"Isn't this a nice surprise," he said softly, holding the peach in front of his face like a vision.
"Everything here's local and organic!" cooed the cheery hostess and the waiter, who echoed the farm-to-table credos emblazoned on the menus and literature throughout the restaurant.
A local peach just before Halloween? I wondered as I saw him lean in for a bite. His disappointed eyes told the story.
If his was anything like our peach, it was as ripe as a rock, and as unyielding to the promise of seasonal goodness as the rest of this menu, which details in such poetry the provenance of every morsel you'd think you were eating at Chez Panisse. In fact, the down-home ingredients and supposedly updated comfort foods here are subjected to so much mediocre cooking that a meal at City Grange would make even a world-weary traveler more cynical.
That chicken noodle soup was no doubt homemade, but it was so ordinary you wouldn't have blinked if it had been served at Little Pete's down 17th Street. The chicken pot pie was filled with such a pasty, sticky cream (and an oddly lemonic tang) that it was an overly literal take on "stick-to-your-ribs" cookery. Vegetarians get whammied with a "rustic" casserole, too, with one shriveled-up layer of heirloom vegetable stacked upon another beneath a goat cheese crust incinerated to such a spattered black mess, I doubt the "Apple Tree Farm Dairy" would even appreciate being mentioned.
