A certain relative of mine – you know who you are – criticised me recently for spending too much time blogging about restaurants.

Then she asked me to blog about a restaurant.

Welcome to my world.

To be fair, this is no ordinary restaurant. And no, she isn’t one of the owners.

You want to tell your friends you have been to Ct, or Community Table. But then you’ll regret it, because it will become more difficult to get a table. That’s what I said the first time I wrote about this restaurant, on another website.

Ct – its name is no accident – sits in the rarefied reaches of Litchfield County in northwest Connecticut. For those of you who haven’t been, Litchfield County is the summer destination for moneyed New Yorkers who elect not to follow their status-conscious brethren to the more popular, more crowded and more everything eastern reaches of Long Island.

Litchfield County, in a discreet, and I must add slightly smug way, is the anti-Hamptons. Its calling card is restraint and understatement, as well as its adherence to a strictly old-school, blue-blood, Protestant aesthetic.

That hasn’t prevented the hedge fund crowd from piling in, but they pile in quietly. In the Hamptons, winning means arriving with a bang. See the recent piece in the New York Times about Calvin Klein’s new beachfront house. In Litchfield, winning means looking like you’ve been there for generations.

I digress. It’s hard to resist.

From the outside, Ct faithfully reflects the Litchfield aesthetic. It is in a simple clapboard house with a gracious veranda in the front that allows you to sip wine (BYO or from their excellent list) while you wait for a table. Ct takes reservations, but if you haven’t booked, you’ll wait a bit.

On the inside, Ct takes the Litchfield aesthetic and starts to play with it. Architectural features like casement windows cut into the ceiling or a house-within-a-house around the entrance suggest something creative is happening here.

Then the food comes, and you are convinced of it.

Ct is one of those places – it reminds me of Modern Pantry in London – where flavours don’t just sit comfortably next to each other on a plate. They combine to greater effect.

And so it was with a mussels and chorizo starter with heirloom tomatoes in a white-wine sauce. Chorizo makes just about everything more interesting, and in this case added fire to the gentle acidity of the white-wine sauce, and firm texture as a counter weight to mussels as soft as tears.

Scallops, graced with nasturtium, trout roe, leeks and buttermilk, harnessed creamy richness within a gently seared surface.

Ct’s elk took me briefly back to a similar dish in Helsinki, though that evening (as it happens, with said relative) was more about Nordic-hunting-lodge hearty than anything else. Ct’s venison comes not from Finland but from New York State, where winter requires little more than a heavy sweater and a pair of duck boots. New York elk is a bit more genteel as a result.

Ct is a locavore establishment, and thanks us for supporting a long list of non-GMO, anti-pesticide, cruelty-free suppliers. If this comforts you, bear it in mind as you devour Ct’s porcelet, which features the meat of a baby, milk-fed pig.

You will devour this porcelet though, because the name is easier to absorb than baby pig, and the meat itself gently absorbs a plum mustard sauce that is magenta on the plate and Technicolor in your mouth.

The service at Ct is warm, gracious, and considerate. Desserts, in my case a birthday cake that wasn’t really a cake but something much more playful, are excellent.

I could go on. I’d prefer just to go back.