The season of the Swine: How Bryce Gilmore's jump from trailer to Barley Swine landed him in Food & Wine

As the April weather turned into a summer preview, the thermostat inside Bryce Gilmore's Barley Swine hit 83 degrees, warmer than the twilight air outside as the kitchen fired up to feed the capacity crowd of three dozen.

Gilmore said a fix was already in the works and that they'd underestimated the space's cooling needs, which makes his A.C. guy the only person in town who misjudged just how hot Barley Swine would become.

It's hot enough that Food & Wine magazine named Gilmore one of its Best New Chefs, not just for Barley Swine but for his Odd Duck Farm to Trailer, where I first had a taste of what he could do with Central Texas' best artisan produce. He made the transition from wheels to brick walls with ease in December, trading paper boats for white china and a screened-in grill box for an open kitchen tiled in smooth subway black. Weathered accents of chalky-red wood echo the farmhouse connections.

Odd Duck is still in business under the care of Gilmore's brother, Dylan. (See review. ) Their father is Jack Gilmore, who owns Jack Allen's Kitchen in Oak Hill and who played a formative role at Z'Tejas, where Bryce Gilmore got some early experience before culinary school in San Francisco and subsequent jobs at Wink and Cafe 909 in Marble Falls.

Barley Swine is a tribute to Gilmore's twin passions for beer and pork. Any place that treats beer with the same respect as wine gets my instant gratitude. Through 16 dishes across my visits to Barley Swine, I started with glasses of chewy Kraken barleywine and malty Real Heavy ale from Real Ale, soft Le Merle saison from North Coast and a mouthy, wheaty IPA from Lagunitas. Was the Kraken worth $10 for a nine-ounce glass, or the saison $8 for 12 ounces? All day long, because you're getting top-of-the-list beers for what you'd pay for low- and mid-list wines by the glass.

Our waitress doubled as a beer steward one night to find a wine-sized bottle of Ommegang Rare Vos ale ($19) whose copper-colored depth and dry-fruit finish worked with our pork belly, lamb and pig trotter dishes, with just enough body left for dessert. That dessert was a $7 plate of boutique candy textures, with the subtle crunch of hazelnut and layered chocolate, chewy white blooms of nougat and an avenue of fluffed caramel pudding. Rolled up as a candy bar, it would convert every Snickers lover on the planet.

Before you eat, there are things you should know. The menu changes often enough that some of the food in this review is by now just a fond memory. When they recommend three dishes per person, that's about right. And so the two of you will spend about $70 for six dishes and a dessert to share. They don't take reservations, and you will most likely sit with people you don't know. The other four seats at your six-top table might fill up with strangers three times during dinner. It's uncomfortably communal and loud if you're not in the mood for a blind-date dinner party with a bill at the end.

Or it's refreshingly social, as it was one night when we shared a big bottle of Black Metal Imperial Stout ($23) with our neighbors. It's a surprisingly dull-witted beer from Austin's Jester King, so out of balance you'd think it got drunk on its way out of the bottle. But it stirred up the kind of beer-geek crosstalk that resonates with the homebrewer in me.

And if you try to gather all the flavors from any one dish onto your fork at the same time, you're going to need a bigger fork.

We all need editors, and a few dishes would benefit from less sensory input. Did pieces of pork belly ($13) with fat heirloom beans and their refried cousins really need octopus? No, just as a dish of grilled squash with goat cheese ($9) could have won a farmers market ribbon with or without chewy pieces of pancetta. But a place with "swine" in the name has a job to do.

Even so, did toned nuggets of luscious sweetbread with Brussels sprouts ($13) and a nice schmear of garlic really need bacon? It's more a question of desire rather than need, but yes they did. And that's the genius of Barley Swine. Take all that farm-fresh feel-good and dangle it from the balcony of its comfort zone. Who knew that the twang of pine nuts could push lamb with artichokes and olives ($14) into a new spectrum of Mediterranean sunlight? Or that the only thing spaghetti carbonara had been missing all these years was the sweet crunch of apple? That's what a dish of pasta stuffed with smoked fish and potato ($10) made us think of, with bouncy pockets of macaroni releasing their cure-house vapors against a backdrop of soft-scrambled egg.