Carmel’s Restaurant and Bar

No offense to Carmel’s Restaurant and Bar, but I figure it won’t be long before a hot hip-hop dance club opens in its location in the southeast end of the Grove Arcade. With the opening of Carmel’s, a classy steak-and-seafood joint, the corner of Battery Park and Page avenues has cemented its reputation as the quickest route to Florida, circa 20 years ago.

Carmel’s was preceded by Anntony’s Caribbean Cafe, a beans-and-rice emporium that specialized in the same sunny kitsch that had 1970s retirees pointing their station wagons toward Boca. While the restaurant favored jerk chicken over pink flamingos, its contrived island vibe smacked of the smarmy “Wish You Were Here” cards sent home by the first flock of snowbirds.

Carmel’s comes by its Floridian aura honestly. A spin-off of Carmel’s of Vero Beach, this quietly elegant restaurant, with its chocolate-brown walls and smartly chosen jazz soundtrack, has the feel of 1980s nouveau riche Florida. It’s a place where you can spend a great deal of money, by downtown Asheville standards—and spend it well.

Carmel’s Asheville outpost may be the second entry in its family of restaurants, yet it studiously avoids playing the role of younger sibling. While so many restaurants try to capture customers’ attentions through cutesy antics, Carmel’s is confident enough to instead concentrate on its unerringly correct preparations of easily understood dishes. Its menu of sauteed salmon and grilled lamb isn’t especially adventurous, but the dining room isn’t always the place for derring-do.

In an era when chefs are encouraged to make ice cream of octopi and shift their foods’ state of matter, Carmel’s conservative approach to cooking seems almost retro. But sometimes it’s simpler to book a ticket on a commercial airliner than hitch a ride on a biplane: Carmel’s delicious business-casual menu makes the restaurant the perfect safe spot to meet your fiancee’s parents, undistracted by the threat of her father inadvertently swallowing a heap of miso-soaked seaweed.

I’ve been accused of caring too much about a restaurant’s physical menu. I can’t help it: As a writer, I’m obsessively interested in any words between two covers. But even diners who barely scored the minimum possible score of 200 points on the verbal section of their SAT will be impressed by Carmel’s menus, which sport red, textured faux-leather covers. In a pinch, one could double as a fashionable handbag (although the tweaks needed to make it functional would probably render the purse somewhat less-than-SoBe-worthy).

The menu’s interior is similarly ingenious, and should be used as an example in any menu-design tutorial. The text is arranged in three columns, with the usual restaurantese—“smoky-roasted breast of chicken, crispy chorizo dumplings, Provencal-style chicken broth with roasted red peppers and capers”—squeezed into the middle. The far right column is reserved for the price. And on the far left—this is where it gets good—the dish’s featured ingredient is written in capital letters. As in: “PORK”, “SHRIMP” and “RIBS”—meaning your future father-in-law won’t have to muck around trying to find the “FILET.”

Why does any of this matter? Because it’s a concession to customers, who Carmel’s clearly understands. The service at Carmel’s is equally caring, with servers unobtrusively managing space on locally made wooden tables so small that the obligatory centerpiece candle is planted in something resembling a test tube.

The only mistake our server made was not alerting us to the crab entree as soon as we sat down. The baked jumbo lump crab cakes were so spot-on that Carmel’s wouldn’t be amiss in appointing a doorman to announce their availability—and to ensure no one leaves without sampling them.

According to a prep cook one of my guests met in the men’s room—I’m intrepid, but not that intrepid—the kitchen uses five different kinds of crabs in assembling its delectable cakes. It’s a fair bet that none of those crabs were as buoyant in life as the pillowy cakes that use their meat. The crab is soaked with a spicy coconut-cream sauce that makes the shellfish sing, rather than overwhelming it with the flavor of sunscreen. It’s joined on the plate by a handful of tempered green beans, which—by the bowlful—could be the best appetizer on Carmel’s drop-dead gorgeous menu.

Right now, the steamed mussels are deserving of that crown. The accompanying traditional white-wine broth was a garlicky sensation at our table, forcing us to put our sub-par complimentary dinner rolls to use. (The mussels are served with two hunks of grilled olive bread, which was far better than the Pillsbury-like rolls in our basket.)

One-third of the appetizers on offer are pizzas, a tricky business for a restaurant just one door down from Modesto, where local culinary hero Hector Diaz is dedicated to turning out masterpiece pies. Our asparagus-and-pesto pizza—which, with its fingers of asparagus perfectly centered on each slice, looked like it was laid out according to a very precise diagram—was passable, as was a cup of the creamy seafood chowder.

Better perhaps to start dinner with a salad: The BLT salad, which features a wedge of crisp iceberg lettuce wearing a cape of buttermilk dressing, is a triumph of good ingredients. The salad is finished with chunks of Maytag blue cheese almost large enough to be speared on toothpicks and served on an hors d’oeuvres tray; tiny marble-sized tomatoes and shreds of applewood-smoked bacon. I didn’t make good on my promise to share.

Our server was a great fan of the sea scallops, which were badly overcooked the night we sampled them. But the addition of diced roasted beets and wild-mushroom raviolis to the dish made for a terrific mosaic of flavors that would be worth revisiting. A strip steak was also overcooked, although the accompanying french fries—presented in a cute little silver pail—were crisped to perfection.

Befitting a restaurant that doesn’t get too wild with its offerings, desserts include a cheesecake, bread pudding, creme brulee and a “ring ding,” to which our server steered us. The upscale take on the ding dong was disappointingly dry, and even pushing a spoon through the dense ring of chocolate cake to the white-chocolate-mousse center didn’t earn a ding from any diners at our table.

I hope the restaurant, which opened just a couple months ago, works out its kinks. As fun as a South Florida-style dance club in the mountains might be, I’d like to see Carmel’s stick around.