Boiled peanuts, spicy lettuces and brown butter cake are a few of the surprises in store for guests at St. Petersburg's Reading Room. Now in soft-opening mode, the west-side restaurant, which CL first wrote about in September, began taking reservations by phone earlier this week.
Owner Kevin Lane and his team have transformed 6001 Central Ave. — formerly a Christian Science Reading Room — into an intimate, inviting dining destination.
Guests on Tuesday night were greeted with a delicious "welcome" elixir of prosecco, tangerine and strawberry purees, lavender syrup, and a little lemon from JP Palombo, who's overseeing the bar program. More crowd-pleasing cocktails followed, all made with wine and vermouth — including the Slippery Slopes (Carpano vermouths, burnt orange, cream soda, ginger) that we're told is the closest thing to bourbon on the drink menu.
Executive chef Lauren Macellaro's garden-inspired, wood-fired cuisine incorporates the bounty of on-site gardens to create subtle, interesting plates. Expect items like boiled peanuts braised in coffee, cardamom and chilis; the restaurant's "daily bread" (on Tuesday evening that meant loaves of fresh pretzel bread cleverly paired with honeycomb and mustard butter); crazy-good baby burrata with San Marzanos, basil and more toasty house-made breads; and brown butter cake featuring banana pudding, sea salt gelato and walnuts.
Lane isn't sure when the Reading Room will officially launch. But if there's anything he's learned during the process of opening a restaurant, he said, it's that you can't plan anything too strictly: "You gotta let it grow."
This article appears in Feb 2-9, 2017.