COURTESY OF TUSK & TROTTER
READERS CHOICE
BACON IS BEDROCK: A fig-jowl jam coats Tusk & Trotter’s house-cured and smoked pork belly and shoulder.
HIGH ON HOGS CHEF ROB NELSON’S ‘HIGH SOUTH’ CUISINE IS PEAK PORK. BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE
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t’s not hard to find a photograph of Chef Rob Nelson in a Hog hat. He’s “a Razorback through and through,” he told us, and he estimates he’s got about 25 such caps in his collection. What he didn’t know when he started acquiring them, though — back when he was a political science major at UA Fayetteville, of the mind to “go off to D.C. and change the world” — was that he’d end up making his living from the very sorts of beasts emblazoned on those hats, and that hogs would end up being the medium through which he’d connect food and community. At Nelson’s flagship American brasserie in downtown Bentonville, Tusk & Trotter, there’s a king-sized mural on the wall that greets you when you walk in the door. You can’t miss it — a line drawing of a pig segmented into six sections: butt, shoulder, belly, trotter, ham and loin. On the opposite wall is a blackboard that catalogues the farms from which Tusk & Trotter sources its ingredients: Ralston Family Farm, Bear Hollow Ranch, 44 Farms, Osage Creek 34 FEBRUARY 2020
ARKANSAS TIMES
Farms, among others. If you’re the kind of person that prefers their protein to resemble the animal from which it came as little as possible, you’ll still find plenty to eat, but you might also risk missing the point. Tusk & Trotter serves meat with an origin story, and what’s on the plate is meant to highlight, rather than mask, the qualities of the animal you’re being offered. Like its namesake, the menu is full of earthy Arkansas notes, protein and otherwise: Fried pig ear chips serve as the base for a “nacho” dish. Smoked loin and jowl dot a flatbread. Ground wild boar provides the base for a burger. There’s fig, muscadine, local greens, sorghum syrup, pickled watermelon rind and sweet tea-brined smoked catfish. “We’re very responsible and sustainable in the methods we use in our cooking,” Nelson said. “That’s the heart of it.” Being able to get ingredients from a small geographical radius, Nelson said, means you’re getting a taste not only of the herd, but the Ozark Mountain terrain on which its members grazed. “It makes it
more true to the area,” Nelson said. “We’re very unique in the Ozark Mountains with the different types of nuts and everything that [pigs] can forage on. Like, with Bansleys [Berkshire Ridge] Farms out in Harrison — they let the hogs out there kinda just free range and do their thing, and they develop a unique flavor because of what you can find in that vicinity.” That blackboard list also represents decades of relationship-building on Nelson’s part. Before he opened Tusk & Trotter in June of 2011, Nelson worked in kitchens across Northwest Arkansas, and his years at Bentonville’s River Grille Steakhouse served as a springboard for his connections with Ozark Mountains farmers and ranchers. He’d visit operations like Ewe Bet Farm in Cave Springs, get to know the farmer and their operation, and observe how the animals were treated. “If it was a small farm,” Nelson said, “I would buy a couple of heads, three or four heads at a time. And hopefully that would make them motivated to start growing their herds a little bit more at a time, and to be
