Historic house opens its door to fine dining

Friday, Sept. 26, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN Owner Leo Dilling, right, and head chef Roger Villalobos celebrate the opening of Corbels in Leonardtown. The restaurant opened on Aug. 12. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story   Corbels Restaurant 22770 Washington Street, Leonardtown Hours: Lunch from 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Dinner from 5-9 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and 5-9:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Entrée prices: $6.75-$14.50 for lunch. $16.75-$25 for dinner. Credit cards: V, MC 301-997-0008 www.corbelsrestaurant.com

The original foundation of the Sterling House in Leonardtown is said to date back to around 1850. In 1911, the Sterling family, who owned the house until 2005, added a Queen Anne-style turret to make room for their 17 children.

Last year, the house was gutted, restored and remodeled to make room for Corbels Restaurant, and the new Sterling Room can now host about 50 guests.

Open a little more than a month, Corbels brings a second fine dining restaurant to downtown Leonardtown, which already hosts the well-established Café des Artistes.

The Sterling House has undergone a tasteful makeover. The scheme is spare yet elegant, and the sleek, modern glow of the wood furnishings has not evicted the homey charm one would expect to find in a place enclosed by a bright, white fence and with rocking chairs on the front porch. There is a bar downstairs, by the way, and additional dining rooms upstairs.

Embracing modernity while nodding respectfully to the past, Corbels' design parallels, in a sense, the back and forth sensibilities of the new American cuisine movement which often applies contemporary or experimental cooking techniques to old-world recipes and thus produces a fusion of tastes.

Corbels' chefs make fine use of local ingredients, particularly produce, which makes a genuine difference in terms of freshness and flavor. Dinner and lunch menus offer a daily fresh fish, and both include an array of appetizers and salads, like the Sterling House salad ($3.75) of "field greens," seasonal vegetables, spiced pecans and lemon thyme vinaigrette. You then have the option of bulking it up a bit with grilled or sauteed shrimp ($4.74), fish ($6.50), chicken ($4.50), calamari ($4), crab cake ($7.75) or skirt steak ($6.25).

Dinner entrees include pan-seared salmon with a salad, potato rounds and a sweet corn saffron sauce ($17.50); a 10-ounce herb-crusted, boneless pork loin with scallion and cheddar spoonbread, red cabbage and chimichurri sauce ($18); jumbo shrimp with cheesy scallion grits, braised greens and a shrimp cilantro broth ($17.50); and a chowder with fish, shrimp, mussels, calamari rings, shellfish, saffron broth and a baguette with lemon aioli ($18 for dinner, $13.50 for lunch).

New American cuisine, meanwhile, is more about tasting than intemperance (although in some cases an entrée can be deceivingly large). A positive experience might be likened to a celebration of artful cuisine, while a negative one might result in something along the lines of a sour disposition, a half-finished dish and a nice-sized hole in the wallet or pocketbook. Unfortunately, I see and hear about the latter experience quite frequently in regards to new America cuisine (and there seems to be no space for neutrality).

Really, it makes sense. When you go to a restaurant like Corbels, for one, you do not expect to eat an ordinary meal. You seek something practically rapturous — mouth-watering, talk-about-for-days food. But if you receive something less — let's say considerably less — and also receive a hefty bill, naturally you may feel a desire to not exactly mince words.

Here are two tips to help you avoid the latter scenario. I ordered three dishes at Corbels — a soup, appetizer and entrée — during a recent lunch visit and was exceedingly impressed. With tip, my bill was $30.

First off, stay away from completely standard fare: French fries and hamburgers might be the most obvious examples. Think of the creative, talented chefs at work behind the scenes. Would you commission an abstract expressionist for a realist portrait?

It is very likely, meanwhile, that Corbel's sandwiches are exceptional. The cubano ($9.50) includes roast pork, ham, swiss cheese and dijon mustard on a grilled baguette. The crab cake sandwich ($14.50) is served on a toasted potato roll with tartar sauce and comes with fries. The Breton Bay sandwich ($9.25) involves a marinated and grilled chicken breast along with oven-dried tomato, fresh mozzarella and basil pesto on ciabatta bread.

But a lunchtime trip to Corbels also offers a chance to get a sense of the dinner entrée menu for something of a reduced rated.

My second bit of advice, then, is to order well. Take your time, look over the menu and make a note of all the ingredients in each dish. This will allow you to step outside the average zone without taking too much of a risk. Also keep in mind that menu items are subject to change, so this is probably not a place to shy away from asking questions.

While the soup of the day when I visited was cream of crab, the server was pushing Corbel's Portuguese chowder, which he claimed is becoming a local delicacy.

The soup consists of bits of pork sausage (Spanish chorizo) and fish along with earthy steamed spinach and potatoes in a rich, warm tomato base. This classy twist on a comfort soup should bode well for the colder months ahead.

My next course was an empanada, a beef-stuffed turnover. The turnover was still doughy, the ground beef was top-notch and there were even some olives and pieces of hard-boiled egg in the mix. The menu said it came with green salsa, but I was pleasantly surprised to receive a small side of a delectably tart olive sauce which made it a truly memorable dish. (Olives, by no means, are universally liked, though, and it is safe to say such a surprise could have turned out poorly for some).

With four options for an entrée, I chose the seared fresh fish of the day, which happened to be halibut.

Out came a hunk of it in the middle of a shallow bowl with a peppery saffron sauce and pearl pasta. A slightly spicy pile of arugula and fennel provided a disparate yet harmonious blend with the yellow saffron sauce which, although known for blandness, contained a slight trace of something like honey.

Then there was the halibut, a simple fish associated by some with simple eating during meatless times. Crispy on top, moderately spiced, the centerpiece to this dish seemed courageously simple, and yet it was nothing less than delicious.