This is a a local food writers review of meatloaf from a Italian Restaurant that an acquaintance of mine is the owner/head chef at. Meatloaf done right is a beautiful thing...
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Despite Farro's Italian accent, the dish that got me this time wasn't Italian at all. It was Franklin's meatloaf (called a "Tuscan meatloaf" on the menu, but really just plain old meatloaf with mushroom gravy and garlic-spiked mashed potatoes). I've eaten it three times in four days and will probably have it again when I'm done writing this.
Franklin's meatloaf (like Franklin's fusion and Franklin's not-quite-French/Mediterranean) should never have worked. He did everything I dislike about meatloaf — adding chopped bell pepper and carrot and celery to the mix, not wrapping it in bacon, giving me an end piece the first time I ordered it — but as with everything else I've seen him create that should've been a carnival of awfulness, Franklin made his meatloaf work through sheer dint of technique and rigid classicism. True, the standard meatloaf recipe calls for a kind of mirepoix of bulking vegetables, but most cooks then make the mistake of undercooking the loaf, leaving it like a meaty fruitcake studded with tough and inedible chunks of carrot or onion or pepper. Not Franklin. And while most cooks have learned that a great meatloaf can only be made with a three-way mix of beef, pork and veal, they often fail to take into consideration the variations in cooking times lent by the amalgamation of three different meats or the loaf's propensity to desiccate in the heat of the oven (a problem generally repaired by the splinting measure of additional bacon laid atop the cooking loaf). But not Franklin.
What he makes at Farro is a hyper-classical meatloaf: excellent quality meats, handled with the care of a French forcemeat, spiked with an Italian mirepoix and then bulked out with the addition of faro, the restaurant's namesake grain. Cooked perfectly (low and slow and, I would guess, with the addition of pork fat to the initial mix), even the end piece I was served on my first night in the dining room was lovely: solid and heavy in texture, topped with just a light nap of scratch porcini mushroom gravy, absolutely delicious. So good, in fact, that I refused to share any of it with Laura, promising we'd come back the next night and get another order that she could taste.
Which we did.
And then I didn't give her any of the second one, either."