Where meat, gluten-free meet

The former Argenta Market space in downtown North Little Rock has new tenants -- Butcher & Public and Good Food by Ferneau. The former is a butcher/deli counter and the latter offers salads and entrees, with patrons encouraged to mix and match. Both operate as a sort of upscale lunch counter with dinner takeouts available, and the space stays open late on Friday and Saturday nights, when Good Food becomes a sit-down restaurant and bar.

For Butcher & Public (B&P), brick-and-mortar became a reality after last year's Kickstarter fund generated nearly $9,000 and much hype. Good Food by Ferneau marks Donnie Ferneau's full-time return to the restaurant business after leaving Rocket 21 nearly two years ago. (He says his dress-code-enforced downtown joint is still in the works and that any rumors of an accompanying reality show are unfounded. But wait, was that a wink?)

Good Food and B&P have been officially open since Sept. 23. The motif is trendy-modern, all clean edges and geometric patterns, and it's most inviting at night, when muted lighting warms the black, white and chrome.

A third venture -- raw vegetable juices created by Garden Press -- also operates out of the space, although it's invisible but for the bottled juices ($5 for 5 ounces, $8 for 12 ounces) in the cooler and the fancy cocktails made with raw apple cider, cucumber-lime or beet juice.

At $6.50, that beet cocktail, called Love Potion and created by Good Food, mixes Garden Press' beet juice (we suspect Beet & Greet, which also has grapefruit and spearmint) with Hornitos tequila and soda water. The effect is sweet, tropical and, yes, soapy-tasting. It's more interesting than delicious, but it isn't unpleasant. Another Garden Press option, the bottled Mana Greens, blends kale, dandelions, unidentified greens, lime and cucumber for a tart, earthy shot of nutrition.

B&P offers prepackaged raw cuts and sausages, as well as smoked and unique prepared meats (chicken liver mousse, for example). There's also a meat share program, where, for $65 a month, subscribers receive 5 pounds of assorted offerings.

Travis McConnell, the brain behind the meat, has worked in kitchens all over the country, including The Four Seasons at Jackson Hole (Wyoming), and locally, at Capital Bar & Grill. He became obsessed with charcuterie while at an Italian-style butchery in San Francisco, and under the Butcher & Public name, he has sold handmade sausages at The Bernice Garden farmers market, thrown local pig roasts and taught meat-carving classes.

Each day a handful of sandwiches is available for dine-in or takeout. The meat is pork-heavy and locally supplied (a list of farms is available on the B&P website, butcherandpublic.com), while the bread comes from Arkansas Fresh Bakery in Bryant.

For a recent takeout dinner, we tried the pork belly pastrami (thus far, B&P's best-seller) and bierwurst sandwiches, paired with a beet and goat cheese salad from Good Food.

B&P's pastrami is thin-sliced, marbled and melt-in-your-mouth tender. And it's not overly salted, a frequent downfall of cured meat. Served hot, the pastrami pairs well with mild rye bread, which seems to dissolve beneath soft Gruyere cheese (we only know this from the menu board; to us, it tasted like blue cheese), house sauerkraut and spicy sorghum mustard.

So there they are, six of the seven "tastes": salty, pungent and umami (meat and cheese), bitter (rye), sour (sauerkraut) and sweet (mustard spiked with a syrup similar to molasses). Only "astringent" is missing, which, to our minds, doesn't have a place in a pastrami sandwich anyhow.

The pork shoulder bierwurst, served cold and piled on sourdough bread, is essentially a giant peppery sausage, sliced into pink slivers -- the German answer to Italian bologna, we are told. It's topped with chowchow (pickled mixed vegetables), mayo, lettuce and again, the sorghum mustard.

At $10 and $11 respectively, the sandwiches come with a few pickled vegetables and a bag of Zapp's potato chips. The vegetables -- cucumber and okra mostly, some sweet, some sour -- are a welcome touch, and the sandwiches are thick and filling (more meat than bread). Plus, the meat is small-batch cured (what fancy people call "artisanal"), and it comes from happy farms, where pigs wander with nary a gestation crate in sight, cows eat grass and chickens peck insects.

The Good Food salad ($9) is premixed in a plastic container, with a generous (two-person) portion of dark greens (baby chard and spinach), scant roasted beets and goat cheese. It comes with a small, separate tub of yogurt-based lemon dressing that, according to the menu board, is a citrus vinaigrette.

The greens were fresh, but the salad was bland. It needed more beets, a sharper cheese (the mild creaminess of the goat cheese was nearly indistinguishable from the creaminess of the dressing) and some additional texture. The salad was supposed to include almonds, which would have helped, but sadly our salad contained none.

On a different afternoon, I tried a B&P pork meatball and tomato gravy sandwich, served on a challah bun, with shaved white cheese and minced something. (It tasted like parsley, but the online menu says mint.) The meatballs were salty, coarsely ground and a bit fatty, with a hint of fennel and bit of heat, in spice and temperature. The gravy (thinner than sauce) was tangy and faintly sweet. The challah bread resembled a hot dog bun, but it was fresh and soft with a lightly grilled crust, and it tasted homemade. (Lunch works like this: Order at the counter, take a number, sit down and enjoy the sunlight flooding through floor-to-ceiling windows.)

The big test for Good Food was Friday night dinner. The place was crowded, the menu sparse and the staff young but attentive.

According to the website (goodfoodbyferneau.com), Good Food's modus operandi is "healthy (gluten-free and sugar-free meals) for people with active lifestyles and athletes." And my dining partner for the night, a yoga instructor, kept saying that if she ate this food after a hard yoga class, she would still feel clean.

This time, we tried the vegetable quinoa salad ($8), the mahi-mahi with roasted red-pepper pesto ($23) and the rib-eye ($35). We were surprised that there were no vegetarian or vegan entrees, although a plant-muncher could probably make a low-protein meal out of a soup and salad.

Like my first experience, this salad was a pile of dark greens, but with a sprinkling of red quinoa (we were expecting a heap), chopped cucumber, cooked peas (which helped with texture) and a light balsamic dressing. Again, it was adequate but not particularly memorable.

The fish was well-grilled but lacking in flavor, although we enjoyed the nutty bulk that the almond gremolata (with parsley and lemon zest) gave the brown rice. And the zucchini and carrot were perfectly cooked, not too crunchy or mushy.

The rib-eye ($35) was amazing, a thick cut marinated for six days in herbs, lemon and olive oil, and cooked medium on our waitress' advice. The savory juices complemented the sweet, caramelized onion, and the whole slab rested on a bed of tender, smashed new potatoes. This was by far the tastiest Good Food offering that we sampled, but unfortunately, it was what we would consider the least healthful.

This raises the question: Must yummy food be fat-filled and healthful food be bland? I think the health-conscious (and yoga teachers) among us will appreciate the additional dining-out option that Good Food provides. But as things stand, I don't think Ferneau will be winning over folks primarily attracted to the Butcher & Public counter or at least, he won't be winning them over with his salads.

Weekend on 10/23/2014