New York Restaurant Reviews – Page 6 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Chickpea-Squash Coconut Curry

There’s a more elaborate procedure of this recipe, but for the sake of you busy people, I’ve published the shortcut version. If you do have several hours ahead of time, you can soak fresh chickpeas in water rather than using those that come in a Goya can. You can also buy the pre-cut butternut squash and save your energy from peeling and chopping it. A jar of preserved lemon can now be bought at Whole Foods in their Mediterranean aisle, though if you read this site often, you know I’m a big fan of pickling my own. As for spices, the ingredients list is long, as most curry-based dishes are, but I can vouch that skipping the mustard seeds is the only thing that’s forgivable. Double up on the cilantro if you don’t have coriander seeds handy. (But why not, I beseech you!) Leftover coconut milk and cilantro may be poured and added to your rice to make your carbs more fragrant before the grains come to a simmer.

Ingredients:
2 stalks of lemongrass, tender parts minced
1 knob of ginger, peeled, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
peanut oil
1 red onion, finely chopped
a dash or two of turmeric powder
1 tbsp coriander, grounded
1 tsp mustard seeds, toasted
a pinch of chiles
1 can of chickpeas, washed, drained
1 butternut squash, peeled, chopped in manageable pieces
vegetable broth
1 preserved lemon, chopped
salt
1 cup of coconut milk
cilantro, roughly chopped

1. Put lemongrass, ginger and garlic in a food processor and pulse to a paste. Set aside. Alternately, you can use your mortar and pestle for this; just make sure you keep your lemongrass large enough so you can pick them off before serving.
2. In a large Dutch oven, heat oil and cook onions until soft and translucent. Add the lemongrass-ginger-garlic paste and fry in low to medium fire until fragrant. Avoid burning.
3. Add the turmeric, coriander, mustard seeds and chiles. Sauté until well-mixed. Add chickpeas and squash with enough broth so that the squash are halfway submerged. Cook in a low simmer until squash is tender but not easily mashed.
4. Add preserved lemon and season with salt. Mix in coconut milk to thicken the broth slightly. Add cilantro and simmer for another 5 minutes until everything is well incorporated. Serve with warm rice.

Masten Lake

285 Bedford Avenue between South 1st Street and Grand in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
718/599.5565
around $125 for 2, with 3 drinks, with tip
♥ ♥ ♥

I was talking to my friend Stacie about where we’ve both eaten lately and as we went through our list, she said, There really hasn’t been anything exciting since Momofuku Ko. I thought about this for a few seconds and I agreed. Sure, I’ve been to some good restaurants the last few months–August and Riverpark among them–but she was right: nothing has stood out. That is until I sat at the bar of Masten Lake in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

During my first visit, there was a generous piece of fresh and unadulterated mackerel served with sour tomatillos and sunchokes with a dusting of Japanese ground spices and a hint of yuzu. It made me get up and walk towards the open kitchen to ask who was cooking that night. It wasn’t a new dish, and any mortal can buy that spice from Sunrise Mart on St. Marks Place–I just haven’t had it that way before.

My second visit was a more wintry night and my companion and I split a comfortable bowl of pici with tripe. This is definitely hand-rolled, he said while pointing at the pasta with his fork. Of course, it is; an alumna of Lupa wouldn’t have it any other way, right? Its heftiness lent itself to the subtle offal taste of the tripe; the crushed tomatoes rounded the dish off. It was a little heavy on the salt, as heavy-handed as the tagliatelle with mussels during my first visit, though the burrata with the shellfish made it more palatable. There are other, shall I say, whimsical and lighter dishes to share, which change almost nightly, like the apples with sheep’s milk cheese and foie gras with smears of melon and mascarpone. You get used to sliding and passing ceramics back and forth, creating works of food art on plates and bowls. Order several wedges of cheese and a plate of thinly-sliced lardo to compliment the easy choices of wine and nicely-made cocktails.

The next time I visit, I’ll take Stacie with me and we’ll cover our palettes with smudges and smears of the day’s freshest ingredients.

Sud de France’s Wine Lover’s Dinner at the James Beard House

After biking my third Century, I cleared my calendar the following week and stayed out of the gym and off my bike. I wanted a whole week where I can just veg and chill. I was on my way to the new extension of the High Line when Nate emailed me about a last-minute invitation to Sud de Franceâ€™s Wine Loverâ€™s Dinner at the James Beard House. How do you say no to that? I had 15 minutes to run to the west Village so I moved my sore legs as fast as I can and just recomposed myself as soon as I stepped in the townhouse.

It was a warm summer night in New York Cityâ€”one of those nights that make you fall in love with the city again even after 18 years of a steady love-hate relationship. A chilled glass of Antech Blanquette de Limoux Brut in my hand helped, of course. I sat in the garden and watched the other guests until we all had to move indoors and take our seats. I was seated under the glassed roof with eleven other people. I used to not do well eating alone, but I’ve since learned to enjoy the moment and languish on being on my own, especially if it means meeting new people with the same interest; in this case, a love for food and wine. The gamble is being seated with guests who have no qualms about picking up their ringing cell phones and actually carrying on with their one-sided conversations. One guest at our table had to finally ask the quatro to my right to remain quiet while someone was introducing the chefs to the rest of the house.

Sud de France invited Chef Charles Fontès of Montpellier, France, to cook for the guests with the help of Daniel Bouludâ€™s Feast & Fetes Catering chef, Cédric Tovar. (Some of the best wedding h’ordeuvres I’ve had were from them, and boy, I’ve been to a lot of weddings.) The chefs met for the first time the day before and they found out they actually grew up in the same neighborhood! Funny that; this city always brings people together–the second reason why I canâ€™t stay away from this place. Everyone seemed like they were in a good mood; the townhouse was abuzz and it even got too loud that I struggled to listen to the wine descriptions. There was a separate table in the entry hall plus a few more upstairs that were not viewable from where I sat next to the kitchen. They were awkwardly set, but how else do you accommodate all the paying guests in a townhouse-cum-restaurant? I was a bit taken aback that the servers stacked up plates every time they removed them from our table. I expect that from a Chinese restaurant, and perhaps from a smaller establishment, but not from the James Beard House.

An oyster appetizer in seawater gelée was fun to eat and looked so pretty on the plate with a small piece of zucchini stuffed with braised lamb, mint and almonds. The two small items were completed by a shot of tomato-basil velouté with small chunks of roasted eggplant–“eggplant royale” on the menu, natch. The zucchini ravioli for the second course fared much better for me, served with asparagus and beautiful morels in, gasp, tarragon-oil foam! Just when I thought Iâ€™ve seen the end of foams on dinner plates! A very memorable 2010 Domaine La Bastide Viognier perfectly complemented the asparagus. If I took home anything from the nightâ€™s event, it’s the fact that Viognier is now my favorite warm weather white wine.

A seared scallop was the third course with a slice of avocado in grapefruit vinaigrette. I felt like the dressing didnâ€™t match the soft avocado. The glass of 2008 Toques et Clochers Haute Vallée Limoux Blanc familiarly tasted like a California Chardonnay which was later confirmed because the grapes grow in a similar terroir as the Napa Valley. The striped bass, an already mild fish, could have used a heavier salt hand, though the bouillabaisse jus reminded me of those meals Iâ€™ve had by the Mediterranean. (Too fishy, the lady to my left said, as she pushed her plate away from her.) The duo of braised beef cheek–described as brisket by the same lady–and roasted tenderloin was delicious with the glass of the 2008 Château D’Aupilhac Montpeyroux and all its black cherry-ness. A nice panisse was warm and crisp and complemented the different textures of the dish. A bowl of (sautéed) cherries–ha!–with verbana ice cream and a delicate pistachio-orange tuile ended the evening’s event.

Chef Charles Fontès, as you can imagine, cooks in Montpellier using the freshest ingredients from the farms surrounding the La Reserve Rimbaud restaurant. Unfortunately, being far away from his original setting didnâ€™t translate quite well, so I was glad the wines paired with each dish more than made up for the food’s shortcomings. It was a wine lover’s dinner after all, not a food lover’s dinner.

M. Wells

21-17 49th Avenue off 21st Street, Long Island City, Queens
718/425.6917
$330 for five, with drinks, without tip
♥ ♥ ♥

It’s rare that I eat out these days mostly because there’s something in my life now called “mortgage”, but when I do go, I make sure that I’m with a good group of people who appreciate food as much as I do. I was at the Breslin a few months ago with more or less the same group of people and we talked about what and where we were going to eat next while we were eating. We jokingly called ourselves the EatingAnimal Club because we realized how much we liked our red meat and pork. I wanted the rest of them to love sashimi and offal as much as I do, so the premise of eating nose-to-tail came up as one of the unofficial foundations of the club. (The “club” in the name made it sound so pretentious and exclusive–two adjectives we all aspire to be.)

M. Wells was the club’s third meeting. I was glad that everyone was willing to take the 7 train to Long Island City, Queens on a weeknight. When we were planning it, all we could find online was their brunch menu, but it didn’t take a lot of convincing to tell them to get adventurous for dinner–Québécois adventurous.

We all looked at the small dishes on the menu but I was pretty much handed the baton to order for the table. They were out of the “porterhouse pork” and the headcheese sandwich by the time we sat down at 8pm, so we picked eleven other dishes while skipping out on the three salads and a blini. Here’s the line-up of what went in our tummies:

Oyster in sabayon – We all met up at Grand Central Oyster Bar beforehand, so I wasn’t a big fan of this. It was also coffee sabayon! I love coffee-flavored anything, but I prefer my oysters unadulterated.

Whelks and blood sausage – I love me some snails and blood sausage, but I never thought I can eat them together. That said, this was one of the strongest dishes on the menu for me. Both ingredients were doused in dill-garlic butter while the soda crackers kept the strong flavors at bay.

They didn’t have sweetbreads on the menu but the veal brains made up for that. It was soft and smooth like homemade ricotta, rich like creamy butter.

Escargots and bone marrow – Another combination that perhaps only Canadians with French thinking would come up with. The textures were odd: chewy escargots with slushy marrow fat but I couldn’t stop scooping them up. I would have loved it even more topped with finely chopped parsley and red onion.

Beef tartare – Tartare is tartare and I wasn’t a fan of how saucy their version was. Like my oysters, I prefer my raw meat clean and immaculate. The poached egg was a nice touch, though–much heftier than a quail egg.

The snow crab salad with celeriac was also delicious and, if I remember correctly, went faster than any other dish on our table. The shaved Brussel sprouts was also a nice break from all the fatty dishes. It was served with dry venison jerky instead of perhaps bacon bits.

My favorite dish of the night was the tripe. It was called tripe “pasta” on the menu because I think they looked like cavatellis, but instead of a sauce, they were tossed with crushed smoked herring. The saltiness of the fish was oddly perfect with the blandness of the tripe. I would have this for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The Canuck breakfast reminded me not of Canada but of my breakfasts in Ireland sans the grilled tomato. I ate fried eggs, ham (bacon to us Americans) and blood sausage everyday for a week before I hiked or biked and the dish brought so many memories of that trip.

The tuna was pretty amazing with capers and egg yolk sauce, but I barely remember the butter chicken that my eating mates loved.

If those weren’t enough, somehow a cheese plate made it onto our table. (Good upsell from the staff there!) We were expecting small wedges of cheese but it came as a sticky mess of Winnimere, hazelnuts and candied fruit in maple syrup. I think if I wasn’t full, I would have appreciated the earthiness and saltiness of the dish. It certainly falls under the “weird” category for me and I didn’t need a platter for four of it.

We were pretty bummed when we found out that they had ran out of the banana cream pie, so we opted for the cheesecake, and man, what a cheesecake! Were those Ladyfingers in there? The cake wasn’t ridiculously sweet and we practically fought over it. The solution: take a slice to go!

Put the EatingClub in one room with food and drinks and we get pretty boisterous. The three ladies who shared our long wooden table weren’t too pleased with our behavior, but our servers seemed to like us, offering us a complementary bottle of bubbly for keeping us waiting in between courses and shots of some type of anise-flavored digestifs. We had to cancel a couple of dessert items after the gigantic cheese course and we felt bad that we requested to remove $17 worth of extra charges from our first bill, but we were also good diners and left them a hefty tip for putting up with us. I hope the staff had a good time with us as much as we had eating at their diner-cum-restaurant. We walked out of there, happy and drunk well past midnight, and into the cold Queens night.

Related post/s:
The Spotted Pig back in 2005

Red Rooster

310 Lenox Avenue between 125th and 126th Streets
212/792.9001
$86 for three, without drinks, with tip
♥ ♥

I’m very familiar with the Harlem Sunday brunch crowd. I’ve biked enough past the Baptist churches on Adam Clayton and Lenox Avenues to know that after service, large crowds gather at the nearby bakery or join the street barbecue line if it’s warm out. What I didn’t expect to see at Red Rooster was a colorful one–and I liked it. Seven years living in Harlem, I’ve witnessed the neighborhood change: beautiful brownstones getting gutted out and renovated, new apartments higher than six floors getting built in less than two years, Starbucks opening to serve $5 coffees. I’ve taken advantage of the gentrification, as most of you know, buying into one of the developments and enjoying decent brews with my bike safely chained outside the bar. I’ve slowly tried the handful of restaurants that have popped up, but businesses have shared one thread that still need a vast improvement: the quality of service. Red Rooster is no exception.

We walked in Red Rooster and joined the crowd at the bar while two people sang gospel songs. The waiting time was half an hour to forty minutes, so we felt lucky that we got bar seats. Getting bloody marys poured out of a plastic jug and a glass of a simply-mixed mimosa was another story–the two bartenders at the front seemed like they needed another pair of, maybe six more, hands to churn out the drinks being ordered. The bloody marys weren’t even worth waiting for.

The service didn’t change when we were finally shown our table. We must have been visited by at least five different servers, but none of them were quick enough at their feet to get our water glasses and coffee refilled, replace our butter spreaders with steak knives or place the correct plates in front of the person who ordered them. It seemed like the staff was overwhelmed, but there was constant traffic between tables and the service room that I wondered where they were all walking to.

Thankfully, chef Marcus Samuelsson hasn’t lost the talent that he’s honed during all his years at Aquavit. I’m not sure how many of the Top Chef audience even know that he has been around before they started blogging, but for a chef who’s been in the industry before all this foodie fuckfest, I’m also surprised that he’s gone uptown to start anew. He has adopted the Web and he has been parading himself on TV; he is also very visible on the floor chatting up and photographing with business partners and customers. It’s like Marcus Samuelsson Part Two without the need to talk about his familial background. It’s all about the food now, and at Red Rooster, it’s pretty good. The nuggets and toast, or their take on fried chicken and waffles, was well-refined and filling. The fried chicken nuggets were crispy and matched the sweetness of the toast slathered in maple syrup. I wasn’t a big fan of the baked eggs because they were just overcooked, but the mac and cheese using orecchiette with bitter greens made up for them. The five-ounce fillet steak was perfectly cooked and the sweet potato bits were a nice surprise with the French fries. The corn bread is the best I’ve tasted in a while, served with honey butter and tomato jam. The coffee, especially if served black, was so good that I didn’t mind not finishing my weak bloody mary; it will be marketed as Samuelsson’s own come next season. If I can’t get to Egg in Brooklyn often, Red Rooster will just have to do.

Chef Samuelsson’s baby is quite new, so I plan to make a return visit another Sunday to check on the service. I hope it improves and I hope they can deal with the crowd a little bit better next time because the food alone doesn’t carry an entire restaurant, nor can a famous chef.