Judie’s Restaurant
51 North Pleasant St., Amherst, 413-253-3491
Open daily from 11:30 a.m.
Entrées to $19.95
Wimpy had his hamburgers, Proust his madeleines. Judie has her popovers.
“I wanted a signature item,” says Judie Teraspulsky, the proprietor of the restaurant on North Pleasant Street that she opened 32 years ago. Last summer she doubled the footprint of the place by taking over Barsi’s, a biker place with a scuffed bar that was replaced by rainforest granite. The new interior is wildly eclectic, like her food; says Judie, “Everything is integrated on my menu.”
First, the popover-integrated dishes. There are the basil pesto chicken popover, gumbo popover, shrimp scampi popover, sirloin tip popover and the turkey “pop” pie which has turkey simmered in Madeira mushroom sauce with peas, fire-roasted corn and carrots, stuffed in a popover with garlic mascarpone mashed potatoes topped with sliced red onions and cranberry sauce.
The food is designed to please no matter what your philosophical leanings might be. The Trout Small Meal is a half filet of boneless rainbow in Creole seasoning. This works for the upscale-on-a-budget for $10 but Judie, God love her, goes even farther by adding grain as a starch. A small mould of couscous, drunk on Dos Equis beer (a sauce made because someone “over-poured,” according to Judie,) is studded with walnuts and “lemon praline,” so what’s not to like?
Another nice grain side is bulgur wheat, re-born. It is exquisite and very, very flavorful. The Basa Small Meal, sweet white catfish in gumbo, is served with a mold of bulgur wheat that is sautéed and partnered with chopped yellow squash, onions, sun dried tomato, zucchini, garlic, white wine, vegetable stock and olive oil. You’d never know the grain once had a dusty existence in a silo somewhere.
My companion had the mussels, which were perfectly fresh, as advertised on the menu. They were mussels from Prince Edward Island steamed with leeks, garlic, fresh fennel, tomatoes, lemon butter and white wine and of course French bread crusting (add a couple of bucks for extra bread). A lot of this is menu-writing at its finest, but any chef will tell you that incorporating all those ingredients in an app that costs a fortune to store (mussels are quick to spoil) is not cheap. It’s delicious, however, and worth the $9.95 we forked out for it.
The biggest seller, this one for the fun- and fat-loving, is a jumbo lamb shank—braised jumbo lamb shank on the bone with ginger mint herbs served in “our invention of a crisp shredded potato pancake” and stuffed with grilled tomatoes, browned onions and marscarpone mashed potatoes, with a burgundy lamb jus.
Directly beneath that dish on the menu is a chaste “Lite Weigh:” scallops with salad greens, squash, broccoli, roasted red peppers and caramelized onions with pearl couscous in a garlic lime Marsala wine sauce. Additional information reassures the diner, “This is under 19 grams of fat and under 1,000 calories.”
If you miss this on the menu, Judie is there to tell you about the protein and grains in the dish. She is everywhere: on the label of the jar of poppy seed jam, inside the cookbooks for sale at the counter, on the wait station video screens and on the floor, where she embraces most visitors.
Judie is one of the genuine brands in Western Massachusetts’ restaurant industry. On Christmas eve at around six, when most of Amherst was tucked in for the evening, she was there in a bright pink turtleneck, greeting the lone customer sidling up to the bar for his martini and dinner.
