MARIANI’S

  December 5, 2004                                                         NEWSLETTER

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EDITOR'S NOTE:  Readers may now access an Archive of all past newsletters--each annotated--dating back to July, 2003, by simply clicking on   ARCHIVE .

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     Everything about Craftsteak screams money, as in corporate money, casino money, and New York celebrity chef money.  It’s too big for my tastes, or anyone else interested in intimacy (250+ seats). The bar is too long, the lounge has all the charm of a airport terminal, and the menu tries too hard to do too many things to impress too many people. 
     Still, it is the best steakhouse in Las Vegas, so let’s give the devil his due, because the devil is über-chef Tom Colicchio, partner in NYC's Gramercy Tavern and owner of Craft and Craftbar.  He may be an absentee chef, flying in only every few weeks, but his disciple in the kitchen, Christopher Albrecht, is knee-deep in the details, by which I mean ingredients, and at Craftsteak, those ingredients are the best meats, seafood, poultry and vegetables that money can buy, air freighted to the high Mojave Desert.  Eating them will cost you a lot of lettuce, but if $46  for a steak doesn’t make you wince, then you will discover why this place goes toe to toe with Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Prime and Charlie Palmer's steakhouse for the heavyweight beef championship of Las Vegas.
     I’ve eaten at Craftsteak eight times since it opened—alone, in a large group, as a twosome and foursome, on slow and slammed evenings, and never once have I been disappointed by the food.  If I have a complaint, it’s about the service, which can be maddeningly slow, even when the place is half full.  And the well-meaning but over-matched teenagers up front sometimes are at a loss to explain why you must wait 30 minutes for a table when 20 empty ones are plainly visible for over an hour. 
     All of this is a shame, because  it just distracts me from the food--perfectly grilled and intensely beefy hanger steak; English peas the size of marbles; short ribs that melt in your mouth, grass-fed strips and grain-fed porterhouses--all of them flawless renditions of these classics.  One of my favorite meals here was consumed solo at the bar, as I devoured two tiny grilled quail with a side hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, washing the lot down with a fleshy Byron pinot noir. 
  Some of the cheapest things at Craftsteak are also some of the best.  The shaved fennel salad is a marvel of licorice-like pungency, and vegetables like baby carrots, sweet white corn shaved from the cob, tiny haricot verts, and a broad assortment of sautéed mushrooms, are cooked  always to respect the sweet and earthy flavors of each. So good are the veggies that I advise vegans to put down the patchouli and tank the tofu for a taste of what good chefs can do with great ingredients. 
   
 

    In case you’ve missed any of the hyper-ventilating press he has generated lately, Thomas Keller now has a presence in Las Vegas.  The man many consider our greatest American chef, and owner of the renowned French Laundry in Napa California, and Per Se in New York (reviewed last week), opened this inflated knock-off of his Californian-ized French brasserie last January in the Venetian Hotel and Casino. The official name is the Bouchon Bistro,  but there’s nothing remotely intimate or bistro-like about it.      
    That doesn’t stop Keller from hoping the name will give you the warm fuzzies, even as you’re surrounded by 20-foot ceilings, eye-popping décor, and 200 other diners.  The name Bouchon means either “wine cork” or a small Lyonnaise bistro.  This Bouchon, however, is actually  a knock-off of a brasserie— a big, bustling restaurant serving hearty rib-stickin’ food, Alsatian beer, and extraordinary shellfish.  
    Maybe it’s the Keller name, the impressive décor, or that Americans are  finally over our Francophobia, but this place is hopping most nights, even though it’s as hard to find as a stripper who takes credit cards.  Once you find it, I suggest diving into a plate of steak frites, roast leg of lamb, or a big boudin noir.  That blood sausage may be too authentic for American tastes, but Keller and his crew get major points for trying to duplicate the tastes, textures and aromas of a plat du jour you'd find in Montparnasse at Brasserie Lipp or La Coupole. Those frites are outstanding, set  in a paper-lined metal cone; good as they are, however, the croque madame--a fest of toasted ham and good cheese bathed in a rich mornay sauce and topped with a fried egg —is even better.  

    After working my way through nearly the whole menu, my major criticisms are that the food can be incredibly heavy, such as a plate of beautiful haricots vert drowned in butter, and desserts lacking the panache expected of a guy with Keller’s reputation, even if he gets here about as often as Michael Moore visits an NRA convention.  The portions are on the smallish side though, so you won’t feel so bad pushing the plate away after three or four bites.   Those wanting to lighten up should go for the mussels in a white wine-saffron-mustard broth or load up on oysters. The small selection is always impeccably chosen, briny and fresh.  Everything is almost perfect at Bouchon, but that’s the problem.   These celebrity chef knock-offs are money machines, pure and simple.  I don’t blame a superchef for cashing in--that's the American way, after all.  But Bouchon--for all its wonders-- is a copy of a copy and has the soul of one.  

 

            One of the reasons you go to a serious restaurant for lunch is to see if you’d like to eat there for dinner.  After five lunches at Bobby “Boy Meets Grill” Flay’s Mesa Grill in Caesar’s Palace, I’m still looking for a reason.  There are twelve entrees on the lunch menu, and I’ve tried nine of them.  Of the nine, only the spicy chicken and sweet potato hash with poached eggs and green chile hollandaise came close to the sharp, deep, and upbeat flavors I expected. 
    Seemingly exotic appetizers like grilled shrimp cilantro pesto quesadilla, and a goat's cheese queso fundido with roasted green chile sauce have passed my lips to little effect.  It may seem  impossible but almost everything I tried, from the not-very-spicy tuna tartare with blistered serrano hot sauce to jerk-spiced blue-nose snapper with papaya black bean salsa was bland.  Almost to an item, each sounded better than it tasted.
     I remember eating at Douglas Rodriquez’s Patria in NYC and at the original Mesa Grill six years ago, when the Nueva Latina  food movement was in full swing, and I was blown away by the combinations of sharp flavors and intriguing ingredients  both restaurants featured.  Unfortunately, at this Mesa Grill knock-off, there is barely a hint of either. 
     Where the 16 spices in the chicken salad are is anyone’s guess;  I tasted three--salt, pepper, and slightly hot pepper.  The smoked chicken quesadilla with toasted garlic crème fraîche was so dull that one of my dining companions compared it to something you'd find at Taco Bell, and I don’t think he was far off.   Most sauces are applied with an eyedropper, which does nothing for decent cornmeal-crusted oysters-supposedly accented with mango-Scotch bonnet hot sauce,  or the ancho chile-honey glazed salmon with a roasted jalapeño cream I could barely find or taste.
     By now everyone knows Las Vegas is the celebrity-chef-cashing-in center of the food universe.  Normally we don’t mind, since selling out is the American (and Vegas), way after all.  And most locals are grateful that Sirio Maccioni, Wolfgang Puck, Emeril et al have saved us from prime rib purgatory.  But when the casino money machines foist a dumbed-down retread of a restaurant on us, because they think the hoi polloi won’t know the difference, it’s time to call a spade a spade, and force Big Bobby Flay to come here and actually use one.
 

    There definitely comes a point at which restaurateurs open too many restaurants to handle easily and maintain consistently, but so far that number does not yet seem to have been reached by Danny Abrams and Jimmy Bradley, who in the last six years have opened the lovable Red Cat, the rustic chic Harrison, and the yo-ho-ho seafood house, The Mermaid Inn. If this last seems their least ambitious effort,  Pace, in Tribeca is certainly their most, their biggest, and their best. With 130 seats and a good, lively bar, Pace has dining room  walls with fascinating rough-hewn calligraphy and a beautiful glass divider etched with Italian buildings.  Colored lights of appealing wattage throw the right glow of conviviality, reflected in nice white tablecloths.  The choice of music tends to be good jazz, but it's loud and unnecessary with a crowd clearly and volubly enjoying conversation.
    Owing to  the current crush of those who need to be here in order to say they have been here, the service staff seems under a lot of pressure. So we had to  flag down our waiter to get a menus, drinks, and wine.  Wine director Peter Botti, on the other hand, is happy to spend the time you need with him to choose among some very interesting Mediterranean wines from a list well geared to the menu here.
      The Harrison, and to a certain extent Red Cat, always showed a Mediterranean flair, but at Pace  Chef Joey Campanaro, formerly at the Harrison, has devoted the entire menu to the lusty cooking of Italy, hitting all the current fads in the genre, from raw fish (crudi) to Italian sandwiches (panini), and does both well.   You might start off with a plate of salumi--good coppa, bresaola, prosciutto, sopressata, and mortadella--along with some yeasty country-style bread.  Among the crudi I recommend most the spigola (bass) with lemon and pickled onions, and the scallops with an unusual, delicious corn pudding and truffled vinaigrette. 
     You can go whole-hog vegetarian if you like, for there are eight verdure (three for $12), including string beans with almonds, tomatoes, and ricotta salata, baby onions with sweet-and-sour sauce, and curly late harvest radicchio, now in the market, with roasted peppers, lemon, and parsley, though the white anchovies overpower the flavor of the beautiful magenta vegetable.  There are also seven very interesting salads, or so they are called, for aside from items like arugula with pickled onions, lemon, and "parmesan" (shame, shame, shame: call it "parmigiano" on the menu), and baby spinach with guanciale, pecans and maple vinaigrette, there is also vitello tonnato (sliced veal with tuna sauce), which hardly qualifies as a salad.
      The panini are first rate, but I wonder what they're doing on a dinner menu. The roasted pork with radicchio, taleggio cheese, and onions on good bread was a winner, and I would love to have it at 1 PM, but not so much at 8.
    OK, we haven't even hit the pastas yet, have we?  Well, aside from being too lavishly sauced, all those I tried were terrific, especially the fanghe, a ricotta pasta with escarole, veal cheeks, and sharp pecorino. Right behind was spaghettini with sweet-hot chilies, anchovy, and toasted breadcrumbs (what Southern Italians call "poor man's Parmigiano), and orrechiette with duck ragù, eggplant, and asiago cheese. I'd rush back just to try the rest of the pastas here.  Also wonderful--and wonderfully cooked--was a Milanese-style saffron risotto with veal rib and gremolata, which is gilding the lily the right way.
     Main courses did not quite live up to what came before them. Spigola and a pasta fagiole of pearl pasta and bean ragoût was blah; cacciucco, the ruddy fish stew of Tuscany, was quite good, generous with fish and toast slathered with an aïoli, but the fish itself was a tad fishy. Sweetbreads with prosciutto and sage was quite good but very messy.  Best of the entrees I tried was a simple costoletta of veal with pancetta, radicchio, and balsamic, a classic of New York-Italian cookery (at $40, the most expensive dish on the menu).
     Pastry chef Larissa Raphael goes considerably beyond the usual Italian desserts with fine renderings of a torta di cioccolato with gelato and chocolate sauce, and a wonderful pizzette topped with pears and a vin santo gelato.  Only zeppoles--oval, crispy fritters--were disappointing for being gummy inside, perhaps  not a good item for a rushed kitchen to make.
      There's one lovely little touch at meal's end: the bill comes inserted in any of numerous Italian novels you've probably never heard of.
     I'm not sure what the suggestion of the name Pace, which means "peace," is, for this is a bustling, good-natured restaurant with considerable vibes.  But by whatever name they call it, Pace is an excellent addition to TriBeCa, as close to a Roman trattoria as you'll find in NYC, just a lot louder.  Now to see if Pace can maintain consistency, assuming  Abrams and Bradley have further divided their energies among four restaurants.
     Appetizers run $7-13, pastas $9-$14, and entrees $17-$40.

"I made air quotes as I ordered the sweet-and-sour pork ($10.95), in case, the server, you know, misunderstood.  As my friend pointed out, I needn't have worried, since Teapot Vegetarian House maintains a vegan kitchen.  Still, it felt a little odd asking for pork--sorry, 'pork'--at a kosher restaurant. . . . A typical evening at the Teapot might find an observant Jew in a yarmulke chowing down on 'abalone' in black bean sauce ($8.95) while, in a neighboring booth, multiply pierced punk kids in 'Meat Is Murder' T-shirts go to town on Mandarin crispy 'beef' ($9.95). . . If the 'pork' was a guilty pleasure, the rose 'chicken' ($11.95) was a triumph of presentation.  'Little drumlettes of gluten and tofu' may sound unappealing, but the Teapot cleverly wraps the 'meat' around short, thin pieces of sugar cane."--Neal Shindler, "Meatless Wonder," in the Seattle Weekly (June 23-29, 2004).

AND PSYCHIATRISTS WANT TO EXAMINE HIM

EDITOR'S NOTE: This newsletter is also available on the very comprehensive food site www.sautewednesday.com
which has dozens of other links to food articles from around the world, and also at www.Gayot.com. New York Corner reviews are also available at
 www.nycvisit.com/johnmariani

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly.  Editor/Publisher: John Mariani. Contributing Writers: Robert Mariani,  Naomi  Kooker, Kirsten Skogerson,  Edward Brivio, Mort Hochstein, Lucy Gordan, Suzanne Wright. Contributing Photographers: Galina Stepanoff-Dargery,  Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.

 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 2004