New York Restaurants by Area – Page 6 – Writing With My Mouth Full

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.

ilili

236 Fifth Avenue between 27th and 28th Streets
212/683.2929
around $125 for 4, with drinks, with tip
♥ ♥

After thirteen days eating fresh seafood and vegetables in Dominica for both lunch and dinner, all I wanted to eat upon returning to New York was a bloody steak. It was godsend that Miriam was still in the city the morning my stomach started asking for red meat and I was glad to meet up with her at ilili before she had to go back to London.

ilili, a spacious restaurant specializing in Lebanese, Turkish and Mediterranean dishes, looks like a hotel restaurant and is apparently a party scene at night. When we stopped by for lunch though, the place was quite serene with only the soft buzz of quiet business meetings. It was, of course, the Monday after the blizzard, but I thought New Yorkers will be back on their feet eating after the New Year holiday. I was okay that most people stayed in.

The restaurant’s $20 lunch prix fixe is one of the best deals in the city and includes a main dish and a side. I was set to order their lamb burger until our waiter announced that the day’s special was lamb porterhouse with stuffed eggplants. It sounded too heavy for lunch, but it was hard to say no after Miriam promised that I may have a bite of her burger.

Their grape leaves were just what I needed to start–that Mediterranean taste was the only thing missing in the Caribbean and it was like something new in my mouth. The shared plate of warm pita bread and hummus sealed the deal for me. Miriam’s lamb burger was perfectly cooked and made light by the spicy arugula leaves. The fries were to die for, thick slivers but light and crunchy. The porterhouse was perfectly seasoned with a pistachio crumb on top. The stuffed eggplant was pillowy and bursted with harissa after each bite. They reminded me so much of the vegetables I ate in Tunisia and brought back so many good travel memories.

I guessed that the pistachio ice cream included either lavender or rose water since it gave me that soapy aftertaste, but otherwise creamy and tasty. It may have not been as creamy as their clotted cream in simple syrup with bananas, but what more can you ask for when all you originally wanted was red meat? I can’t wait to return for dinner.

Related post/s:
Tunisia road trip travel journal

Kin Shop

469 Sixth Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets
212/675.4295
$100 for two with tip, with one cocktail
wheelchair patron may wheel in, but bathrooms are downstairs
♥ ♥

The last time I was on Sixth Avenue above 8th Street, I was at Jefferson Market buying blood sausages after a stranger tipped me about the store at Whole Foods. He saw how frustrated i was when I had to explain to the guy what blood sausages were. At Jefferson, sure enough, I found what I was looking for and noted that they also carried sweetbreads. (That’s another story.)

To me, Sixth Avenue between 8th and 14th is pretty much the dead part of the West Village; there’s nothing past the nice Filipino guys behind the counter at Gray’s Papaya unless you’re buying Co.Bigelow handwash or your morcilla for Sunday breakfast. I think Harold Dieterle’s Kin Shop will change that.

I was excited to eat at the Top Chef’s second restaurant in the city because of my experience at his first, Perilla. I had a very good meal there because of the straightforward cooking and I wanted to see what he could do with one of my favorite cuisines, a type that New York city overflows with but doesn’t excel at. (I’m sorry, but techno music and fake modern furniture do not make a good Thai restaurant–I’m looking at you Sea and all of you at Hell’s Kitchen.)

Jennifer and I followed our server’s suggestion that we share a few dishes family-style. We usually share plates anyway but I like that this was how it should be at Kin. We started with the pork and oyster salad, a beautiful mix of textures. The pork was crispy while the fried oyster gave softly inside the breading. The celery was crisp and added a fresh contrast. I’ve never been to Thailand, sadly, but to me this dish represents the flavor profile I truly love about southeast Asian food: mint, lime and chiles.

The soup with pork meatballs and bok choy was hard to resist. The broth had legs but was subtle, and the meatballs well-seasoned and bursted with flavor–just what I needed to warm up even more after the ALN cocktail with Thai pickle brine.

We were warned that the duck laab salad was really spicy, but we still ordered it. I believe there were preserved Chinese long beans in there, one of my favorite Sichuan pickles to make at home. Toasted rice added to the crunch while the Romaine lettuce mimicked Korean and Vietnamese dishes. They’re not kidding when they tell you some of their dishes are hot. The Thai chiles kicked in right on the tip of our tongues which made us take advantage of the buttery roti and fragrant Jasmine rice. It woke our senses up and also filled us up that we didn’t have room to try the crab noodles that came next. The next night though, I peeled the plastic cover back and ate it for dinner with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice to keep the saltiness at bay that seemed to have settled overnight. This reminded me of the Filipino pancit, only with hardly any vegetables and more seafood flavor.

The service was unobtrusive though we had to wait for a while to get our check. Our server acknowledged that she forgot to offer us the desserts, but we didn’t mind: we wheeled ourselves out of the restaurant.