Photo by James Fox-Smith
Dishes arrive table-side in sizzling black iron skillets accompanied by fresh salads and slices of crisp, house-made flatbread—a format that definitely encourages sharing. The wood-fired fish of the day was a thick fillet of red snapper topped with an olive, tomato, and preserved lemon sauce.
Making good on 230 years of hospitality
You could say it was rum that drove Regina and Doug Charboneau to open Natchez’s newest restaurant in the city’s oldest building. With the couple’s son Jean Luc, Doug Charboneau has long harbored an ambition to establish a rum distillery in Natchez. So father and son attended the American Distilling Institute’s Craft Distillers Conference to research the possibilities, explained Regina, who is a nationally renowned restaurateur. “Doug came home and said, ‘I know the perfect building for the distillery. It’s right by King’s Tavern.’ ”
As a landmark, everyone in Natchez knows King’s Tavern. Constructed in the 1790s using sun-dried bricks and bargeboards from scrapped Mississippi river flatboats, King’s Tavern has marked the southernmost terminus of the old Natchez Trace trading route since the city’s earliest days. In its more than 220-year history, the building has served as an inn, watering hole, staging shop, mail station, private home, and, most recently, as a restaurant popular for steaks and smoked prime rib. That restaurant closed in early 2012, and by the time the Charboneaus came looking for a place to make rum, King’s Tavern had been shuttered for over a year. “The building just spoke to me,” said Regina, who, as chef de cuisine of the American Queen steamboat company, proprietor of Twin Oaks bed and breakfast, and founder of four preceding eateries, wasn’t exactly looking for another restaurant project. But the ambience of the ancient structure stirred something. The couple bought both buildings, and the Charboneaus’ rum distillery project evolved in a new direction.
With great age comes great character, and King’s Tavern has accrued it in spades. Although the building required extensive renovation, the Charboneaus have preserved the rustic tavern ambience that fairly oozes from the National Historic Register-listed building’s time-blackened timbers and rough brick walls. Sparsely furnished with antique artifacts and period portraits of early Natchez residents, the inn’s interior retains the flavor of an early colonial outpost. Wall sconces cast a honeyed glow throughout the dining rooms and across a long bar built of reclaimed whiskey barrel staves, setting the bottles of artisanal spirits behind it to glittering. But more about that later.
Communally, guests gather around Amish-style picnic tables, choosing plates and silverware from a rack and silver bucket in the middle of each, and order from the bar once they’ve made their selections. Concessions to modernity are limited to the inevitable illuminated EXIT sign by the front and rear doorways and a flat screen TV in a side dining room for the sports crowd. Climb the narrow staircase to the floor where inn guests were once quartered and there’s a dining room with front and back balconies for private dinners, mixology classes, and other special events. There’s a beer garden out back, with plans taking shape for BYOB (Bring Your Own Blanket) nights offering outdoor dining and cocktail tastings when the weather is right.
“I’ve done all kinds of restaurants, and at King’s Tavern I wanted to do something that would be durable,” said Regina, explaining the casual dining approach she is presenting here. With building secured, she set about developing a food and drink philosophy that would be at home in the city’s oldest structure, while keeping a foot firmly in the eat-local, farm-to-table movement energizing the kitchens of the twenty-first century South. “Our criteria was that we would serve only those things that we could make entirely ourselves,” she said.
To that end the original kitchen was restored around a wood-burning pizza oven from which emerge all the menu’s major dishes. Outside, a plot of raised garden beds provides more than half the fresh greens and herbs required to satisfy the menu. In the kitchen, Chef Allison Richard tends the wood oven, preparing the gourmet flatbreads, cast-iron fish dishes, and artisanal salads that comprise King’s Tavern’s menu. A native of tiny Raceland in far south Louisiana, Richard attended the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University and did stints at the Institut Paul Bocuse in Écully, France, as well as at Chef Susan Spicer’s Mondo restaurant in New Orleans’ Lakeview before making her way to Natchez.
“It’s a different cooking experience for me,” noted Richard as she deftly rotated flatbreads around the glowing interior of the wood oven. The flatbreads (think gourmet pizzas without the stereotypical tomato-sauce-and-pepperoni approach) are the mainstay of the Tavern’s small, but satisfying, menu. Made with high-quality flours and delivered to the table piping hot on wax-paper-lined trays to encourage sharing, they put the emphasis on simple combinations of house-made ingredients, locally sourced gourmet items, and greens grown onsite.
Popular (and delicious) combinations include one topped with thin-sliced peppered brisket, caramelized onions, and horseradish cream. The shrimp with smoked tomatoes choice (light garlic cream, spinach, smoked tomatoes, shrimp, and chèvre cheese) was eaten too quickly to be photographed; and an elegant Madeline (San Marzano tomato sauce with fresh tomatoes, basil, and locally made mozzarella) was popular with the younger visitors. Other surprising combinations on this winter menu included a bacon and brussels sprouts flatbread; another blending house-made Italian sausage with roasted red peppers, spinach, and mozzarella; and a vegetarian choice offering four seasonal vegetables topped with mozzarella pearls.
Besides flatbreads, Richard uses the oven to prepare other dishes, too. Appetizers include wood-fired selections such as oysters in pepper marinade or a trio of creamy cheeses served with olives and celery. Both are prepared in small black-iron skillets, consigned to the flames, and delivered to the table bubbling hot and accompanied by flat bread chips and assorted sides for dipping in the luscious sauces.
The restaurant’s wood-fired fish of the day offers a thick fillet of sustainably sourced red snapper, oven roasted with a choice of toppings: either a marinade of olive oil, garlic, basil, and black pepper or olive, tomato, and preserved lemon sauce. Either combination is delivered sizzling in its iron skillet, accompanied by a salad of seasonal greens and wedges of that delicious flatbread. Presentations are simple and rustic, with an emphasis on freshness, flavor, and local produce that somehow manages to be contemporary and in keeping with the two-hundred-year-old surroundings, all at the same time.
This being a tavern run by people working to establish a craft distillery, it will come as no surprise that spirits are taken seriously here. Behind the bar, Ricky Woolfolk brings a measure of mad scientist zeal to every drink he makes. “Everything I do, I try to achieve balance,” Woolfolk noted. “An eighth of an ounce can make or break a cocktail.”
Woolfolk makes his own fruit infusions, sodas, bitters, and more, blending them with small batch spirits from all over the world to create craft cocktails that are truly things of beauty. On a chilly Saturday evening, Ricky made a visitor his twist on a Manhattan: three drops of orange flower water on a cedar plank, which he then fired with a blowtorch. Once the wood began to smoke he upturned a martini glass onto it. Then into a beaker went one and a half ounces of Four Roses Bourbon, half an ounce of a fifty percent dilution of maple syrup and hot water, and half an ounce of Carpano Antico Formula vermouth. He finished it with a dash of angostura bitters, another of Fee Brothers Plum Bitters, and three drops of homemade moonshine clove tincture, which is actually a topical anesthetic.
Woolfolk learned his craft making cocktails in South Beach, Miami. But his family’s from Natchez, and he relishes the opportunity to be back in the community. “My great aunt is one of the five women on the Turning Angel,” he noted wryly. “Here I’ve got less of a family tree and more of a family onion.”
Keeping the emphasis on handmade goodness, Woolfolk hosts a series of mixology classes that take place upstairs at the tavern, teaching folks how to make a range of exceptional cocktails for themselves. Another treat on offer is a craft liquor store upstairs that sells all the rare, small-batch spirits put to good use behind the bar. So if you like something that you taste, you can pick up a bottle or two to take home. Doug Charboneau noted that in a couple of months patrons would have a new spirit to consider: the first batch of white rum from Charboneau Distillery should be available by later in the first quarter. Barrel-aged dark rums will follow in two to three years.
With fresh, inventive fare, high-style craft cocktails, and an ambience that has been two hundred years in the making, King’s Tavern manages to do something great. It returns Natchez’ oldest structure to commerce while offering fine food and drinks into the bargain. That’s worth a drive any day.
Details. Details. Details. King’s Tavern 619 Jefferson Street, Natchez, Miss. Open Thursday–Sunday, 11 am–11 pm (9 pm Sunday) (601) 446-5003
