Gold Book Story - Shooting for the hip

Shooting for the hipGraze has martinis, real food 

(April 2008) Gold Book - BY BRANDY WELVAERT

 

Prepare to pamper yourself.  How about a Hot Tub, Silk Sheets and a Honeymoon in Vegas?

 

Drink all three and you’ll be a Silly Goose – another name for a Grey Goose vodka martini shaken with Vanilla schnapps, crème de banana, pineapple juice and simple syrup.  All thrse martinis and more are available at Graze: The Food Guru Experience, the new martini and appetizers bar at 5250 Utica Ridge Road, Davenport.

 

Graze is the second such restaurant for chef and “Food Guru” Peter Harman, who with his wife, Kim, also owns and operates Graze in Iowa City and Martini’s in Burlington, Iowa.  Int eh Quad-Cities, the Food Guru likely is best known for his 90-second cooking “moments”, which air on KWQC-TV6.

 

Graze restaurants offer a female-friendly non-sports bar atmosphere and “real food” with a twist.  The trademarked Chicken Lips, for example, are fried chicken tenders presented tapas-style with homemade sauces for sharing.

 

Graze’s martini menu features more than 60 drinks whose flavor rests on quality vodkas and gins and 100% fresh squeezed fruit juice.

 

“That’s the first thing I tell people when they pull up a chair,” says bar manager Dereck Fisher. “We spend about two-and-a-half hours a day squeezing juices.  WE also make all of our own sweet and sour and simple syrup.” That’s an extremely rare thing these days.

 

Graze dining rooms bring to mind not a trace of Crave or Sully’s, the restaurant and pub, respectively, formerly house there.  The walls are either rich, chocolatety brown or warm taupe with almost peachy overtones.  Pub tables with tall upholstered chairs populate the central area.  On the south side is a private dining room, an the dining room on the north side provides padded, high-backed booths for a quieter, more intimate experience.

 

“We basically cleaned the kitchen and bought a couple of new pieces of equipment,” Chef Harman says of the space. “We gutted the whole front of the house.”

 

Food Guru Harman landed in Burlington about a decade ago after losing a bet on which he won’t elaborate. To say he lost “is enough” of an explanation, the 48-year old chef says.  Today he lives in Burlington with his wife and their miniature dachshund, Toots.

 

“I married a certified Iowa farm girl, and I’m happy here,” he says. “We met in Iowa.”

 

Chef Harman enrolled in culinary school in Florida in 1975 because he thought it would be “a good place to get something to eat.  Back then I was into the eating end of things, he says jokingly.

 

Today he splits his time among his restaurants; his Food Guru TV studio and classroom at Martini’s where he films cooking spots that air on television and via podcast, and where he treats diners to food and food education; and the Chicken Lip Foundation, the Food Guru’s non-profit wing.

 

Those interested in his recipes and cooking podcasts can download them from the Food Guru Web site, www.foodguru.com. A limited number of recipes and videos are free, but a $9.99 membership fee provides access to all of the recipes and videos on the site.

 

“Right now the restaurant takes up the most time,” Chef Harman says, adding that it’s hard to choose which arena he likes most. “It’s like saying which kid is your favorite. It depends on the day, right?”

 

Yet the Food Guru is the Food Guru not just because “it’s a cool name,” as he puts it, but because he puts food first.

 

As he says, “food is the passion.”

 

Graze is located at 5250 Utica Ridge Road, Davenport.  The phone number is (563) 355-8646.  Food and beverage menus are available on the Web site, www.foodguru.com. Hours are 4 – 10pm Monday through Thursday and 4pm to midnight Friday and Saturday.  Later this year, the restaurant will open for lunch.

 Plop, plop, fizz, fizz 

“Bubbling martinis,” as they’re called at Graze, bubble and smoke thanks to hidden ingredient at the bottom of the glass; a small chunk of dry ice. Don’t worry, “it won’t hurt you, “ says Kim Harman, chef Peter Harman’s wife.

 

“It kind of gets gooey.  It turns into a pile of goo in t he bottom of the glass, and it stays there,” Ms. Harman says.  She adds that use of dry ice doesn’t require special martini glasses.  In fact, at Martini’s in Burlington, bubbling martinis sometimes are served in delicate hand-made glasses.