Lucques

[Lucques](http://www.lucques.com/)- I’m overwhelmed physically, gastronomically, emotionally. We’ll discuss it later.

North Fork Table and Inn, Visited

Let’s face it, New York City eats its residents. It’s true. We’re all being digested by the Beast of the Five Boroughs. No wonder people flee to the country and open inns.

One such group of fugitives opened [North Fork Table and Inn](http://www.northforktableandinn.com/) about a year ago, in [the middle of nowhere] beautiful Southold, NY, 100 miles out on Long Island. It’s housed in an imposing but understated whitewashed 1700s Georgian home that’s been an inn for as long as anybody can remember.

The players are the real deal, but this isn’t about them. If you know about restaurants, you’ll recognize names on the website. Let’s talk about the food. You might think from the description below that there were ten people there; let me assure you, there were two of us, and we were hurting.

Why screw around? We’ll start with foie gras. This was a seared, local lobe: very subtle, very delicate, with a savory corn griddle cake and a dark, rich sauce with cherries. Fruit and duck liver, does it get any better?

Vegetables are clearly favored children, with a number of appetizers dedicated to them, and with good reason. Chunks of asparagus and fava beans lounged around on very fine red romaine leaves with not-screwing-around lardons of applewood smoked bacon, all bathed in a bright green- and strangely subtle- buttermilk dressing. A more basic salad of greens tossed with shaved radishes and fennel were anointed with an old-school mustard vinaigrette. What a concept, a dressing that tastes like something.

What did they bring next? Well, what they brought next was one of the 20 best things I’ve ever eaten in my life. Just listen, and take it all in: crudo of fluke with radishes, radish syrup, fleur de sel and mustard cress. Flat, rich fish slices, teeny tiny radish matchsticks, a sweet, peppery mystery-elixir and some microgreens I kind of ignored. Where this dish jumps from silent eating good to speaking in tongues-convulsing good is the fleur de sel: little crisp flakes of wonder, exploding something already delicious into extraordinary vignettes in your mouth.

It seems we were in good seafood hands in general. A *tranche* of wild striped sea bass was perfect, with crispy skin, knee-weakeningly moist interior and some melting fennel. Finally, a Berkshire pork tenderloin (bacon wrapped) was anchored to confited belly in sweet pea sauce. Sweet pea sauce? Sweet pea sauce. Believe me. The tenderloin was a hair dry, but if that’s my only complaint with this meal (and it pretty much is), then you know we’re on the right track.

Did I mention I was there with a pastry chef? Here we go.

Strawberries With Rosewater Over Meringue
This was served almost like an *amuse bouche* to the second meal (of desserts) we were about to have. A tiny, perfect, crumbling meringue with macerated strawberries, all whispering “rosebud” behind your left ear.

Chocolate Caramel Tart With Chocolate Mousse And Caramel Ice Cream
The tart was a delicate chocolate pastry covered with ganache, hiding a dark, flavroful caramel. The mousse, also caramel inflected, gave me a headache when I looked at it, and the ice cream… forget about it. Just go there.

Hazelnut Ice Cream Bar
The ice cream bar is more like [Fudgie the Napoleon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudgie_The_Whale), but it was delectable, with whole toasted hazelnuts sort of popping out of nowhere.

Sugar And Spice Doughnuts With Cinnamon Cream
Simple, but lovely: freshly fried doughnut holes with a spicy *anglaise* for dunking.

Coconut Tapioca With Basil, Coconut And Passion Fruit Sorbets
This is one of those desserts that makes you call into question everything you have ever believed. Pearls of tapioca in a coconut cream were a lake with a crispy brown coconut dock, holding perfect quenelles of the best coconut sorbet in the history of time, and a passion fruit sorbet so full of flavor that I yelped when I had my first taste of it. I yelped, like a little dog. There was a fine, subtle drizzle of a very unsubtle basil infusion, adding a sharp element to a cloudy coconut dream. Embrace the basil.

Macerated Nectarines In Phyllo Pastry With Mascarpone Cream And Elderflower Nectarine Sorbet
Another shorts-changer: crispy phyllo covered a light, cheesy cream holding soft fruit. The sorbet was bright and fresh, yet sort of acid and mysterious, the elderflowers wearing overcoats and fedoras, but making their presence known.

Rhubarb Shortcake With White Chocolate Cream
This is what it says, but it was far better than what you’d expect: a biscuity shortbread with perfectly cooked fruit. The cream was light and congruous, but I don’t like white chocolate, and this was no exception.

To sum it up: North Fork Table and Inn, go there, get a room, get food coma and pass out. They serve breakfast.

The North Fork Table & Inn
57225 Main Road
Southold, NY 11971

phone: 631-765-0177
fax: 631-765-0179

Listening: To The Point, NPR

North Fork Table and Inn

I hate crowds. I hate lines. I **hate** traffic. And yet, I seem to be going to Long Island, on a Sunday, in June. This can only mean one thing: there is something seriously good to eat out there. It might be at a place called North Fork Table and Inn, and I’m excited about it because I haven’t seen a menu like this in a long time. What do I mean? Well, here’s one example from the current tasting menu: Hudson Valley *foie gras* with with black mission figs, endive and lavender sea salt. I know what you’re thinking, ‘Fish, this is so busy, you must hate it.’ But really, it’s not. It’s local offal (my *specialite*), fruit (a classic with FG), a salad and salt, albeit an infused one. It’s actually quite simple, with a little elevation. Likewise this long-winded gem from the First Course menu: butter beans, red romaine and favas with green onion buttermilk dressing and applewood smoked bacon. This is a loquacious way of saying pork and beans. This combination has stood the test of time, no doubt.

Yes, there are a few things that made me roll my eyes (bluefin tartare with edamame, ponzu, purple shiso and taro chips), but they just sort of wander around the fringes of things I’d really like to eat (wild salmon gravlax with blini, crème fraiche and dill).

I don’t usually talk about a restaurant before I go to it, but I thought it would be an interesting before and after thing. If I survive the LIE.

Democracy and Frogs

I actually wrote this on a different [site](http://code0range.net/node/1823) a while back, but I saw it today, and it’s not bad, so here it is:

Being, as I am, a leftist, Northeastern, bleeding heart, working-class pseudo-intellectual, it will come as no surprise that I lived in France for a while. Nearly anyone who has spent much time there often spends their restaurant-going efforts once home trying to replicate the delicate and deliberate relationship that the French have with restaurants. Especially for those of us who spent time in the countryside, which is fast disappearing in Western Europe, there is a long tradition of bistros and cafes who lack a menu. This is not the authentic history of a degustation: they only make one thing. In his seminal tome, “The Lutece Cookbook,” Andre Soltner recollects the sign in the window of the cafe in town he and his mother ate at when they went into town: Tarte a l’oignon pret a quatre heures (Onion tart ready at four o’clock). When I was in Annecy, there was more than one restaurant that sold almost entirely cheese. You went to one to have raclette, the other specialized in tartiflette. I had a friend who was Jewish, and we had to call ahead to get a special tartiflette made for her without bacon. There was nothing else on the menu.

Other restaurants were almost dining rooms to a home kitchen where local specialties were executed with the same attention to detail and authenticity that they had been for- in some cases- hundreds of years, largely without much technological innovation, although I will never understand the French preoccupation with the electric knife.

People rarely are able to find that experience stateside, largely because most of the people who understand that aesthetic and are willing to invest in that kind of relationship with their customers file towards the upper echelons of the dining world. The attention to detail and love of the craft of cooking, in addition to an understanding and appreciation of truly good ingredients remains by and large within the realm of quasi-elitist “fine dining” establishments. Since it is often, especially in New York, so expensive to gather the talent and products necessary for sublime cooking, from a business perspective it just makes sense to add white tablecloths and silver flatware and charge more.

Occasionally, however, you find a restaurant desirous of providing its customers with a magnificent meal in a comfortable, but not luxurious, setting at price that’s appropriate for an occasion no more enthralling than, say, a day ending in “y.” One such restaurant is Le Singe Vert (the green monkey). Located in good, old Chelsea, it is one of a series of sidewalk-tabled bistros along Seventh Avenue. Nothing about it makes it stand out especially, although its dark-wood exterior signals it as something different from the high-concept designs of most of the places nearby.

The menu is simple, elegant and straightforward. There are some fresh ideas, but the list is grounded in old favorites. The website claims that the food has Senegalese influences, but the only meaningful evidence of that is the restaurant’s name, which is borrowed from a bistro in Senegal (unless a renaissance of soy sauce has taken place in West Africa that I am unaware of). The wine list, around a hundred bottles, is entirely French with one sparkling Spanish exception. It is a geographically thorough list with a few values, and although it’s not a list of bargains, it’s hardly overpriced. At least a third of the wines are available by the glass, and the selections beg experimentation, especially for the oenologically curious (Cahors, red Sancerre, Bandol).

In addition to the printed menu, there are almost always specials, usually seasonal. On a recent visit they included a substantial but not overly filling salad of beets, haricots verts (green beans, but very fine, narrow, excellent green beans) and roquefort, built into a little vegetal blockade around some mache, garnished with toasted walnuts, all dressed with an unadorned, marvelously traditional vinaigrette. A few weeks before, poached leeks with the same vinaigrette shared a plate with its classical accouterment: chopped hardboiled eggs. This may not seem especially earth-shattering, but I assure you it was a memorable marriage of classic tastes, expertly prepared. From the regular menu, the snails are the textbook Burgundian style snails of many expat dreams. Served, thankfully, without the ceremony of their shell- which is entirely disingenuous; the vast majority of snails eaten in restaurants around the world are canned- they emerge from their buttery depths to deliver a meaty, chewy burst of salt, garlic and butter and can reduce most sensible people, myself among them, to bread-mopping troglodytes. The pate is very good, but unremarkable as pates go, and the charcuterie plate, whose components are plentiful and well-intentioned, were not all alike in quality. It consisted of prosciutto, rosette de lyon (a dry salami made from pork shoulder), garlic saucisson (fattier, softer) and duck rilletes (leg meat cooked in fat, shredded and served like a spread). It had a few olives scattered around, with a small salad and a little ramekin of (forgettable) dijon mustard. I felt it would have benefitted from a few of the inexplicably absent cornichons,

The main courses were no less bread-reachingly inspiring. There was a duck breast, with leg confit, just on the medium side of medium-rare, with a rich fig sauce and sauteed potatoes. Several beef dishes were uniformly excellent, a hanger steak, bloody and luscious, a shell steak frites with excellent fries and salad would scratch any francophile itch. On a visit several weeks ago, when the weather was more in tune, a leg of lamb was sliced into beautiful pieces of dense flesh with a crust of herbs, laid out on a stew-like bed of tender beans. Fish is equally represented, although that will have to be a separate review (no one has felt much like fish, recently, for some reason). They have also expanded into oysters, which will be reported on subsequently as well.

Desserts, also, will be absent from this review. Although mildly curious about a coconut creme caramel, the only thing that can be definitely said is avoid the creme brulee. It isn’t bad so much as unworthy of its calories.

The restaurant is a double storefront, with a long dark wood bar along the wall. A lot of things are dark, like the room itself. So dark, at times, that the table’s candle was handy for perusing the menu and wine list. A little more light would also be convenient for deciphering the hand signals necessary to communicate, since after a certain hour the music can get, er, intrusive. Although I have heard complaints about this in regard to this restaurant in the past, in truth we only experienced this once, later in the evening on a weekend. The crowd varies a lot; it is a neighborhood place to be sure and it is utterly without ceremony (in a good way). The service is good, when it’s there, but we estimated there were as many as ten tables for each waiter. Tellingly, on three visits in three different sections of the restaurant, we had the same waitress. The thin stretching of the waitstaff led to things like having to ask about the specials, a slightly frantic ordering process and a noticeable delay from seating to server. People who eat in Manhattan restaurants all the time, however, may be so used to this that it becomes invisible.

At the end of the day, Le Singe Vert is not like the dining room in someone’s country house. It makes more than one thing, and there is no doubt that it is anywhere but New York, but it offers its customers a quality meal, at moments even a sublime meal, in an approachable setting and at a price that can let everybody get a taste of it.

Le Singe Vert

160 7th Ave
Bet. 19th & 20th St

Phone: 212-366-4100
Fax: 212-366-9570