The Omnivorous Fish - expensive

North Fork Table and Inn, Visited

JoeFish — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:30:23 -0400

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

Providence and Oz

JoeFish — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 18:25:04 -0400

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.

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.

Geh ins Wallse! Mach schnell!

JoeFish — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 11:09:30 -0400

We spent last weekend in Connecticut, land of milk and money. Of course, there are areas in Connecticut that are normal, middle-class places, but when you live in New York City (and you don’t decide which of your homes to go to for the weekend) Connecticut just has the connotation of people named Muffy and having live-in maids.

The wedding was lovely, we saw dozens of people that we don’t often get to see and was a complete success for the lovely bride and groom.

Except for the food. I don’t know, maybe the bride and groom loved it, but all I could think about was Wallse, where we ate last week.

Wallse is as much a state of mind as it is a restaurant. It’s teutonic in the extreme, from the black carpet and white walls to the paintings by Albert Oehlen. The flatware, the Riedel O glassware and the all-Austrian wine list whisper sweet ordnung in my ear.

It has been there at least six years, but I only recently discovered it while clicking links and reading an old review of it by one my lesser fave NY Times food critics, William Grimes. The Agent and I are still swooning a little over our Valentine’s dinner at The Modern, and, truth be told, I have always had a penchant for things Oesterreichisch. When I was an apprentice, my chef (a French chef, American by birth, German by extraction, trained by a Hungarian) referred fondly to “the dumpling belt” and we learned the likes of lebenknoedel, erdapfelknoedel, serviettenknoedel and stirum.

The food at Wallse is like those foods’ thin, exotic, runway model cousin from Hawaii. I had an appetizer of poached lobster with fava beans and a butter sauce which had a perfect but unexpected foil: sour cherries. Don’t laugh, I know: lobster; cherries, lobster; cherries. WTF? It works. The cherries burst into a tart, fruity little tapdancer in your mouth, enrobed in a Martha Graham butter shawl. On a subsequent visit, although I think in reality it was just as good, the surprise of the cherries wasn’t there. I guess you can never go home again… with lobster. Or with lobster and cherries. Or. Whatever.

The rabbit spaetzle almost reminded me of an Italian-style braise with pasta, except with spaetzle. (For you cognoscenti, the spaetzle are the pie-plate-with-holes style [as opposed to potato ricer method, or the end-of-the-spoon-on-the-lip-of-bowl method I learned as an apprentice]). Tender, salty bits of rabbit swam through the creamy herbed spaetzle. Truly memorable. I think, however, the appetizer de résistance had to be the palatschinken (very thin whole weat crepes, perhaps buckwheat) stuffed with smoked trout and horseradish. They were served rolled up tightly and sliced, laid over identical asparagus soldiers.

For main courses, on our first trip the Agent had the special fish: rainbow trout, panfried with bunashimeji mushrooms and served on top of braised Belgian endives, garnished with supremes of oranges. A supreme, in case you are unaware, is a very fancy, but highly specific term for a citrus segment, without any pith or seeds. Again, I know it sounds crazy, but it works. The crispy skin foiled the moist, flaky trout, and the mushrooms added interest to the texture and earthy flavor. But just when you were afraid it was all going to be too salty or rich, a juicy orange crush lit up your mouth. Browned, soft Belgian endives made a nice little nest for the fish. Another bizarre-sounding combo wins. I had the Wiener Schnitzel. What is this iconic thing, you may ask, subject of Bugs Bunny cartoons? A veal cutlet. Breaded and fried, end of story. This particular one was excellent, served with a lingonberry conserve (much better than the one at Ikea) and a light, flavorful potato salad. Something more ethereal than that of a church picnic, it was further lightened by paper thin slices of cucumber. Cucumber, it seems, was- outside of diner pickles- almost erased from my culinary experience for a time, but thankfully, Wallse has shown me the error of my ways. There’s something to be said for that light, crisp taste, bursting with water.

On our next visit, everyone had fish but me, and I think I may have missed out. Halibut hit the table twice, once with cucumbers and once with light and wonderful dill sauce. Red snapper was another crispy-skin triumph, and I had Kavalierspitz, boiled beef shoulder with beautfully cut and perfectly cooked vegetables. It was served with the most highly evolved potato roesti I’ve ever seen, and “creamed spinach” which turned out to be entirely pureed. Elegant? Yes. Flavroful? Eh, give me my spinach in pieces, thanks. A tower of freshly grated horseradish cascaded over the meat, very pretty and pragmatic, since you’re going to want some in every bite. Let’s face it, at the end of the day, boiled beef is boiled beef; but, as boiled beef goes, this was clearly the zenith.

Unsurprisingly in an Austrian place, the desserts are no slouches, either. I had a cherry strudel with pistachio cream and some richly good but nondescript buttermilk ice cream. It was sort of a “concept” strudel rather than the big, flaky slice you’re used to, but it was excellent, and a little trail of chopped pistachios made a disappearing, winding road off into the distance (of the corner of the plate). On a subsequent trial, this rocky road wasn’t there, and I have to admit I was disappointed. It was just slightly whimsical, very attractive, and we got cheated out of a tablespoon of chopped pistachios. Jeez.

There was a chocolate “pudding,” more like a molten-center chocolate cake, (not very much like a steamed pudding) which I found a little dry at the edges, but the raspberry sorbet and candied beets it came with went a ways to make up for it. Not far enough, in my opinion, but the agent loved it, as did a friend of ours. On the second trip, the shaved-ice presentation of the sorbets caught the Agent’s eye, and he went with the lemon sherbet and Riesling granité with mint and cassis. Were they good? Absolutely, but for my dough, at an Austrian restaurant of this quality, I’ll save the ices for in between courses. A huckleberry Salzburger nockerl was everything it’s supposed to be, a light, barely sweet puff of browned meringue with some perfect fruit in the bottom. It wasn’t the alpine-crested nockerl I have seen in the past, but it was so good it could have been shaped like mouse-ears and I would have devoured it.

The wine list is a bit of a bear. First of all, it’s all Austrian. Hands up, everyone who knows a lot about Austrian wine! Let’s see… ok, nobody. I believe there was one Australian and possibly a German selection by the glass, and that’s about it. And it’s not cheap. It starts around $50 and goes up to $150. After talking to two different waiters and the man I believe to be the sommelier (he did not identify himself as such, but spoke knowingly about the wine program) it seems that if you’re going to get any real Austrian wine-drinking on, at least at Wallse, you’re going to need to go into the $80-plus range. Like German wines, Austrian wines are largely demarcated by ripeness, the most common on the list being federspiel (less ripe) and smaragd (more ripe). Our waiter told us the federspiels would “drink more or less like any crisp white wine,” but the real action was in smaragd. Was he right or trying to pad the bill? Dunno, but we went with the wine he suggested, a smaragd Gruener Veltliner from Wachau, made by a producer called Knoll, who is apparently among the newer generation of producers committed to producing world-class wines (at world-class prices). Was it good? Yes. Was it better than some off-the-shelf warm-weather crisp white wine? Yes. Was it better than the $20 bottle of tocai friulano or the $25 bottle of Alsatian riesling ten feet away from me? Not really. It was complex and minerally and floral and slightly tropically fruity and $90. We also had a bottle of Schlumberger sekt (sparkling wine, $45) as an aperitif. Again, it was good, but was it better than the $12 bottle of prosecco sitting in my stash? I can’t say yes.

The wine list does, at least, make an effort to educate. The wines are largely broken down by region, and each page has an introduction to what you’re going to find on it. It is a bare-bones guide, however, I wouldn’t be afraid to ask for help. One thing that does irk me about the list, though, is the its arrangement by price (within subcategories of region and grape). I mean, come on. Also, I like to have a small ice bucket on my table. I don’t want my white wines whisked away to someplace where I can’t see them, and can’t pour them for myself, in a quantity that I want them. I should have asked if they had any, and when I go back (which I will) I will ask. I will also, as a control, order the cheapest bottle of wine on the list and see if it makes a damn bit of difference.

Wallse
344 W11th St, at Washington St.
212.352.2300

Restaurants: Union Square Cafe

JoeFish — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 17:35:23 -0400

There are different schools of thought in the food world on the merit of innovation. Some people value it above most, if not all, other qualities, preferring to consider the genius of cocoa-infused anchovy paste barquettes than to savor the sacramental releves of Larousse Gastronomique. Some people spurn it and only begrudgingly accept canard a l’orange. Wherever you fall in the debate, it can be agreed that every so often, it is refreshing to have a meal that is simply excellent. This is a meal that is staid, even predictable, but is of such high quality and executed with such technical expertise that there is no debate to its merit: it is merely fantastic.

Some people might wonder if it’s even worth writing about (or visiting) a restaurant that has been around as long as Union Square Cafe. It has been given its accolades, it has made its mark, it has had its moment; enough. I disagree. Restaurants evolve; they undergo changes in staff, both back-of and front-of-house; they change suppliers and menus and chefs and prices. People also just get plain lazy. Not so with Union Square.

Truth be told, the decor is one thing that might stand a little change. It is simple and understated, mostly timeless, but kissed here and there with touches- like vibrant salmon-hued watercolors of ingredients- that are best described as When-Harry-Met-Sally Provincial. Like a rental apartment from the Reagan era, there is certainly nothing wrong, but its modern touches could use a little updating.

One aspect that needs no updating whatsoever is the service. It seems that a knowledgeable waitstaff has somehow come to mean the suggestion of “favorite dishes” to customers. Truly good service, however, remains a balance of enthusiasm and restraint; it is a mixture of knowledge and the desire to serve. Indeed, the reservationist was apologetic, if not empathetic to the difficulties of securing a table. The waiter was friendly, but cordial, professional. It took a long moment to secure his attention, but once we had it, he was practically ideal. Knowledgeable about the menu and wine list, he gave opinions when asked, but remained otherwise occupied with giving us what we wanted.

The food, uniformly excellent, if sometimes uninspired, remains true to its mission: an American menu with Italian flourishes, prepared to branch out, but never at the sake of flavor or consistency. The first appetizer, Yellowfin Tuna Tartare with Salsa Verde, Spicy Aioli, Asparagus-Radish Salad and Potato Crostini, was perhaps the busiest thing on the menu, but truly a triumph. Highest-quality yellowfin, anointed with flecks of brilliant emerald salsa verde- an earthy, herbaceous amalgam of parsley and salty goodies- and garlicky, piquant mayo, was served with a side of what could best be described as some really fantastic chips. The sparse but flavorful salad broke the texture barrier set up by the crisp chips and yielding fish.

Another appetizer- unfortunately the only pasta sampled- was beautifully made and prepared frascatelli. A tiny dumpling resembling a slice of an gnocchi, but with a lighter texture and pure semolina flavor, the frascatelli were supposedly alla carbonara but in reality were sauced with cream, guanciale (a richly flavored, marvelously baconesque product made from the jowls of the pig; certainly worth a google) and pecorino romano cheese. Delicious by any name, but nary an egg in sight.

The main courses, though not as exciting, demanded no less attention. Tiny, tender grilled lamb chops Scotta Dita- marinated in a basil-infused vinaigrette- were cooked exactly medium rare, served with a tart tangle of sauteed insalata tricolore (arugula, belgian endive and radicchio). A simple but delicious potato-gruyere gratin ensured I wouldn’t have to go a whole course without any type of cheese, thankfully. A Pan-Seared Halibut with Spring Vegetable Farrotto and Mushroom Jus was a crusty piece of fish on a bed of grains with perfectly cooked vegetables. Hardly exciting, it is a clear illustration of the menu’s desire to please without offending anyone. It is one of a few dishes on the menu remarkable only in their uncanny perfection.

Incidentally, these were both superb with a Whitcraft 2004 Pinot Noir from Santa Maria Valley.

Desserts cater mainly to the sweet-tooth crowd, but are very good for what they are. A Rocky Road Baked Alaska with Chocolate Cake & Fudge Sauce was comprised of dense, moist cake with a mound of voluptuous cream-and-egg-filled ice cream. Not to be confused with anything low-fat or compromising in one’s experience; this is the kind of ice cream that people care about. A toadstool of lightly sweetened meringue capped off the presentation, a fantastic nod to desserts of this tradition. For those less enamored of the sweets, the restaurant goes out of its way to have on hand an array of cheeses that would make Murray proud. From Maconnais chevres to Cato’s Corner Hooligan (available steps away at the Saturday Greenmarket), the selections show a desire to bring some lesser known but deserving products to the forefront.

Overall, the restaurant’s dedication to quality and commitment to local purveyors- and the unmistakable beauty of something grown close to where you are eating it- make it worth the trip. Innovation will always be around, but, thankfully, so will Union Square Cafe.

unionsquarecafe.com

212.243.4020