Eating Alone

I’m famous for hating to eat alone. I regularly ensare more or less total strangers to have lunch with me at work, since I never pack and often eat at the wholly unsustainable but democratically priced diner near the theaters.

That said, I still eat alone all the time. I’m spending a few nights in my “investment property” in Washington Heights, where there aren’t a ton of resaturants to begin with, and a sizable portion of them are patently abysmal. Tonight, I wandered into a place that I’ve been to for lunch in the past with acceptable reuslts. Sometimes, it’s better to eat at the bar when you’re alone, but not when the restaurant doubles as the one-tier-from-dive-bar of the neighborhood. At dinner, like many places for which I see no discernible reason, they like to turn the lights down really low. And, while there may be heart shaped mirrors along one wall, it’s not exactly a romantic spot. Interestingly, the lights were low, but readable until I unfurled my dinner companion (the new New Yorker). At that instant, the lights went down even further, probably for the benefit of the ONE other inhabited table.

I ordered pasta against my better judgement, and told myself that no matter how poorly cooked the pasta itself (pretty bad) I would base my judgement solely on the sauce. In this case it was linguine with portobello mushrooms and goat cheese.

In my imagination, the pasta was going to come out with big, meaty chunks of portobello along with tart globs of goat cheese loosened with some wine or pasta water. What I got was overcooked bad box linguine with slightly burnt thin slices of crimini mushrooms with a smear of supermarket goat cheese all inundated by some truly bad tomato sauce.

In about a month the kitchen in this place will be able to be cooked in. Yee-haw.

Listening: “Half a World Away” REM Out of Time

Providence and Oz

When you read about restaurants and food enough, you get to the point where you can name a restaurant in just about every city you’ve heard of. There’s Bern’s in Tampa, Christopher’s in Phoenix and Al Forno in Providence. These are places you may never go, so who knows whether they’re really good, or whether they’re just better than what’s around.

In case you had any doubt, Al Forno is great. And I don’t mean great like “wow that was really good” great but I mean great like “holy shit, I’m afraid to have sex because Al Forno might be better and I don’t live in Providence” great. Al Forno is the kind of restaurant that you want to take people to when they say something decidedly idiotic like “it’s Italian food, how great can it be.” Al Forno is the kind of restaurant you go to to cheer yourself up. Al Forno is the kind of restaurant to go after several meals in places like [Sabatino's](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/55).

It’s along a cute little block in Providence on the East side of the river, just south of the Rhode Island School of Design. The address (577 South Main) takes you down a beautiful brick-lined walk to the kitchen door, so, if on foot, you walk around the building to find a very pretty facade with a very pretty view (of the restored foundries across the river) fronted by an onerously ugly parking lot. (Caveat: if you go before the restaurant is open, the doors are all shuttered, and since the edifice is covered with vines, it looks foreboding at best, abandoned at worst.) Once your fifty foot trek through the parking lot is done, you find yourself in a beautiful %arbor, speckled here and there by light filtered by overhead vines, walled by brick and facing a glass wall looking into one of the dining rooms. It seems as though a singing clock and candelabra are about to walk up and seat you. No one, however, comes out, and it’s still another several paces inside. If you’re early, you could easily stand there waiting to be seated until a regular walks past you- and around the corner to the door invisible to you if you’re not looking for it- wondering what you’re doing, standing there like an idiot.

I don’t really have the time right now to go into the food, but let’s just say I ate both meals basically in complete silence, chewing at the same rate a slug runs the mile. The food was so good it was almost scary. If you happen to find yourself there, and you’re wondering whether the melon, feta, mint and olive oil salad is a good idea, let me say this: if you eat nothing else (that doesn’t contain pork fat) in your life, you need to eat this.

Back home, finally, and loving it. Bought a 50 bottle vinotemp today, and down to Bowery tomorrow to get a new worktable for the kitchen. Life is good.

Sabatino’s Baltimore: The Emperor’s New Clothes

There are great restaurants ([Wallse](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/17)), and there are good restaurants ([Elmo](http://elmorestaurant.com/)). There are bad restaurants ([Artepasta](http://www.artepastanyc.com)) and mediocre restaurants ([Good](http://www.goodrestaurantnyc.com/)). There are even restaurants that aren’t that good, but you want to be good because they’re nearby (Trattoria Daniela) or they have a beautiful dining room ([Valbella](http://www.valbellany.com/homeny.html)) or a great wine list ([Bellavitae](http://www.bellavitae.com/)). Then, of course, there are restaurants that are egregiously awful, so bad that when offered a choice between them and Wendy’s, Wendy’s wins with unfettered enthusiasm (Malibu). Rarer still are those restaurants that are sub-Wendy’s that have the the trappings and reputation of something greater.

There is such a restaurant in Baltimore, and it is called Sabatino’s. Somehow, it gets glowing accolades from locals and tourists citywide, and when you visit their [website](http://sabatinos.com/), it seems as though people must be lined up around the block for their “bookmaker salad” and their house dressing by the jarful. And, well, they are; the place was packed. This is the part I don’t get: the food was awful. And just to be clear here, this isn’t picking apart a humble restaurant with an eye for *haute cuisine*, this restaurant was truly without merit and it is inconceivable to me how they could have any repeat business, in the middle of Little Italy with a dozen Italian Restaurants on either side.

Like most meals in American restaurants, we’ll start with the bread. Not everyplace can have [Amy's](http://amysbread.com/) bread, and even when places that go to the trouble to make their own, even from a mix, it’s a nice touch, if not the greatest. The bread presented to us at Sabatino’s, however, was stale, with a thin, sour crust (and I don’t mean sourdough, I mean sour) and a cakey Wonder Bread like interior that was neither as moist nor as flavorful as Wonder Bread, if that gives you any indication. Without even going into the dirty silverware and the melmac plates, the bread was an indication of things to come.

Next up was the “famous” bookmaker salad, a composed salad of wilted iceberg lettuce; supermarket salami; dry, disturbingly tangy provolone cheese, long past its prime; brined banana peppers that were brown and gaunt, basically rotten; and a few of the lowest quality, least flavorful shrimp I have ever encountered. This suspicious melange was completely inundated with a salty, vaguely acidic mixture loaded with the kind of grated cheese that comes out of a cadboard tube. It was reminiscent of a locker room, but not in a good way: busy, smelly and making me wonder why I was there. It did it’s job well enough though, I can’t tell you definitively how awful the shrimp tasted, because the dressing spared me tasting anything, except maybe the canned olives. The ferrous glutamate-aluminum flavor lingers in my memory.

Had I been on my own, or just with The Agent, the story might have ended differently. It might have ended with us getting up and leaving (and maybe going to Wendy’s). But I was out with other people, and we were celebrating something (or at least trying to) and so we soldiered on. Personally, I soldiered on to a “Veal Saltimbocca,” which in Italian means “jumps in the mouth.” It might be better named “Saltdallafinestra” or “jump out the window,” because I would prefer doing that to eating it again. Traditionally, Saltimbocca is a thin piece of veal cut from the leg and pounded completely flat. It sometimes is dredged in flour, but always is covered with a slice of prosciutto and a sage leaf, held in place by a toothpick. These pieces are briefly sauteed, and served with a light pan sauce, usually made with broth, but sometimes with white wine. Often, in America, it features some kind of melted cheese.

Regardless of how you feel about the purity of old culinary names, this is what I was served: thick pieces of tough veal (maybe it was veal, maybe it wasn’t), battered and fried, served with chopped up prosciutto-flavored beef jerky and a brown, primordial sauce, thick with cornstarch and almost crystalline with salt. The sauce was the viscosity of Campbell’s tomato soup, with the texture of motor oil. The only thing that can be said for the dish is that the thick blanket of collagen cheese on top prevented me from looking too closely at what I was eating. It’s in the top 5 worst meals of my life.

My companions didn’t fare any better. A lobster marinara with pasta was brown and mysterious and dishes like it were the reason I didn’t eat seafood until I was in high school. A piece of grouper was baked into submission with a slightly lighter, although identically flavored, version of the sauce on the veal. Two broccoli florets came along it, one raw, the other gray.

How these “legendary” restaurants remain open long after their heyday- if Sabatino’s ever had one- is beyond me. I suppose it’s because if everybody says it’s that good, it must be. How could they all be wrong? But, like a conversation about pizza in New York City, taste doesn’t always win out over conviction. For my dollar, the Emperor Sabatino is naked.

Breath of Fresh Air and Corks

I feel like a new man. The Agent came to visit, I went home for the day, saw some family and bought a new bed. Actually, The Agent bought the new bed, but I helped pick it out. Planning for the new kitchen and other home improvement projects continues and I still have sixty three meals to eat outside major restaurant cities. I hear Hartford has some good places, any truth to this?

We went to [Corks](http://www.corksrestaurant.com/default.asp), which [I mentioned before](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/52), the restaurant with the all-American wine list. The list is fascinating and extensive, with at least 200 labels, and the one wine they were out of they told us about immediately upon presenting the wine list, a very nice and impressive touch. I won’t write a full review, because I was so involved with seeing The Agent my attention was not on the food. I will, however tell you what we ate.

We split a salad with some unmemorable fried oysters. It certainly wasn’t bad, but the oysters had either been washed or were simply not that flavorful to begin with. Eating an oyster is all about taking a tender little bite of the ocean, and these were just crusty little bits; they could have been clams or pieces of chicken. The salad was dressed simply and plated with some infused and/or emulsified oils that I don’t remember as being identified, but one of them involved herbs, the other tomatoes. They were flavorful, but didn’t much help the eh-ness of the oysters. I had the duck, which was not only very good, but a sort of barometer about restaurants in Baltimore: when I ordered it, the waitress sheepishly- almost apologetically- told me that the chef recommended it be cooked medium rare to medium. The inflection told me I should *at least* try it medium. She looked relieved when I said he should cook it however he liked.

The duck came with better-than-average mashed potatoes and some delicately seasoned, if unseasonal psychologically, braised red cabbage. Although, since Baltimore has been having Seattle weather lately, it was actually somewhat appropriate. The meat was just on the medium side of medium rare, probably a symptom of being gun-shy with poultry in Baltimore. All in all, it was a winner.

The Agent had pork three ways: a braised belly, a terrine and a loin chop. Again, I don’t remember all the details to do it justice but I remember enough not to get it again. The terrine was dry and bland, the belly seemed more poached than braised and the chop was completely overcooked. Pork belly needs a counterpoint to its lovely fatty richness, like a crispy exterior or a strong sauce. This was just a flabby piece of pork belly.

We got the cheese plate after, again all American sundries, but not exactly chosen for diversity. There was a reblochon-ish cheese (think brie, but stronger) and two harder cheeses, much too similar to share a three-selection cheese plate. One was not unlike a good aged dubliner, but without the crystals, the other more cheddar-like and less memorable.

The restaurant has all the raw ingredients of greatness, but needs some attention. The menu advertises a chef/owner, but doesn’t specify whether he’s an executive chef or if he’s sweating the line every day. If he is, he might want to take a night off and eat at his place.

I did chat with the sommelier briefly, a lively and charming man named Chris Corker. He knew his stuff, and knew his winemakers. He told us about some of the small pinot noir producers he carries and made no secret that his restaurant was the only place you’re likely to see them in the area. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the geography of the Central Valley and questions about the AVAs on the wine list were met with enthusiasm and thorough responses.

Short answer: I would go back if I had the time and the crowd to really do the wine list justice, and I would ask a lot more questions about the menu.

[Corks](http://www.corksrestaurant.com/default.asp)

1026 S. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21230

410.752.3810