East Village – Page 4 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Ramen Setagaya

141 First Avenue between St. Mark’s Place and 9th Street
212/529.2740
about $30 each for three, with sake, with tip
â™¥

What shoyu, or soy sauce, ramen is to Rai Rai Ken is shio to Setagaya. Shio, or salt, ramen is the only type available at Setagaya, so you better like it more than you do your pork bone type, or tonkotsu, or fermented soybean paste, or what we all know as miso.

I walked in with two other friends who were craving a hot bowl of soup for dinner and I suggested that we try Setagaya. It was cold outside so the line that snaked around First Avenue when the restaurant first opened is now gone, but the cold air has moved inside with the customers. The glass wall does not help. We sat tucked in the corner by the kitchen bar, but every time someone came in, we felt a chill. We ate our dinner wearing our coats and sharing two small bottles of sake.

Setagaya follows the traditional shio broth recipe that includes boiling dried seafood, like anchovies and scallops, for hours at a time. In fact, all that saltiness comes from the ocean. The broth is not clear because it is also flavored with pork that’s been barbecued on a charcoal grill. It sounds good, but we all had the same complaint: the broth tastes too much of barbecue. The secret ingredient is reportedly Vietnamese salt, and boy, was it salty. I love shio ramen because it’s lighter than the other types, but the charred and salty flavors didn’t meld the night we visited.

The noodles, though, were perfect in texture and stringiness. I love my ramen noodles a little chewy and meaty, and Setagaya’s reminded me of those $5 giant bowls I ate in Tokyo’s ramenyas oh so many years ago. Stick with the regular size when you visit, though, because you can only have so much barbecue and salt flavor in your ramen.

Knife + Fork Restaurant & Wine Bar

108 East 4th Street between First and Second Avenues
212/228.4885
about $170 for two tasting menus with wine pairings, without tip
â™¥ â™¥ â™¥

It’s almost unheard of in New York City to pay $45 for a six-course tasting menu. At Knife + Fork, chef and owner Damien Brassel pulls it off without sacrificing taste and creativity. When I called two weeks before we planned to eat there, they couldn’t accommodate four people. So two of us went and insisted we sit at the bar. Apparently, they don’t allow diners to sit at the bar unless the chef says it’s okay. The waitress asked the chef, who was only three feet away from us, and relented. The space has a romantic feel to it: heavy wood and dim lighting. There are a couple of tables which can accommodate more than two diners, but most of the guests around us came in pairs. As our night wiled away, we realized why the bar is off-limits. Chef Brassel just doesn’t want people in the way, lest it turns into a loud restaurant like Mercat.

If I have to pick a word to describe the food at Knife + Fork, I would have to say “thoughtful.” Each dish served tasted like chef Brassel put a lot of work into testing to see if his inventive
combinations would work out. Most of them do. I can imagine him working in the kitchen like a mad scientist replacing ingredients with whatever’s in the market that day.

Our first course was the salmon sashimi with pickled radish and seaweed salad. Salmon sashimi is salmon sashimi especially if it’s fresh, but chef Brassel added a dollop of homemade wasabi creme fraiche to this dish. We all know how delightful and painful at the same time wasabi can be through your nostrils. Knife + Fork just happens to make it all delightful. This was paired with a Francois Crochet Sancerre, one of my favorite white wines, which was fresh and lightly fruity.

In between courses, we picked on the dense and creamy homemade bread with salt and butter. I knew the bread was extra special after a man came in to buy a loaf before leaving again. The waitress told us that a lot of the people in the neighborhood stop by just to buy their bread.

The second course was a small dish of frog’s legs covered in sauce. The watermelon chunks and micro-greens were a good addition to them because the sauce was a little undersalted. I actually liked the wine more than the dish itself: a more citrusy and toastier Paul Cluver Chardonnay.

The third course was barbequed eel with risotto and sun-dried tomato tapenade. It sounded better on print because I thought this dish needed a little bit more of a spike. Chardonnay’s main contender, an Aligote, made the dish more interesting. I loved the firm skate with apples in Thai green curry as our fourth course. An “Innocent” Viognier from Shinas Estate was the perfect match for this spicy dish. I liked this dish so much I could have eaten one more serving.

We were prepared for more seafood with our white wines, but then the lamb with the mashed black bean-licorice reduction was served as our fifth course with a glass of Burgundy. I thought the meat was a great way to end our meal. I didn’t quite understand the black bean and licorice combination, but I was more than happy to ignore it for the medium-rare lamb.

I’m not a big fan of port but it came with our last course of cheeses and honey. The port tasted a little bit like jam and was even more decadent with the spoonful of honey. Our experience so far was a gradual presentation of chef Brassel’s cooking skills–this was the perfect end to it.

Mercat

45 Bond Street between Lafayette and Bowery
212/529.8600
$120 for two, with 3 drinks, with tip
â™¥ â™¥

It was a Monday night and Mercat has only been open for three days, yet the decibel level made it seem like it was a Thursday night. The place is packed; the white tiles immediately reminded me of Cal Pep in Barcelona. One of the bartenders gave me a long-stemmed pink rose to alleviate my 25-minute wait for a seat at the bar in front of the restaurant. (I saw later that every woman in the house was holding the same rose. I wasn’t so special after all.) The sausage and cheese station was manned by one doing all the slicing and plating and was surrounded by the curious also waiting for the bathroom to free up. In the back, the open kitchen was being watched by the more important people who sat at the chef’s bar. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits.

We started with the crispy sweetbreads on a bed of fennel, orange and capers. It was a light and delicious appetizer to an unexpectedly heavy meal. The grilled sardines were great with salsa verde even though I was picking small, thin bones off my mouth the entire time. What made my night, however, was the braised pork belly served with crosnes, my latest favorite vegetable. Never mind that it also came with asparagus which seemed pretty boring compared to the sauce that made the dish special: a dollop of preserved cherries. No one should be afraid of eating their meals with fruit; I could have eaten this all night with my glass of cava.

The mushroom dish will mostly likely leave Mercat bankrupt. For only $12–and I can’t believe I’m saying “only” here–I think I tasted sautÃ©ed morels, hen-of-the-woods, shiitake and crimini mushrooms on my plate. The last time I stopped by a Whole Foods, morels were going for $60 for a pound. A very earthy and filling dish served with crunchy strings of potatoes and topped with a fried egg was hard to resist even if the egg was a little overdone. They ran out of razor clams by 10pm and I totally missed the blistered Padron peppers from the top of the menu, so we finished with the snails and chorizo skewers. It sounded promising but what happened to this dish? The snails tasted like they’ve been in the bottom of an aquarium for days. The chorizo-tomato salsa could not even cover the algae taste that we decided to leave the dish unfinished.

From my experience at Cal Pep, the meals got better as the night wiled away. At Mercat, the night started inspiringly, but after I ate the snails, all I wanted was to rewind my experience back to the pork belly and back to Spain.

Il Buco

47 Bond Street between Lafayette and Bowery
212/533.1932
$180 for four people with a bottle of wine, without tip
♥

We wanted to eat at Il Buco ever since we walked by one night and took a peek inside. Candles were lit that made the ambiance romantic and rustic at the same time. We just knew that it would be a nice place to sit, eat and drink wine with good company. Four of us finally booked a table one cold, winter night to do exactly just that. We could only get a 6pm table with a week’s notice, so we took it. Unfortunately, we were seated right next to the entrance of the wine cellar. Cozy it wasn’t. It looked like they were conducting a field trip down the basement. Guests kept walking in and stepping back out and I kept interrupting our table’s conversation by pushing the door closed to keep the draft from coming in. Our waitress never made a move to transfer us to an unoccupied table even though the restaurant was not completely full before 8pm. We had to ask the bus boy for more bread and olive oil because our waitress kept forgetting us. But since the bus boy only came by to take our plates away, we never had enough.

The menu is Mediterranean, a cuisine that I can enjoy any time, with some Italian specialities. But nothing in the menu made my heart palpitate. The special of the night was braised oxtails on mashed potatoes which I make at home for less than $30. An appetizer portion of baby eels were ordered, only to be canceled when our waitress informed us that it was going to cost us $75.

We ended up ordering the octopus with Umbrian chickpeas and parsley, the bass with fresh pomegranate, lime, red chili and cilantro, the cod with fennel, lemon and red onion with mint salsa verde, the fennel-crusted sashimi-grade tuna and the beef carpaccio. The small plates were at least $12 each. They were all delicious but a little hard on the wallet. We also decided to order full plates of the pappardelle with black trumpet mushrooms and the gnocchi. The pasta servings were so small. I can’t imagine getting them as half orders.

Il Buco is like waking up startled in the middle of a beautiful dream.

Grand Sichuan St. Marks

21 Saint Marks Place between 2nd and 3rd Avenues
212/529.4805
$25 each for three, with three beers, with tip
♥ ♥ ♥

The Chipotle opened along St. Marks opened first and then the vending-machine store BAM! made headlines. When I saw the Grand Sichuan open, I only thought, Great, I don’t have to go to Chelsea for Sichuan Chinese food. The neighborhood is truly changing and now tattoo and piercing parlors co-exist with restaurants catering to both college students and punk kids. I wasn’t about to pass by the area without trying some spicy Chinese food. Because I am used to the Grand Sichuan menu, I also ordered the same dishes from the St. Marks branch.

The Dan Dan noodles is always good, almost swimming in oil and red, chili sauce. I don’t think I ever go to any Sichuan restaurant without ordering these noodles first. The double-cooked pork was a little bit cold and chewy served with scallions and green peppers but still a good dish with rice. My favorite is the kung pao chicken. Every person who insist on ordering Chinese food from the take-out stores should order the real Sichuan version of kung pao chicken so that they can change their minds about how hit-or-miss Chinese food can be. The smoked tofu with celery dish is also a choice of mine for its texture and earthy taste. The celery becomes a palate cleanser while the tofu tames my tongue from all the spicy taste it’s been getting. With all those dishes, we can’t say no to the vegetables. Peashoot leaves are always expensive but a big plate of them always finishes first. They’re sautÃ©ed in hot oil and garlic and balances out the whole array of plates on your table.

The St. Marks is sparkling new and it’s definitely less of a zoo than the Chelsea branch so if you’re craving Chinese food and don’t want to keep walking downtown, Grand Sichuan is the way to go.

Related post/s:
Grand Sichuan in Chelsea