The Modern Hotel and Bar
If ever I needed a reminder that Boise’s food scene is getting progressively better, it’s a recent bite of The Modern Hotel and Bar’s potato salad. Okay, it was a fingerling potato salad with arugula and house-made pancetta, but a potato salad nonetheless — and it induced the eye-rolls and involuntary sighs of a much fancier dish. There was something intuitively right about it, something subtle and just a little surprising.
GQ writer Brett Martin had a similar experience when he visited The Modern for a 2013 article. “It had long since become clear,” he writes, “that the fortuitous collision of political, philosophical, health, and fashion movements that together form the Food Revolution had, over the past decade, penetrated nearly every corner of American life...
We the people have come to rely on, indeed feel entitled to, good food everywhere.” That now apparently includes Boise. Along with The Modern’s already famous cocktail program, Martin had a gnocchi dish he described as “ethereal.”
That this low-slung, once threadbare, former ‘60s-era Travelodge in Boise’s Linen District would become a symbol of America’s culinary ascendence carries a little irony for Elizabeth Tullis, The Modern’s owner.
“When we opened in 2007, we did not have food,” she says. “I was planning on having a bar, because I just can’t imagine staying in a hotel without a bar.” But she’d also been in the food business “and it wasn’t a place I wanted to go again.”
Then in 2009, Remi Courcenet—a Burgundian who’d moved to Boise planning to spend a single year learning English while washing dishes at Café de Paris—came on board as bar manager. “It didn’t take me very long,” Tullis recalls, “to figure out it was a waste of his talents not have him deal with food. So I called him in for a meeting one day and said ‘Remi . . . I want to convert these two hotel rooms into a kitchen and I want you to run it.’” Having said that, Tullis breaks down laughing. “We just jumped off that cliff.”
The two hotel rooms were in a rather cramped section of the main building, around the patio from the bar and not the most appealing bit of real estate for guests. “We called it the Easy Bake Kitchen,” Courcenet says, through a still-prominent French accent, of the rudimentary kitchen they built. “We were cooking with one panini press, a couple of induction burners and a home range.” A photograph of that early kitchen looks like it was snapped in a rumpled dorm room. Still, it was a major step up from the wasabi peas and peanuts Courcenet remembers serving before the remodel.
“The idea was to just offer a bar menu that had some interesting food,” he says, “that wasn’t just your typical bar food like chicken wings and fried things.”
Right from the start, they succeeded — even in that Easy Bake kitchen. I reviewed The Modern in 2009 for the Idaho Statesman and loved the tartine platter that arrived looking like an edible game of tic-tac-toe and the cumin guacamole that I wrote “lets the clear, clean flavors of fresh ingredients speak for themselves.”
Chef Nate Whitley has run the kitchen since 2012, refining an already solid formula, while focusing more purposely on local, seasonal food. “It was probably good timing for me to find this place,” says the young chef who had worked at Boise’s respected BB Strands and Amore restaurants before doing time in several San Francisco restaurants. He liked the idea of ambitious bar food coming out of a less than elaborate kitchen: “I think I was kind of in a place personally where that was really going to be what I was into . . . trying to work in slightly an unorthodox setting.”
After burning out one-too-many household ranges, though, he and the rest of the staff realized they couldn’t move ahead without improvements. In March they completely remodeled their beloved Easy Bake kitchen.
“We were at a point,” says Remi Courcenet, “where food became such a big part of the Modern Bar that it was getting difficult to stay creative and be able to handle all that volume . . . So the whole idea was to just upgrade to a real commercial kitchen, like a 10-burner gas range, a couple of ovens, a salamander and a full hood system.”
The new kitchen hasn’t moved from those two converted motel rooms behind the bar, nor has it — as evidenced by my excellent potato salad — lost its culinary soul. It has, however, opened up a new opportunity.
“It will be the natural evolution for the Modern to move on and do brunch,” says Courcenet. He thinks weekend brunch is an underrepresented part of the Boise food scene and hopes to start offering the Modern’s take by early summer.
But don’t expect the usual brunch fare.
“What matters is giving people an experience,” Courcenet says of what could also describe the raison d’être for the whole iconoclastic hotel. “It’s about having a vision and wanting to do that instead of trying to think about what people expect from you and just give them what’s expected . . . We like to surprise.”
The Modern Hotel and Bar | @modernhotel
Chef Nate Whitley | @natemyproblem
