Tsampa

Fri., June 13, 2008

Without difficulty, the Tibetan restaurant Tsampa qualifies as the darkest restaurant I’ve ever eaten in. The only way it could have been darker would have been if the tiny white votive candles at each table were blown out. Andie, Katie and I took turns raising the one at our table to review our menus. Our waiter may have noticed our predicament because he later brought over another candle, which brightened things but not much. If, as a child, I’d been caught by my mom reading in this level of light, I’d have been chastised to turn on a light lest I go blind.

I drank a beer although I sort of wanted to try the traditional barley drink, described by our server as having the thickness of a milkshake and the sweetness of a dessert. Tiny tofu cubes and hot pepper topped my eggplant sauté and overall the dish was so un-spicy that I dumped a bunch of hot sauce on it to amp it up.

Afterward, we walked over to East 4th Street for drinks at KGB Bar and continued the low-light-level theme of the evening with goofy snapshots.

Katie at KGB Bar.

Jason at KGB Bar.

Tsampa

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Friends, Photo | Photos by Andie. |

Hundred Acres

Sun., May 25, 2008

I enjoyed Cookshop and when I saw the owners were opening a new spot in the Village, Hundred Acres, I decided to give it a try: the whole front opens onto Macdougal on nice days like today; wooden chairs inlaid with dark brown leather; huge onion-shaped white paper lamps. Each marble tabletop is initially set with a candle and a tiny wooden bowl of salt. All ingredients are locally sourced and most entrees purposely hover in the $20 range. I had the Tamworth pork and wild nettles sausage (juicy!) on a bed of fava and cannellini bean rarou (bland!). I don’t remember what our cocktails were, but they were tequila-something-or-other refreshing. Soundtrack included “Go it Alone”" by Beck, “D’Yer Mak’er” by Led Zeppelin, “Breakdown” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and “Bittersweet Symphony” by The Verve. The place hasn’t even been open a week so it seems they’re still ironing-out some details: you have to walk through the servers’ station (and a clot of chatting servers) to get to the stairway leading to the restrooms downstairs where the taps are labeled in French but the restrooms themselves are labeled with handwritten cards taped to the doors. I’d return.

Hundred Acres

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Roebling Tea Room

Sat., May 24, 2008

Roebling Tea Room greenery.

Roebling Tea Room grub.

Dana and I stopped by the Roebling Tea Room on a lark for brunch. I liked this place. High ceilings, large arched windows, filled with light, main room has a long bar. The wainscoted walls in the large front room are papered in an old pattern of an English foxhunt. An intermediary area in the back has couches for sitting around with tea or a cocktail. In the back is a smaller room when we sat, open to a fenced-in patio area with a few picnic tables, and divided by windows with flowers and ivy in planters. It’s tight seating but relaxing.

The small menu, which changes daily, is typewritten—items and descriptions from the black ribbon, prices from the red—with quirky spacing and exciting spelling mistakes (“raisen,” “brussel sprout leaves”).

Dana had the baked pancake (cleverly billed as “A Big Baked Pancake,”) which spanned her plate and was easily enough for two. Although billed as featuring stewed rhubarb, it was made mostly with stewed pears, which was disappointing but still tasty. My baked cheddar eggs were simple and satisfying, and had two whole hard-boiled eggs buried in a ramekin of baked cheddar cheese. Another ramekin of grits arrived on the side, accompanied by thick slices of raisin-fennel toast and apple butter.

I drank a refreshing Pimm’s (made with the gin-based Pimm’s No. 1 Cup, cucumber and lemon-ginger tea). Dana had a Supercoffee, a mug of amped-up Irish coffee with whiskey, Irish cream and Grand Marnier.

Roebling Tea Room

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Brooklyn, Photo | Photo of Roebling Tea Room greenery by Dana. | Comments have been closed.

Elettaria

Fri., May 23, 2008

Elettaria was pricey but only okay and not knock-my-socks-off awesome like I thought it’d be. The duck, which got the nod in the New Yorker review, was served atop an Indian-spiced curry, which on the whole was bland. I was most looking forward to the cocktails; the “mixologists” at Elettaria built on their craft at Freemans and Death & Co. My Zombie Punch, based on a recipe from 1934, contained a sock-knocking combination of rum (Appleton VX, Brugal Gold and 151 El Dorado Demerara), lime, Velvet Falernum liqueur and absinthe, in a tall, ceramic, ’60s-green tiki-mug. I appreciated the eGullet poster who noted:

Zombie Punch: This tasted like jungle juice with cinnamon.

Elettaria

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Death & Co.

Wed., May 14, 2008

I dunno, Death & Co.: I expected Old West saloon-style double doors. Maybe Daniel Day-Lewis shouting, “I. Drink. Your. Cocktail!” Instead, the imposing wood and steel facade, which has no windows, was blocked by a large but friendly man with opaque sunglasses who asked, “You flyin’ solo tonight?”

“Uh, just me,” I said.

“Hold on. Lemme see if they’re ready.”

He had me wait outside while he disappeared through the front door. He emerged a minute later and waved me in. I’m telling you, if you want a seat at Death & Co.—and I’ve tried to get in three times before, only to be given the option of being placed on an extremely long waiting list by the guy outside—go right when they open at 6:00 p.m. I was the only person in there and when I’d left by 6:45 or so, there were only six people.

Surrounded in the low-lit, sumptuous setting (lots of dark wood, thick marble-topped bar, comfy stools), I had a Double Fill Up (rye, muddled mint, lemon juice and pomegranate syrup), which was served to me by head bartender Philip Ward. And I didn’t even think until now to ask him whether the drink’s name is a pun on his own. With my dinner, I wanted something spicy, so I ordered a Fresa Brava (muddled strawberries and lemon with jalapeño infused tequila). It paired well with my mac and cheese (of course) which was served as a surrealist might: on eight silver spoons, arranged on a flat square plate in a circle like pedals on a flower. I didn’t understand it but it tasted good.

Overheard gossip: the Death & Co. owner’s next big venture is going to be a tequila bar. “The owner’s got a big mouth,” said Philip the bartender with a certain degree of annoyance.

Death & Co.

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Takka Takka & Ohbijou

Fri., May 9, 2008

Before the Takka Takka/Ohbijou show tonight 1, Beth and I stood at a table upstairs at Union Hall, rain-dampened but enjoying a Triple Threat (three Sliders with a bit of sharp cheddar and one measly B&B pickle slice apiece, with thick, heavily seasoned fries on the side) when this speedy/shifty dark-eyed fanboy sidleed up to our table and asked if we were going to see Takka Takka downstairs because they were starting in 10 minutes.

Yeah, we’ll make our way down there, we told him. He replied that he was a big fan of Takka Takka. And they’re starting shortly. Downstairs. In 10 minutes. The guy was lingering and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said cheerily, “Are you in the band?” That quieted him down. He smiled, muttered something about being a fan and shuffled off to bother another table.

When we arrived downstairs, the fanboy was already down there. “Hey!” we said, as if we were long-time friends. As we got the backs of our hands stamped, he seemed to be having trouble getting in and I hoped he wouldn’t ask us for help. He was pestering the hand-stamper about his Takka Takka love until the guy snapped, “Why don’t you go away?” It didn’t appear the superfan even had a ticket. We slipped past him and stood up front waiting for the show to start.

And here’s the punch line: the fanboy was the bass player for Takka Takka. His name is Grady, which seems about right. We weren’t sure what to make of all of this other than it was pretty awesome. We couldn’t even make eye contact with Grady after that because he played most of the set with his back to the audience.

Ohbijou was good, too: happy songs by happy people. I suspect it’s because of the Canadian connection but they reminded me of Arcade Fire—the whole strings, guitars, banjo, keys and pep thing—if Arcade Fire were happier, apolitical, not flush with cash and fronted by a short woman who rarely made eye contact with the audience. She didn’t have much to shy from; the crowd bolted after Takka Takka and there appeared to be more photographers (three) than there were people there listening to the music. (The crowd included more than three people but they talked loudly among themselves as if the band they’d theoretically paid to hear was a distraction.) I enjoyed especially their last song, which I think was called “The Wood Song,” for which five of the seven band members produced drumsticks and provided a beat by striking random wooden objects nearby, including an amp housing, a pillar and the wall behind the tiny stage.

Union Hall

1 Don’t worry; I’d never heard of them, either. [back]

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Brooklyn, Music | Comments have been closed.

Lucali

Thu., May 8, 2008

Far, far away from the big city’s tall buildings, grit and ugly people, Carroll Gardens is a magical fantasy land of tree-lined streets, beautifully refurbished brownstones and young, attractive parents with their young, attractive kids in tow. Lucali, the neighborhood pizza joint I ate at tonight, was chock full of these people and I felt like an interloper amid their friendly neighborhood conversations when my companion was a lively but essentially inanimate farce by Evelyn Waugh. I’m terrible guessing people’s ages, especially children’s, so I can report only that they ranged from that age where you can barely stand and spend most of your time walking into stationary objects, and that age where you’re distracted and breakdance around on the floor because you suspect it annoys your young, attractive parents.

The space for Lucali used to be a candy store and the present owner bought it because he didn’t want a bank or fast-food chain moving in and dumbing down his ’hood, which is admirable. A giant, unadorned window frames the restaurant’s front, under a large awning where the families waiting for their table gather to sit and chat. A pressed tin ceiling and walls of plaster and brick frame surround worn wood floors and tables. On the tables are candles, dim lights overhead, but the interior must be one of the darkest non-fancy restaurants I’ve been in.

The simplest menu ever is chalked on a slate on the wall: pizzas are $20, large calzones (which I suspect are folded-over pizzas) are $19 and small calzones are $10. That’s it. You can also get a can of soda but why bother when there’s a bodega a few doors down for BYOB service. Young dudes brought sixes of beer and larger tables had multiple bottles of fine wine. The food satisfied though my allegedly small calzone approached the dimensions of Neil Armstrong’s lunar bootprint. Made with ricotta and other cheese, plus fresh mushrooms and a plate of sauce on the side, t’was tasty.

Walking back to the F train afterwards, someone on President Street had fanned a few dated computer programming manuals and an Emile Zola paperback on a stoop for anyone to take. More young families with strollers passed, then a dude on a skateboard letting his leashed, jogging dog pull him down the street.

Lucali

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Brooklyn | Comments have been closed.

Ippudo

Wed., May 7, 2008

Another Japanese-chain import slash Asian-themed “fast food” joint arrives on the East Side, but unlike Momofuku Ssäm Bar or Ramen Setagaya, I like the atmosphere of Ippudo. It retains traditional ramen-counter sensibilities—traditional, simple recipes; overheard Japanese—but the place is comfortable and inviting, not just an after-work stop-and-go for the hassled salaryman (or hipster). After all, “Ramen is Japan’s Soul Food,” at least according to the Flash splash screen of Ippudo’s website, in soul-sucking Brush Script.

An entire front window has been boarded over by long rectangular blocks of wood, fit snugly into place like a completed Jenga puzzle. A wall over the bar in the antechamber is decorated with dozens of ceramic ramen bowls. Down a short hall, the small dining room in the back features lots of thick woods and darkness punctuated by thin halogen beams.

I sat at the counter, which has seven tall, sturdy-backed chairs upholstered in white leather or a reasonable facsimile. The counter’s smooth, handsomely varnished wood that’s deeper than most, about three feet, so there’s plenty of room for your menu, condiments, place setting, drink and elbows, without encroaching on the space of the flanking bar-customers. I recommend a seat because you can watch the chefs cook and prepare stuff. I was hypnotized to relaxation watching them bustle around sautéing stuff, preparing elaborate salads, cooking meat, chopping vegetables and tofu, generally doing five things at once.

The tall, skinny young Japanese guys who comprised the main chef staff had the non-uniform uniform of a do-rag, vaguely skateboarder pants and a slim long-sleeved T-shirt illustrated with a vibrant, busy print (one guy’s was dark blue with koi arcing all over it). Everyone—the chefs, the servers, other random people—seemed to be talking loudly all the time, always in Japanese, except for the laughably token white guy. He was serving the couple sitting to my right and when I overheard him say, “You guys want some water?” I actually groaned to myself. The customer sitting to my left attempted to compliment a chef on the pork belly; there was a brief but awkward pause of translation difficulties, then the chef smiled, gave a slight bow and said, “Hai!”

In fact, the two most popular words shouted at Ippudo, intermingled with short Japanese phrases that begin musically high then trill down a brief scale, are the abrupt but friendly “Hai!” (“Yes!”) followed closely by “Hey!” (“Hey!”), the latter of which served as an all purpose interjection. I heard it used for “Your attention, please,” “Welcome back,” “One Sapporo, comin’ up,” and the tight-kitchen comment of “Coming through!/Watch your back!”

I had the minimalist but delicious “Shiromaru NY” ramen, a traditional tonkotsu variety made with housemade al dente noodles, a few slices of stewed pork, trimmed white leaves of crisp cabbage and thin-sliced scallions. I’ve read the broth is made by boiling pork bones and fat for 18 hours, after which the stock is reduced thrice to gain the correct consistency and flavor. Steaming while I ate it, the soup was fragrant with the scents soy, pork and mushrooms, and the color of coffee with a bit of cream. Not too much salt, either, which is a challenge to excellent ramen: this was seasoned perfectly so as not to overpower the flavor. (And you get your own pepper grinder if you want an extra kick.)

Next time I’ll consider an artful salad and perhaps the green tea crème brûlée. Ippudo also features a comprehensive sake menu.

Ippudo

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Smiths Singalong

Sat., May 3, 2008

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a fan-made video of a dude dressed up like a Catholic priest, wearing shades and a giant grin, dancing and shimmying down the sidewalks of the West Village. Oh, also he’s wearing a pink tutu. It was so good, we demanded to watch it twice.

This was part of an inaugural “Gen-X Singalong series” at Pianos Lounge, which involved creative types making one music video each for every song off the Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen Is Dead. Each video had subtitles and the crowd was encouraged to sing along. The dancing priest accompanied the song “Vicar in a Tutu.” Kelly tackled “Frankly Mr. Shankly” with a creative camera mount (her bicycle) and character (a Mr. Blonde action figure), making it appear as if Mr. Shankly is superspeed-walking through Manhattan.

I had a lot to drink and then walked into a low table and knocked a quarter-sized chunk of flesh off my left shin that I didn’t discover until the next day. Later we had a late dinner gathering at the “Always Open” greasy spoon, Sidewalk. I had a fruit-covered waffle, I think. When the receipt for our group arrived, it indicated we’d “been served by Jason #14.”

Bonus video: Kelly’s version of “Frankly Mr. Shankly”

Sidewalk Bar & Restaurant

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Exhibition, Friends, Music | Comments have been closed.

Resto

Thu., May 1, 2008

Last night, I had a light dinner at the Belgian restaurant Resto. The place filled up quickly and got loud but I’d brought The Onion to read, so no big deal. I had a salad made with crispy pigs’ ears because, hey, pigs’s ears. It also featured chicory, tarbais beans and a soft egg laid on top in such a fashion that I initially thought it was a large dollop of mayonnaise. Salty and the warm pork and cool greens contrasted nicely. My frittes arrived in a custom ceramic cozy with an attached mayonnaise dipping receptacle. It was all pretty good. I hadn’t realized how addicted I am to the sweetness of ketchup because my meal, especially the mayo-dipped fries, tasted not-sweet-enough. I like the cozy atmosphere at Resto and that the men’s restroom is wallpapered with a pattern of old-timey black-and-white illustrations of ladies’ legs in girdles and stockings. I was tempted to peek into the unoccupied women’s room to see if it was patterned with illustrations of vintage codpieces or something.

Resto

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Wildwood BBQ

Thu., April 24, 2008

This is New York so no matter how much you wish to imbue your barbeque joint with hickory-smoked authenticity, you can’t garnish the entrance with a screen door or tack an oilskin tarp over the bare doorframe. So I like the weird compromise of Wildwood BBQ: they replaced the glass panels of a standard revolving door with wood.

Arriving to Wildwood after work for dinner, two workers stood scrutinizing this door with concern; it appeared to be revolving improperly. I learned only after my meal, when my sever Yvonne, wearing a black T-shirt with the Wildwood logo and the phrase “Get Sauced!”, perkily informed me I’d been her very first customer, that the restaurant just opened today, which may have explained the kinks in the door. It also explained the dozen servers clustered in the rear of the place with ready-for-the-rush alertness and apprehensiveness, as if they needed giant catcher's mitts to field the expected barrage of customers. That’s right: another BBQ restaurant has opened in New York City.

This one at least has tasty enough fare. My half-rack of baby back pork ribs was sweet, smoky and unexpectedly spicy. The sauce was supposed to have a raspberry element, which was part of the reason I’d ordered it, but I couldn’t detect any such flavor. Drinks were good: a nearly too-sweet julep made with proper pebbled ice and fresh mint sprigs, followed by a straight Buffalo Trace from the comprehensive bourbon and whiskey menu. I automatically deducted points from the mac-and-cheese for being made with miniature shells instead of proper elbow macaroni, but it tasted rich and cheesy.

The architecture features a lot of heavy, bolted wooden beams and distressed steel at odd angles, lending the large, tall dining room a lodge-like vibe. The whole thing with the severs’ custom T-shirts (others read “Wingman” and “I [heart] BBQ”) and a big-city marketing agency’s idea of a “BBQ joint soundtrack” (“Bad to the Bone” and worse) reeked of theme-restaurant cheesiness. And unfortunately the location on Park Avenue near Union Square means the place attracts one of my most despised elements, especially when dinner-for-one means I eat at the bar: the white-collar After-Work Get-Together. Tonight they were all loosened ties and Banana Republic skirts, jostling me as they talked loudly about their day in the office.

Wildwood BBQ

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), BBQ | Comments have been closed.

Freemans

Sat., April 19, 2008

A few weeks ago, I overheard two young ladies on the 1 train speak ecstatically about the brunch they’d just had at a place called Freemans, and as I’m usually still sleeping at brunch time, I made a mental note of the place and tried it for dinner last night. I gather that a lot of its allure swirls around its location through an unmarked door at the end of a blind alley on the Lower East Side, an actual alley with grafittied walls and rear windows for an art gallery and a barber shop. As such, Freemans seems to draw a clientele easily impressed by perceived exclusivity (more on that below).

Appealing to me is that the place aims for the vibe of a rich gentleman’s hunting club: a maze of connected rooms with little nooks and crannies, fireplaces, unfinished rough-hewn wooden floors, darkness punctuated by Edison bulbs, walls hung with mounted animal heads and large oil paintings of anonymous bearded men. I would be not surprised to find a trophy case or possibly some large leather chairs in another room.

I started with the fennel tomato soup, rich and topped with a pair of large and crusty toasted-bread croutons, and for my entree had the barbecued heritage pork spareribs, which arrived topped with shredded pickled jicama and artfully crossed over a bed of cheddar cheese grits. The accouterments were bland but the ribs were smoky and tender. From the “light drink” menu, I had a honeysuckle (rum, lime and honey syrup), followed by a Freemans Cocktail off the “dark drink” menu, too sweet for my taste; it was made with rye, lemon juice, pomegranate molasses and orange bitters.

I was sitting at a table for two in a high-traffic spot near the smaller of the two bars, and there was another table for two sidled up next to mine. The host attempted to seat two jackass ad executives at that table for two and the louder of them, in expensive hair, pink dress shirt and chunky platinum important-executive watch, kept bitching to his companion that “I didn’t think we asked for a table for three.” The bided their time waiting for a waiter to appear to loudly discuss the book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster and how Pink Shirt had recently secured Sears as a client, which required The Other Guy to one-up Pink Shirt with a list of his equally bland clients. Once a waiter arrived, they complained enough that they were moved and replaced at some point between my soup and entree with a trio (the third pulled up a chair). After listening in to their conversation, it transpired they were just-as-annoying but much quieter PR executives.

So the crowd wasn’t ideal but the atmosphere was great and the food was good.

Freemans

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

BKLYN #2: Indian

Sun., April 13, 2008

So BKLYN #2—a dinner awash in a frisson of samosas, homemade curries and exotically spiced soup, and cardamom coffee—totally rocked, but the talk of the dinner was cham-cham we had for dessert.

Have you eaten this before? Is it an elaborate prank-food? Chris was fairly certain the Indian lady at his local Indian store recommended it to him just to see if a Westerner would purchase these vaguely doody-shaped donut-things, dripping with a naughty sucrose syrup. Indeed, each appeared to contain enough sugar and fat to send even the paunchiest average American into a porky coma. And this coming from a guy (me) who’s previously eaten clumps of brown sugar directly from the bag when there’s been no other food in his apartment.

BKLYN #2

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), BKLYN Dinner, Brooklyn | Comments have been closed.

Tiffin Wallah

Fri., April 11, 2008

After a trip to Kalustyan’s for a pound of paneer, dried peppers, chutneys and spices for the Indian-themed dinner this weekend, Allison, Angela and I had lunch at one of their favorite spots, Tiffin Wallah, which features a kick-ass vegetarian all-you-can eat Southern Indian lunch buffet for only $6.50. It’s Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and includes various curies, two kinds each of rice and flatbread, sundry chutneys and relishes, salad and dessert, which is a spiced fruit cup sweetened with condensed milk. I really wish this place was located nearer my office.

Interesting bit on the restaurant’s name from its website:

Tiffin Wallah translates as one who carries the box. Tiffin is an old English word for a light lunch, and also the name of the multi-compartment metal lunch box that carries it. Tiffin Wallahs originated over a century ago when the many Indians working for British companies disliked the food served at work. Tiffin service was created to bring home cooking to the workplace.

Tiffin Wallah

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

edIT

Sat., April 5, 2008

I don’t regret the concerts I attend but because I’m a young white guy with black plastic-framed glasses, most of the action at these concerts is onstage. By which I mean the crowd is not hipping, hopping, swaying or bodyrocking. Which is why it was nice to attend the edIT show at the Knitting Factory tonight. It’s not a concert I’d choose of my own volition; Sherry follows-up on all of her invitations and is persuasive.

I liked edIT immediately when he took the stage wearing a homburg and a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. His energy and skills at the turntables impress. He creates glitchy hip-hop electronica for neither strictly robots nor breakdancers but for breakdancing robots—in slow motion. Yes.

Beforehand we’d gotten Indian food in the Curry Hill region of New York at Banjara, which Sherry had chosen in large part on the basis that it wasn’t stereotypically decorated with strings of colored Christmas lights (although it did have a loose mosaic of mirrors glued to the ceiling).

Banjara

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Friends, Music | Comments have been closed.

Jury Duty, Day 2

Fri., April 4, 2008

After a half-day of jury duty, spent sitting in the clerk’s room during which my name was (again) never called, I was sent home (or in my case, back to work) with a handsome certificate indicating I’d served my duty in the largely uneventful criminal justice system of New York City and cannot be called to serve again for six years. For dinner, I caught up with Vincent and Megan at Los Dos Molinos, a dark, packed and cozy Mexican restaurant where the margaritas are literally something like $12 apiece.

Los Dos Molinos

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Friends, Politics | Comments have been closed.

Beach House

Wed., April 2, 2008

I caught the sold-out Beach House show tonight at the Bowery Ballroom with Beth. I was expecting sweet boy-girl harmonies, in the vein of the Fruit Bats or Mates of State, but it a little more oblique, like, uh, Brooklyn’s own Fiery Furnaces around the time they starting producing concept albums involving their grandmother.

Mainly the Beach House lady sang solo and played keyboards and beatbox pedal-effects while the dude played guitar and a faceless drummer knocked out the backbeat. They were clad in Elvis-style white spangled jumpsuits that suited the spacey atmospherics. One of the openers played a Hammond organ, which I liked.

Before the show Beth and I met for dinner at Congee Bowery, which is nearly as conveniently close to the Ballroom as the Bowery station of the JMZ. I enjoyed my hot and hearty fresh mushrooms and fried bean curd and appreciated the tapioca-like concoction served as a surprise, complimentary dessert.

Congee Bowery

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Friends, Music | Comments have been closed.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Tue., April 1, 2008

Jhumpa Lahiri read from her new book tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. It was sold out and the crowd was mostly women. The reading was adequate; the most memorable part was the repeated pre-reading instructions from the noble Barnsies on staff involving increasingly complex details as to how and what Jhumpa would sign, how the lumpish cretins “saving” seats had to give them up, and how those of us with books to be signed were going to line up in a calm and orderly fashion afterwards with our dust-jackets tucked in the appropriate fashion for ease of title-page signage.

Going into it, I expected fireworks; Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize when she was 32 for her first book, the short-story collection The Interpreter of Maladies, which I like. I realize she's a writer, not an entertainer or a motivational speaker, and that her stories are about everyday people in everyday situations, only, you know, the Bengali-American thing. But the affair was as solemn and dry as a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on proposed budget estimates for the Department of Education’s upcoming fiscal year. Even the Q&A session was dull, with Lahiri offering vague answers to all three questions, the groaner of which was, paraphrased, “Being a female, is it a challenge for you to write such believable male characters?”

Which is like asking a lumberjack whether it’s a challenge for him to cut down all those trees. Because if you were to ask a lumberjack that, he’d turn off his chainsaw and ask you to repeat your question, then tell you, “No, because cutting down trees is what I do. It’s my job.” Which is how Lahiri should have responded—not necessarily mentioning chainsaws and lumberjacks, although that would have been more exciting than her rambling answer which was, in effect, “No, because writing is what I do.”

Afterwards, Allison, Jovito and I took a short walk to the Flatiron Lounge for cocktails. It was busy so we sat on stools at a narrow wooden ledge in the long arched entryway of the bar. To our right, Hiroko Masuike was photographing drinks she’d positioned on the ledge, for a New York Times feature on Martinis in the paper’s Travel section. She asked for us pose with the drinks—which were apparently props and undrinkable—so as for us to appear blurry in the background as people having fun and enjoying their fake drinks. This sort of happened to Allison before and I’m beginning to think she attracts photographers: after attending an outing of the secret-dinner society Bite Club early this year, she found that she appeared blurry in the background of a photo in an accompaning Page Six Magazine article.

[April 12, 2008 Update: None of us appear in the photo published in the article (“Places That Put the Proper Prefix on the -tini” by Seth Kugel for the April 13, 2008 issue.). Although that could be us, blurry in the background.]

The Flatiron Lounge.

Post drinks, we ate dinner at LAnnan, a Vietnamese join that by nature of its proximity serves as a sort of cheap yet charming antidote to the hipster-mess-hall of Republic. I had a spicy curry made with string beans, eggplant, onions and peppers. It also featured okra, which, like sweaters and girls, I appreciate much more now that I’m no longer a child. My favorite awkward English menu moment was the “Steamed Grandma Recipes Soup,” wherein it is not immediately clear whether grandma is angry or the soup is hot.

LAnnan

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Books & Authors, Friends, Photo | Photo by Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times. | Comments have been closed.

Olive’s

Sun., March 30, 2008

Oh, yes, another deliciously expensive sandwich, number 63 on the list of Stuff White People Like.1 This one from Olive’s, a tiny soup, salad and sandwich outpost located in one of my favorite shopping neighborhoods, featured roasted shiitake mushrooms, dried tomatoes, cress and herb ricotta on a crusty/chewy sourdough baguette. The key was that the mushrooms tasted to have been marinated then grilled. Another key was that I was walking around SoHo and starving and there’s always a clot of people sitting outside this place on the famous worn wooden bench, munching on expensive sandwiches. The bench was full and I was headed west, so I ate mine on the go, peeling down the butcher-paper wrapper as I went, as one would eat a banana. It lasted me until West 3rd Street and Sixth, with a detour down Minetta after it started getting messy and I wanted to avoid passers-by having to see me with bits of cheese stuck to my face.

Olive’s

1 My feelings for this website can be summed up by this Simpsons bit from the 1994 episode “Homer and Apu”:

Comedian
Yo, check this out: black guys drive a car like this. [Leans back, as though his elbow were on the windowsill.] Do, do, ch. Do-be-do, do-be-do-be-do. Yeah, but white guys, see, they drive a car like this. [Hunches forward, talks nasally.] Dee-da-dee, a-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-dee. [Audience howls with laughter.]
Homer
Ah ha ha! It’s true, it’s true! We’re so lame!

Although the guy who runs the site just nailed a book deal with Random House, so what do I know. [back]

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Citrus Bar & Grill

Fri., March 28, 2008

For an Upper West Side restaurant that’s fancier than a diner yet with a diner’s expansive menu, look no further than Citrus. They got sushi, Mexican, salads, pasta, burgers, you name it, all highly fancified and priced accordingly for UWS consumption. I had fajitas made with “Ancho dry-rubbed Brandt Natural Skirt Steak,” which came with peppers and Bermuda onions, steamed flour tortillas (although a wee stingy to provide only two), rice and black beans, and spicy homemade salsa.

Citrus Bar & Grill

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Smokin’ Q

Sun., March 23, 2008

For being located in an un-BBQ neighborhood (the Upper East Side) in a city frequently maligned for its BBQ (that’d be New York) while sporting a decor that conjures nothing of what I’ve been trained to believe a BBQ restaurant should look like, the BBQ itself at Smokin’ Q is pretty great. At least the pulled pork sandwich I ate there tonight was. I can’t begin to explain what mad genius it is to top sweet, saucy and smoky shredded pork with a layer of coleslaw. So tantalizing. Their mac-and-cheese is awesome, too, rich and hearty, with that slight grit real cheddar brings to the table.

The music strove to conjure fun BBQ-based times, though the speaker near my table was malfunctioning and the mix was revealed to be iPod-based when someone decided a few seconds into Dick Dale’s surf-guitar version of “Misirlou” that it wasn’t all that great and mashed the skip button.

Smokin’ BBQ Mix (Selection)
BlondieOne Way or Another
Barry WhiteYou’re the First, the Last, My Everything
The KinksRock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy
Hank Williams, Jr.There’s a Tear in My Beer
Joan Jett and the BlackheartsI Love Rock n’ Roll
AsiaHeat of the Moment
Kenny RogersThe Gambler

There were only four other people in the place, probably because Easter doesn’t have all that much to do with barbecue. And although the food was fine, I just couldn’t get over that decor: reedy, woven-back chairs; lots of pastel paint on the walls; plush banquettes; a potted plant on the stairway landing; good lighting. The closest nudge to country-time was a wooden barrel plunked near the front door, on which sat takeout menus and individually wrapped toothpicks. There are at least brick walls and wooden floors, and at each table, the requisite caddy of wet-naps, extra sauce and a whole roll of paper towers in vertical wooden-dowel dispensers. But the framed B&W photos of plumes of smoke are a too arty, even if they are offset by a sad framed poster of Jim Carrey’s character from The Mask, overlaid with his catchphrase “Sssmokin’!”.

I read later, in a New York Times article from late January, that the space for Smokin’ Q was most recently a kosher Japanese steakhouse, so perhaps many of the incongruous design elements are left over from that failed venture. The space just doesn’t seem that comfortable in its new cuisine genre.

Smokin’ Q

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), BBQ, Playlist | Comments have been closed.

Spiga

Thu., March 20, 2008

Andie and I had been talking vaguely about trying Spiga since it opened and seemed intent on stealing some of the thunder from Celeste, another Italian place located around the corner on Amsterdam. Then we’d usually end up just going to Celeste. I was in the neighborhood tonight, and stopped by Spiga. And it’s not bad, just a little too “new Italian.” Next time I’m in the neighborhood, I know I’ll find myself back at Celeste.

Spiga’s artichoke lasagna sounded promising and it was hearty but non-distinct with no readily identifiable flavors of cheese or spice. My salad, with fresh pears, was similarly common. The decor? Wooden, literally and figuratively. And everything’s much more pricey than Celeste. True, the tables at Spiga are more than one inch apart, but the experience was a bland one, not an exciting, bustling one involving amusing overheard conversations, as usually happens at Celeste.

Spiga

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BKLYN #1: Local Ingredients

Sun., March 9, 2008

As I foretold, Allison staged the first installment tonight of the Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, BKLYN #1, a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme. It went down at the Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy apartment of her and her boyfriend, Jovito. I love this part: the building used to be a Tootsie Roll factory.

The dinner party included Allison and Jovito, my friend Beth and I, Allison’s friend Angela, and her sister Laura. Also present were the resident tabby, Ra, who warily shares space with the resident shelter-mutt, Manute. He’s a blend of black Lab, Great Dane and black German Shepherd named after Manute Bol because both are long-legged shot-blockers who like having their bellies scratched.

We started with three New York state sheep’s milk cheeses, Berkshire pork prosciutto and membrillo (quince paste), purple grapes and candied walnuts. For "local" drinks, we drank rye-stiffened Brooklyns throughout the evening, inspired by a recipe Allison procured in an entertaining fashion. On Tuesday, she and Jovito attended a reading featuring Brooklyn-based cocktail authority David Wondrich, whom I’ve written about before. As he signed her copy of Imbibe!, she mentioned the upcoming dinner and her consideration of serving locally invented cocktails, namely Manhattans and Jack Roses, the latter a classic New Jersey drink in honor of Jovito’s home state.

Wondrich concurred then rattled off the ingredients for a Brooklyn, a cocktail curiously absent from his book. Realizing the recipe would be a tall order to remember, he removed a piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled it down. Meanwhile, Allison told him I’d wanted to attend the reading but couldn’t, then blurted that I had a man-crush on him, so after laughing nervously, he autographed the recipe as a sort-of-wish-you-were-here keepsake.

The man-crush thing is true. What human wouldn’t lovingly admire another who can mingle alcohols to their tastiest and most potent permutations? Although I had to tell Allison that men will not often admit a man-crush to one another. Regardless, it netted me a scrap of cocktail ephemera that I’ll treasure always until I spill bitters on it. Here’s a scan of it. You’ll notice Wondrich spelled liqueur wrong, unless liquer is an archaic cocktail-maven spelling.

David Wondrich's Brooklyn recipe.

After the first round, shaken with ice and served in old-school coupes, Allison deviated from the handwritten version of the recipe to the one I’ve reproduced below. I must say that rye in its 100-proof form is excellent for clouding one’s mind in the best way possible.

Allison’s Brooklyn

  1. Shake with ice and serve.

Ah, and for the food. Beth made butternut squash soup with a plain-yogurt and cilantro topping. Laura made a shredded carrot and toasted almond salad. Angela made a Sicilian-style potato gratin with capers and Parmesan. Allison made tender, braised short ribs with chocolate and rosemary. We also had baguettes with Brooklyn-made butter. The dessert course brought out ice cream sandwiches made from oatmeal toffee-chip cookies and almond/English-toffee ice cream from the Adirondacks. I supplied my Gâteau Aux Pommes apple cake, made with apples and eggs from upstate New York. In short, great good, great drinks, great music, and great company.

Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner

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Veselka

Tue., February 19, 2008

Stuffed cabbage at Veselka.

Foodies and barhounds alike chastised me. I hadn’t been to Veselka yet? Jesus! I’ve lived in New York how long? Jesus!

The foodies championed the hearty portions of authentic Ukrainian fare. The barhounds championed the prime East Village location for 24/7 pre- and/or post-drunken splendor. And when I arrived in the chill after work tonight, a paper sign on the door alleged that the godmother of punk herself, Patti Smith, would choose to eat her last meal here.

Jesus.

My love and hate of Veselka lies where these lines of reasoning intersect. I cannot deny: I was here once before, in mid-December. After I’d seated myself, not one member of the not-too-busy waitstaff acknowledged my presence. Twenty-five minutes later, during which I absorbed more than my usual fill of sprawling New Yorker bullshit, I left. I’d already been cranky, felt worse then, and didn’t feel like a confrontation. Apparently Veselka’s notorious for its service but this had been foretold by the barhounds: the place is a 50-year-old diner in a grubby part of town with the spotty service that crustiness may imply.

The foodies insisted I give it another try. “The raspberry blintzes alone are worth the ineptitude,” they said. I’m stubborn, so it took some time but, O.K., I’m back and John R., my waiter, is prompt and attentive. He recommends a 300-year-old Ukrainian brand of beer, Lvivske, and yes, that’s good. He recommends I don’t order a side of the horseradish-beet salad because my entrée will arrive with a dab of it and that’s all most people need, and he’s correct there, too. But later he recommends two blintzes, each brown-edged, eggy crêpe rolled fat with farmers’ cheese and served with raspberries on the side, when clearly only someone of Orson Welles’ corpulence could eat two.

So some of John’s advice was right, as was some of the meal. The borscht, made with thick beet slices and butter beans, was topped with fresh dill—a perfect winter garnish—although the broth was almost too sweet. An accompanying slice of potato bread arrived sad and stale on a ceramic plate decorated with an amusing illustration of an interplanetary meatball hurtling towards Earth, perhaps where Patti is scarfing down a veal goulash. My other side dish, a potato pancake, resembled a puck of stone-cold spackle. But my entrée of stuffed cabbage in tomato sauce was great, the ground beef and pork filling flecked with white rice recalling my Mom’s own secret recipe for meatballs. So although the meal was hit or miss, I will give the edge to the foodies. Those blintzes were good, or at least the 1.25 of them I ate. Jesus.

Veselka

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Lovely Day

Sun., February 17, 2008

Not only is Lovely Day the name of one of my favorite Bill Withers singles (so shiny/happy that I forgive the repetition in the chorus), it’s now one of my favorite Thai restaurants. It’s cheap, it’s so intimate that Katie and I almost trampled a patron at the table nearest the door, and it’s in Nolita, convenient to some of my favorite places to shop. The walls are covered in flower-print paper, the tabletops and the booths are a deep shade of red and everything on the menu without peanuts sounded equally vivid, so I based my order on the names I found the most amusing. That’s how I came to have an order of steaming “hobo noodles” (sautéed wide rice noodles, red chili, red bell peppers, onions and Thai basil in a spicy red sauce) and a Dark & Lovely, which was not an ethnic hair care product but an alcoholic drink that contained dark rum and a bunch of other ingredients I forget; it tasted exactly like Haribo Happy-Cola gummies.

Lovely Day

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Big Daddy’s

Sat., February 16, 2008

After I bought a large ceramic mixing bowl at Fishs Eddy, I asked a clerk where I could still get breakfast food, being 2 p.m. on a Sunday. Around noon downtown, I’d had an intense hangover-recovery need for sodium and grease and really, really just wanted a breakfast sandwich of the sort many delis and bodegas in New York sell: plain egg and meat and/or cheese on a bagel or a roll. But none of them were still serving breakfast and I was feeling I’d have to go to an actual restaurant. The clerk at Fishs recommended Big Daddy’s, and since I only had to walk down 19th to Park, I tried it. Can’t miss it: there’s a giant script sign above the door, spelled in carnival lights.

It’s sort of like if the Hard Rock Cafe decided to open a diner. Or, better still, if aliens were to have recreated a diner based on a description of its contents. Cheesy ’80s pop burbles from the sound system. Little ceramic holders of vintage Trivial Pursuit cards are set on the counter here and there. The menu cover and an entire length of a wall at the restaurant are plastered with pop culture logos. Shelves of eBay purchases line the wall behind the counter: rusted steel soda cans from the ’60s, vintage lunchboxes and boxes of breakfast cereal. A peeling bumper sticker for Richard Nixon hovered on the painted brick wall near my head. The place is packed with likely tourist-types. Waiting for my order to arrive as I listened to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” I started to make a list of all of the logos I could see from my seat, but I got exhausted; this is about one quarter of them:

French toast at Big Daddy's.

The food, like the decor, approximates a diner experience. Yes, it looks nice in the photo, doesn’t it? But the bacon was cold, not frying-pan fresh. The Challah French toast was groggy with liquid egg. And the prices were decidedly not diner-like, as you can see below. I almost would have rather had Denny’s.

Big Daddy’s

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Photo | Comments have been closed.

Palo Santo

Fri., February 15, 2008

On a quiet side street of Park Slope lies Palo Santo, a small, low-key Caribbean-inspired restaurant with murals and points of turquoise on the brick walls, tables and chairs crafted from salvaged wood, and glass-topped tables like specimen drawers, containing assemblages of antique bric-a-brac that recall Joseph Cornell’s picture boxes.

The food’s eclectic, too, with a focus on seasonal, locally sourced, organic ingredients. Whole baked plantain, served in its skin, were delicious. Rabbit tacos featured moist masa tortillas the shape of drink coasters. And fillets of mackerel arrived atop black olives, whole string beans, blue potatoes and wafer-thin slices of pickled watermelon radish. A bottle of malbec complemented it all nicely after a server supplied a sample to ensure it was a keeper.

Palo Santo

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Sunday Shenanigans

Sun., February 10, 2008

Chinese New Year parade.

Although I thought it was a good idea to see the Chinese Lunar New Year parade this afternoon in Chinatown, it turned out to be like thinking Times Square on New Year’s Eve is a good idea. Crowds obscured the floats and undulating dragons. Swept up in the mass of brightly colored confetti and people wearing Mickey Mouse Club-style rat ears, Beth and I nixed the soup-dumpling lunch plan, broke free of the throngs by Little Italy and walked up to McNally Robinson for a lunch recommendation from Katie. She not only sold Beth a book, she sold us on the diner around the corner, the American, where a sales-rep recently bought her a tasty lunch and a hazelnut milkshake. Decked out like a traditional diner, the place attracts an incongruous crowd smacking of Eurotrash rockstar, which affords views of scruffy and skeletal physiques in tight black clothing, if that’s your passion. Feeling a vitamin deficiency from my convenience-food dominated diet of the past week, I ordered the veggie tacos, made with soft corn tortillas, onion, cilantro, a medley of vegetables including mushrooms, hot sauce and a side of homemade chunky guacamole. It hit the spot. A hungry Beth got a burger and proclaimed it awesome; it was the archetype of a burger, a giant, toasted bun, fresh lettuce and tomato, like what you’d get if you were a photographer and ordered a prop burger.

After lunch, we wandered uptown to play darts at the Bleecker Street Bar with Iggy and his climbing buddies. “Is that Lafayette over there?” I wondered aloud, squinting through the snow flurries. “Yes,” said a helpful but grumpy passerby, reason #88 why I love this city. I find that if I’ve been drinking, I excel at darts, up until a point.

The American

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New Favorite Karaoke Songs

Sat., February 9, 2008

Here are the top-three new songs in my karaoke repertoire, animal-tested tonight during a Japas 55 outing with Katie, Sam, Iggy, Megan and Vincent.

  1. “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” by Joe Jackson, although I kept laughing at the call-and-response line:
    Jason
    Look over there!
    Everyone Else
    Where?
    Jason
    [laughing] Here comes Jeannie with her new boyfriend.
    Also, this was a good one to save until later in the evening, when my voice was rougher, so as to elicit the emotion-scuffed, tremulous vocal stylings of Mr. Jackson.
  2. “Hello” by Lionel Richie. I laughed during this one, too, because Katie reminded me about the blind girl in the song’s video who sculpts Lionel’s giant head out of what appears to be deli sandwich spread. Also, per Wikipedia:

    Grown Iraqi men get misty-eyed by the mere mention of his name. ‘I love Lionel Richie,’ they say. Iraqis who do not understand a word of English can sing an entire Lionel Richie song.

    So you see, I had to sing this song; it was my duty as an American and a patriot, for if we let the Iraqis seize our Lionel Richie karaoke, the terrorists have already won.
  3. “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel. Because it’s in my range and who doesn’t like S&G (or “Mrs. Robinson”)? Koo-koo-ka-choo.

Runners-up:

  1. “Two of Us” by the Beatles. It’s from Let It Be; my requisite non-single Beatles track. Plus it’s a superb song if you pair-off with someone who can sing the harmony, as Iggy can.
  2. “1234” by Feist. Joyous! We were surprised Japas 55 had this song; their song directories are not known for their freshness of selections.
  3. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” by Kylie Minogue. When one has been drinking, certain songs seem like an excellent choice, but they are not. This is one of those songs.

Afterwards, Iggy, Sam, Katie and I tromped over to Columbus Circle, where you can order food by the pound at the Whole Foods Market and eat it right there, cafeteria-style, in the basement of the Time Warner Center. I was so hungry, I pilled a literal pound of food into my plastic bowl before I realized every selection hailed from the cold-food bar. My delicious-looking dumplings and soba noodles were not warm as I’d thought. Meh. I was hungry and it was delicious regardless. As we stuffed ourselves, we talked loudly about something I don’t recall but which must have been offensive because the old couple sitting to the table next to us rose silently and moved themselves and their food to a table far away from ours.

Bowl of food from Whole Foods Market.

Whole Foods Market

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Friends, Music, Photo | Comments have been closed.

Brunch & Bands

Sat., February 2, 2008

Megan, Vincent and I were going to try the Clinton Street Baking Company on the Lower East Side for brunch but the wait for the hipster spot was two hours so we gave the Remedy Diner on Houston a try and it was just fine. They even put cinnamon and wafer-thin slices of orange on their French toast, which is made with a hearty, challah-like bread. Also, the servers wear tuxedo T-shirts and the place is decked out with tables, chairs and decor from a vaguely 1970’s European kitchen.

Later I got dinner with Beth at Song in Park Slope, which I’ve ordered-in from before, and we caught a show nearby at Union Hall, which is decorated like a rich old white-man’s mansion, all dark, rich woods, floor to ceiling bookshelves, oil portraits, roaring hearths, and two incongruous full-length bocce ball courts in the back. The concert was downstairs, with Andrew Kenny and the folksy, string-sectioned Ghosts I’ve Met opening for Ola Podrida, strummed acoustic guitars and the soft, tremulous voice of singer David Wingo (reminiscent of Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam) with a country tinge, recalling lonely middles-of-nowhere. Their live act is louder and faster and makes them sound like a wholly different band than on their only album, which I only previously knew via the Interpol cover art “scandal”. But it’s great music (I just ordered the CD) and there’s no bad publicity.

Remedy Diner

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Friends, Music | Comments have been closed.

The Kitchen Counter at Beacon

Thu., January 24, 2008

“There are two opportunities to burn yourself tonight,” Waldy Malouf said. “This is one of them.”

The Beacon Restaurant chef was referring to the miniature cast-iron skillets he’d placed before our table of six, each piping-hot pan filled with a bed of rock salt on which sat two oysters on the half-shell, accented with a delicious mignonette and shallot-herb butter sauce Malouf encouraged us to slurp (but only once it had cooled). The second opportunity for injury arrived later in the evening when we each placed rectangular slices of raw Kobe beef atop smooth stones that had been heated to the temperature of the sun. We ate 10 other courses, none of them as hot but all as delicious, as part of Beacon’s Kitchen Counter session.

Upper-crust restaurants commonly pull stunts like this now, exercising various levels of secrecy, but this was the first I’d been to. Kitchen Counter is an exclusive, reservation-only little get-together, for which six people get to sit at a long, narrow, freestanding wooden table in a special section near the back of the restaurant, directly in front of the open kitchen. Chef Malouf, who’s sharpened his knives and culinary skills at classic Manhattan hotspots like the Rainbow Room, the St. Regis and the Four Seasons, then shepherds the party through a two-hour dinner that features wine pairings with each course and a few surprises, explaining each dish and answering any questions.

Malouf seems like a cool guy. He resembles a shorter, ST:TNG-era Jonathan Frakes and he talks like Rocky, only with diction. (I swear, it’s the same tune, cadence and depth.) Unlike brethren chefs with Napoleon complexes, he joked that he compensates for his short stature only by hiring staff 6' and taller, women included.

After our group had been introduced and served near the bar with a fried lobster-tarragon amuse-bouche and a Kir Royal-like drink seeded with grains of dry ice, so that it bubbled and steamed from the flute like a magic potion, the hostess escorted us to the table in the back, where Malouf shook my hand and no one else’s; he said he appreciated me taking the empty sixth seat on short notice.

In typical New York City exclusive restaurant fashion, one must reserve a spot for the Kitchen Counter months in advance. When I called Beacon yesterday, a woman named Dalia was able to accommodate my attendance tonight because the sixth member of the other five people in my group, none of whom I knew, had to bail at the last moment. Those three gentlemen and two ladies, each three to five years younger than I, had cherubic complexions and made a lot more money than I do. They weren’t rude but I didn’t talk to them much because they had their own group dynamic, featuring discussions about their offices, their secretaries, the artwork in their offices, their homes in Connecticut and the best lodges at Stowe. Although it pleased me to hear that they’d been waiting since October 2007 for their reservation confirmation, one of the fun things about outings like this is potentially meeting new people; maybe next time for that.

In addition to the oysters, early in the meal we were each served a tiny rectangle of wild mushroom pizza, the lamest and most incongruous course on our private menu. These two dishes are the only ones that appear on Beacon’s regular menu. Everything else, said Malouf, is a rare menu special or an exclusive to the Kitchen Counter.

Among the more adventurous dishes, I ate the moistest fish I’ve ever laid lips on, wild bass cooked in a corn husk with lemon and fennel.

The gentlemen ate squab, served rare and garnished with huckleberry jam, salsify and Brussels sprouts, “to evoke the season,” said Malouf, with mock pretension. At first, the ladies didn’t realize the dish was pigeon and when they did, they had visions of the Washington Square Park variety spit-roasted by bums over a trashcan fire. They passed. I should have told them that if a purebred squab met a city pigeon, he’d probably bore it to death cooing about his sheltered upbringing, his Whole Foods diet, his home in Connecticut, the best lodges to roost upon in Stowe, etc.

We had pâté, paired with a strange and delicious combination of braised short ribs, grits and acorn squash, although I remain suspicious of pâté; it will be forever Fancy Feast to me and you cannot convince me otherwise that the French have been playing upon us a hearty prank all these years.

I ate a watermelon radish, a mutant vegetable that didn’t appear on our menu and which looked to have been plucked from the cartoon soil of Super Mario World.

I ate scallops, squash-mascarpone ravioli and marrow from the trough of a long, bisected bone. (I wasn’t a total savage; I spread it on the provided flat-leaf toast.)

We finished with a two-course dessert, comprised of a pear-grapefruit sorbet, a chocolate soufflé with smoked vanilla ice cream, and a cool Australian muscat that tasted to have been distilled from the smiles of supermodels. My soul writhed around my body in satisfaction.

Throughout the dozen dishes and a didn’t-even-notice overtime of 2.5 hours, I enjoyed watching Malouf and his staff hustle about. It was satisfying to view each of our courses prepared right before they were served, directly in front of us, and taking precedence over all other orders in the kitchen—and because it’s Restaurant Week, the place was busy. The kitchen itself at Beacon arcs directly above the Kitchen Counter table. At times, standing in the bright light at the arc’s apex, Malouf resembled a symphonic conductor, which is a kitchen cliché, but also in this case true. I heard him drop only one F-bomb, over an incorrectly prepared dish, then he moved on. He’s not one to linger. He did ten things at once, including entertaining us, and he revealed that he’d like to enact the Kitchen Counter twice a week, except that his staff would kill him, then possibly cook him in a cassoulet, which he would then critique from beyond the grave. (He didn’t actually mention a cassoulet, but I imagine it to be true.)

The Kitchen Counter at Beacon Restaurant

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.

Dumont Burger

Mon., January 21, 2008

A 30-seat Williamsburg outpost of Dumont proper, Dumont Burger has an comparatively small menu, but features the two post popular Dumont dishes: the burger and the mac-and-cheese. Beth tried the former and I tried the latter and we’d proclaim each of them delicious. The mac was sadly made with radiatore pasta (the spiral-ly kind) and not the proper elbows, but happily made with cubes of bacon, and both cheddar and Gruyere cheese. To drink, I had a Czech lager that the bartender recommended and the name of which I now forget, but it was dark and delicious and served as her answer to my frequent request, when I don’t see the familiar face of Guinness, of “Give me the darkest beer you have on tap.” It was cold in that place, with the constant coming and going and the door of the curtain insufficient to prevent arctic gusts of wind from entering and eddying around.

DuMont Burger

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Brooklyn | Comments have been closed.

Pegu Club

Tue., January 8, 2008

At the Pegu Club, conceived and operated by some of the same folks behind my favored Flatiron Lounge, music from the ’20s floats in the background. Comfy sofas and chairs with wraparound backs line the windows, which afford views of Houston Street and are overlaid with wooden lattice panels that resemble floor plans of symmetrical labyrinths. Black, lacquered-wood high chairs are angled at precise 45-degree angles to the bar, the top of which is a grained blonde wood with thick, randomly undulating edges all buffed to a sheen.

As I sat there, I perused the weighty, leatherbound drink menu. It lists a dozen seasonal drinks, contains a lot of gin-based concoctions and features wines by the glass and specialty champagne beverages. Regarding the bubbly, a Winston Churchill quote crisply notes, “In defeat I need it, in Victory I deserve it.”

I was happy and sad to see Tom & Jerrys on the seasonal specialty menu: happy because I’ve wanted to try one since reading the drink’s storied history in David Wondrich’s well-researched history of key American bartenders and cocktails, Imbibe! And sad because I wasn’t in the mood to drink one. Something about the raw eggs, I think. (Ironically, when I wanted one, late last month, I tried ordering it from a bar actually named Tom & Jerry’s, but they serve the drink only one day a year, during their Christmas party.)

I ordered a small plate of truffle-steamed portobello mushroom dumplings from the Asian-inspired menu of 10 snack-style items, half of which are seafood-based. And for my first drink, I knocked back a Whiskey Smash, made with rye, muddled lemons and mint, and simple syrup. It had a lactic aftertaste but I got more into it after a few sips.

Although I’m no big fan of gin1, I also enjoyed the club’s powerful signature drink, the bracing, melon-colored Pegu Club Cocktail, made according to an early 20th-century recipe that calls for London dry gin, two types of bitters (Angostura and orange), orange curaçao and fresh lime juice, shook with vigor until ice-cold then strained into a squat and frosty cocktail glass. In perparing the drink, the bartender had locked the lid to the shaker so tightly that when he separated them, they came apart with a loud snap. Presentation is everything: the lime-wedge garnish was lanced with a fettuccine-width spear of bamboo tied at the end into an artful knot. A real kick in the head.

In short: spending any more than an hour at Pegu, I could burn through the contents of my wallet.

Pegu Club

1 And yet, here is a digression: according to the delightful Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, billed as “A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence,” slang for “gin” in early nineteenth century Europe included the following words and phrases (which I’ve mentioned before). We need to revive these into casual conversation, post haste!

[back]

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Radegast Hall & Beer Garden

Sat., January 5, 2008

I met up with Megan and her friends Bonnie (celebrating a birthday), João (did I spell that right?) and Claire at Radegast Hall & Beer Garden, an Austro-Hungarian themed beer hall in Williamsburg with extremely high ceilings, crazy Czech music and long communal tables made from 150-year-old barn wood. It’s billed as “authentic” which I think refers to the fact that the servers wear dirndls. There a dozen beers on tap and I most enjoyed the Hofbräu Dunkel dark lager, a century-old favorite in Munich, that boasts a smooth and malty taste with caramel undertones and a welcome 5.5 percent alcohol by volume. We had two pitchers. We also tried the Spaten Oktoberfest, the Weihenstephaner Dunkel (both also from Germany) and the Gösser Pilsner from Austria, my appreciation for which was ranked in the order in which we drank them, which was pretty convenient.

Pitchers are pricey at $18 a pop, the menu entrees equally so, though a nice, more cost-effective substitute is to get some wurst, sauerkraut and fries from the overworked dudes in the back by the grill. The ordering system is abysmal. I put in my order and was told twice to stop back “in five minutes,” at which times my bratwurst was still sputtering on the grill. When I returned the second time, the grill area was overrun with an impatient clot of hipsters waving their hands and trying to get in their orders, so I muscled to the front and fortunately the beleaguered cook remembered me and tossed my food my way. The fries were for Megan, a vegetarian, and the sole meatless option on the menu, excepting the streusel, which I’m told doesn’t have much meat in it.

João told us of a recent trip to Suriname, which necessitated a break in the conversation as we tried to guess the location of this alleged country. South America, as it turns out; João showed us a map on his Blackberry after we expressed incredulity.

Deciding we hadn’t punished our livers enough, we took the L back into Manhattan and emerged at First Avenue where some girl was puking violently at the base of the “Manhattan Only” subway sign. A guy with a can-you-believe-this? look held back her hair and shouted at random passerby, “Welcome to New York!” At Jimmy’s No. 43 on E. 7th Street we ordered additional beer and random food (apple-horseradish couscous, bread pudding and a cheese plate that had more sliced apples, pears and Carr’s crackers on it than cheese).

Radegast Hall & Beer Garden

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008) | Comments have been closed.