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Cover Story: Baden-Baden Baedekker by John Mariani

New York Corner: Les Halles Downtown by John Mariani

Notes from the Wine Cellar: Chappellet Old Vines Cuvée by John Mariani

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  - Readers trying to reach me through e-mail can do so by writing directly to johnmariani@prodigy.net
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 BADEN-BADEN BAEDEKER
by John Mariani

    I sense that Baden-Baden  is one of the quietest cities in Europe, perhaps because its residents are ever in awe of their good fortune to live in the verdant Oos Valley, surrounded by the majesty of the Black Forest.  In homage the city’s designers and architects have always paid very close attention to harmonizing the city to its natural beauty, creating low-lying buildings within gardens alongside streams and rivers whose silent movement makes this one of the most romantic spots in Germany.

          Almost untouched by the Second World War, Baden-Baden was spared the destruction of its monuments, including Das Goldene Kreuz (the Golden Cross), a gate that opens onto a pretty shopping street, and the charming neo-classical buildings set around Augustaplatz, Marktplatz and Leopoldsplatz in the Old Town. In warm weather the city is ablaze with gardens, in many of which are held concerts and performances throughout the summer, and the Casino here is justly famous for its baroque and rococo interiors.  Of course, the city’s fame originally grew from the therapeutic properties of its thermal baths, now housed in a modern structure of shimmering beauty built on the idea of Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. (For views and info on Baden-Baden go to  www.baden-baden.de )

          For 125 years now Brenner’s Park-Hotel & Spa ( Schillerstrasse 4-6; 49-72-21-9000;  www.brenners.com ) has been identified with the good life in Baden-Baden, and recent renovations have kept it not only at that ranking locally but, with the addition of a new state-of-the-art spa (where you can enjoy a selection of saunas, take a plunge into the icy Frigidarium pool, have yourself stretched, pulled, walked on, and colorized, and have a computer-generated look at your feet that shows you how silly your walk is).   Brenner’s began back in 1872 as the hotel Stéphanie-les-Bains. opened by a master tailor to Pforzheim royalty named Anton Alois Brenner. Over the next two centuries the hotel was expanded and rebuilt, including the acquisition of César Ritz’s Hotel Minerva next door.  After World War Two it changed names, to Brenner’s Park-Hotel & Spa, now owned by the Oetker family.  Thus, what you see today is a fairly modern but still classic-looking grand hotel that has been modified numerous times over the last 125 years, and the most recent renovations of the 100 rooms and the new spa make this as great a hotel as any in Germany.  It is conveniently set just yards from the darling river-run park and a few minutes’ walk from the Old Town. 

          All of the hotel’s restaurants have also be redone, starting with the beautiful Oleander Bar (left), a cushy and comfortable spot to have cocktails before dining at either the formal Park-Restaurant or the more casual Wintergarten (below right).   (The breakfast buffet in another dining room is one most extensive and elegantly presented in Europe.)

Cognizant that no one wants to dine on haute cuisine each day and night, the Wintergarten’s menus have been lightened and enlightened with internationalism.  The setting is that of a conservatory, with sliding windows open to the Baden-Baden air—which is plenty therapeutic for me. The canopy ceiling has slow-turning fans, the black-and-white tile floor and wicker bistro chairs make it all the more cheery, and little red lights cast a sweet glow on the tables.  I had two meals here, beginning with a local favorite, fried goose liver served with apples, a corn salad and beets, and a delicious “Baden style” potato soup that was as velvety as it was deeply flavorful. Also very good was a pepper-and-shrimp cream soup.  Not so a rather insipid beef consommé with slivers of crêpes.

          My favorites among the main courses were braised local beef with glazed onions, bacon, celery and mashed potatoes, followed by a lamb chop with a gratin of cheese sidled with a pesto-sage polenta.  Fillet of sea bass on borlotti beans with a vegetable sauté and olive-flecked gnocchi married well together, as did medallions of veal and sweetbreads in a red wine sauce on wheat risotto, with morels and kohlrabi—splendid ideas, each complementary to one another. For dessert don’t miss the traditional apple pancake with vanilla ice cream or the pretty iced soufflé Stéphanie with raspberry sauce.

          The formality of the Park-Restaurant (below) is softened by the use of brilliant cheery colors of cherry red and white-and-blue striped chairs, with the twilight of spring and summer pouring through the windows.  Here exec chef Rudolf Pelkofer and chef de cuisine Andreas Krolik keep in mind this is a grand hotel, so their menu is up to the task, while sommelier Heinz Schopf makes sure guests can find anything could wish for on the winelist.  Main courses at the Wintergarten range from €27.50/$31 to €31/$35.

          My dinner started off very well indeed with three forms of goose liver—marinated in a berry sauce, sautéed and covered with brioche, with an apple-celery confit.  Marinated prawns on greens with a mousse of black salsify and a tomato vinaigrette was a splendid appetite-starter, and fish courses like steamed turbot in root vegetables with a caviar-Champagne sauce showed the classic approach at its best.  More Mediterranean was a sautéed whole sea bass with herbs and rosemary potatoes in tarragon-mustard sauce.  For meat there is rosy roast breast of duck with Black Forest honey, duck liver on stewed pears and braised chicory and potato cakes, and a rack and braised haunch of lamb with gnocchi, beans and sweet-sour gremolata. It is far from easy to choose between a gratin of mango and pineapple with chocolate sauce and mint ice cream or a chocolate soufflé with lavender and honey ice cream.  The cheese tray, it goes without saying, is excellent.  Main courses at the Park-Restaurant range from €36/$40.75  to €42/$47.50.

          Baden-Baden has plenty of good restaurants (I must assume this, since I hadn’t time to eat around town too much; the Michelin Guide awards a star to both Le Jardin de France and Zum Alde Gott), though a much beloved one, La Provence, nestled in the hills above the town, isn’t one of them.  Indeed, everyone I spoke to said, “Ah, La Provence! It’s a wonderfully romantic place—though the food isn’t very good.”  They were right.  Always crowded with people enjoying themselves in a rustic German tavern-like setting, La Provence is bare bones when it comes to amenities, although service is brisk.  The problem is finding anything on the menu to praise—a wide-ranging amalgam of French and Italian bistro favorites without a scintilla of good taste.

          I did, however, get out of Baden-Baden for a breathtaking drive through the Black Forest, swerving across hills dense with trees then coming around a bend in view of valleys of stunning beauty below.  I stopped for a tasting at a very modern winery named Gut Nägelsförst that showed how underrated the wines of the Baden region are, including varietals like merlot and cabernet sauvignon once verboten in these parts.  Starving by midday, we turned off at  Sasbachwalden to dine at restaurant blissfully set restaurant in one of these valleys.  Located within the Hotel Talmühle (Talstrasse 36; 07841-62-8290;  talmuehle@t-online.de ), Restaurant Fallert is best appreciated when one can dine outdoors on the broad lawns dotted with magnolias.  Chef Gutbert Fallert is very serious about his cuisine but he has a light, elegant touch based on a very few perfect ingredients rendered with respect.   If you wish to sample a wide array of Baden area wines, this is a very good place to indulge.
     Our amuse gueule was a delicate smoked trout mousseline, very creamy, very savory, then came a bright salad of asparagus with the German ham called Bauernschinken and quail’s eggs.  There was a superb trout in a light Riesling cream sauce, and a pleasant filet of breaded veal--certainly the best rendition of Wienerschnitzel ever, served with spinach and gingered carrots.  Tender, flavorful chicken cooked in Barolo wine was delicious.    A lamb cutlet with ratatouille was tasty enough, and I must admit that although a plate of Back-Hend’l Gebackenes von Schwarzfederhuhn Barlauch/Kartoffelsalat Joghurt-Limonen Sauce came to little more than a German variation on chicken nuggets with lemon sauce, the dish, quite frankly, they hit the spot.  A vanilla parfait with rhubarb  ended the meal off beautifully. Main courses €19/$21.50 to €30/$34, with a prix fixe menu at €39.50/$44.50

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NEW YORK CORNER

LES HALLES  by John Mariani

 The original Les Halles, uptown at Park Avenue South and 29^th Street, was one of the first of the “modern” old-fashioned bistros in New York when it opened more than a decade ago, bringing an authenticity and no-kidding-around devotion to meat and potatoes that was missing elsewhere.  Named after the old Paris food market, Les Halles also functioned as a butcher with French cuts of meat.  Fueled by the publicity garnered from chef Anthony Bourdain’s best-selling book, Kitchen Confidential, it has kept a steady clientele that comes as much for the sizzle and the steak frites.

          Les Halles Downtown (15 John St.; 212-285-8585; ) in the Wall Street area is also doing well, now that that neighborhood is attracting more residents who enliven those murky streets after 6 p.m.. (For anyone driving his own car into the area, post 9/11, it can be a maddening experience constantly frustrated by streets that go one way, then the other, and never the way you want to go.)  Shadowy but not dark, with a sound level that ratchets up to the level of very loud  (I asked them to turn it down and they graciously did), the place is the epitome of French bonhomie, and if I lived around there I’d certainly eat at Les Halles at least once a week. 

          I could hardly ever tire of a fat slab of terrine de foie gras or a steaming pot of mussels in white wine.  The frites are indeed excellent here and go well with the full-flavored beef they serve,, along with a menu teeming with bistro classics that never, ever get tiresome—bubbling Gruyère-rich onion soup, a hearty goat’s cheese salad, a burning hot tartlet of Reblochon and bacon, and generous choucroute garni.  The mussels actually come in nine preparations—basquaise, portugues, and so on. I loved the billi-bi version with cream and saffron.  Confit de canard was perfectly crisp and delicious, and at meal’s end the profiteroles come with rich dark chocolate, and the crème brûlée restores your faith in that old standby.  It’s really difficult to go wrong here with anything and impossible to be bored by any of it.  While the food here would drive people on the Dean Ornish diet mad, it is just about ideal for those on the Atkins, with plenty of caveman protein to go around. Of course,  anyone who can resist Les Halles’ potatoes or macaroni and cheese French style is probably half dead already.
    Wine prices are fair, with plenty under $40.  Coppola Chardonnay '00 retails for $18, at Les Halles, /$36 ; Paul Blanck riesling '00  is $13, here $34 ; Domaine Quatre Vents '00 $12.50, here $28.  But Pichon-Longueville ’98 sells for $45-$60 in stores, here for a walloping $165.
    There are also branches of Les Halles in Miami and Washington DC.

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WE TOO HAVE A SINGLE QUESTION: JUST HOW MUCH OFFAL HAVE YOU BEEN WHIFFING LATELY? 

"We’ve been upriver into that heart of graciousness, and we’ve come back.  We prefer the garlicky persillade, the long-simmered jus, the whiff of offal, to the thrice-strained sauce named after a thin-blooded noble. Ambience, attitude, food--for many of us, they combine to raise a single question: We’re glad the restaurant is there, but do we really want to go?”                  
                                               --Patric Kuh, reviewing L’Orangerie in L.A., Los Angeles Magazine (August 2003).

Chicken Liver Cookies

2 c Flour3 T Vegetable oil

1 c Wheat germ or cornmeal
1 Egg lightly beaten
1/2 c Chicken broth
2 ts Chopped parsley
1 c Chopped chicken liver cooked

Preheat oven to 400.  Combine flour and wheat germ. In a separate bowl, beat egg with oil, then add broth and parsley; mix well. Add dry ingredients to bowl a little at a time, stirring well. Fold in chicken livers and mix well. Dough will be firm. Turn dough out on lightly floured surface and knead briefly. Roll out 1/2" thick and cut into shapes. Place on greased cookie sheet 1" apart and bake for 15 minutes or until firm. Store in refrigerator.

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NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

Chappellet Old Vines Cuvèe 1999 Chenin Blanc
 
Chenin blanc has never been among my favorite varietals, especially after I tasted 80 of them in one day for a wine judging where I found myself writing over and over again--like the mad writer in "The Shining" typing  "All work and no play. . ."-- "citrus, grassy, grapefruit...citrus, grassy, grapefruit . . . citrus, grassy, grapefruit” and so on.
    Chenn blanc is  hardly to be found among many connoisseurs’ favorite wines, except for those who find, perhaps, Vouvray, to their liking.  Yet the first sip of Chappellet Old Vines Cuvée ‘99 Chenin Blanc had me dumbfounded.  It was not only delicious and mellow but didn’t have that assertive grassiness that makes more than a thimble-ful of most Chenin Blancs worth drinking.  At first I didn't even think it was a Chenin Blanc.  Here is a white wine of exceptional finesse, a wine you can tell was very, very carefully made to demonstrate the point that this second-rate varietal can be a first-rate wine.  It had a lushness and fullness to it, its fruit and acid components all in balance, a velvety feeling in the mouth, and a long elegant finish that made me want to drink more and more of it with pleasure.
    First produced in 1992, planted on steep, rocky terraces with a northwestern exposure,  the grapes gain an intensity of sun and sugars that  help cut the green-ness of the varietal, with the wine aged “sur-lie ”for six  months. And since it retails around the U.S. for between $13 and $15, it is testament to the fact that a great California wine need not compete in price with the hierarchy of any other nation’s wines.
                                                                                                                                               --John Mariani

QUICK BYTES   

 
* On Aug. 21 Penfolds winery and Wine Educator Matthew Lane, will host the latest Beverly Hills Hotel’s Winemakers Dinner.  Executive Chef Katsuo "Suki" Sugiura has created a “Taste of Australia” menu to showcase the hand-selected wines.  $95 pp.  Call 310- 281-2919.

* Chicago’s Café Ba-Ba-Reeba! (2024 N. Halsted) commemorates Spanish Heritage Month during its Annual Pasion De Paella Festival, Sept. 1-14, featuring guest chef Manuel Sanchez of Restaurante L'Albufera in Madrid. There will be interactive paella cooking lessons, a discussion of the Spanish artist Velazquez and two live performances by flamenco dancers. Chef Sanchez will also feature nightly tapas and paella specials paired with sherry and wine tastings. Tickets are available on line at www.cafebabareeba.com or at the front door.

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John Mariani is a columnist for Esquire, Wine Spectator, Diversion and the Harper Collection. He is author of The Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink (Lebhar-Friedman), The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink (Broadway), and, with his wife Galina, the award-winning new Italian-American Cookbook (Harvard Common Press).   To  purchase from amazon.com, click on the image below.

copyright John Mariani 2003