Colorful vegetables on the menu at True Food Kitchen. (Photo via Facebook)

Dish of the week: Crudités platters

Where to find it: True Food Kitchen, Tyber Creek, PassionFish, Convivial

Sit down at a restaurant and a platter of cut up, raw vegetables is probably the last thing that is going to grab your attention. Crudités platters, as they’re known, are mainstays of catering spreads and housewarming parties everywhere, right up there with cheese trays and mini quiches. But given the choice of other options, who really wants those hard florets of broccoli or baby carrots beginning to blush white with a film as they dehydrate?

In the last several years, though, stories have buzzed about the trendiness of raw veggies platters in New York, New Orleans, and Chicago. A beautiful platter was part of Laduree’s (3060 M St. NW) spring opening in Georgetown, though the item has since been rotated off the menu.

There’s not a catering menu that doesn’t have a crudités option, but around town restaurants dedicating space to a full crudités platter are few and far between. The word shows up on many menus around town as a garnish for buffalo wings and beer cheese spreads. Usually it’s more of an effort to sound fancy than anything else, a French word for what amounts to a garnish of carrot and celery sticks. At some places like Due South (301 Water St. SE), count yourself lucky when a few haircot verts are added to the mix.

So when previewing True Food Kitchen (7100 Wisconsin Ave.,) before their Bethesda grand opening last week, we looked right past the Farmers Market Crudités ($13) on the “vegetables and fruit” section of the menu. That was before catching a glimpse of the towering leaves of romaine lettuce, hues of carrots and radishes, vibrantly green rapini and string beans, and spears of cucumber standing at attention out of a bowl of ice.

“It’s symbolism of what we do with the fresh vegetables and straight-up serving of them,” says Greg Kopit, who left D.C.’s Fat Baby Inc. restaurants (Estadio, Doi Moi, Proof, etc) to help manage the latest outpost of the health-driven restaurant.

Approaching two dozen locations nationally, True Food Kitchen first opened locally in Fairfax’s Mosaic District. But its heart is in California. Healthy and flavorful food is stressed. Servers wear t-shirts with words like “honest,” “farmy,” and “green goddess.”

Just as vital as fresh, cold, crisp vegetables for a crudités platter is the dip they’re dunked into. Here, two bowls are served: a tzatziki and creamy black olive tapenade.

Crudités show up in multiples at newly opened Bloomingdale wine bar Tyber Creek (84 T St. NW). They’re on the happy hour menu with green goddess dressing ($5) and again on the dinner menu surrounding a hummus served with fava beans, endive, and flat bread ($10).

One technique crucial to an advanced crudités platter is to blanch the green vegetables briefly than shock them with an ice water bath to bring out their color and just slightly soften the texture to get a snap in the bite. Tyber Creek uses vegetable stock to blanch the lot of their veggies, carrots and all.

Putting the crudités on ice like a plateau of raw shellfish keeps the vegetables perky and at peak freshness until they get munched on. Along with True Food Kitchen, that’s how crudités come out at PassionFish (7187 Woodmont Ave. Bethesda), along with a bowl of buttermilk ranch ($9, and $5 during happy hour).

Then you get a dish like the Bagna Càuda ($15), which shows up on the brunch menu at Convivial (801 O St. NW) and takes the dish in an unexpected direction, one where the word crudités is used not only to sound French. Chef Cedric Maupillier layers shavings of 15 types of fresh raw vegetables over a decadent anchovy sauce, a dish inspired by his grandmother’s table growing up in France, the country credited for crudités. Maupillier is poetic expounding on the dish in an Instagram post. He recalls a “dish of the flavor of the riviera, of the scent of the sun, the sea and the land. This is a dish that is anchored in the local gastronomie from Piedmont to Marseille. It is a dish that reflect a spirit of sharing, conviviality and for my case some loving family reunion.”

Previously on Dish Of The Week:
Bring On The Bao
Stop And Taste The Rose
Beat The Humidity With Cold Noodles
Diving Into Seafood Towers
Grilled And Smoky Asparagus