Photograph by Chris Von Holle
With restaurants like S.W. Clyborne, Tahona Kitchen + Bar, and Toast & Berry, Looking Glass Hospitality already has several local hits, but Alara is its grandest and most refined effort to date. With two floors and more than 8,000 square feet, it’s massive, though it somehow feels intimate. Alara’s dim lighting, hanging plants, purple drapes, and muted music all create an atmosphere of subdued sophistication. However, you shouldn’t confuse “subdued” with “boring.”
As the corporate development chef for Looking Glass Hospitality, Mark Bodenstein has devoted most of his time and attention to Alara in recent months. The menu skews New American but pulls in flavors from across the globe, like BBQ pork buns, tuna crudo, and Korean corn dogs, a reflection of his itinerant background. In the late aughts, he cooked in and/or ran a string of local restaurants, including NuVo, Chalk Food + Wine, and Nicholson’s Pub and Tavern, before opening NuVo at Greenup. Prior to that, he lived and cooked in kitchens in Europe, Asia, and Hawaii. Most momentously, he worked under Chef Kathy Cary at the iconic Lily’s Bistro in Louisville, one of the regional pioneers of the farm-to-table movement. It’s clear that Bodenstein carries these experiences with him as local and regional producers like 80 Acres, Queen City Farms, and Great Lakes Growers play a large role in shaping Alara’s seasonal offerings.
Seasonal produce is on glorious display in the smoked carrot hummus. Housemade hummus has become something of a perquisite in fine dining these days and Alara’s iteration is a welcome addition to the pureed club. It certainly has the most ingredients—spiced oil, fried chickpeas, black garlic molasses, Fresno chiles, pickled carrots, dill, and sourdough crostinis—but the medley came together nicely. Its mousse-like consistency was the smoothest I’ve had, with the fried chickpeas providing a welcome crunch.
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
Fried hearts of palm cakes is a less common but equally delightful appetizer. These fleshy inner cores of certain palm trees are breaded and shaped into three small cakes, fried golden brown, and served with avocado aioli and a bite of frisée salad. They have a creamy texture and almost cheesy flavor that bring the dish into “sophisticated bar snack” territory.
Alara’s larger dishes lend a certain “family style” air to the dining experience, albeit a family that passes the bone marrow demi-glaze in lieu of the gravy. I balked a bit at the $52 price tag for the lobster and pea carbonara, but I should have brought two more people. It wasn’t just a generous portion of pasta; it was a generous portion of lobster, seemingly an entire trap’s worth of claws and meaty chunks almost crowding out the rigatoni.
I came back the next weekend with two dining companions in tow, primed for sharing. We swapped steak, salmon, chicken Milanese, and asparagus. The steak wouldn’t have made it past my placemat had I not been duty-bound to divvy. Specifically, it was an eight-ounce, center cut filet with a trio of condiments—rosemary truffle butter, chimichurri, and the aforementioned bone marrow demi—each condiment reinvigorated the straightforward dish.
The tender salmon, deep red like my rare filet, also stood out. It was Glory Bay King Salmon, harvested off the coast of southern New Zealand. Bodenstein says he prefers it because of its high fat content and the fact that it’s harvested near where it lives, giving it a similar flavor and appearance to wild-caught salmon. I see his point. It’s shipped in multiple times per week. It seems that when Alara turns to non-local places for its sourcing, it does so with good reason.
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
The chicken Milanese—a light, rustic, and lemony dish that ate like a biergarten schnitzel—was massive and tasty, but perhaps a bit out of place on Alara’s menu. It came with asparagus, but I was glad we opted for the asparagus side as well, as it was decked out with mushrooms, lemon curd, and bits of crispy chicken skin that I now believe should be sprinkled over every asparagus side.
Like lots of local restaurants at this price point, Alara takes farm-to-table dining seriously. It’s also a restaurant that takes service seriously: glasses are quickly refilled, plates and cutlery frequently exchanged, and servers deftly explain its rather novel sharable menu.
Arguably, Alara’s most imaginative dishes appear on its dessert menu. Which is why I wasn’t especially surprised to learn that Pastry Chef Lisa Hood was previously the pastry sous chef at Disney World. The Creamsicle Cloud was her (very successful) attempt to make a cheesecake that wasn’t so dense. It’s a light, creamy dessert that pops with the bright summer flavors of passionfruit curd, orange and vanilla mousse, and what the menu beguilingly describes as “color shifting glaze,” a psychedelic swirl of purples and blues. It’s not for me to say if Hood still pines for the Magic Kingdom, but it seems to have been distilled into this dessert.
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
Between the nearby Element Eatery food hall and restaurants like Mazunte and Bee’s BBQ, Madisonville has quickly established itself as one of our city’s great dining destinations. A sparkling, high-end restaurant was the missing piece. Alara spectacularly fills that void. With it, Looking Glass Hospitality has created a true wonderland.
5410 Medpace Way, Madisonville, (513) 272-5315, alaracincinnati.com
Hours: Dinner Sun–Thurs 4–10 p.m., Fri & Sat 4–11 p.m.
Prices: $8 (Flock Bakery Focaccia)–$72 (8 oz. Wagyu Sirloin Strip)
Credit Cards: All major
The Takeaway: Sharables will wow the table at this ritzy Madison Square spot.
Facebook Comments