Standing half a block off Boulder’s Pearl Street pedestrian mall, the Black Cat Restaurant doesn’t look like much at first glance from the street. Located in the former space of a Cold Stone Creamery, Black Cat is quietly building a reputation for some of Boulder and the Front Range’s most inspired cuisine. And like many great restaurants, it foregoes an ostentatious façade for a restrained, unassuming exterior. Here, the showcase is the food, not the front entrance or the décor.

For that, we can thank Eric Skokan, the Black Cat’s soft-spoken but passionate chef and co-owner. For him, the restaurant is the culmination of a 20-plus year career in the kitchen, and a chance to reflect—through his food—on where he’s been and where he’s going.

That journey began, humbly enough, when Skokan worked his way through college at the University of Virginia as a cook at Tippy’s Taco House, where his claim to culinary fame was making the guacamole each night. He graduated in 1993, and transitioned into an apprenticeship at the Silver Thatch Inn. Skokan worked his way up to sous chef, and after the executive chef was fired, Skokan slid into that role, too.

“I thought I knew a lot, but I was humbled,” he says today. It was also, Skokan notes, “the beginning of fusion cuisine. Cool food equated to tall food.” The people came in droves…250 to 300 a night.

After two years, it was time for a change. Restaurant Nora, in Washington D.C., was just the kind of change Skokan needed at just 28 seats and perhaps 40 customers a night. Restaurant Nora’s approach was meticulous, not to mention a decade and a half ahead of its time, which meant local, seasonal, and organic (in 1999, Nora became the first certified organic restaurant in the country).

“The idea that we shouldn’t serve strawberries in Washington D.C. in January was revolutionary,” Skokan says.

By 1995, he had moved again, this time to San Francisco, and a vegetarian restaurant named Valentine’s Café. Skokan’s culinary perspective was nudged yet again.

“San Francisco was different. The dishes didn’t have a lot of pizzazz. It wasn’t about flames, or elaborate garnishes, or height,” he explains. “There were no fireworks. We took pride in the quality of the ingredients and in the mastery of techniques.”

Not long after San Francisco, Skokan found himself in the foothills above Boulder at Gold Lake, a mountain resort and spa. Gold Lake wanted a spa-oriented menu for its restaurant that worked at high altitude, a menu that blended Rocky Mountain fare such as elk with the unique dietary tendencies of its clientele. Skokan was the man for the job, and spent nearly ten years crafting local, seasonal, organic, from-scratch dishes.

There was one step left in the evolution, though, and on November 11, 2006 it became a reality when Skokan officially opened the doors at Black Cat. The hallmark of Black Cat has been an inspired menu that changes daily, based on what’s in season and available locally from the farmers and ranchers with whom Skokan has built personal relationships.

The penultimate realization of that ethic of cooking and eating may be the restaurant’s Dirt Dinners, which run from spring through fall, currently. In those dinners, Skokan serves foods that come from his own home garden in North Boulder.

“It allows the dining public to conceptualize the true season,” he says. “To focus on the agricultural cycle as it’s experienced from spring through summer into fall.”

For example, over the course of 2008, Skokan’s home harvest began with spinach, peas, mustard greens, beets, turnips, carrots and lettuce in spring. Summer yielded cucumber, eggplant, corn, peaches and tomatoes. By fall, the Dirt Dinner menus featured apples, leeks, pumpkin and pears.

And while patrons experienced a culinary journey of the seasons, Skokan experienced a culinary journey of the heart.

“I went from being a chef who was in total control, who created food that defied gravity and the seasons,” he explains, “to a chef who slowly lost that hubris. The Dirt Dinners were a final letting go.”

To the degree that such a letting go was an intentional act of submission to the region and its seasons, Skokan has proven himself a visionary intent on defining a gastronomic identity for the Front Range. It’s not that the local, seasonal, organic ethic is new to Boulder, or to Colorado more generally. But what is unique is the way in which Black Cat wholeheartedly embraces that ethic with sincerity, authenticity, focus and passion. It’s also worth noting that the ethic itself can’t automatically produce fine cuisine—the base ingredients require a skilled artisan to showcase their potential, and Skokan does it well.

Take, for example, my recent trip to Black Cat for dinner in January 2009. Wanting to eat as close to Black Cat’s ethic as I could, I began by ordering a glass of local cabernet franc from Colorado’s Bookcliff Vineyards. My appetizer was a smoked trout, served with a juniper vinaigrette and blue spruce needles. Juniper and blue spruce, you’ll note, both grow very well here in Colorado (Skokan joked that the blue spruce was “the only thing green in his garden” in January). For dinner, I enjoyed a grilled whole quail with con fit stuffing, served over a bed of wild rice and mushrooms, pumpkin puree, yellow carrots, and an orange sauce. The dish, I couldn’t help but notice, was wholly evocative of the winter season, with its whole bird, root vegetables and squash, and citrus. It was an artful blend of the rustic and the refined. To conclude the meal, I finished with a flourless chocolate cake paired with a house-made amaretto (Black Cat strives for the bar to mimic the kitchen in its from-scratch, local ethic).

In total, it was a dining experience punctuated by food that made me want to eat—not in a “drawn in the by French fryer at McDonald’s” kind of way—but rather in a more intellectual and emotional way. The service was unhurried and diners in a rush might perceive it as slow. It was a relaxed dining experience that unfolded at a pace which encouraged taking one’s time and truly enjoying the meal.

The restaurant industry, I find, can be one driven by trends—tall food, exotic food, fusion cuisine, molecular gastronomy. But what do we call this new trend…the locavore, seasonal, organic movement? It is a return to the pre-industrial, pre-agribusiness way we used to cook and eat. Does that make it retro? Or artisanal? Or nostalgic? Or a rediscovering of our roots? I can’t say for sure, but I do know that we can find it at Black Cat, and what we find there is that culinary perspective executed masterfully.

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