Melting Pot

How many culinary influences can Square 1682's Guillermo Tellez meld into one meal?

by Trey Popp

[ review ]

The triple-folded food menu opens up like a topographical map. Drinks run 10 pages deep on a square wooden clipboard. Bar fare gets the rectangular treatment on yet another tablet. Reading at random, you see bacalao cake, poblano pepper en nogada, rice paper rolls, baba ghanoush, Amish chicken, Tobago swizzle, Korean "hot pot."

You're dressed dry-clean-only in front of a champagne flute, but you're thinking, Hurry up with the compass and pencil, this scavenger hunt's mine!

Or maybe you're wondering if you can start with 10 milligrams of Adderall.

Square 1682, which replaced the old American Institute of Architects at 17th and Sansom, is the restaurant of the new Hotel Palomar. Let's hope someone snagged a copy of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture before the bookstore cleared out: If menus were buildings, Square 1682's would be a Frank Gehry concert hall made out of adobe, capped with a Victorian roof.

You forget what your party has ordered as soon as the server glides off. Why try? If ever a dinner were destined for disaster, this is it. Who could weave this Copenhagen Summit's worth of culinary influences into a meal that makes any sense?

A brown bag of popcorn arrives. And now, hold on! The menu said truffle ... but is anyone else getting lemon from this?

Make that everyone else, their faces slipping into soft focus as though foreplay has begun — you know it's your own vision that's playing the tricks, but there are loud purrs coming from the other side of the table. Who could have guessed that a dose of citric acid and lemon zest on truffled popcorn was the way to shiver your brain stem with ecstasy?

Small plates come like a slew of exotic postcards. Soft lobster tacos, their earthy guajillo sauce inflected with the burnt-sugar sweetness of roasted pineapple. Manchego-cloaked croutons decked with Serrano ham, all lined up in a saffron-touched tomato purée under baby-bean-sprout filaments as translucent as fly-fishing line. Duck sausage cassoulet, umami-bombed with seared maitakes, every white bean perfectly al dente and sheathed in the essence of smoked bacon. Beef and pork stuffed into a seriously hot Poblano pepper, the capsaicin unlocking every last taste bud for a sweet/tart slick of pomegranate that rushes in after the burn.

When each bite is this delicious, does it matter how well everything meshes, or doesn't, with everything else? The answer turns out to be yes — but in an unexpected way. The juxtapositions within dishes here awaken you to surprisingly fine distinctions between them. The blistered mushroom fans in the bowl of sage gnocchi look and taste almost like the local maitakes gracing the cassoulet, but not exactly. What are they?

Maitakes sourced from Burgundy, chef Guillermo Tellez confesses on the phone later. Broader, not quite as pungent, and better suited to the delicate gnocchi than the bacon and duck fat richness of the cassoulet. But that conversation comes later. Right now you're simply in the middle of a wonderful meal — regretting that your pessimism kept you from ordering Korean soup.

Had I known Tellez's background before I ate at Square 1682, his ability to graft so many foreign flourishes to the rootstock of French cooking may have been less of a surprise. Tellez started out at IHOP and eventually became Charlie Trotter's right-hand man, as chef de cuisine at the Chicago flagship and head honcho at Trotter outposts in Las Vegas and Mexico.

He was something of a pioneer in both places. When Trotter's restaurant at MGM Grand opened in 1994, Las Vegas was not yet a fine-dining destination. Tellez flew in a lot of stuff, but also tried to source locally — by hook or by crook. "You really had to push yourself," he says. "I had a guy raising squabs and quail for me in Las Vegas. I found a lady who started growing stuff in her backyard, baby carrots and lettuces."

He had to push harder on the Baja Peninsula, where Trotter's Restaurant C was located in a government-designated "pure zone" with stiff restrictions on importing fresh produce from the States or mainland Mexico. Tellez bought seeds in the States and found people on the peninsula willing to plant them.

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When Trotter wanted greens that would seem sexier than mesclun, he sent Tellez to work with Ohio farmer Lee Jones to fine-tune a new idea that would soon conquer fine dining. "I can probably say I was the one who invented the microgreen," Tellez told me. (Jones remembers it more or less the same way, though he surely merits co-inventor status.) Now Tellez is back in the land of plenty, but still bent on discovering niche purveyors — even if it means sending his wife on dairy runs to Lapp Valley Farm in Lancaster County, or flying in transcendentally delicious wasabi from San Francisco for the potato purée substrate of his seared scallops.

Yet the guy who claims credit for the microgreen has created a restaurant blissfully free of the righteousness that runs through the Alice Waters axis of fine dining, where entrées masquerade as the eco-Eucharist. "I really didn't want to build a temple of food," Tellez says. And the magnificent view of First Baptist Church's stained glass windows across the street — echoed by a jewel-toned abstract glass mural inside — is about as reverential as Square 1682 gets.

The cocktail menu departs from the current fashion for near-priestly seriousness, opting for whimsy like maple syrup in a Manhattan and a "Tai-Fashioned" on the "Classics" list. Our service was more peppy than prompt, but an offer of Champagne to compensate for a five-minute seating hiccup made us feel welcome.

Meanwhile, the big plates were as delicious as the small (among which only the bacalao cake and tuna tostadas lacked vividness). Roasted chicken came atop gorgeous pink fettuccine — dough impregnated with beet powder, pasta tossed with a pickled-beet Alfredo: piquant and soothing all at once. There was cod in porchetta, with caramelized fennel and a whisper of something like apple cider against the pork fat. Squab with gold chanterelles, port-braised cabbage and nutty soba noodles to give the taste buds rest without boredom.

In a restaurant scene increasingly dominated by paeans to the "authentic" or the highly specific, Tellez's multi-culti grab bag is refreshing, delicious and fun. Complexity and contradiction make for rich architecture. At Square 1682, you may find that they can also produce a great meal.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Square 1682 | Hotel Palomar, 121 S. 17th St., 215-563-5008, square1682.com. Breakfast daily, 7 a.m.-10:30 a.m.; lunch daily, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner Sun.-Thu., 5:30-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11 p.m.; bar daily, 11:30 a.m.-2 a.m. Soups and salads; $9-$13; small plates, $7-$20; large plates and entrées, $10-$35. Reservations recommended. Wheelchair accessible.