Small Wonder One of the newest additions to a growing Durham is a little gem - John T Edge
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6/30/2021 Small Wonder – Garden & Gun
___
FORK IN THE ROAD
Small Wonder
One of the newest
additions to a growing
Durham is a little gem
By JOHN T. EDGE
December/January 2017
PHOTO: LISSA GOTWALS
Potted rabbit with house-made crackers.
Potted rabbit, strafed with tarragon and presented with a house-baked
version of Ritz crackers, sounds queer and tastes old-fashioned. Shrimp and
spoon bread, scattered with roasted corn and ringed by a butter sauce ruddy
with ’nduja sausage, suggests a punk-rock shrimp and grits. Shishito
peppers, overstuffed with salt-dried catfish, look like diminutive zeppelins
and remind me of next-generation jalapeño poppers. Open since June in
downtown Durham, North Carolina, Littler is a very small restaurant that
delivers very big flavors, a velvet-draped supper club, necklaced by patio
lights and built for pleasure.
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6/30/2021 Small Wonder – Garden & Gun
Conceiving and opening a restaurant beckons a plague of problems. The
building contractor goes missing when it’s time for final glosses. The health
inspector, faced with newfangled equipment, gets unreasonable. At Littler,
the name was the matter. In the run-up, the proprietor, Gray Brooks—a local
who made his reputation in Seattle before returning to open nearby Pizzeria
Toro in 2012—aimed to name the restaurant Hattie Mae Williams Called Me
Captain.
He intended a tribute to the African American woman who helped raise
him. But critics argued that the name clumsily celebrated a past when
black women, in the shadow of Jim Crow, felt compelled to call white
children like Brooks captain. In booming Durham, where gentrification is a
vital issue, and white-owned businesses like Littler now encroach on a
district once known as Black Wall Street, blowback came swiftly. Before he
opened the doors, Brooks changed the name.
True to its moniker, Littler is smaller than Toro, which presents as an auto
garage doing a side business in wood-fired pizza and antipasti. Brooks said
he was inspired by New York City restaurants developed when the Lower
East Side and Tribeca were frontiers, rent was comparatively cheap, and
chefs took chances. Those 1980s restaurants served Manhattan as
clubhouses, where artists forged bonds and plotted fledgling businesses.
Today, as Durham entrepreneurs fashion vacant storefronts into boutiques
and stylish hotels open, Littler aims to be a cabaret for a new generation of
flush North Carolina creative types.
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PHOTO: LISSA GOTWALS
Littler’s che de cuisine, Amanda
Orser, and proprietor, Gray Brooks.
To realize his vision, Brooks drafted a great menu and hired a team of pros,
including chef de cuisine Amanda Orser, who spent a decade across town at
Magnolia Grill, the beloved New South citadel that chefs Karen and Ben
Barker closed in 2012 after a twenty-five-year run. Flash back to 2000, when
the Barkers published a cookbook, Not Afraid of Flavor, and you recognize
why the cooking at Littler is righteous. Like the Barkers, Orser and Brooks
show no fear.
The tomato tarte tatin, paired with two blue-veined boulders of Stilton,
beautifully subverts the French apple dish while reminding diners that the
tomato is a fruit that responds well to butter and sugar and the Maillard
reaction. Latkes, fried to a snap and crowned with yellow button yolks, prove
ideal foils for creamy hunks of applewood-smoked trout. Falafel, made from
butter beans and garnished with goat yogurt, tastes brighter and sweeter
than the chickpea norm. Not all bold dishes work: The beef heart tartare,
tumbled with a house version of processed cheese, looks and tastes goofy.
Like a guitarist in an indie band who stares at her feet while abusing the
whammy bar, Littler broadcasts studied insouciance. Mismatched china,
embossed with flowers and seemingly pilfered from a grandee’s
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breakfront, lines the tables. Striped napkins, tucked in rings shaped like
roosters, sit next to high-sheen cutlery. Lowball glasses, embossed with
coppered cartoons and seemingly rescued from a 1970s man cave, slosh
with mezcal and rye cocktails. A stark Harrison Haynes photograph of a
fallen tree, mounted above a spindle-backed bench, recalls rock-and-roll
posters from the 1980s:
The message embedded is inscrutable—and somehow compelling.
At a moment when it’s common for restaurants to install a turntable and a
library of flea-market-sourced vinyl, Littler both meets and exceeds
expectations. A reel-to-reel deck, the audiophile’s choice, dominates the
back bar, bordered by tapes from Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Blondie, and
Rod Stewart. Viewed from the dining room, Littler’s wall of sound resembles
a kind of art installation. But it serves as more than a mere backdrop.
When a needle hits a groove or a tape hisses to life, diners hear more than
Gram Parson’s reedy-voiced rendition of “Hickory Wind.” In this digital
moment, when chefs use the antiseptic word concept to describe
restaurants, and scalable fast-casual is the entrepreneurial grail, Littler
wants you to know that it’s an analog restaurant, a singular space, where real
live humans work the turntable and the reel-to-reel, and bright-eyed
Amanda Orser tarragon-braises rabbit, bakes Ritz, and cranks the volume
nightly.
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