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CLUCK, GRUNT & LOW

362 Bloor St. W. 416-962-5050.

Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $75.

I have an empty nest. Such are the fruits of middle age. When my baby (I know, I know) left for university a few weeks ago, I stopped buying milk. And bread. And great hunks of steak. Who needs food in the house if you have no kids to feed? I have discovered that a person can have a perfectly good life and hardly ever go home.

Of course I miss my kids, but it is, I'm embarrassed to say, a bit of a relief not to be responsible for anybody.

Number one child, also a university student, upon hearing that I had been dining (if such be the word) at Cluck, Grunt & Low, said that very restaurant had been the subject of a conversation in her Culture and Nature course. Both students and prof had things to say about the restaurant's sign: cute cartoon characters of a chicken (cluck), a pig (grunt) and a cow (low). They said our culture has reached a point where we're so distant from the food we eat that we don't realize what goes into getting it from the farm to our plates.

They think that seeing humanized cartoons of animals doesn't affect our perceptions of what we're eating. The animals are, pardon the expression, so "de-humanized" that we hardly know they're animals, despite the cartoons. We are, saith the intellectuals, so distant from the food we eat that it doesn't cross our minds that this is what we're eating.

It crossed my mind.

Reading a menu with all meat mains (mostly pork and beef), save for some cheesy things, feels like a throwback to the not-so-good old days.

If you ask me what foods I like, that's an easy question: I like animal fat. Foie gras is, for me, as good as it gets. I like butter and cream and pulled pork and ribs and steak tartare and filet mignon and roast beef and lamb chops. These are urges I fight daily. It should be painfully obvious to any sentient being living in the 21st century that eating meat is both bad for you and bad for the planet.

Which is why I question the very premise of Cluck, Grunt & Low. A restaurant dedicated to meat? On Bloor Street West in the heart of the student ghetto where progressive values hold sway? How come? We know Marc Thuet has a love affair with matters carnivorous, but Chef Thuet is such a consummate cook that he hardly needs to limit himself to flesh.

Thuet stepped in as exec chef when Paul Boehmer, who started Cluck, Grunt & Low in July, decamped prematurely to become exec chef at Rosewater Supper Club (good luck with that). The prospect of a classic French chef like Marc Thuet doing southern barbecue is not as surprising as it sounds. Thuet is Alsatian; Alsace is the part of France that most resembles Germany, and Germans love meat. Southern barbecue and Alsace go together like pulled pork and buns.

The restaurant recalls the real barbecue joints I've visited in the American South - relentlessly casual, purposefully déclassé. The menu majors in the deep-fried, the greasy and the aforementioned flesh. I love their fried green tomatoes, although it may be the crispy deep-fried coating that has my heart pounding, cause let's face it, fried green tomatoes, glamorous as they sound, are not exactly at the top of the flavour food chain. Hush puppies, the other important appetizer, are a disappointment. The hush puppies of my dreams are moist and soft. This rendition is a real dog - dry and somewhat hard.

But we're there for the meat: Thuet's beef brisket is the classic southern slow-smoked pulled meat, a triumph of taste and texture: It's sweet and moist and bursting with flavour, thanks to a beautifully balanced barbecue sauce.

Ribs come in three classic renditions: sweet 'n' sticky, dry rub and big beef ribs. Sweet 'n' sticky feature the marvellous barbecue sauce from the brisket applied generously enough to sink deep into the fatty meat. Divine! Dry rub uses a restrained spice mix, streets ahead of the over-salted supermarket spice rub that is almost ubiquitous on Toronto ribs. Beef ribs are the only downer, because of overcooking, which has left them dry and tough.

For chickens that can't step up to beef and pork, there is dry-rubbed rotisserie chicken, which is nicely smoky, the happy beneficiary of that well-composed dry spice rub, but slightly overcooked.

Southern barbecue joints (in my limited experience) have a tradition of mediocre sides, often aggrandized by their loyal adherents. Cluck, Grunt & Low is loyal to the tradition. New Orleans dirty rice is pleasant but on the road to drying out. The slaw is pedestrian and the baked beans have a nice hint of molasses but no zing. As for the southern buttermilk biscuit: Passions run high over biscuits, and these are credible. Flaky and tender, yes, but could be more fragile and buttery.

Speaking of butter, Chef Thuet's desserts take the cake. Clearly these are not being made by southern barbecue chefs. The apple pie is so à la français it should have a French accent: barely cooked apples, each slice maintaining its own integrity, spiked with the occasional raisin, atop a buttery flaky crust that cracks into fragile shards at the touch of a fork.

This guy shouldn't be concerning himself with giant hunks of meat, for it flies against la grande cuisine française, of which he is one of our precious few fine practitioners. At cooking school in France, I learned to use small portions of meat to anchor a plate, but never to control or dominate it. Monsieur Thuet, which is it to be, the culture of the American South or la belle France?

jkates@globeandmail.com