The White Linen serves a 4-course tasting or an a la carte menu.  Their tasting is different in that the first and dessert course are set but the second course has a choice as does the entree course, which also sets the price of your tasting.  If you want less or just some optional starter shared plates that is also an option.   Chef Adam VanDonge and his wife Kasie opened the restaurant about 8 years ago, to offer a fine-dining experience to Topeka residents.   The food is American with French accents and changes monthly based on seasonal offerings.  It’s a small place in an historic old bank building.  The bar was in a room across the hall and servers would ferry cocktails and food across.   Pictures from the town’s past line the walls and the wine storage is now in one of the vaults.   It’s an attractive space but there was no white linen on the tables and the napkins were polyester.   It gets great reviews online but the food was mixed and service amateurish, but then our server was new and Chef was not in house as he was at a new concept he’s developing nearby.

Set-up

Food

Tomato salad was with an olive tapenade and a sweet basil vinaigrette then topped by some fresh basil.  The tomatoes and tapenade were both tasty but the temperature of the dish was on the cold side which did dampen the flavor.  Even so, it was a nice harbinger of summer.

French onion soup was topped with Gruyere cheese and sourdough bread was below.  The onion broth was quite thick and the cheese topping very tough but the worst part was its saltiness.  It was mostly inedible.  This had been reduced or held way too long without anyone tasting the concentration of salt flavor.

Prime ribeye was topped with blue cheese butter and rioja sauce and served with carrot fries.  The meat came out partially sliced with a few gratuitous microgreens on the butter and sauce.   It was cooked close enough to rare to be acceptable but the blue cheese butter was too mild.  The beef should have had more beefy essence but it was saved by the divine carrot fries that came with it.  They were crisp and hot with some kind of coating to keep their crispness.  They were almost as sweet as a sweet potato fry but with much better flavor.

An optional side was lobster poutine made with tater tots and Cajun lobster gravy.  This was another fail by the kitchen.  The lobster was mostly sponge meat and strong tasting – not in a good way.  There were good sized chunks of lobster but it tainted the flavor of everything in the bowl.  It also destroyed the crispness of the tater tots.  At least it had microgreens – obviously a kitchen favorite.

Dessert was in two forms, one a mascarpone ice cream topped with basil oil and second a lemon meringue cookie.   The ice cream was tasty but the cone was the star here – just delicious with a perfect crispness.  This was my easy favorite of the two.  The thick cookie was topped with a couple old meringue tuffs and some lemon curd.  There was no crispness in the cookie but lots of lemon flavor.  I’d call this one okay.