Oak’s tasty roots spread beyond Fourteenth

BOULDER — Old-timers who live in the folklore-rich Ozarks of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas like to describe their homeland this way: “The hills ain’t as high as the hollers is deep.” At the bottom of those hollows, crystal-clear streams meander through thick forests of hickory and oak.

The wood of those oaks, and the smoke it produces when burned, are treasured by food-lovers from backyard barbecuers to top-notch chefs — and that’s how Oak at Fourteenth got its name. Its oven and grill burn white American oak from the Ozarks of Arkansas.

“That’s the staple of our restaurant here,” said Eric Corff, general manager of the popular eight-year-old eatery just off Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall. “Our motto is ‘Smoked, shared and cocktail paired’ — not to mention how great and boutique-y our wine list is. We specialize in supreme hospitality and the best service — with that oak oven as our backbone.

“Oak imparts that smoke and wood flavor without imparting cherry or hickory,” he said. “It’s a very neutral flavor but it still gives you that char and smoke without giving you another flavor.”

That flavor is smoked into many items on a contemporary, seasonal menu that nearly always will feature some Oak standards such as tomato-braised meatballs with grits, a popular kale and apple salad — “We probably sell more kale than anybody else in Colorado,” Corff said — and a double cheeseburger he describes as “awesome.” But it’s also updated with new items nearly every week.

“We make our own bitters, our own syrups, our own root beer, ginger beer,” Corff said. “If we can’t find a product, we’ll make it.

“Our goal is to get the best products we can possibly provide for our guests,” he said. “We source as local as we possibly can, but in the wintertime in our great mountains it’s hard to find fresh tomatoes. Depending on what we can get, we might have clam sausage risotto instead of shrimp risotto. We do more rustic things, too, like braised short ribs.”

The restaurant’s driving forces are proprietors Bryan Dayton and Steve Redzikowski. Dayton, a certified sommelier, also is passionate about mixed drinks, ran his own cocktail catering service and led the beverage program at Boulder’s Frasca Food and Wine. That’s where he met Redzikowski, a chef who also had stints in New York, Aspen and the Napa Valley. The pair reunited in Boulder in 2010 to open Oak, then reimagined its design and menu after a fire closed the restaurant.

Oak’s owners have a sister restaurant at 3350 Brighton Blvd. in Denver’s RiNo district. Fittingly called Acorn, it features small and shared plates in an industrial space, and is where Corff worked before coming to Oak. Their other central Denver venture is Brider, described as a “casual rotisserie and seasonal market concept” with counter service on the ground floor of the Nichols building at 1644 Platte St, just north of the large REI store.. “Brider” is a French term for trussing a piece of meat for the rotisserie.

Back in Boulder, Dayton hopes by mid-March to open a Spanish-influenced restaurant called Corrida in the Pearl West development at 10th and Walnut streets. Corff said the rooftop restaurant, with views of the Flatirons, will focus on dry-aged steaks. Former Oak general manager Jenica Flippo, who started as a server at Acorn, “will be curating the menus there and watching me to make sure I don’t buy any stupid stuff,” Corff said, adding that “she’s a great wine buyer.”

To work at a place like Oak, Corff said, “you kind of have to know about wine. Most of our servers are level 1 or level 2 sommeliers. If we pass a wine or spirits or beer class, Bryan will pay for half of it.”

The Court of Master Sommeliers, which Corff described as “the most accredited wine school in the world,” travels the country, staging classes in Colorado twice a year. The school held classes Feb. 19-20 in Boulder, he said, “and we have three servers getting their ‘Level 1 som’ certification at that class.”

The restaurants’ owners, Corff said, “are almost like educators, making this all about making yourself better if you want to. They really specialize in moving people up through the system.
Corff estimated that Oak employs “about 40 people in front of the house and about 40 in the back,” many of them part-timers.

“A lot of students here in Boulder need these jobs, but we only hire people who want to better themselves,” he said. “Our goal is to surround ourselves with people you think you can make better than yourself.

“Nothing makes me more proud than hiring a server who thinks they’d like to go into management and then watching them do it. We have very much that family, that nurturing feel. If I were going to open a restaurant, that would be my value, my forethought.”

For a career or for a business, that’s a way to grow something solid and enduring — much like an oak.

If you go:

Oak at Fourteenth

1400 Pearl St., Boulder

303-444-3622

oakatfourteenth.com

Also see Exec Travel story in BizWest’s March 2018 issue: Gotta get away: Warm-weather destination tips for the sophisticated traveler

on Facebook on LinkedIn