Chuck Zumbrun

Tales from Skunk Hill

TW Fable

For our 17th anniversary Debbie and I went to TW Fable for dinner. TW Fable is located in Bluffton, many a hard mile from Skunk Hill. It takes us about an hour to get there.

TW Fable promotes themselves as farm to table. (fable, get it? TW are initials of the owners.)

It was nice. The decor was very hip and fresh. (Although necessary, I assume, I deplore the TV in the bar.)

The service was professional and excellent. We made our reservations on-line and they called us the day of reservations to confirm. That was a nice touch.

I love the farm to table idea, and I recognize the difficulties of it. If you live in Northern Indiana, a religious adherence to ‘farm to table’ seriously restricts what you can eat. Nonetheless I was surprised at the amount of tomatoes on the Fall menu. There are no fresh tomatoes in Indiana in November.

I ordered up the ‘Pan Seared Sea Scallops with Cold Tomato & Rosemary Salad.’ And it was delicious. The scallops were perfectly seasoned and cooked. The tomatoes however were sliced grape tomatoes, from California or Mexico or Chile and honestly tasted a bit funky. If you want to serve fresh tomatoes and you live Indiana, you really need to accept you can only do that in maybe July through October.

I had a deconstructed French onion soup that was clever and delicious.

Then the entree. Well. The server pointed out that they bought their pork from a local farm. What to do with that endorsement but order up the ‘Porterhouse Pork Chop with Cinnamon CousCous and Caramel Apples?’ Which I did, but shortly our server came back and informed me they didn’t have the porterhouse but were serving a bone-in lollypop chop instead. No problems, I was looking forward to that porterhouse chop, but a nice bone-in chop would be fine too. I was mainly interested in trying the cinnamon and apples, which I associate with desserts instead of as a main course.

The chop arrived, and there was no bone in evidence, certainly no long rib bone sticking out as you’d expect with the description of ‘lollypop.’ A bit of poking at it and it was obvious there was no bone at all.

Ah well, life is not perfect. It was quite tasty and cooked to absolute perfection. I was not thrilled with the cinnamon in a savory dish, but it was well executed, just not to my taste.

They were just packed with patrons on a Saturday night, it was great to see them doing so well. If TW Fable was closer to us we’d eat there often, and if you’re in Bluffton area it’s definitely worth a stop. Not perfect, but really, really good.

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