A Moving Experience

For the past eight years, Lawrence’s Pachamama’s has been located in a spacious, lodge-style building — visually dramatic, but not exactly cozy or intimate — hidden behind a big Hy-Vee on one side and the Alvamar Golf Course on the other. It’s just far enough from the lively business district centered on Lawrence’s Massachusetts Street to make lunch business impossible.

Ditto for attracting a bar crowd. “I did everything I could to build up a bar business,” says chef and owner Ken Baker, “and no one wanted to drive over for that.”

Last spring, Baker told me he planned to relocate to a historic building on New Hampshire Street, closer to the college town’s main drag. The opening date was scheduled for the early autumn. Like now.

“I thought we would be open now,” Baker said by phone last week, “but demolition of the interior took longer, and we had to get all the proper permits and approval by the city’s historical resource committee.”

The 1923 building at 800 New Hampshire — formerly a National Guard armory and most recently a T-shirt factory — still looks a long way from opening. Baker says the new place is tentatively scheduled to begin serving customers in January. “The framing is all up, the wood-fired oven is in and we’re pouring the concrete for the bar.”

Fans of the original space, with its soaring 30-foot ceilings and limestone pillars, will be relieved to know that Baker is holding on to it for use as a banquet facility. But he says his plans for the new dining room will redefine Pachamama’s as a “contemporary urban place.”

Urban isn’t a word I would use to describe the current space, where Baker has been serving up regional American fare since he took over the kitchen in 1999. (He purchased the restaurant outright three years later.) Even in its hard-to-find location, Pachamama’s easily outlasted culinary rivals such as the tastefully designed (but short-lived) BleuJacket and the Prairie Fire Bistro, both of which were located in the heart of the business district.

“Pachamama’s is operated by a chef-owner, unlike the other two,” Baker says. “And I had a lot more restaurant experience. I knew what I was getting into when I got into it.”

That much is clear, regardless of where you’re eating Baker’s creations. I saw the phrases “brown sugar-cured kurobuta pork chop” and “tart cherry-brandy sauce” and heard them calling my name. It had been more than five years since I last reviewed the place — before Baker owned it — and I decided I couldn’t wait another four months for the new place to open. I wanted to eat there now.

When I arrived, I noticed only a few superficial changes. The table settings were less formal; Baker had done away with the colored napkins and the stylized tropical-motif charger plates. (“They’re for sale on eBay, if you want them,” he says). The servers are more savvy (and more attractive, if memory serves), but the menu has the same price range as it did back in 2000, give or take a couple of bucks.

It’s not an inexpensive dining experience, as I discovered the night I ate there with a handful of hungry friends who lusted after everything on that night’s menu. Culinary combinations that sounded too eccentric — a layered “torte” of smoked salmon, herbed cheese, pistachios, wildflower honey and fat blackberries — turned out to be fabulous, according to my friend Fran, an art gallery owner who admired the artistic composition of the appetizer almost as much as its taste.

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Artistry is intrinsic here; Baker combines ingredients — even seemingly incongruous ones, such as vanilla-infused poached lobster in a saffron-lime butter — the way painter George Seurat mixed colors. Sometimes the innovations seem slightly over-the-top, such as a “parcel” of lemon-grass-garlic sausage with mango aïoli, but they taste heavenly. Bob ordered a chilled sweet-pepper soup with a dollop of hazelnut crème fraîche that had more kick (but less fire) than I expected. The restaurant’s house salad, a jumble of locally grown greens, hearts of palm, crispy shallots and toasted almonds, is also exceptionally good. And it doesn’t change when everything else on the menu does, on the first Tuesday of the month.

That was the night when Fran, Bob, Gayle, Bruce and I passed around the fantastic kurobuta pork (marbled meat from plump, corn-fed black Berkshire pigs), a succulent Brunner ribeye with a Chambord onion jam, and a roulade of roast lamb with minted garlic-arugula pesto. No one but me was interested in tasting that night’s vegan concoction, a smoky tofu “cutlet” sided by a succotash-stuffed tomato (no plebeian grocery-store tomato, but a hard-to-find Russian Nyagous variety, celebrated for its sweet, aromatic flavor). But we all practically fought over that night’s mixed-grill plate, a meaty combo of lemon-grass-glazed chicken, a pork chop with a sweet plum demi-glace, and a New Zealand rack of lamb. Superb!

My second visit was early this month, but the handsome assistant manager Conrad was still passing out the September menu. Oh, well, c’est la vie. I was with Bob and Patrick, and they were hungry and didn’t want to come back later in the week.

Patrick was impressed from the start. He thought our waitress looked like a healthier version of Lara Flynn Boyle (“I get that a lot,” she said), and he loved that night’s amuse-bouche, a fat baked mushroom cap stuffed with herbs and goat cheese. “This menu is so interesting,” he said. “I’d like to order the Moroccan-spiced carrot soup just to see what ‘minted English pea foam’ tastes like.”

It sounded more like a paint color than it did anything edible, so Patrick opted for a salad instead. I wanted something more substantial than carrots and pea foam, so I ordered (and made quick work of) the soup du jour, a thick lentil broth with bits of bison chorizo.

Patrick and Bob had fascinating reactions to their dinners. Patrick raved about his bowl of house-made spinach pappardelle, with shredded chicken (hormone-free, from Bauman Farms), green-chili sofrito and wine-soaked Spanish goat cheese. “There’s a lot of different flavors going on here, but they’re all wonderful and totally work together,” he observed. Bob liked the juicy, horseradish-crusted beef tenderloin and the gorgeously tender veal cheek in his bowl, but he’s more of a steak purist and proclaimed the dish “over-accessorized.” It must have been the candied shallots that sent him over the edge.

But I like my food accessorized, especially if that means slices of duck breast “lacquered” with a red-currant glaze. I could have eaten two plates of it.

The desserts at Pachamama’s don’t change as frequently as the savory fare does, and Baker’s signature sweets — a warm green-apple tart and a molten brown-sugar cake — are fixtures on the pastry list. I wish the brown-sugar cake had been a little more molten and a little less dry. The kaffir-lime crème brûlée was an interesting culinary experiment, but the waiter shouldn’t have served it with a trivia note that kaffir-lime leaves “are used to make citronella candles” — that soured me on the dessert before I took a bite. On the other hand, a chocolate terrine with a crunchy hazelnut meringue and a smattering of black raspberries was extraordinary.

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Baker isn’t planning to make sweeping culinary changes at his new location when it opens after the new year. The dinner menu will still change monthly, but there will be a new lunch menu and some small-plate selections for the late-night lounge lizards. The biggest difference won’t be on the plate but rather the ease in finding the place.