The Artisan’s Palate Launches New Spring Menu Following Rough Winter

When I ask Christa Csoka what drove the creation of her new spring/summer menu at The Artisan’s Palate, she starts talking before pausing mid-sentence then breaking into laughter.

“This is going to sound so fucking corny,” she warns, explaining her hesitation to finish the explanation, “but the produce speaks to me.”

For Csoka, who serves as owner, executive chef, bar director, gardener and any number of other titles at the NoDa establishment, it all starts in the ground.

Sometimes the produce comes from the small garden next to her building on East 36th Street, other times through special delivery from community partners like Deep Roots CPS Farm, or it might come from spots like Bush-N-Vine Farm in York, South Carolina, by way of Charlotte-based third-party vendor Freshlist.

What’s important to Csoka is that, wherever it comes from, it arrives fresh. And if the produce speaks to her, this season the strawberries have been screaming.

Csoka’s new menu includes a strawberry-glazed Verlasso salmon with grilled purple asparagus, strawberry beurre-blanc, pickled asparagus and crispy salmon skin. That pairs nicely with the new Rhuberry Fields Forever cocktail, which features Botanist gin, Zucca Rabarbaro, house-made strawberry basil shrub and strawberry cordial, egg white and rhubarb bitters.

The strawberries come from Bush-N-Vine, and Csoka knew as soon as they arrived that she could build something around them.

“I don’t know what it is, they’re just plump and lush and super, super sweet, more so than they were last year,” she tells me.

They’re perfect for the Artisan’s Burrata Salad, which she tweaks seasonally but currently includes brûlée strawberries on top, serving as a dressing of sorts.

“You get that little crunch and then the sweetness and it kind of drips into the rest of the salad,” she explains. “They’re just really, really juicy this year.”

The new menu reflects a sense of springtime renewal for a restaurant that’s coming out of a tough winter.

In December, Csoka put out a plea for help after equipment malfunctions created unexpected bills at a time when the restaurant was already struggling financially. A crowdsourcing campaign raised just over half of what she needed to continue, and a surge of customers who showed up to support the business helped usher the Artisan’s Palate team into spring.

Over the last six months, Csoka has worked piecemeal to fix urgent issues such as the air conditioning and plumbing. When I visited on a recent May afternoon, the ice machine was still down but she expected to have it finally replaced before the end of the month.

For Csoka, the rough winter was another obstacle along a line of issues The Artisan’s Palate has faced. She opened the restaurant as an inclusive, femme-centered, LGBTQIA-affirming space where patrons of the arts and foodies could connect in 2019, and since then she’s weathered COVID-19 along with repeated vandalism attacks and break-ins at her storefront.

Read more: The Artisan’s Palate Is an Art Gallery Restaurant with a Femme-Forward Focus (2021)

Then there’s the struggle to get all those guests down the street along the main stretch of NoDa to visit her part of the neighborhood on the border of The Plaza.

While COVID-19 was harmful for the obvious reasons related to restaurant shutdowns, it also put a halt on housing construction that had provided the promise of foot traffic at the time when The Artisan’s Palate first opened.

For example, a townhome development on Latin Quarters Lane across from the street from the restaurant was originally scheduled to be open by 2022 but only recently started moving residents in.

“The pandemic kind of just put a halt on so many things that when I moved into this area were planned,” Csoka says.

She was glad to see her friend Chef Sam Diminich open Grey’s Diner just a block over, which may help bring some people to the area where Plaza Shamrock meets NoDa.

In the meantime, Csoka remains focused on getting the word out about her new menu. She said mixed messaging has resulted in many people not quite knowing what The Artisan’s Palate.

Upon opening in 2019, she heavily promoted the coffee program, which led many residents to think it’s just a coffee shop. While she does open at 8 a.m. and serve amazing coffee, she doesn’t plug that so much anymore.
Then there’s the art gallery, which rotates local artists in and out every two months.

“I don’t think I’ll ever change that because it’s just really important to me,” says Csoka. “It always has been. My sister’s an artist and that’s my inspiration for a lot of what I do is from growing up with this idea of merging food and drink and art.”

Still, whatever people may know The Artisan’s Palate for, its strength is in its menu and the culinary mind of Csoka. Her new menu proves it.

Her favorite new dish is the braised lamb rib with farro piccolo tabouleh, lemon oregano and Castelvetrano olive gremolata, pomegranate arils, and agrodolce.

“I had them a long time ago, but it’s been a really long time and I just love lamb,” she explains. “It’s weird because you get a lamb shank, you get a lamb chop, but nobody really ever does lamb ribs and I was like, ‘Well, we’ve got to figure this out.’”

She first served the dish during one of her popular Women of Whiskey events, a monthly food-and-spirit tasting for which she partners with distillers and mixologists to pair three cocktails with three dishes.

Her April 30 event brought Grace Gonzalez, fourth-generation master distiller with El Mayor Tequila, to Charlotte from where she’s based in Jalisco, Mexico.

Csoka, who often sees the young woman who intern with her as students at Johnston & Wales University depart to other cities after graduation, it’s important to bring in folks like Gonzalez but also encourage them to stick around and help build Charlotte’s culinary scene.

Looking forward, Csoka is hoping to launch an ice cream program at the restaurant by midsummer. The idea came from a Women of Whiskey event for which Csoka made a carrot ice cream in partnership with Deep Roots CPS Farm, a regular produce provider and collaborator with Csoka.

Read more: Deep Roots CPS Farm Builds Network of Urban Farmers (2024)

Deep Roots co-owner Wisdom Jzar was captivated by the carrot ice cream, as were many of those in attendance for the event, and that lit a new fire under Csoka to start making ice cream and sorbetto regularly at the restaurant.

It will be yet another adaptation for the ever-evolving Artisan’s Palate, but whether it’s the coffee, art, cocktails or ice cream that brings you in the door, we suggest you stay for dinner. This menu is worth it, and the produce can speak to that.