Table X Brings Farm to Table to Life

The chefs at Table X use on onsite garden for fresh farm-to-table dishes.

September 6, 2017

The Table X Garden. Photos by Dung Hoang.

With three chefs, you have three very creative minds that bring a unique array of culinary experiences, backgrounds, and heritages. This collaboration from chefs Mike Blocher, Nick Fahs, and David Barboza at Table X, is clearly a collection of great minds, artistic talents, and hard work. The result is beautifully crafted foods with unique tastes and presentations.

The nightly menu is carefully constructed to compliment the tastes of the season; they are currently on their 32nd edition of the menu since opening last November. That said, one night your favorite dish may be on the menu, and on the next visit, it may not.

In the open space behind the restaurant, they grow a garden, which yields many types of the produce they incorporate in their dishes. From roman lettuce, oak leaf lettuce, and mustard greens; to every herb you can think of, including one that is not so common, Papalo—a flavorful herb that tastes like a mixture of cilantro and jalapeño without the heat. Papalo is used as a garnish in Table X’s carrot curry dish.

There are beets, tomatoes, strawberries, six varieties of peppers like shishito, habanero, jalapeno, and pepperoncini. Utilizing the pepper varieties, a Spanish octopus dish is on the menu. It is served with a chili-type sauce that has been cooked down with several of pepper varieties.

Cucumbers and zucchinis from the garden are used in a green salad, topped with a house-made vinaigrette created from extracted juices from peach, plum, and stone fruit pits that they dehydrated and began soaking in vinegar last year. The extracted flavors from this process has a very aromatic vanilla flavoring, and is used as the base of the Plum Pit vinaigrette. These guys are always thinking ahead.

“Our mission isn’t necessarily to be a true farm to table restaurant, what we do as chefs is we never let the creative process stop,” Fahs said. “A big part of being passionate about food is being passionate about the quality of ingredients you work with, so this restaurant is all about being able to show that consciousness to our guests.”

Although they pride themselves on serving honest food without all the fuss, they have not neglected a single detail. The kitchen is wide open so you feel part of the process and since each menu item is made to order, and from scratch, peering into the kitchen reassures you your dish is being prepared with care.