Phantom Gourmet: The Foundry In Easton

EASTON – What are the ingredients of a great restaurant? Excellent service, a warm and friendly atmosphere, and of course, great food. At The Foundry in Easton, all those ingredients combine to create one delicious dining experience.

While The Foundry may be brand new, owner Neil Levine is no restaurant rookie.

"I've worked as a chef. I've worked as a bartender. I've worked as an owner. I've been a manager. I've bussed tables," said Levine. "My goal is to send you out of this place with a smile on your face, so whatever it takes to get that job done, we're going to do."

At The Foundry, Levine has created a space with an intimate dining room on one side, a cool and comfortable bar on the other side, and food from all over the world coming out of the kitchen.

"You've got Italian, you've got Asian, you've got French, you've got all different types of cuisines, and what we try and do is bring a little of that to everything we do," Levine explained.

The man making it all happen back in the kitchen is chef Logan Powell, whose high standards are evident on every plate.

"When we opened this place, the chef said to us, 'Let's be the best restaurant within 20 miles,' and I said, 'Why can't we just be the best restaurant?' And everything that we do strives to bring us to that level," said Levine.

First and foremost, that means that virtually everything is made from scratch.

"We're butchering our own meats; we're making our own stocks, our own sauces, our own demi-glaces," listed Levine. "You can taste the difference in everything that we serve out of the kitchen."

Dishes at The Foundry come in all shapes and sizes, and many are meant for sharing. That includes the addictive Angry Oysters, showcasing fresh shucked shellfish, coated in a crispy Cajun batter.

"You bite into it and you get the spice, the crunch, and the nice softness of the oyster and the freshness and deliciousness. It's just an explosion in your mouth," Levine said about the popular dish.

There's also roasted tomato and house made burrata topped with basil pesto; short rib spring rolls with stuffed with smoked gouda; and Caribbean chicken wings with an authentic Jamaican sauce that brings just the right amount of heat and sweet.

"You don't want the spiciness to kill the deliciousness of the flavor, and it's that perfect blend of spicy, sweet, and spectacular," Levine added.

For a dish that's beautiful, bountiful, and bursting with flavor, he always recommends the Torched Tuna.

"We get some really fresh sushi grade ahi tuna, and we take a blow torch to it and we sear the outside of that tuna. We drizzle that with our homemade mango teriyaki sauce, and then we take a little bit of grilled pineapple salsa that's got a little bit of spicy, a little bit of sweet, it's absolutely delicious."

When it comes to entrees, you can go gourmet with a Boston cut sirloin covered in smoked tomato demi-glace and great hill blue cheese butter, or keep it casual with the 10-ounce, grass fed, Foundry Burger.

"We serve it with some aged cheddar cheese, some maple cured bacon, and you've got to get it with the fried egg on top with that nice loose yolk. When you break the yolk and it drizzles over the top of the burger you bite into it, it's like 'oh my god this is so delicious, how am I gonna eat this?'" Levine said.

One dish you'll have no problem eating, but might have a tough time finishing, is the big bowl of hearty, heartwarming Bolognese.

"You have to have a pasta dish on the menu, and if you're going to have a pasta dish, it's got to be the best pasta you can possibly serve," Levine explained. "So we start with our hand rolled pappardelle. Every day our chef makes fresh pasta dough. We stretch it out, crank it through the machine, he takes his knife, slices nice wide thick noodles. But we don't stop there. We take veal, beef, pork, lamb, pancetta, and braised beef short rib meat, and we introduce it to our house marinara. And all those flavors become friends, and they fall in love. And when you marry that up with a touch of cream, some aged parmesan cheese, we fold in that pasta, and every bit you taste that love. You taste that passion. It's so delicious."

Desserts at The Foundry are worth saving room for. While you can't go wrong with the giant chocolate chip cookie with salted caramel ice cream, Levine is a big fan of The Foundry's fresh new take on old-school Bananas Foster.

"We start with our homemade vanilla bean cheesecake ice cream. Then we make a homemade strawberry sauce that we drizzle over the top of that vanilla ice cream with some fresh sliced strawberries, a little bit of whipped cream off to the side. Then we take the classic bananas foster," Levine described.

"We slice up some bananas, we throw in some brown sugar, a little bit of butter, and some Cognac. We toss that in the sauté pan and flambé it up, you've got this beautiful, nice hot delicious banana kind of caramel sauce, we serve that in a bowl. The dish comes out to your table, you take your spoon of that hot banana mixture, you dip it over the ice cream and the ice cream starts to melt and becomes gooey and kind of drizzles down the plate. You stick your spoon in that, you eat it, it is like so good, so delicious, makes you feel so happy."

And happiness is what Levine is all about at The Foundry. Because making customers happy, makes him happy.

"You give people great food, you give them great service, you make them happy and you see the smiles on their faces, and there's no better feeling than that when you get that response from the customer," he said.

You can find The Foundry at 520 Foundry Street in South Easton, and online at thefoundrytable.com.

Watch Phantom Gourmet on Saturdays and Sundays at 10:30 and 11 a.m. on myTV38.