole dish anointed with excellent olive oil and vin cotto reduction, vin cotto being the "cooked" red wine vinegar that is reduced to intense, syrup-like sweetness.
   Likewise, a 12-ounce New York strip steak ($26) is rounded out, heartily and deliciously, with spicy cannellini beans and a wild mushroom-tomato ragu and scallion coulis. But pan-seared salmon ($22) crossed the line into cloying sweetness with its endive-scallion marmalade and carrot coulis, and the night’s lamb shank special was lackluster, its meat mushy and its flavor pallid.
   One gnocchi-loving companion was very pleased with the sweet potato gnocchi ($19) with fava beans, roasted sweet potato, pea shoots and grana padano cheese tossed in brown butter. For me, not quite a potato gnocchi devotee, the dish was passable, although also on the sweet side.
   All of this came after uniformly spectacular starters. My favorite among them is the fennel-crusted tuna, a steal at $11. Four thick-cut slabs of excellent quality are larded with a crust of fennel and salt, then seared, leaving a small, perfect, rosy center. Enhanced with a good handful of nicely dressed baby arugula and a dollop of "Sicilian salsa verde" — a breath of summer made with parsley, basil and mint — I was still dreaming about this dish days later.
   Not that the salad of local organic greens ($8) is a slacker, either. Flavorful, tender greens are coated in a winning sherry-shallot vinaigrette and served, for good measure, with irresistible goat cheese crostini. The soup of the day, a creamy, spicy, sweet potato with shrimp and fried leeks ($8), had a wonderful smoky quality. But it was the wild mushroom paté ($12) that really floored us. A foie gras-paté lookalike, it manages to evince all the meaty flavor and texture you could ask for, as well as its own earthy flavors. It comes with a salad of mizuna with a citrusy vinaigrette, apricot chutney and slabs of delicious grilled black olive bread.
   Chambers Walk is a bring-your-own-wine spot, which delights many of the regular patrons who make reservations for the Friday and Saturday dinners. Many bring along their best bottles knowing they will not only be enhanced by the fine fare but will be treated with respect by the well-trained staff, all of whom appear to be young, handsome, cheerful and energetic. That they scurry around under the watchful eye of Mario Mangone probably doesn’t hurt any.
   Five desserts, each $7, are offered on the spring menu by pastry chef Jennifer Chell. We tried three and, in each case, the reality exceeded the description on the menu. Chocolate cups filled with two mousses — chocolate and cassis — could have featured those thick-walled, pre-fab edible cups that for years were the scourge of "fancy" dinner parties. Instead, they were delicate, chocolatey tulips, and the cassis mousse, in particular, was a delight. A nice fillip is the dollop of chocolate gelato alongside. Dense, rich hazelnut cake is studded with nutty chunks, layered with chocolate-hazelnut pastry cream, glazed with chocolate, and served with hazelnut gelato. My favorite dessert, though, is a diminutive blood orange curd tart served with a tiny coconut meringue cup filled with lemon sorbet. Both pieces are tiny works of art boasting big-time flavor.
Pat Tanner’s reviews can be heard on Dining Today, Sat. 9-10 a.m. on MoneyTalk AM 1350.
For directions to Chambers Walk Café and Catering, click here.