chef’s table
FROM THE HEART
Love is the key ingredient in Dish Café’s many treats.
WRITTEN BY SANDRA MACIAS
PHOTOS BY CHRIS STOWELL
Haute cuisine at Dish Café, turning 10 this November, means down-home, comfort food. Salads of locally grown produce, organic whenever possible; soups, seasonal and from-scratch; hearty sandwiches; and daily specials made with farm-fresh ingredients as well as humanely raised and antibiotic- and hormone-free meats.
Lunch hour is packed. People line up to place their orders at the counter, some dash in for call-ahead, take-out sandwiches. One young woman snaps up her order of cupcakes.
“They make the best cupcakes here,” she says, confiding they’re addictive, as she heads out the door.
Meanwhile, table service is energetic. Servers veer around oilcloth-covered tables (red polka dots, here, Hawaiian floral, there) and Formica tables with chrome legs (the yellow drop-leaf is particularly cute). Dish’s seating is tight, but neighborly.
| From left, Kelsey Fairchild, Jacob Moyle, Nancy Horn, Austin Fiannaca (behind), Matilde Magee, and Terie Hamman |
GATHERING TOGETHER
Nancy Horn — the soul of Dish who owns the restaurant with husband Joe, who runs the catering side of the business — scans the buzzing scene and smiles, knowingly.
“People miss being around the table,” she says. “They crave the food and talk that come when you sit at the table visiting with a friend.”
Surrounded by medical buildings, Dish is a block from Renown Regional Medical Center. Among the crowd are medical professionals and family members of patients. The latter is a plus, Horn says. By nurturing those families with the next best thing to a home-cooked meal, she says she feels a part of the healing process.
FOOD ROOTS
Food is in Horn’s genes. She grew up in a family where everyone cooked. Her mother, Cherie Jamason (who is executive director of the Food Bank of Northern Nevada) baked the family bread daily, tended a garden, and canned leftover abundance. Her father, a hunter and fisherman, stocked the larder and her grandfather was the ultimate all-around good cook.
Horn, a Slow Food Reno founder, keeps to those roots, serving food that is as close as possible to farm-to-fork principles. Her ability to do that relies on many sources, including Lattin Farms in Fallon and other Nevada and California farmers. Meat used for breakfast and lunch dishes comes from hormone- and antibiotic-free cattle and pork, humanely raised by producers such as Niman Ranch and Applegate Farms (two of the nation’s premier meat suppliers). Eggs for quiche and breakfast entrées come from free-range chickens living on farms in Fallon, Reno, and Red Rock.
ON THE ROAD
You’ll also find Dish’s food and staff members outside the small café’s confines several times a day when the restaurant takes its show on the road. Customers count on Dish to bring tantalizing and healthy food to their corporate functions. Dish caters events big and small, from 20 to 120 people. Dish even catered for the White House staff and press corps when President Barack Obama was in town earlier this year.
MENU STANDOUTS
Though one can’t live on quiche alone, it might be conceivable at Dish. Its quiche, which changes daily, is sublime. Take the feta and spinach tasted on one visit. Imagine feta’s sassy saltiness and spinach’s deep grassiness in a custard filling as light as soufflé (gotta be those eggs). Now wrap that in a buttery crust. Need I say more?
There is a lot to explore on the menu. Breakfast choices include from-scratch pastries, organic oatmeal, a breakfast burrito, and a killer granola (crunchy, toasty, and house-made).
For lunch, seasonable salads head the list, followed by sandwiches. One bestseller is the Cowgirl Tri-tip, a hefty panini of grilled tri-tip, caramelized onions, and goat cheese on sourdough bread. Featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, the sandwich is known from Texas to Hungary and beyond. Once a Texas visitor even took a photo of the Cowgirl and Horn.
Specials, made with seasonal ingredients and changing daily, also are popular. Look at the blackboard inside the café for such daily specials as brown rice risotto with roasted squash and gorgonzola or spaghetti squash with marinara sauce.
Saving desserts for last — or maybe not; life is too short — Horn and Baker Joannie Stosic dish out a daily variety of baked goods made with organic flour and seasonal fruits. Their magic produces crisps, lemon bars, brownies, cookies, quick breads, tarts, and more.
And those cupcakes? Airy as meringue, light as a feather — and definitely addictive.
Sandra Macias is a Reno-based freelancer with a long career in food writing. She’s a longstanding foodie, but not much of a sweets eater –– that is until she met Dish’s cupcakes. Thank heavens, she says, she doesn’t work nearby.
RESOURCES
Dish Café & Catering
Open 7 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. Mon. – Fri. for breakfast and lunch. Breakfast is served until 11 a.m.
855 Mill St., Reno
775-348-8264
For more details (including a video of Food Network’s visit to the café), visit www.Dishcafecatering.com
