The Omnivorous Fish

Well, I’m in Oklahoma City.

Crazy, right?

Well, it’s as bleak as you think, visually, but it’s not as overrun with jesus-crazies as you might think. Well, downtown isn’t so much; of course 5 miles from where I am the church-to-person ratio reverses.

We ate at this chain place called Melting Pot, which is apparently all over the place, but I’d never heard of it. As you might have deduced, it’s a fondue place. Let’s face it, fondue is fun, no matter how crappy, and it was fun. The fondue was ok. Not crappy, surely, but not exactly life-changing either. Like many mediocre restaurant experiences, it makes me want to go home and make fondue.

Anyway, I had a great time with the Art Guy, and I’m ready to head home and get ready for the onslaught of visitors. Check this out:

9-10 Feb: Good friend from NYC pitstopping on his way to vegas
11-15 Feb Another friend from NYC treating herself to some beach time
16-23 Feb: The Parental Units invade
25-29 Feb: The Artist (not to be confused with the Art Guy) is coming from Philly to hide out (from reality)

Needless to say, we’ll be cooking.

See you in LA.

Listening: “Get Up” Green R.E.M.

…you live in a town with this sign over part of a newsstand:

You guessed it: there’s another section called “Women’s Interest.”

I’m back in NYC, that is to say, civilization. No offense, Nashville, but I’m glad to be back decidedly north of the Mason Dixon line. I think it’s really funny when urban gay men like to wax nostalgic at their southern upbringing, and then- after a few drinks- their formerly imperceptible drawl suddenly rings true like the Bells of St Mary’s, y’all. Then I ask the obvious question: if it was so great, what the hell are you doing here with all us yankees? The answer stammers back anywhere from the predictable white lie “work” to the truthful though usually incomplete “I was gang raped with a broom daily by the entire football team because I was in show choir.” Exactly.

And that’s why I’m glad to be back in NYC. That, and I went to Prune last night!! OK, so what I wrote in the last Prune post was somewhat overstated, although it was true at the time that “everything I have ever eaten there has made me emote audibly.” I admit to having had a couple of eh things there subsequent to that writing, but not last night. Last night I had a vaguely spicy but good old-fashioned hot and brown octopus zuppetta with potatoes. It is SUCH a thing my great grandmother would have made: Broth flavored by the cooking octopus and- in my imaginary version- the leftover bones from a guazzetto, with potatoes cooked right in the same broth. That was followed by a lamb blade chop (my favorite part of the animal both for roasts and chops) simply grilled with a squeeze of lemon and a branch of oregano. We then had two desserts, a boozy, icy milk punch (ok) with two remarkable caraway cookies. Very much like a caraway flavored oldschool spice wafer, I was swept off my feet. A pineapple upside down cake was textbook and delicious, though less engaging to me than the cookies. Nothing really remarkable to drink with it, I had a kir and then an iced tea, which was flavored with vanilla or that other vanilla-like pod that I can’t recall the name of, which really pisses me off because when I order an iced tea, I want a freaking iced tea, not a vanilla iced tea. If I want a vanilla iced tea, I’ll ask for it, damn it.

Speaking of, we went to a restaurant in my new hood a couple of weeks ago and when they brought us water it was “flavored with cucumber and mint,” to which I responded, “great, now how about some water?” I mean jesus, people. Can’t we merely have a really excellent iced tea? In fact, the last time I was at the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market I ducked into the Mafia Hollow* store and wanted to buy a bottle of water, and sure enough my choices were cucumber or mint. I asked if they had water-flavored water, which was met with a disapproving “no” and a look that said everything the clerk thought of the unwashed redneck I was.

Speaking of being a redneck, I just finished working on the 41st Annual Country Music Association Awards, which was actually a lot of fun and a great show. It also inserted country music back into my life, which had sort of wandered out for a lot of reasons not relevant to this incredibly focused and nuanced monologue I’m on right now.

So, now that this post really isn’t really about anything anymore, I might as well tell you about my new fantasy. Those of you who know me know that every so often I get this idea in my head that I might want to really have career X. Granted, I’m in my third career at this tender age, so it stands to reason that I have these ideas, although they’re not always practical. I applied to the Forest Service; I looked at photography schools; I interviewed at a winery for an outside sales job. You know, ideas. But now that I live in a house, an old flame has been rekindled: woodworking. Now that I kind of have a space to do it in, I am laying out some furniture making projects for myself, which has me excited. I’m sure I’ll blog them.

So the long term fantasy part is I’ll buy some farmland up in the central valley or central coast and build a barn to be the New Cranky Workshop/hog butchery/meatlocker. Then, once I have a boyfriend that can stand me for more than a couple of years, we could even build a house on it. Like I said, fantasy. I have to sell my place in New York before I can do anything.

So that’s the news from Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are goodlooking and all the children are above average.

Listening: The Crash Test Dummies “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” God Shuffled His Feet

*Also known as Frog Hollow

Lucques- I’m overwhelmed physically, gastronomically, emotionally. We’ll discuss it later.

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 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, 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

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.

I actually wrote this on a different site 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

There’s something about the block of 18th Street in San Francisco between Guerrero and Oakwood. Maybe it’s the ancient spirit of the Mission, maybe it’s something in the water, maybe Jimmy Hoffa’s body is under Bi Rite, I’m not quite sure what it is, but some of the best things to eat in the city are right there.

On the corner of 18th is Tartine, which is a bakery and café in a big space, yet the tables and chairs are jammed inexplicably into a New York corner. Thanks to California’s progressive ideas about the sale of booze, it’s a proper café, where you can get anything from OJ to a bottle of wine to enjoy with your goodies, savory or sweet. In fact, the kids at the next table over came for a bottle of wine and three glasses to while away the afternoon discussing Marxism. It was so undergrad.

Huge, unsubtle but delicious croissants come in plain; (Niman Ranch) ham and gruyere; chocolate and other permutations (though be warned; they cook them dark). Tarts, cakes, cookies, quiches, quick and yeast breads all make appearances, and I have to say they range from pretty good to underwear-changing good. Lemon lovers look out for the lemon meringue cake; a baked Alaska filled with lemon curd. Cute hipster kids swarm both in front of and behind the counters from which they make excellent coffee (though SF has some of the oldest hipsters I’ve ever seen).

The Bay Area, I must say, has the most consistently good coffee from the greatest number of independents than any city I have ever been (calm down, Seattle, I haven’t been there- yet).

Speaking of places I hadn’t been, I took a suggestion and went to dinner at Delfina, almost next door. It looks like your typical urban hip place, easily transported to New York, LA, Philly, Chicago or Boston, with distressed metal this and marble that. I didn’t take note of too much of the décor since I was flying solo and ate at the bar, but I did have a nice view of the open kitchen and the very young, mostly cute crew behind the line.

It was an absolute madhouse when I got there at 9, but being a party of one, I snagged the end seat at the bar, next to two completely odious 20-something women that were there to see, be seen and eat expensive food they don’t deserve before going home to vomit it up. The advantage to eating so late (and planning to eat everything in the place) is that you get to watch the place slow down and see how the machine contracts to its slower pace. I have always been fascinated by the operation of restaurants, and this process is perhaps the most interesting bit of theater.

At any rate, I sat down and was brought some dense-crumbed, crusty, but noticeably cold bread, and remarkably good butter, anointed with one of the new salts that all the cool kids have. This was soon followed by mint tagliatelle with porcini. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, so does string theory, but it’s not. This pasta was the kind of pasta that grandmothers make, but flecked with fresh mint, in a butter sauce light enough to keep you hungry, inundated with paper thin shavings of boletus edulis that kicked you in the teeth when you bit into them. The whole thing was earth, sex and light-colored sin in my mouth, and I regretted getting the half portion one bite in. Since, however, details haunt me, I have to note that I scratched down ‘tagliatelle’ in my notebook, and the website confirms that’s what the menu had written on it, and it is a free country, but in reality what I was served is tagliarini. No harm no foul.

With this, I drank a Gavi from Villa Sparini, one of a few half bottles available on the short but functional wine list. I was struggling between it and a colline they had by the glass, and the bartender’s rec was right-on. It had just the right amount of citrus to lighten it up.

Next I had quail stuffed with sausage and fennel, a little polenta and a brown, nectarous sauce made of stock and vin santo. It was one of those dishes which is merely excellent, that is to say, I wasn’t annoyed by the lengthy list of ingredients or put off by dubious combinations. I had a red wine with this that was being served by the glass after much discussion with the bartender, but I was having much too good a time by then to write anything down.

Delfina is one of those places where everybody loves food. Everyone who works there wants to talk about the wine list and the ingredients and they genuinely want you to have a good time. Unlike the clientele, I observed no posturing. I started talking to the bartender, a mysteriously beautiful young woman who lit up to chat about the minutiae of Gavi. And I got to hear her story since, like New York, nobody is from San Francisco, so everybody has a story.

Then I had cheese, which I will quote right from their website:

Wrinkled pagliarina with marcona almonds
Piemonte- cow, sheep, and goat milks
Moliterno tartufato with housemade quince paste
Sardegna- sheep’s milk
Parmigiano Reggiano with saba
Blu del Moncensio with brachetto gelatina
Piemonte - cow’s milk
Tumin rutulin with wildflower honey
Piemonte- goat’s milk

They were mostly fantastic, and the braccheto gelatina kind of haunts me still. By this point I had fallen completely in love with the bartender, and was overwhelmed emotionally and gastronomically by a big pedestal-dish of strawberry ice cream she put in front of me. It was rich and cold and ambrosial and frankly almost surreal. It was like sitting at the bar chatting with a giant strawberry breathing strawberry breath on you, inundating you with his strawberry presence. It was smooth and subtle, yet frosty and poignant. It was perhaps the best ice cream I’ve ever had in my life.

Delfina. Go there. Fall in love.

Delfina Restaurant
3621 18th Street
San Francisco, CA
415.552.4055

Someone recently told me about a person who at the tender age of 25 is the chef de cuisine of a somewhat known restaurant in a major american city. I responded in my usual pensive way and said something like “Get the f___ out of here.” Why? Can’t this person cook? Can’t this person taste? Can’t this person be creative? Of course this person can, but my question becomes, ‘Is this person a badass?’

Well, you might wonder, what is a badass? The easiest way for me to describe this phenomenon, for those of you who know him, is to say that my dad is a badass. For those of you who don’t, let me explain. A badass is someone whose technical acumen is beyond question and whose reflexes are unerring to any situation in their chosen field. He or she is alert, calm and his or her analysis on the subject is without reproach. The badass may not be the most popular person in the room, but he (ok, dropping the ‘or she’ now, get over it) commands the notice of his superiors, the respect of his peers and the admiration of his subordinates.

Jacques Pepin, Norm Abram and Obi-Wan Kenobi are all Badasses.

Well, can’t this person be a badass at 25? Well, it is possible to be a badass at 25. I would never dub myself worthy of the title, but there are people who consider me a badass at my job at a mere 28. However, I started when I was 14. I’m not exaggerating. 14. This person did not start at 14.

Why does it matter, you might be tempted to ask. Well, for one thing, the chef of a kitchen, like the captain of a ship, must exert some control over the kitchen, whether through respect, fear, admiration or awe, usually more of the former, and most succesfully a combination of all four. This person’s standards and taste (literal and figurative) dictate the ethic of the kitchen. Any decent cook can do a tasting, but one man does not cook 300 covers by himself. The chefs de partie will only ever be as good as the man that leads them, so he must be a Badass.

A great example of motivational rebuke comes in a story I recently heard about an internationally acclaimed restaurant on the West Coast. If the person who told me the story thinks it’s appropriate to name names, please comment so. I’ll leave them out. We’ve all heard of this place, and anyone who hasn’t eaten there whishes they could, even if they won’t admit it.

One evening during service, the Sous-Chef kicked all the cooks off the line and cooked a large table’s meals by himself. Every station, from the bottom up had to stand and watch him bust out the entire order better than any of them could have done individually at their own stations. This person, although not necessarily voted Miss Congeniality, is a Badass.

I’m at a crossroads in my life, and, as many of you know, I am considering switching careers- again. But I’ll tell you, stagehand, engineer, cook, baker, writer, whatever, the one thing I strive to attain, the one thing I long to be, whatever the job: a Badass.

Listening: “Hocus Pocus” Lee Morgan The Sidewinder

Someone asked me, the other day, if I wanted to go to a famous New York City restaurant, famous for its food, certainly, but as famous for its produce and relationship to the farm. You know what? I didn’t.

I’m sure the food is very good. I’m sure most of the dishes challenge the eater and make excellent use of the raw materials, maybe even highlighting them in a way we’re not used to, featuring celery or Jerusalem artichokes as dominant flavors. I haven’t eaten there, but I know some of the players involved, and I know how they operate, and I know they wouldn’t have it any other way.

But you know what? The food is just too damn busy.

What? Too busy? They’re making art on the plate! They’re pushing boundaries! They’re using innovative combinations of flavors to create new tastes in our mouths! We are indebted to them!

Whatever. Chatham Cod In a Crust of Cacciatorini Castelluccio Lentils, Roasted Broccoli Ribbons and Sauteed Cauliflower Lingonberry-Red Wine jus.

No thanks. I am not so bored with the flavor of every dish ever created that I need that kind of excitement. Union Square Café took their first reservation in the age of the dinosaurs, and it’s still impossible to get a reservation. Why? The food is great. Le Bernardin? Yuzu, okey dokey, whatever floats your boat. I’d prefer if it was New York State grown yuzu, but, hey, far be it from me to cast the first coconut.

Country, Felidia, Wallse or Prune, can anyone deny them? Seriously, what bad can you say about the food at these places? None of the menus are boring; in fact, I would say they are all innovative. I mean, lobster with cherries? WTF? But the beauty of the dish is just that: lobster, cherries, butter, fin. In lesser hands, the lobster might have cherries, crones and raisins, in pastry. These restaurants, that is, these chefs, understand innovation with a hand of restraint: we needn’t be hit over the head.

When I was sperm, I had the good fortune to apprentice to a brilliant old-school chef for a very brief period of time. Like everyone at that age, I was convinced that I knew everything and had the most advanced sense of taste to grace the planet. It took a while, but Chef handed me my balls in a little velveteen bag, reducing me to a quivering lump of check-pants-clad goo in his presence.

I would make things, easy things- so I thought- like omelets or crepes for his approval. In the aftermath, I maintained a stiff upper lip until I could get to the bathroom and cry. Little did I know everything that could be wrong with a crepe. You might think that this would discourage me, and make me hate him. Well, you’re wrong on both counts. Armed with the knowledge that a decent-tasting crepe can be offensive to those who cared enough about food to notice, I made them over and over and over again, at the restaurant, at home, at friends’ houses, at the pizzeria where I had a part time job: I ate more crepes at age 17 than most people will eat in a lifetime. And I loved him for it. Today, I can make crepes without a recipe, four pans at a time, without missing a stroke.

You might think that vomiting between projects is a bad way to learn how to cook, but I assure you it is the only way.

When I was a kid, I looked at the menu from that place, and I thought it was old and stodgy. I said ‘Duck with cherries? Lame. Rack of lamb? Lame. Assiette des terrines? BOR-ing.’ Little did I know the quality of the home-dried griotte cherries and the complexity that the Armagnac gave to the sauce. Little did I get the prosciutto skin that cooked with the white beans that made people order the lamb to begin with. Little did I understand the sexual desire of the black truffle in Sauce Perigord. Those three dishes are still on the menu, and with good reason. The duck has other incarnations, but the lamb is unchanged, right from Julia Child, right from Escoffier, right from Careme.

Those white beans, on the other hand? Scandal. Prosciutto skin, you say? From Italy? Incroyable! The armagnac with cherries? Sacre bleu! Zeez are not prunes! And don’t even mention all the Austrian doo-dads that snuck onto the menu.

I guess my point is, innovation isn’t renovation. You don’t need a sledgehammer to do something original.

I’m going to say something scandalous:

Prune is probably the best restaurant in New York City.

Wow. I said it.

Prune is as close as it gets to what I would cook for myself, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. That, and everything I have ever eaten there has made me emote audibly. It’s truly a wonderful restaurant.

It’s teeny tiny, but rather than make you feel like fish in a can who should thank them for letting you in, the staff smiles and somehow makes more room, although I am sure how they do it involves witchcraft. The staff is mostly young and, if not pretty, perky. They all seem to be excited about food and wine, and many realize what an extraordinary thing they are part of. It’s kind of fun to watch them know how good the food they’re bringing you is.

All this, and it’s somewhat affordable, with an intrepid if not impressive wine list. It’s organized “Sparkling, White, Red,” but what’s there is worth taking a look through, especially given the very democratic prices (although markup is no less than standard).

So I guess what I’m saying is, go there.

Prune

54 E 1st St, New York 10003
Btwn 1st & 2nd Ave

Phone: 212-677-6221

Listening: NPR. Fair Game is on. She’s funny.