Food Writer’s Diary

sometimes “rising stars” quit their jobs

2009-07-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

July 15

I might be over-interpreting the San Francisco Chronicle’s lede in its story about Nate Appleman quitting his job “[j]ust two months after nabbing the national James Beard Foundation award for Rising Star Chef.” But to me it sounds a tiny bit accusatory, like you’re not supposed to quit a job after winning an award there.
But it’s not an uncommon practice. Of the past ten chefs to win the Rising Star award, including young Mr. Appleman (he has to be young, you have to be aged 30 or younger to win the award), four have left their jobs within a year or so. Grant Achatz won the award in 2003 for his work at Trio in Evanston, Ill., and soon left to work on Alinea in Chicago, which opened the following year. Allison Vines-Rushing quit Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar about a year after winning the award in 2004. She moved to Louisiana and opened Longbranch.
Christopher Lee was named Rising Star at Striped Bass in Philadelphia in 2005. He became chef of Gilt in New York in 2006.
David Chang was named Rising Star in 2007. Being an entrepreneur, he couldn’t quit his own restaurant, but no doubt that award, and the nine quadrillion others that he’s received, have helped him to expand his empire.
There’s no shame in it.

Aureole’s Daniel connection

2009-07-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

July 15

Poor Jennifer Watson! She’s smart, talented and interesting, yet she thought she was unable to perform the simple task of reading my blog. Because she knew I was having dinner with her at Aureole, and yet according to my blog, I was still in Hawaii.
In fact, I got back from The Aloha State weeks ago and still haven’t finished writing about it (that Aloha State link will take you to all of my blog entries about that trip — current and future).
Jennifer sells defibrillators and pacemakers to cardiologists, but she doesn’t just sell them. She goes into the operating rooms with the cardiologists and observes their procedures. She also entertains her cardiologists, of course, and she loves, loves, loves food and drink. So it’s fun to eat out with her, not just because of her good company and appreciation of the meal, but because she often knows people working in the restaurant.
That’s especially true if those people have ever been involved in Daniel Boulud’s restaurant empire, because Jennifer loves Daniel’s restaurants and eats at them a lot. Indeed, the last time I saw Jennifer, we started the evening at a gay pride cocktail party at the Beard House, followed it up with music at Arlene’s Grocery and finished it with wine and sausages at Daniel’s newest restaurant, DBGB. Daniel himself was there, and he sat down and chatted. As I had just returned from Hawaii at that point, we spoke about sustainable fisheries among other things. (The wine, incidentally was not yet the house wine being blended for DBGB in Brooklyn, but an inexpensive boxed wine that they referred to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as a “soft magnum.” I’m not sure whether DBGB’s house wine is ready yet.)
Anyway it seems that a lot of people who used to work for Daniel have found jobs at the new Aureole.
There’s nothing scandalous about that. Restaurant workers move around a lot as opportunities present themselves, and it makes sense for them to see different styles of cooking, management and service.
So just as Aureole’s kitchen is heavily spiced with staff from Oceana and Gilt, which are two of executive chef Chris Lee's last three jobs (after Oceana and before Gilt, he was at Striped Bass in Philadelphia), the front-of-the-house has hostesses, managers and wine people from Daniel’s restaurants. They greeted Jennifer with warmth, and they were nice to me, too.
Chris started us off with the corn soup, and he personally brought out a middle course of Alaska halibut. Jennifer thought that was especially cool.

What I ate:
Chilled sweet yellow corn soup with American caviar, Vidalia onions, lemon citrus and ancho chile oil
Artichoke Ravioli with Louisiana crayfish, black olive oil, andouille sausage and white caper wine sauce
Alaska halibut with fruits de mer, baby carrots, fresh garbanzo beans, preserved lemon and saffron mussel sauce
Canadian lobster tail and Berkshire pork belly with summer squash, chanterelle mushrooms, Cape gooseberries, jura wine and an almond emulsion
Cherry brioche panzanella with almond cream, roasted cherry sorbet and fennel
And a bunch of chocolates and other mignardises

Casting Call

2009-07-09T11:11:00.001-07:00

Did you know that CBS News Productions was the production company for The Next Food Network Star? You learn something new every day.
Anyway, they've issued a casting call for a new show. If you want to apply, go right ahead:

CBS Eye Too Productions is seeking two-person teams for a new restaurant competition show.

WHO SHOULD APPLY:

Two person teams with pre-existing relationships: couples, family, husband and wife, father and daughter, best friends, cousins, co-workers

The Skills to Run a Restaurant: Are you a pro in the kitchen while your teammate is a star in the front of the house? Are either of you a restaurant manager, waiter, host, chef, weekend gourmet, line cook, sous chef, designer, business person? Combined do you make the perfect team to run a restaurant?

Personality that Pops: Are you and your teammate charismatic and outgoing? We’re looking for lots of energy and charm!

HOW TO APPLY:

Attend the NYC Open Call
July 21st 10am-2pm
CBS
530 W. 57th St.
(btw 10th and 11th Ave. on the south side of the road)
NY, NY 10019

If you can’t make it to the open call and still want to apply, please e-mail us at restaurantshow@yahoo.com. Please include your names, ages, locations, occupations, contact phone numbers, a recent photograph of yourselves, and a brief summary as to why your team is perfect for the show!

For more information and application go to www.restaurantshow.wordpress.com

Light reading

2009-07-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

July 8

Oh, I have so much to share with you, dear reader, but I have some fires to put out today, and so in the meantime, please enjoy this this interview with the chef at Chez Roux, Albert Roux's new restaurant outside of Houston.
And while I'm at it, in case you missed it, my story on the cuisine of Puglia.

Thank you.

Dinner at Mavro

2009-07-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

July 6

Let me discuss again why I am not a restaurant critic and don’t recommend restaurants to my readers (although I did just express delight at the deliciousness of my lunchtime baby octopus).
Saturday night dinner during my visit to O‘ahu (two weeks ago, I know) was at Chef Mavro, where I dined with the chef's wife, Donna Jung, and were given a grand tasting menu that I shall detail in a moment.
As far as I could tell, everyone was getting great service, but it’s hard to tell when you’re eating with the chef’s wife, when the chef is in the kitchen, at the very least looking after every plate that comes your way, and later coming out to chat.
Often when chefs come out to chat they’re very polite but rather standoffish, but given the fact that we’d spent the previous day at the harbor, trudging through a watercress farm and eating malasadas, that would have been weird. And I don’t think it’s Mavro’s style. So he just plopped into a spare chair (because when you’re me — or one of hundreds or possibly thousands of people like me — even when there’s just two people dining, you’re usually seated at a four-top) and hung out for awhile after the main dinner rush had ended.
During dessert, commented on one of the trendiest flavors going these days. “Maple is a magic flavor,” he said. Like Vanilla or lilikoi (which is what Hawaiians call passion fruit; they can't help themselves) it adds an ineffable flavor that you can't necessarily itentify, but you know that it’s delicious.
I’d put nutmeg in that category, too, but you’ll start to think I’m obsessed with the spice.
Indeed, maybe I am.
We ended up closing the place down and Mavro gave me a ride back to the Royal Hawaiian in his Lotus, and I really, really should have taken a picture of my inelegant exit from that low-slung vehicle, just to show you how self-deprecating I can be.

What I ate and drank (hold on to your hat):

Abalone ceviche, croquettes of cod, red chimichuri, essence of cilantro
Craggy Range 2008 Sauvignong Blanc (Martinborough, New Zealand)

Striped olive oil-marinated marlin (nairagi) with poached quail egg, sunchoke chips, big wave tomato confit and hanapepe salt
Domaine Laroche 2006 Chablis St. Martin (Burgundy, France)

Hudson Valley Foie Gras torchon with cocoa nib and candied pecan crust, pickled grapes, citrus infused celery and toasted Portuguese sweet bread
Fitz Ritter 2007 Gewürtztraminer, Spätlese, (Pfalz,Germany)

Day boat catch with caramelized baby fennel, picholine olive purée and sauce monégasque
Planetz 2006 Cometa (Sicily, Italy)

Crispy rice flake crusted flouner fillet with braised green papaya, broccolini florets and tamarind curry
Vollrads 2004 Riesling (Rheingau, Germany)

Keahole lobster pot au feu with spring vegetable gribiche and calamansi accented crutacean jus
Marc Colin 2006 Saint Aubin premier cru La Chatenière (Burgundy, France)

Kurobuta pork “a la malais” — a roasted rack, crispy shank with sweet and sour watermelon, ginger dressing and caramelized pork jus
Nicolas Potel 2006 vielles vignes Morey-Saint-Denis (what can I say? the sommelier likes Burgundy; it’s not a crime)

Wagyu strip loin, burgundy braised veal cheek, “no eggs no butter béarnaise,” boulangère potatoes and essence of sumida watercress
(and just when you think he’s a Burgundy whore, he pulls out the Bordeau) Clos du Marquis 2003 St. Julien

“Return from Marrakesh” — chick pea crusted mountain meadow lamb loin with bulghur wheat, dates and upcountry vegetables in yogurt-garlic sauce
Dashe 2007 Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley (Sonoma, California)

Big Island goat cheese blanc manger toppe with cranberry, marcona almonds and hirabara baby greens
Jean-Maurice Rauffault 2007 Chinon Les Galuches (Loire, France)

The Grand Dessert: star anise pavlova filled with maple-marinated berries, served with berry jus and hibiscus ice cake
Jorge Ordoñez 2006 seleccion especial, (Malaga, Spain)

Lilikoi malasads with guava coulis and pineapple-cocnut ice cream
Five year Blandy’s Malmsey Madeira (Portugal)

chocolate tofu: Valrhona filling, sesame crust, macha sauce and buttermilk ice cream
Domaine de Jau 2006 Banyuls (France)

More pictures of nutmeg, and my trip to the north shore.

2009-07-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

July 3

Boy, Hawaiians sure get up early. Or maybe farmers do, I don’t know, but my second morning in Hawaii I had a 7:45 a.m. appointment with Dean Okimoto, one of the founders of the Kapi‘olani Community College Farmers Market.
My directions for getting there were so easy that I didn’t even turn on the GPS, and in fact it was very easy to find, the only surprise being how far away I had to park at 7:30 in the morning. The place was packed.
I strolled around the market a bit and took pictures of nutmeg, as you can see in the first picture.
The second picture is just a detail from the first picture, because about a third of this blog’s readers are New Yorkers, and they’ve probably never seen a nutmeg fruit before.
Other than the nutmeg and a couple of other somewhat exotic fruits such as soursop — and mango and papaya if you count them — and the fact that the weather was more perfect than at most farmers markets, it was pretty much a farmers market. Dean explained that the inspiration for the venture came from time he spent in San Francisco. And indeed, it did have a sort of Bay Area vibe somehow, and lots of temperate-climate vegetables.
Those are new crops in Hawaii, Dean explained, driven in part by chefs who want to use more local produce, and by farmers who have been priced out of the pineapple and sugar cane markets by lower production costs elsewhere in the tropics (everywhere in the tropics, I would think, except maybe Singapore).
Dean himself is the head of Nalo Farms, which specializes in salad greens (indeed, I’d had some the night before at Orchids). I asked if it was a challenge to grow lettuce that wasn’t bitter, as the tropical sun tends to do that to lettuce, and he said that, indeed, it was, and in the summer they had to harvest the greens at a younger age than at other times of the year.
So that was interesting.
I snacked around a bit — a little pulled pork sandwich made by the culinary school students, some curry musubi, a bit of roasted corn.
There was a lot of prepared food at the farmers market, which I guess is okay, but Dean said they had 60 merchants at the market and a waiting list of 40 more who wanted to display their wares. I'd think I'd want to give priority to the farmers who are selling their own stuff, but I’ve never tried to run a farmers market, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Then it was time to check out of the Halekulani and move about a block over the the Royal Hawaiian, a procedure that, given the one-way streets and the fact that neither the GPS nor I were sure, exactly, what little unmarked side alley we were supposed to drive down to find the hotel, took about half an hour. In fact, I tried at first to check into the Sheraton Waikiki, which is considerably less upscale than the Halekulani (or, as it turns out, the Royal Hawaiian). Sheraton owns the Royal Hawaiian, too, so the receptionists, even while managing a patient herd of tourists standing in line, were able to direct me to my proper hotel.
“The pink one,” one of them said.
The Royal Hawaiian is, indeed, pink. And there's no typical front desk there at which to check in. Instead there are several fairly opulent desks. You are supposed to sit down at one end, across from the uniformed hotel emplyee who will help you while you sip a light, refreshing greeting beverage. It’s very civilized.

But it being 10:30 a.m., my room wasn’t ready.
No matter, as I was driving to the north shore anyway to have lunch at a seaside place called Ola.
“Turn right on [brief pause] *ee *oy street,” the GPS said.
“On where?" I asked it as I found myself in the wrong lane to turn onto Piikoi Street.
The GPS isn’t very good at pronouncing those hard voiced consonants, but it does provide an interactive map, and its verbal instructions are also written on the screen.
“Recalculating.” said the GPS and she started pointing me to the airport.
I thought maybe she’d had enough of me and that her next instructions were going to be: “If you think you’re so smart, get out and find a way to fly to the North Shore, dip-shit.”
But no, we headed north and without too much fuss ended up at the Turtle Bay Resort.
Ola looks like a touristy seafood shack that sells fried clams, calamari and, if you’re lucky, cold beer. But instead I had a tuna poke salad, and baby octopus with orechiette pasta in a coconut milk sauce that might have had just a whiff of curry. I was kind of shocked by its deliciousness.

Here's how the menu describes those dishes:

Ahi poke
North Shore Limu, onion, Inamona, Kahuku sea asparagus, sesame soy.

Grilled baby octopus
Orechiette pasta, spinach, Maui onion, roasted pepper, citrus, lemon grass herb oil, crab luau cream.

Oh, and the chef is Fred De Angelo.

nutmeg and mace

2009-07-02T15:49:00.000-07:00

July 2

This is a picture of a fresh nutmeg. That thin partial layer of reddish stuff around it is the spice mace. I guess physiologically it is to nutmeg what the paper-like layer around a peanut is to the peanut.
That’s all you get from me today, but tomorrow the story of my trip to O‘ahu and my passive-aggressive relationship with the GPS will continue.

dinner with Miss Hawaii

2009-06-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

June 26

Dinner last Friday was at Orchids, one of the restaurants at the Halekulani, and my companion was the hotel's public relations director, Erika Kauffman.
Erika looks like a California blonde, but in fact she was born in Hawaii and grew up on the Big Island (in the Kona area), where she says they didn’t bother to pack lunch for school but simply plucked whatever produce was available from nearby trees.
I later learned that Erika is a former Miss Hawaii, but she didn’t discuss it herself. I mean, how could she?
“Hi, nice to meet you. I was a Miss Hawaii."
You just sound like an idiot if you do that.
Her colleague, food & beverage dirctor Sabine Glissmann, could have mentioned it, but why would she?
Before dinner, Sabine joined Erika and me for drinks at the House without a Key, which is what they call their mostly-outdoor beachside lounge. A band of ukuleles and a standing bass played surprisingly mellow music as a hula dancer performed and I drank a cocktail of gin and guava and snacked on big-eye tuna poke sliders (with nori, Japanese pickles and wasabi mayonnaise).
Erika was big on promoting Orchids’ newest feature, Table 1. It hasn’t been launched yet, but it will basically be a chef’s table in the middle of the restaurant. The hotel’s new executive chef, Vikram Garg, will come out and chat with guests at the table, determine their likes, dislikes and mood and prepare a tasting menu for them.
Vik came out after the meal and we chatted about trends (we think pork belly’s about done) and tropical fruit. I mentioned snake fruit, an obscure and completely unappetizing sounding thing that I had in Sumatra. Vik had never heard of it, which we agreed was weird. It’s kind of an uneven oblong about the size of a small plum, with a brown, scaly skin (hence the name). At first bite it’s completely unappetizing. It looks and has the texture of garlic. It tastes a little sweet, but mostly acrid, with a tendency to dry out the mouth, but it’s addictive on some level and actually a lot of fun to eat.

What I ate (chased down with glasses of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc):

Pacific oyster and caviar shooters served in a ginger and mango cocktail
Kona crab cappuccino topped with truffle and coconut cream
Steamed onaga sizzled with sesame oil and garnished with shiitake mushrooms, green onions, ginger, cilantro and soy
Berries and sorbet

And the Hawaii story continues

2009-06-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

June 25

When we last left off, it was Friday morning in Honolulu. With marlin, eggs and rice under my belt, along with two half malasadas, I clearly needed to figure out what to do for lunch, and how to get there without irritating my GPS too much.
I have to admit that I like how the GPS pauses before reconsidering my best route to someplace after I’ve missed an obvious turn. There’s a pause, and then an emotionless, Stephen Hawking-esque (but feminine) computerized voice says “recalculating.” The pause followed by the purely emotionless voice, to me, makes her sound kind of pissed off. It’s like she noticed I missed the turn, can’t quite believe that I ignored her, pauses for a moment to contain her rage, and then, trying not to yell, says “recalculating.”
My friend Jonathan Ray, who taught at a fancy Honolulu high school called Punahou ("Pew-na-how,” according to the GPS, who calls Kamehameha Highway “Camay-hamay-ha Highway") had fond memories of Mekong 2 for Thai food, but I thought I’d start with more local fare (not to say Hawaiian, which implies the food of ethnic Hawaiians such as poi and laulau, as opposed to the spam musubi, plate lunches, loco moco and saimin of the locals, whom you can't call “native,” even if they were born in Hawaii, because that implies ethnic Hawaiian, too).
So I ended up at Zippy’s, a local diner chain, for saimin, which is a local version of ramen. I scarfed down a small bowl at the counter and then climbed back in the car and drove down S. King St., until I could find parking. By then Mekong 2 was closed for the day, but I went nearby to the corner of S. King and Punahou (excuse me, Pew-na-how) and had an adobo plate lunch.
A plate lunch is protein — chicken teriyaki, a burger patty, a piece of salmon, what have you — often served in one of those sectioned-off TV dinner trays, with two scoops of rice and one scoop of macaroni salad. Alan Wong likes to describe that as a quintessential example of how the different groups who have settled in Hawaii have affected each other's food to create something unique in the islands.
Hawaii also has a very serious obesity and diabetes problem — among the worst in the country. Some awareness has been raised on that front, and so not only was I able to order a small saimin at Zippy’s, but also I could order a small plate lunch at Pee Wee (so-named because it's a little corner shop, not because the portions are small). So I got a big scoop of adobo — not the Mexican kind, but the Philippine kind, which is stewed pork cooked with vinegar, soy sauce &c. — with one scoop of rice and macaroni salad. I have to say, there’s something about how the mayonnaise from the macaroni salad and the juice from the adobo mixes with the rice that really is magical.
With dinner approaching, I figured I should go ahead and stop eating for awhile, so I told the GPS to take me back to the Halekulani, and she did.

La Bonne Soupe

2009-06-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

June 24

Just got a call from Monique at La Bonne Soupe, a much-loved neighborhood French restaurant in Midtown Manhattan (48 W. 55th, between fifth and sixth avenues). A fire closed the restaurant some months ago, but the clean-up is just about finished, they’ll be cooking over the weekend and hope to start selling brandade de morou, croques madames and other homestyle French dishes by Tuesday.

July 2 update:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Danielle
July 2nd 2009
TEL: (212) 586 7650

LA BONNE SOUPE NEW YORK RE-OPENS
….following kitchen fire March 2009

WHAT: La Bonne Soupe, mid-town’s favorite French bistro re-opens with an aesthetic that captures a new streamlined spirit. The new surroundings are a modern take on the original bistro décor, and regulars, some of who have been coming for over thirty years, will still feel at home in a space with a new-found joie de vivre.

Also in place is the ever popular menu of standard bistro favorites like…steak frites, award winning onion soup, fondue au fromage, fondue au chocolat… and daily specials with a more international flare keep every diner in mind.

WHEN: Saturday, July 4th 2009

WHERE: 48 West 55th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenue)
Hours of Operation:
Monday though Thursday 11:30am-11:00pm
Friday and Saturday 11:30am-11:30pm
Sunday 11:30am-10:30pm

WHO: Jean-Paul Picot
Yves Picot

For more information please visit our website at www.labonnesoupe.com

Mavro and me

2009-06-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

June 21

I have the morning off! So it’s time to update the blog.
The past two mornings have required that I be out of bed and ready to go quite a bit earlier than I'm accustomed to, but this was really no hardship as Hawaii is six hours behind New York during daylight savings time (the Aloha State does not observe the twice-yearly clock adjustment practice, so it’s five hours behind during the rest of the year).
On Friday I was picked up at 6:15 a.m. — a time I’m more likely to see from the other side, before going to bed — by chef George ”Mavro” Mavrothalassitis and his wife and publicist Donna Jung.
Donna was the main protagonist in getting me to O‘ahu. I normally see her and Mavro about once a year, when he cooks at the Beard House in early May, and she wanted me to try his food in their restaurant. So she made some calls and here I am.
We were meeting so early because they wanted to take me to the Honolulu fish auction, which starts in the very small hours of the day. The first picture in this blog entry is what the auction looks like. Those are wholesalers bidding on big-eye, or ahi, tuna. They really do have big eyes, but I didn’t have the good sense to take pictures of their eyes. I was more interested in the carcasses, which you can see in the next picture, and the flesh samples taken from each of them for the bidders to examine. One sample's from the tail, one's from the midsection and the third is like a core sample, drilled from the center of the carcass.
Mavro and I spent most of the time talking with Brooks Takenaka, general manager of the United Fishing Agency, which is what the auction company is called.
Donna took a picture of us talking, in case you need proof.
I should stop slouching.
Brooks said that in his 30 years working with the United Fishing Agency (he did various fascinating things involving marine biology before that) this year’s catch is the worst. He’s not sure why, as the Hawaiian wild fishery is one of the most strictly regulated on the planet.
And there’s no need to panic. One year of bad fishing doesn’t mean ecological breakdown.
And on Friday the catch was good. Three boats came in, and apart from ahi, there was also opah, which you can see in the next picture, and swordfish, which you can see in the picture after that.
Our conversation with Brooks focused mostly on regulation, and on how the rules that are made tend to be based much more on what sounds good than on what actually helps to protect fisheries. It is very aggravating for Brooks. I told him the story of goose farmer Jim Schiltz, who wanted to sell his geese in Whole Foods, but that self-righteous grocery chain wanted him to raise his geese on all-vegetarian diets.
Vegetarian diets became de rigueur for cattle after it was discovered that “mad cow” disease developed when cattle were fed other cattle, including their brains and other parts of their nervous system, which contained prions that catalyzed the formation of prions in the cattle’s brains, which is how they developed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).
Now, that’s all very gross, but what does it have to do with geese, who in fact are not ruminating herbivores like cattle, but waterfowl, for whom it’s natural to eat fish? Jim says if he didn’t give them fishmeal at specific stages in their life, a third of them would die.
So we all had a good laugh about that, and then after taking a look at some of the fishing boats, Mavro and Donna took me to Nico’s at Pier 38, a restaurant by the wharf where I had breakfast of Hawaiian coffee (hurray!) and marlin and eggs, with a scoop of rice. Donna had the same thing, while Mavro had loco-moco.
From there we went to Sumida Farm, where about 70 percent of Hawaii’s watercress is grown.
The farm is on a wetland fed by natural springs — scratch that, obviously they’re natural. They’re springs.
Anyway, a number of hard-to-find birds frequent the farm to eat insects and snails and crayfish and other creatures that live in the water in which the watercress grows (the plant itself roots itself in gravel). My first bird picture is of a black-crowned night heron. I’m not sure why it’s called a night heron, because there it was, sitting around in the middle of the day (okay, it was actually around 8 a.m., but it felt like the middle of the day to me).
The next picture, the blurry one, is of a Hawaiian stilt.
David explained that a lot of Asian cuisines use watercress as a vegetable, stir-frying the stem, for example.
The farm is on a slight grade, so water is always flowing around the cress. Their main weed is a sort of algae, that has to be removed daily, although Filipinos do eat that particular type of algae. David knows that because his workers are almost all (maybe all, but I didn’t ask) ethnic Filipinos, who make up a big chunk of the Hawaiian community. David allows his workers to have garden plots on the outskirts of the farm, and some of them let the algae grow longer and harvest it to eat.
Each plot of watercress is harvested every eight weeks. The plant is pulled up, the roots are chopped off and the rest of the plant is bound into 1-pound bunches, which are then wrapped into 35-pound bundles and vacuum chilled. They are delivered to David’s customers three times a week.
Mavro insists that it is the best watercress in the world. He’s French, so you’d think he’d declare anything French to be the best, but of course he left his hometown of Marseilles many years ago (he used to say that only Marseillais knew how to cook fish, then he learned about Japanese cuisine). One of Mavro’s early jobs in the U.S. (maybe his first, but I don’t remember) was in my hometown of Denver, at a fine-dining restaurant called Château Pyrenees, where he worked for a couple of years before being courted by the Halekulani, where he worked at its French restaurant, La Mer, before moving to Maui to work at The Four Seasons.
After we left the farm, we went to Leonard’s which is famous for its malasadas, a type of Portuguese doughnut coated in granulated sugar. There was a long line at Leonard’s which pleased us all, because it’s nice to see a restaurant doing good business.
Then we drove to Kaimana Beach, to eat them. Donna took a picture of me eating a malasada. That’s a plain one, but I also sampled one filled with haupia. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t finish either one, because, believe it or not, I do believe in practicing restraint from time to time.
Donna and Mavro dropped me off at my hotel, at around 10:30 a.m. After I regrouped, I began to explore the city.

Alan Wong’s and why I shouldn’t drive

2009-06-19T18:52:00.000-07:00

June 19

I am in Hawaii, guest of the O‘ahu Visitors Bureau, which has asked me to come check out the food of the island, home to most Hawaiians. I arrived last night in the Honolulu airport at a little after 5 p.m. and found my way to the rental car companies, where a vehicle was waiting for me. Did I want a GPS? They asked. It occurred to me that, being a terrible navigator, and having never been to O‘ahu before, I probably should go ahead and get one.
I soon learned that GPSes make you stupid. Or maybe it was the late hour; 5 p.m. might not sound late, but 5 p.m. in Hawaii during daylight saving's time is 11 p.m. in New York, and I had been on an airplane pretty much straight — except for a brisk walk in Phoenix from my plane that had arrived from Newark an hour late to the aircraft headed for Hawaii that was taking off on time — since around 10 a.m. (4 a.m. Hawaii time).
So I was a little punchy anyway.
I learned that the GPS gives you some good information (“go .3 miles and turn right on Kalakaua Avenue” although it has no idea which accents to stress with Hawaiian words, making for amusing mispronunciations), but not quite enough information. It doesn’t tell you when the highway is going to suddenly split into three seperate roads, or when you might be trapped in a left-turn-only lane. Normally, of course, when driving you pay attention to those things, because you’re responsible for navigating and you need to focus. With the GPS, I found myself focusing a lot less.
“Recalculating,” the navigational system would tell me when I missed a turn, or when I was shunted by my fellow drivers onto a street I hadn't actually wanted to be on.
“I was trapped in the wrong lane!” I’d tell it, but of course it didn’t care.
After that had happened twice I decided to just relax and enjoy whatever views the GPS and my own ineptitude led me to. So I toured around the harbor a bit (“recalculating...”) until I managed to inch myself past the alarmingly oblivious tourist pedestrians of Waikiki to the Halekulani hotel.
You might have seen the picture of my view from the hotel room in my last blog entry. The picture at the beginning of this entry was, to me, one of the most salient features of the restaurant where I ate dinner, Alan Wong’s. What you see there, illuminated by an oil wick, are two lovely bottles, one containing soy sauce and the other containing vinegar. Those condiments can be seen on many more humble tables in Hawaii and much of Asia. You’d likely see them in dumpling houses in China, for example. Seeing them immediately took me back to the jiaozi, or boiled dumplings, around the corner from my dormatory at Nanjing University, although there the vinegar was dark brown and malty (variations of those condiments are seen in other countries; in Thailand you'd have fish sauce with chiles in it, vinegar with chiles in it, sugar and one of a number of other condiments depending on the restaurant).
Alan has a reputation for being playful with his food, and for incorporating local elements into his cooking, but to me it seemed that his food really exemplified the food of Hawaii’s Asian communities (I’m told about 30 percent of Hawaiian residents are ethnic Japanese), brought together in fine dining style without toning down the robust flavors of those cuisines.
That’s very different from what happens most of the time when Asian influence is brought to bear on fine dining in New York. There, even in 2009, the Asian influence is usually just a whisper, and the intensity of flavors is almost always toned down to appeal to francophiles and wimps.
At Alan Wong’s the Asian influence was front-and-center.
But the food, and the restaurant itself, still seemed to me to reflect Hawaiian realities. Wine director Mark Shishido explained that the Portuguese brought the vinegar that they use to the islands. For them, it was a source of vitamin C. The staff also was a great ethnic mix, ranging from my apparently lily-white head server Rachel to the mostly Asian (and mostly young and hip looking) men who brought out and explained my food to me, to the large and maybe a little uncomfortable-looking Pacific Islander (that’s a guess) who seemed never quite sure what I wanted to do with the lemon aïoli that was served with the bread.
Probably my favorite part of the meal was the coffee list, an extraordinary menu of about 20 coffees from throughout Hawaii — at least one from every major island.
It seemed extraordinary to me, at least. The most advanced coffee list I’d ever seen on the mainland was at Spruce in San Francisco. But Mark said coffee menus were not uncommon in Honolulu.
I guess I’ll find out over the next few days.

What I ate and drank:
locavore Mai Tai (Mai Tai Rao Ae) with orgeat-like syrup made from macadamia nuts, rum distilled in Maui, Kunia pineapple, organic Paomoho farms limes and Maui sugar'

Kalua pig grilled cheese sandwich on a Parmesan crisp, served over red and yellow tomato soup in a Martini glass
seafood cake of lobster, shrimp, scallop and crab over caper mayonnase and tsukemono relish
“poki-pines”: crispy won ton ahi poke balls on avocado with wasabi sauce
2004 Carneros sparkling wine

butter poached Kona lobster (raised on the big island from North Atlantic lobster eggs raised in seawater brought from 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface) with Honda tofu, nagaimo potato cake and green onion oil
A 2007 Vouvray

ginger crusted onaga with organic Hamakua mushroom, corn and miso sesame vinaigrette
a 2006 German Riesling

Twice-cooked short ribs, soy braised and grilled kalbi style, topped with gingered shrimp and served with ko chu jang sauce, served with a side of white rice in a bowl
A 2008 Gamay Noir from Napa

Haupia (that’s a local coconut custard) sorbet with tropical fruits and lilikoi sauce, and dark chocolate “crunch” bars (no®).
a 2007 Brachetto d'Aqui

A sampling of three coffees:
Kailiawa Coffee Farm from Pahala, Ka‘u (Big Island)
2000 vintage Eddie Sakamoto from North Kona (Big Island)
Waialua Estate North Shore (O‘ahu)

The view from my room

2009-06-19T18:05:00.000-07:00

June 19

This is the view from my room at the Halekulani hotel in Honolulu. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, of course, but I thought I’d share anyway.

Puerto-Ricanischetag

2009-06-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

June 19

Last Sunday, when 2,000,000 other people in New York were attending or participating in the Puerto Rican Day parade, I was at Seäsonal, stuffing my face and drinking wine — mostly Grüner Veltliner, of which Seäsonal offers six varieties by the glass.
Seäsonal is not a good name for this restaurant on 58th St. Sure, they use produce that’s in season (much of the time, I did have quark with strawberries there in the winter), but what restaurant in New York doesn’t? Its main distinguishing characteristic is that it mostly features the cuisine of Austria and southern Germany, under the watchful eye of co-executive chefs Eduard Frauneder and Wolfgang Ban. That’s Ed in the picture, looking on with satisfaction as I polish off the vegetables accompanying a fish dish.
I’m not sure what my dining companion Sandra Fowler is thinking. It looks like she’s thinking “Good lord, Bret, have you never seen food before? Slow down.”
But she seems a bit more generous of character than that.
Sandra had suggested we meet for brunch at Seäsonal (that umlaut is, of course, the only indication of the restaurant’s cuisine), so we met there around 2 and then spent the next eight (8!) hours chatting with Glenn the bartender while Ed and Wolfgang fed us. We had non-traditional things like scallops with beets and horseradish, and really traditional things like Wienerschnitzel, and upgraded versions of traditional dishes, like braised veal cheek goulash.
The title of this blog entry is my own fractured version of German, a language I don’t speak. It’s how I hoped you might say Puerto Rican Day in German, but my friend Clark Mitchell, who speaks German, says they’d probably just call the day Puerto Rico Tag.
That, however, would not be a good title for a blog entry.
Apart from eating, Sandra and I drank a lot of different types of Grüner Veltliner as well as some Blaufränkisch and Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (Sandra’s a Californian and so it’s important that she drink Chardonnay often), and just a little bit of grappa that had recently been dropped off by a liquor merchant.
I had meant to do laundry that day for my trip to Hawaii. But we didn’t leave until 10pm, so that was out of the question.
Sandra suggested I eat at Alan Wong’s while I was in Honolulu. I had actually interviewed Alan some years ago, when Nation’s Restaurant News inducted him into our Fine Dining Hall of Fame, and it seemed like I should, indeed, try his food. So the next day Sandra e-introduced me to Leigh Ito, Alan’s publicist (Sandra is a very hard-working networker), and dinner was arranged.
And that makes for a good prelude to my trip to the Hawaiian island of Oahu, which I’ll begin documenting with my next blog entry...

Morou on the move

2009-06-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

June 16

Darn it! I got a Facebook IM from Morou Ouattara this morning. His restaurant FarrahOlivia, in Alexandria, Va., closed last month.
I’ve always liked Morou. He’s probably my second favorite member of the West African Malenke tribe (my favorite is my friend Fatou), and he made an effort to incorporate some West African flavors into the food at his last restaurant.
But he's moving back toward the mainstream with an Italian restaurant that he'll be opening in Crystal City. It will be named Kora Restaurant, Bar and Lounge, and is scheduled to open in the first week in July.
This was all actually reported weeks ago, except for the opening date, which of course doesn't mean anything until the place actually open, but I just learned about it, and I thought I'd share. It also give me a chance to show you a photo I took of Morou when he was chef at Red Sage in DC, back when I wrote a profile of him in 2000.

The Four Seasons at 50

2009-06-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

June 15

Sad news: Christian Albin, long-time chef at The Four Seasons restaurant, died on Saturday, just five days after being diagnosed with cancer.
His last big event, then, was the restaurant’s 50th birthday party, which I was lucky enough to attend with about 1,000 other people.
On average they ate one and a half pigs-in-a-blanket per person, according to co-owner Alex Von Bidder. That’s what he told me when introducing me to the restaurant’s chef de cuisine, Fred Mero, pictured here.
I’m not a good celebrity spotter, but I’m told that many of them were at the party.
Among them were Henry Kissinger (I probably would have recognized him had I seen him) and Salman Rushdie (him too, maybe). Food journalist Peter Elliot almost pointed to Rushdie, but stopped himself as it is rude to point, although I was blocking his finger anyway. We talked about what sort of personality is required to walk up to a celebrity unbidden and just say something.
“I walk right up to you,” I said to Peter, who quite un-self-deprecatingly said “but you know me.” Usually when I say sycophantic things like that people wave me off with mock irritation (like when I suggested to Sara Moulton that I could sell her business card on eBay). I think I liked Peter’s response better.
I actually ended up spending a fair chunk of time with the Baum family. Legendary restaurateur Joe Baum founded The Four Seasons, you see, and it remains an elegant spot where power brokers like to dine.
Above is an underexposed, flash-free picture of the pool room, which looks good no matter how bad my photography is.
From the left to right we have Alex Baum-Stein, his sister Annie Baum-Stein, their uncles Edward and Charles Baum (they’re both Joe’s sons), and Annie’s husband, Mauro Daigle.
Annie and Mauro actually are going into the foodservice world themselves. They’re opening a food shop, called Milk & Honey, in West Philadelphia (at 45th St. and Baltimore Ave.).
I’ve know Charles Baum for awhile as he’s the husband of New York restaurant publicist Jennifer Baum. He reminisced about when the restaurant opened, when he was nine years old.
Here’s another guy hired by Joe Baum many years after The Four Seasons opened. On the left there is Michael Lomonaco, who Baum had hired to be chef at Windows on the World. Michael’s the chef-owner of Porter House now, in the Time Warner Center. He said business is good. To his left is self-proclaimed saffron king Behroush Sharifi, who says the price of the spice has skyrocketed recently. Behroush is an Iranian, and he says Iran not only has the world’s best saffron, but he chafes — absolutely chafes! — at the myth that Spain produces most of the world’s saffron. Apparently, it almost all comes from Iran.
Go figure.
Here we have Alex von Bidder’s business partner, Julian Nicolini, with rosemary bedecked chef Cesare Casella, I guess best known these days for his charcuterie shop Salumeria Rosi. I think he selected a particularly handsome rosemary bunch to wear in his pocket that evening.
For awhile I circulated with food writers Julie Besonen and Sheri de Borchgrave, and I explained to them why I didn’t invite any of my friends to be my guest that evening.
Because we were allowed to bring a +1. But this was a work affair for me, and I needed to socialize, network, catch up with people. I love my friends, but this was no place for me to catch up with them.
Julie agreed, and in fact her husband Jim came an hour after she did so she'd have time to do her necessary schmoozing.
Jim’s the guy in the middle of this picture. Julie’s on the left, and on the right is Glenn Collins, a longtime feature writer for The New York Times and, à propos of nothing also the best friend of my cousin Leonard Kamsler, who is the country’s leading golf instruction photogrpaher. I bet you didn’t know the country had a leading golf instruction photographer, but indeed it does, and he’s been friends with Glenn Collins for decades.

And now a word from our sponsor

2009-06-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

June 15,

As you may know, Food Writer’s Diary is a product of Nation’s Restaurant News, the great mother ship of restaurant trade magazines, the Death Star (in a good way) of reporting on the restaurant industry.
The magazine’s biggest event of the year is MUFSO (MUFF-so), a conference for multi-unit foodservice operators, being held this year on October 4-6 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas.
This year the event is dedicated to Norm Brinker, a mentor to many, many people in the restaurant industry, who passed away last week. Plans are in the works for ways to honor him.
Last week we also confirmed some great speakers for the conference, to wit:

•William Taylor, founding editor of Fast Company and one of the shapers of the global conversation about how to compete, innovate, and succeed in modern times. He’ll be speaking as well as moderating our Hot Concepts panel.

• Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan:The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which is about how unpredictable, one-off events shape our world. He’s a much sought-after speaker on financial topics, having predicted the current crisis. He’ll be speaking and then running a question-and-answer breakout session afterwards.

• Frances Frei, Harvard Business School’s resident expert on service management, whose ideas on operational strategies have influenced some of the most competitive companies in the world. Her course on managing services operations is one of the most popular classes at her school, and our publisher, Tom Larrañaga, a man who is not easily impressed, says he was “blown away” by a talk she gave a few weeks ago.
“She will send folks home with ideas,” he said in a message he sent to NRN staff.

We will also have a panel featuring the winners of our “Golden Chain” awards, which go to multi-unit restaurants that have staged successful turnarounds or otherwise behaved impressively. We have six winners, and I’m going to tell you five of them (because, I mean, come on, we have to keep you guessing a little bit): Burger King, McAlister’s, Bruegger’s Bagels, Cameron Mitchell Restaurants and Burgerville.

Our editor-in-chief, Ellen Koteff, will be moderating a Q&A session with Darden Restaurants (Red Lobster, Olive Garden et al.) chief executive Clarence Otis and Domino's chief executive Dave Brandon.

So register now. Come on, it’ll be fun!

All Batterberry, all the time

2009-06-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

June 12

What’s the plural for Batterberry? If it were a type of berry, obviously it would be Batterberries, but Michael and Ariane Batterberry are people. Indeed, they are probably the prince and princess of the New York food writing world. The archduke and archduchess at the very least. They founded Food & Wine magazine many years ago, and then founded Food Arts, where Michael is still editor-in-chief. They are gracious, warm-hearted, charming people who despite their long stint on the dining scene seem still to approach each meal with an open mind and curiosity.
I don’t see the Batterberrys all that often, but this week I dined with them, twice.
The first dinner was on Tuesday, at Sandro's, the Upper East Side Italian restaurant of Sandro Fioriti. He was celebrating the 25th anniversary of his arrival in New York.
You don't hear much about Sandro these days, but he is very much loved and appreciated by New York’s gastroscenti, for his full-figured jocularity almost as much as for his food.
It was before my time, but I’m told that Sandro introduced Roman cuisine to New York when he landed here in 1984 and opened his first restaurant, with the help of Tony May, the father, or maybe the uncle, of Italian fine dining in New York.
Since then Sandro has moved around a lot. He is famously as peripatetic as John Tesar, perhaps even more so, donning a toque, imbuing a restaurant with aromatic Roman goodness and then mysteriously doffing his toque and vanishing into the night, or to the Hamptons, or St. Martin.
He has stayed at his current restaurant for nearly two years, since he opened it in autumn of 2007.
A-List people came to the celebratory dinner, including former New York Magazine critic Gael Greene, former New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, and the Batterberrys.
Tony May came, too. Incidentally, his new restaurant, SD-26, the Madison Square Park incarnaton of his recently shuttered flagship, San Domenico NY, is scheduled to open on September 9.
Sandro's food is still old-school Roman — fried artichokes, a light spring vegetable stew, batter-fried cuttlefish that reminded me of how pedestrian most calamari is by comparison, hunks of roasted veal in ragù.
Then the next night, I was at the James Beard house, eating the savory food of Ben Pollinger and the desserts of Jansen Chan of Oceana.
Oceana, too, is leaving its current location on E. 54th — the lease expires next month. It’s moving to the McGraw Hill Building (49th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, right near Del Frisco's), where it, too, is planning to open in September. The Beard House dinner was intended as a preview of what they were planning on doing at the new restaurant, which will be a bit more laid back than the current Oceana.
At Sandro's the Batterberrys and I had talked about Ben and what a fine chap he is, but for some reason I still hadn’t expected to see them at the Beard House last night. In fact, I hadn't expected to see anyone that night that I’d seen the night before, so (this is quite embarrassing), I wore the same necktie two days in a row.
What can I say? It’s my Sovereign Beck “bloom” tie, and it’s really very sharp.
Back when business attire was required in NRN’s offices, just a few months ago, I never would have worn the same tie two days in a row. I wouldn’t have worn the same tie twice in the same week. But now that our dress code has changed and I don’t wear ties that often, I have become lax.
Anyway, if the Batterberrys noticed I was wearing the same tie (different shirt, of course, I mean, come on) they didn’t say anything. They wouldn’t say anything, of course, because they’re not bad-natured jerks.
I had a good chat with Jim Poris, another Food Arts editor, who sat to my left (he scooted down when the Batterberries arrived so they could sit down more easily) and talked a bit with Nick Livanos, who owns Oceana (and Molyvos and Abboccato and a number of places in the suburbs) and was seated to my right. I made Nick laugh with my conversation with two Italians at the table, one from Florence and one from Milan. I told the Florentine what I think of Florence, which is that I understand why so many famous sculptors come from there, because Florentines are so beautiful that you want to sculpt them. I told her about one of the most flattering moments in my life: I was in Florence, strolling along the Arno River in clothing I had just bought, and some guy walked up to me and asked me directions, as though I actually looked like a local.
I loved that. Too bad I had to tell him “No Parlo Italiano.”
I told the Florentine with whom I I was dining at the Beard House that I was Jewish and that I always thought that Jews looked like Italians’ ugly cousins.
That’s when Nick laughed.

What I ate and drank at the Beard House:

hors d'oeuvre:

Razor Clams with Citrus and Yuzu
House-Salted Cod Tempura
Smoked Trout with Cherry Raita
Monkfish and Shiitake Spring Rolls
Lucien Albrecht Crémant d’Alsace Blanc de Blancs Brut NV

Dinner:

Fluke sashimi with rhubarb and cucumber (the rhubarb and cucumber were a broth with just a whisper of tarragon in it)
Raymond Reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2007

Braised Widow’s Hole oysters with chanterelles and ramps
Alois Lageder Pinot Bianco 2007

Wild Alaskan coho salmon burgers (served with potato chips tossed in fines herbes, something I’d never seen before)
Cloudline Pinot Noir 2007

Whole-roasted wild striped bass stuffed with arugula, olive, tomato, and Swiss chard
Joseph Drouhin Véro Pinot Noir 2006

Lychee and raspberry salad with buttermilk sorbet
Paolo Saracco Moscato d’Asti NV DOCG

A plate of doughnuts (which Ariane declared were the best doughnuts ever, ever).

The new Aureole

2009-06-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

June 9

Restaurateur Charlie Palmer is in town, and he took the opportunity to provide a preview of his new flagship for local media.
As I mentioned when reporting on my most recent "hard hat" preview party (so named because the places are still under construction), at the much ballyhooed DBGB, it’s smart to give media a preview, because it makes us feel closer to the project.
The new Aureole is very much in line with what fine dining restaurants are doing in New York these days. I’d show you a picture, but I have no confidence in my ability to do justice to interiors with my inferior photography. The folks at eater.com took nice shots, if you’re curious.
Instead I have a couple of artist’s renderings, the first is a view from 42nd St. The second is from Anita's Way, which is the little alley next to Aureole, before Broadway.
Anyway, as I was saying, Aureole is doing what a lot of fine dining restaurants are doing these days — diversifying.
As Charlie Palmer said (after asking me where my hard hat was) the new Aureole has three dimensions: a bar, a bar-lounge area and a fine dining room. In addition, it has a private room that seats 60 and can hold 100 people for cocktails or whatever.
The restaurant, which is starting preview parties with actual food next week (we just got a glass of Champagne, and a bag of milk chocolate-covered toffee from pastry chef Jennifer Yee), has three menus: one of bar snacks, a bar menu that will basically be American brasserie food (this is a fairly new term, but it’s becoming popular; Michael Symon said something similar about the food at his new restaurant, Bar Symon, in the Cleveland suburb of Avon Lake), and a fine dining menu for the dining room, which will be an old-school prix-fixe affair at dinner. The bar and the dining room will have the same menu at lunch, and it will be à la carte, although a prix-fixe option will be available in the dining room.
In that second picture you can see that one of the design features is what they’re calling the “wine mezzanine,” which will house 3,500 of the restaurant’s 15,000 bottles — mostly French and Californian — including 100 varieties for less than $100.
The art hasn’t been installed yet, but Charlie said they’re computer enhanced images by designer Adam Tihany’s son, Bram Tihany. “This art was developed over many, many bottles of Champagne,” he assured us.
The kitchen is freakin’ huge. The picture with Jennifer Yee in the middle, a cook kind of in front of her, Charlie on the right and a bunch of media types on the left, is in the pastry kitchen. The savory kitchen is around the corner. All told, it’s three to four times the size of the old Aureole’s kitchen.
Today was the first day they had gas, so executive chef Chris Lee and his crew were starting to practice and tweak their dishes. I asked Chris how the food here would be different from his last job, at Gilt, and he said it would be pretty much the same — seasonally driven modern American.
Charlie praised Chris’s knowledge of modeern kitchen technology and the fact that he doesn’t use it "to the point where it’s foolish.”
They hope to be taking paying customers by the last week of June or first week of July. Some parties are already booked for late July, and a grand opening party and fundraiser for Citymeals on Wheels will be held after Labor Day.
Commenting on the restaurant’s three dimensions, Charlie said he wasn’t looking for new customers, but for the same customers to use the restaurant on different occasions.
Aureole and its PR machine say the restaurant is in Bryant Park, but it’s quite near the corner of 42nd and Broadway, meaning it’s also in Times Square and will almost definitely have a robust pre-theater crowd. That, as Charlie said, will be a learning experience.
Management was nice enough to share with us some very early draft menus that should in no way be considered a reliable source of information on what actually will be served in the restaurant.
Here they are:

Bar Room Dinner Menu

1st Course

Heirloom Tomato Gazpacho
Canadian Lobster / Avocado / Baby Basils

Foie Gras Torchon
Wild Strawberries / Anise Hyssop / Pistachio / Brioche

Diver Sea Scallop “Sandwich”
Sugar Snap Peas / Passion Fruit / Chives

Crispy Soft Shell Blue Crab
Belgium Endive / Granny Smith Apple / Sauce Rémoulade

Pasta Garganelli
Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes / Fresh Mozzarella / Prosciutto di Parma

Yellow Fin Tuna Tartare
Diakon Radish / Nori Toast Points / Miso Sake Dressing

“House Made” Charcuterie
Onion Marmalade / Pickle Vegetables / Country Bread

Farmed Baby Green Salad
Blue Cheese / Summer Vegetables / White Balsamic Dressing

2nd Course

“Aureole” Grilled Burger
Smoked bacon, Vermont White Cheddar, Creamy Pickled Ramp Dressing

Wild Striped Bass
White Asparagus / Smoked Yellow Tomato / Watermelon

Free Range Chicken
Black Beluga Lentils / Baby Romaine / Smoked Ham Hock / Chicken Jus

Scottish Organic Salmon
Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes / Fava Beans / Pomegranate Vinaigrette

Whole Roasted Branzini
Artichokes / Capers / Black Olive / Piquillo Peppers / Anchovies

Berkshire Pork Chop
Porcini Mushrooms / Summer Squash / Peaches / Picked Ramp Pork Jus

West Coast Halibut
Sweet Yellow Corn / Potato Gnocchi / Sugar Snap Peas / Basil Pesto

NY Strip Loin
Green Asparagus / Potato Puree / Tarragon Mustard Beef Jus

Dining Room Dinner menu:

1st Course

Yellow Fin Tuna Tartare
Daikon Radish, Nori Toast Points, Aji Amarillo, Miso Sake Dressing

Artichoke Ravioli
Louisiana Crayfish, Black Olive Oil, Andouille Sausage, White Wine Caper Sauce

Diver Sea Scallop “Sandwich”
Seared Foie Gras, Sugar Snap Peas, Passion Fruit, Chives

Japanese Madai Snapper Ceviche
Summer Melons, Hearts of Peach Palm, Cucumber, Avocado, Prosciutto di Parma

Crispy Soft Shell Blue Crab
Belgium Endive, Granny Smith Apple, Smoked Paprika, “Sauce Rémoulade”

Local Heirloom Tomatoes
Sheep’s Milk Ricotta Cheese Gelato, Haricot Vert, Petite Lettuces, Pine Nut Crumble

Grilled Foie Gras
Maine Blueberries, Corn Bread, Pickled Jalapenos, Macadamia Nuts

Chilled Sweet Yellow Corn Soup
American Caviar, Vidalia Onions, Lemon Citrus, Ancho Chile Oil

2nd Course

Crispy Black Sea Bass
French White Asparagus, Smoked Yellow Tomato, Endive, Watermelon, Basil Vinaigrette

West Coast Halibut
Smoked Bacon, Baby Leeks, Haricot Vert, Preserve Lemon, Razor Clam Broth

Olive Oil Poach Alaskan King Salmon
Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes, Quinoa, Watercress, Fava Beans, Warm Pomegranate Vinaigrette

Canadian Lobster Tail vs. Berkshire Pork Belly
Summer Squash, Porcini Mushrooms, Cape Goose Berries, Jura Wine, Almond Emulsion

Label Rouge Poularde
Sweet Yellow Corn, Black Beluga Lentils, Baby Romaine, Smoked ham Hock, Foie Gras Jus

Veal Tenderloin and Sweetbreads
Wild Asparagus, Charred Onion, Georgia Peaches, Pickled Ramps, Lovage Veal Jus

21 Day Aged Beef Rib Eye
Chanterelle Mushrooms, Green Asparagus, Potato Puree, Tarragon Mustard Beef Jus

Australian Rack of Lamb
English Peas & Carrots, Cipollini Onions, Medjool Dates, Almonds, Vadouvan Devonshire Cream

As for pastry, Jennifer, like Chris, comes from Gilt where she worked at Gilt under executive pastry chef David Carmichael. She now has her own chocolate room and will be making her own ice cream.

Bread’s being made in-house, too, according to Chris.

Happy Doughnut Day

2009-06-05T12:16:00.000-07:00

June 5

June 5 is apparently National Doughnut Day, and if I were really on the ball I would have alerted you sooner that participating Dunkin’ Donuts are handing out free doughnuts with the purchase of a drink.

Please note that I wrote “participating” stores. Dunkin’ Donuts is all franchised and it’s up to each franchisee whether to participate or not.

In other Dunkin’ news, the company just announced that Jeff Hager of Hoover, Ala., is the winner of its “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut” contest. His “Toffee for your Coffee” is a glazed sour cream cake doughnut topped with chopped Heath Bar.

Hager gets $12,000, and his creation will be available at Dunkin’ Donuts (participating ones, I imagine) this fall.

I asked Dunkin’ Donuts if they made up National Doughnut Day, but they said they didn’t. I wonder if it was Winchell’s.

Ed Witt has moved to Washington

2009-06-04T12:06:00.000-07:00

June 4

New Yorkers might remember Ed Witt as the creative chef at two short-lived restaurants, Varietal and Bloomingdale Road.
Well, he’s going to try his hand at cooking in a different city: He has moved to Washington, D.C., and he plans to open a place in Georgetown at the end of the summer called Morso. He says it will be small plate Mediterranean cuisine with a Turkish influence, and as an indication that he’s not kidding around, he’s about to leave for Turkey for three weeks of research.
This is particularly interesting to me because I’ve seen an uptick recently in cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean. I think I’ll write a story about it.

a good slap in the face

2009-06-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

June 2

I’d never been slapped in the face out of friendship before, but I liked it. Michael Pesce, who’s the presiding justice for the New York State appellate court that hears criminal and civil cases from Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, smacked me after we had dinner at Tommaso. It was a very gentle slap, but it was a slap. It seemed oddly appropriate, too, and kind of nice — like he was saying, “your okay, kid.”
Mind you, I’m 42 years old, and thus not a kid. I’m certainly younger than Mike, though, who took on a de facto mantle of leadership during our recent trip to Puglia with the Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani. Tommaso's chef and owner, Tom Verdillo, was on the trip, too, and he’d had us over for dinner while trying to replicate some of the dishes we’d eaten on the trip.
Alan Schoenberg, whose family has been salt merchants in Brooklyn for three generations, was on the trip, too, and he has a car, so I rode with him and his wife Brenda. Also at dinner was food-writing couple Bob Lape, until very recently of Crain’s New York Business, and his wife Joanna Pruess, who has written many food books, most recently a bacon cookbook. She’s currently working on one on cast-iron pot cooking. Bob and Joanna weren’t in Italy with us, but they were invited to dinner anyway.
Mike Pesce was an enthusiastic senior aficionado on the trip. He’s a Barese, you see, a native of Bari, which is Puglia’s capital*.
Tom, being a chef, strayed a bit from his original plan, and served other dishes as well, including a sort of salt-cod pâté (not unlike a French brandade de morou, except that dish is made with potatoes, and Tom’s was all fish), and his own signature dish for the season, Nantucket Bay scallops, steamed with plenty of garlic.
Tom never fries garlic. The key, he says, is to cook it gently to tone down it’s bitter qualities.
Here’s another thing about Tom and his cooking: His family is from near Naples, in Campania — if Puglia is the heel and back ankle of the Italian boot, Campania is the lower shin — but he doesn’t like dried oregano, a key herb for the region’s food. “I prefer marjoram,” he says. And he also uses fresh oregano, from his own garden.
He served a traditional regional dish called fave e cicorie, which you'd think would mean fava beans and chicory, but in fact, it means basically any beans and any bitter green. Normally the beans are puréed, but Tom tracked down some beautiful gigante beans, which as you can imagine are gigantic (for a bean — let's say an inch and three quarters by two-thirds of an inch, or something like that) so it would have been silly to purée them. And he cooked them with dandelion greens. Then he veered away from Puglia with a Calabrese dish (Calabria is the front of the foot of the Italian boot — the part that’s kicking Sicily), because he’d procured some cod tripe from Chinese suppliers, and the Calabrese stuff that and braise it. It was very tender, and had the sort of unctuous quality that good tripe has.
I think Mike enjoyed it, but he also said that Calabrians and Sicilians aren’t really Italians, but something different, which is really what you’d expect a Barese to say.
Then we had orecchiette made with Primitivo wine (Primitivo is a grape native to southern Italy, and is in fact the same grape as Zinfandel) and a ragù of all sorts of meats, including lamb and rabbit and pork, and some veal sausages.
I ate too much of it, especially since it was followed by a black bass that had been caught the evening before. The people who caught it couldn't fit it into their fridge, because it was so big, so Mike had them call Tom and drop it off.
At that point we opened the bottle of wine that Alan had brought, a 1949 — yes, 1949 — Burgundy, a Volnay, that remained fully intact, robust and delicious.
You never know with wine that old.
And that was followed by a semifreddo topped with chocolate.
So then, full of food and wine, we slowly stood up, wandered outside into the great late-spring air and chatted a bit more, and that’s when Michael Pesce slapped me in the face before wandering off into the night with his girlfriend.
Mike moved to the U.S. as a teenager and did the typical American dream stuff, working his way through the ranks to become one of New York State’s top judges as well as a food and wine aficionado and by all accounts a respected member of the community, nice guy and all-around good person.
I couldn't decide whether it was more generational or Italian to slap someone in the face affectionately. It’s definitely an alpha male thing to do, and a product of a patron-client system: I don’t think you could slap someone who was both your social equal and of a similar age.
I imagined slapping my underlings. I don’t have any actual underlings, really, but I am the official mentor of my colleague Mike Dempsey, who likes to do food writing, and I encourage him, try to get him good assignments and give him advice when he asks for it. I think he might let me slap him, once, gently, the way Mike Pesce did, but I don’t know if I can reach that high: Mike Dempsey’s 6'5", making him 13-and-a-half inches taller than I am.
So I’ll probably never really know.

*Technically, Mike’s not from the city of Bari, but from the province of Bari, but provinces in Italy are really like U.S. counties. They’re small, and you can be counted as a Barese if you come from anywhere in the province.

Crazy May

2009-05-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

May 29

May is typically a crazy month for New York food writers, as restaurants rush to open and promote themselves before Memorial Day comes and everyone leaves during the weekends, no one dines out, no events are planned and I can try to lose some weight.
O.K., that was an exaggeration, even for typical years. But now anything goes, really, and either in spite of the lousy economy, because of it, or maybe for other reasons I don’t know about, restaurants here seem to be promoting themselves with more vigor than they have in years. I have some really spectacular-sounding parties coming up: Gourmet’s hosting a preview of the new Aureole, The Four Seasons is turning 50, The American Pork Board is hosting a lunch at the New York Stock Exchange (feel free to comment, especially about that last one, below).
And in the past couple of weeks I’ve received two (2) invitations made out of aluminum. I hadn’t seen one of those since before 9/11, when ridiculous overspending on things like aluminum invitations was the norm. Really, it was.
The May, 2000, opening of the Tribeca Grand hotel comes to mind.
Here’s a little excerpt from the story I wrote about it:

Invitations were ... sent out to rich and influential movers and shakers as well as to plenty of models, dancers, actors and folks who just looked great in black. A good 2,000 of them braved the rain to witness the launch of this new haven for the young and fashionable. They ate 6 kilos of Iranian osetra caviar.

Now that was a good party.
Speaking of 9/11, The Tribeca Grand, which is about 10 blocks from Ground Zero, became something of a refugee camp at that time as it provided temporary housing for displaced families in lower Manhattan. Rob Miketa, the chef at the time, responded to the need of the displaced children for grilled cheese sandwiches by warming the naan he had on hand for a mezze platter (bread purveyors were having trouble getting south of 14th Street — you might remember that lower Manhattan was cordoned off for a number of days) in butter and stuffing it with cheese.
(Rob, a fellow Coloradan — from Pueblo, of all places — now lives in Belgium, where he works as a private chef).

The past month or so has in some ways felt kind of September 10th, which is weird, because people are broker and gloomier than I remember them being, and businesswise, May has been pretty bad for a lot of restaurants here — worse than March and April by many accounts. Perhaps not as bad as January. But of course it depends on the restaurant.

At any rate, they’re keeping me busy, from a Cinco de Mayo dinner at Cabrito (which was packed, by the way — I mean four or five people deep at the bar packed — with people who seemed to think they absolutely needed to have Mexican food on that day), to the opening of a wine bar on the outskirts of the Meatpacking District called Entwine (the sommelier moonlights as a wine equipment merchant, meaning they have state-of-the-art technology for their wine-by-the-glass program), and George Mendes’ new restaurant, Aldea (which I already wrote about). Rink Bar opened at Rockefeller Center, too, but it does that every year.
I had a really extraordinary dinner at Eighty One with a group called the International Academy of Gastronomy, an organization I’d never heard of before. They had declared chef de cuisine Juan Jose Cuevas “Chef of the Future” and were having dinner there to celebrate.
Juan made something the likes of which I’ve never eaten before. It was a horseradish sorbet topped with a "granola" made out of dehydrated root vegetables, which sounds like a stupid, nasty-tasting dish, but it was, in fact, delicious and hard to figure out, in a really fun way, with bright, refreshing and very tangy sorbet and crunchy little vegetable cubes, served as an appetizer.
The dish got a round of applause at the end of the evening.
I also had dinner at Dirt Candy with its publicist, Philip Ruskin.
Dirt Candy’s a vegetarian restaurant, but at the moment has just one tofu dish (served crispy with a vegetable ragoût and a kaffir lime beurre blanc), because the whole point of the place is that vegetables are delicious — the candy of the earth. Hence the name.
So we ate the requisite jalapeño hush puppies with maple butter, and the portobello mousse that chef Amanda Cohen has submitted for PETA’s foie-gras substitute competition (Amanda herself is not a strident PETA-file, but that doesn’t mean she can’t enter their contests), a Greek salad with preserved lemon mayo, golden beet pappardelle with yogurt, pistachios and honey, and stone ground grits with a tempura poached egg.
Among the desserts we had was a popcorn pudding, served in a mason jar.
Serving food in mason jars is all the rage these days, by the way. My colleague Elizabeth Licata recently wrote about it.
I also had a Beard House dinner, as guest of the Denver Five, which meant I all but missed a drunken not-quite orgy at Pranna celebrating World Cocktail Day (May 13). It looked like it had been a good party, and it was still plenty full when I got there, but conversation was difficult due to the general drunkenness.
It’s a funny thing about professional drinkers. They can remain just on the edge of speech-slurringly drunk for hours without quite falling over the edge into oblivion. It’s very impressive.
Some cocktail experts, in fact, maintain high levels of sobriety much of the time, because it’s not like you have to guzzle a cocktail, and a wise drinker doesn’t shy away from water, either. I mean, it’s not like they’re drinking competitively.
And then last Sunday I finally made it down to Tommaso restaurant in Brooklyn, the 36-year-old restaurant of my new friend Thomas Verdillo, an opera singer, wine expert and aficionado of medieval symbolism. The private dining room is perhaps worth the trip to Dyker Heights just to look at the mural of a medieval Italian countryside, with unicorns and scarabs and other symbols of the day.
On the door back into the main dining room is a quote from Dante that I love. No, it’s not "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," you rude, cynical bastard. It’s
Segui il tuo corso
Lasciare dir le genti
which means, "Follow your own path, ignore what people say.”

Tom would like more people to know about his restaurant, of course, and to head out to Dyker Heights to eat there, but he already gets a fair share of press (some of it’s posted on the restaurant’s web site, if you’re curious), and the people I’d have him contact to check out the place already seem to know about it.
“Oh yeah, Tommaso’s. That place is great! It’s been around forever,” is what they tend to say.
Soon-to-be-former New York Times critic Frank Bruni included it in a round-up of old-school Italian restaurants, and he described the food as being kind of existentially dusty — good for people seeking culinary nostalgia rather than adventure. That might have been true then, in 2006, but Thomas has done a fair amount of innovation, although it seems to me that he still stresses traditional dishes over avant-garde ones. He travels regularly to Italy to learn about the food of his ancestors — he recently added a Roman pasta dish to the menu called caccia e pepe, straight up spaghetti with Parmesan cheese and black pepper, mixed at tableside into a sauce using a smidgen of pasta water.
Tommaso’s likely to get some more attention soon. Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael recently filmed there for their new series.

What I just wrote about was not, of course, all that I’ve done since the Beard Awards, but some things in life should remain a mystery.
Not what I ate at the Beard House, though.

What the Denver Five fed me:

Hors d’Oeuvre

Ahi tuna-lobster rolls with charred jalapeños, kumquats and ramp salsa
Wild pheasant confit-filled tamalitos with apricot-güero chile jam
Braised chile-cured White Marble Farms pork belly with huitlacoche, duck egg salad and tomato-ancho chile sauce
Korean barbecued foie gras with corn shoots, cilantro, coconut rice fritters and nori-infused caramel
Mont-Marçal Brut Rosado Cava NV

Dinner:

Sweet and crunchy softshell crab with pork and adzuki beans, ginger ale ramps and chinese garlic mayonnaise
Oriel Palatina Riesling 2004

Crispy Hawaiian moi with roasted Olathe corn, Pueblo asparagus, lightly smoked trout salad, and truffled kabayaki dressing
Stonestreet Upper Barn Chardonnay 2006

Colorado lamb albóndigas with heirloom bean chile verde, smoky duck chorizo, nopale–fiddlehead escabèche and duck cracklings
Oriel Courant Côtes du Rhône 2003

USDA Prime New York strip steak with dinosaur kale–wrapped veal cheeks, smoked goat cheese–potato flan and morel jus
Martin Ray Reserve Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon 2004

Honey-caramelized apples with chocolate crème chiboust and saffron cream
Santa Julia Tardio 2007

Mignardises

What’s MUFSO? What’s MUFSO!?

2009-05-28T14:24:00.001-07:00

May 28

Sorry I’ve been such a bad blogger since the preview of DBGB. I’ve been so busy I haven’t even had time to ask what is wrong with you that none of you are attending MUFSO.
Okay, maybe many of you are, but of the six people who responded to my poll asking if you were attending, two said maybe, two said no, and two asked, "What's MUFSO?"
Oh, for goodness sake.
I admit, it’s not a pretty name (it’s pronounced MUFF-so, not MOOF-so) and it stands for Multi-Unit Foodservice Operators. It’s NRN’s annual conference of restaurant operators. It’s mostly attended by chain operators, it’s true, which might be why you don’t know about it, but speakers have ranged from Union Square Hospitality Group’s Danny Meyer (himself a multi-unit operator, if not a chain operator), to author, TV star and self-proclaimed bad-boy Anthony Bourdain, to Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser (who in fact quoted in that book a speech that our recently retired group publisher, Jim Doherty, gave at MUFSO). Jay Leno has done stand-up comedy there. George H.W. Bush was a keynoter a couple years back.
It’s a terrific conference, especially for networking, which is so crucial in this stupid economy.
If you register in the next month by clicking here and following the instructions, I think you get a 50 percent discount.
Click here to learn more about MUFSO, Or you could just ask me.

Stay tuned to this blog for more tales of my culinary adventures, I promise not to be such a slacker.

DBGB

2009-05-16T11:36:00.001-07:00

May 16

It's smart to invite people to look at a restaurant before it opens. It makes them feel like insiders, and like they have a personal emotional investment in a place. So if you invite the media, they're already predisposed to like you. The media's predisposed to like Daniel Boulud, anyway, but why chance it?
A couple of years ago, when Bar Boulud was about to open, Daniel and his people had to test out the charcuterie that they were serving there, so it made sense to invite people to share their endeavors. It was a good party, and when I wrote about it this blog got more traffic in a single day than ever before (or since), even more than when I wrote about what kinds of tips Hooters girls get (about 45%, so I'm told).
I doubt this blog entry will generate that much traffic, because many bloggers were at the sneak peek of DBGB, Daniel's new eighty-seat brasserie near the Hell's Angels headquarters on Bowery (between 1st and Houston). DBGB is of course a reference to the famous club CBGB, and it means "Daniel Boulud, Great ..." fill in the blank: burgers, bangers (that's British for sausage), beer, what have you.
The space is big and festive, the culinary focus really more sausage than burger. They'll start with 14 sausages on the menu and go up from there. The beer program will be about as extensive as the wine program and will include 22 beers on tap and another 50-60 in bottles. There will be about 100 wines in bottles, and two on tap. They'll be about as local as New York City can get for wines. The wine itself is from long island. It will be blended and poured into kegs in Brooklyn. Beverage manger Colin Alevras, the man behind The Tasting Room, said he hasn't set a firm price on the house wine, but it will likely be more than $5 and less than $7.
What else? Oh! There will be many desserts, but a highlight will be a sundae cart, with many choices of ice creams, sauces and toppings. That'll be a hit.
Among the design elements is Daniel's copper pot collection, donated by chefs from all over the world for the restaurant. So there's a Victorian jelly mold from Heston Blumenthal, a fish poacher from Tom Colicchio, an ancient, ancient looking stock pot from Alain Ducasse, a chestnut roaster from Mario Batali.
They're planning on opening "at the end of the first week of June," but of course a place isn't open until it's open.

After the party, Daniel flew to Chicago for the national restaurant show, and he spoke about how DBGB fit with the current economic times. click here to read about what he said.