MARIANI’S

  June 19, 2005                                                        NEWSLETTER

Raymond C. Hair, Jr. and Clifton Webb  in "Sitting Pretty" (1948)

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PHILADELPHIA STORIES
by John Mariani

     The easy thing to like about Philadelphia's restaurant scene is that no more than a handful of interesting new restaurants opens each year. So  you can repeatedly go to old favorites without missing too much from visit  to visit.   Many of the  new places are Philly versions of concepts created elsewhere--a specialty of local restaurateur Steven Starr, who is ever busy copying whatever the next big thing is coming out of New York. So on a recent trip to the city, I returned to a favorite, checked out a revamped restaurant, and got my first taste of a restaurant that was once famous, then ridiculed as a tourist trap, now re-opened with a snazzy new look.


The Swann Fountain, Logan Square

     As has become  the rule on my trips to Philly, my lunch at The Fountain at the Four Seasons Hotel (One Logan Square; 215- 963-1500 ) was my best meal. Chef Martin Hamann and his crew have proved themselves the best in the city--and I mean he and his crew, because this is clearly a group effort, evident in the consistency they achieve year after year while other restaurants change chefs, concepts, and direction  with distressing frequency.
    The dining room (right) has over time achieved a classic, if dated,  grace, with a patina of sophistication that draws a business clientele for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as much for the fine cuisine and grand view of the circular outdoor Swann fountain  here as for the flawless service of a staff I'd rank at the very top of American hospitality, including the cordial, well-informed sommelier Melissa Monosoff, who keeps the Fountain's wine list well up to snuff in a city where it isn't always easy to stock what you'd like.
      My lunch began with the classic ingredients for French potato-leek soup, but Hamann scented it with Meyer lemon, giving  it just a single note more of savoriness and piquancy. Halibut was touched with just enough caviar to flavor it but not enough to make the roe the center of attention. With this Ms. Monsoff served a 2002 Grüner Veltliner by Nigl "Kremser Freiheit."
     After all these years I'm not sure if I prefer foie gras fresh and seared or as a silky terrine, but Hamann dashed any such ruminations by presenting both on one plate, accompanied by rhubarb and fresh honeycomb, a canny pairing indeed.
       The main meat course was a rack of rabbit tenderloin, which can be a puny thing of little flavor.  This one, however, had some real meat on its tiny bones and plenty of rabbit flavor, enhanced with sweet corn, glazed fennel, and prosciutto to add fat and a saline dimension. The sauce was a simple reduction of white wine and tarragon mixed with the pan juices of the rabbit. This is clean, clear-headed cooking in which every element complements the other in delicate balance, enhanced beautifully by the selection of Isole e Olena "Ceperello" 2000.

Lunch entrees range from $29-32, and prix fixe is $42.50; Dinner entrees are $44.50-$58.00; Prix fixe is $85-$110.00 or $105-$200 with wine.

      I was also happy to return to the nearby Ritz-Carlton, which has revamped its main restaurant, The Grill (10 Avenue of the Arts; 215-523-8221) and given Chef Terence Feury a freedom to create new, seasonal dishes without straying from culinary discipline.  A veteran of NYC's Waldorf-Astoria and Le Bernardin, he came to Philly to become executive chef at Striped Bass,  and now works from a splendid open kitchen in the posh but casual dining room  here (left).
       Feury has an admirably light hand, but his food is highly flavorful from impeccably reduced stocks and sauces, which is a strength many younger chefs no longer possess.  Too often recently I've been tasting dishes by chefs who take out so much fat that they do not replace it with distinctive flavors; Feury, I assure you, is not in the band of cooks.
      Dishes like his Dungeness crab with avocado, crispy onions and brioche touch all the best complementary textures for crab, and he'll take the finest veal chop and do little more than add an earthy ragoût of mushrooms and artichokes, then give it a little acidic edge with lemon and capers.  Wild striped bass is done with crispy lentils (a charming surprise) and a lemon-coriander sauce.
      Feury has really sparked this fine looking and unpretentious dining room with American food very much of the moment while very clearly anchored in the best culinary traditions.  With Fuery at the Ritz, Hamann at the Four Seasons and Jean-Marie Lacroix at the Rittenhouse, hotel dining rooms have become the best fine dining restaurants in the Philadelphia to dine right now.

At lunch main courses run $12-$25, at dinner $28-$40, with a $45 pre-theater menu available.

       The story of the two Bookbinders restaurants in Philly is more confusing than it is complex, but here goes: Back in the 1865 a lunch counter named Bookbinder's opened on Walnut Street, run by Dutch immigrant Samuel Bookbinder, whose family continued to run the place until 1935, when a family squabble send Samuel's grandson off to Fifteenth Street to open his own Bookbinder's. The keys to the original premises were handed over to the city's Jewish charities, but the place was repurchased in 1941 by the Taxin family, which still runs it today and claims they can trace the restaurant's lineage back to 1865.  So, up until a couple of years ago Old Original Bookbinder's on Walnut Street and Bookbinder's Seafood House on Fifteenth Street co-existed independent of one another.  Then both closed, for although business was already down, 9/11 really put the kibosh on them. The 15th Street restaurant never re-opened, but the Walnut Street property did, last February, still under the Taxin family aegis and care.    
   The new decor of the Old Original Bookbinder's (125 Walnut Street; 215-925-7027) is certainly a great improvement over the old one, which had grown tatty and full of kitsch, including photos of every celeb who had come through since the 1940s. Many are still here in the hallways, but interior designer Floss Barber took the flair of Parisian brasseries for inspiration, using bright colors and mahogany tones with accents of silver and blue. "The "world's largest lobster tank," holding 350 of the critters, is the centerpiece for the restaurant, which sprawls over several dining rooms and a very handsome bar area (below), hung with a chandelier saved from the old place.  There is a curved raw bar, a very large open kitchen, tin ceilings, and good lighting--always a virtue in a seafood restaurant.  The $21 million renovation of the building includes 8 apartments and 19 condos upstairs. Downstairs the restaurant seats 400 people.  (There are, incidentally, branches of the restaurant in Richmond and Midlothian, VA.)     
     The Taxins have brought in a chef with considerable credentials, David Cunningham, who's done stints at the Hotel Bristol in Paris, and at both Lespinasse and Le Bernardin in NYC (see review below), so the man knows his seafood. Yet on a recent visit I did not feel he's been given much freedom to go beyond the kind of simple seafood dishes OOB's had served in the past.  That he is doing it with better ingredients and greater finesse is obvious, but the size of the operation and number of customers may not encourage the kind of cuisine de fruits de mer he was doing back in Paris and New York.

       You can begin with an assortment of raw shellfish, steamed Littlenecks, or oysters Rockefeller.  Tuna tartare with soy and ginger was certainly not on the old menu, but it is nicely done here, and there is some novelty in dishes like sautéed sea scallops with a carrot-sauce and vegetable slaw.  The "original recipe" snapper soup didn't thrill me, and a steamed lobster's claws didn't have much meat in them, which at the market prices charged was disappointing indeed.  Most of the fish come as filets, so don't bother to ask for a whole one.  There are also a lot of meat and surf-and-turf items available.  Desserts, like coconut tart crème brûlée with pineapple ice cream and hazelnut crunch bar with three sauces are very, very sweet but come in sufficient sizes to feed two or more at the table.
      The wine list is pretty solid, though curiously stronger in big California reds than in white wines that tend to go better with seafood.
       I'm glad to see OOB's is back up and running in a far more appealing form, and I like the energy of the place immensely.  If the menu is not as exciting as it someday might be, the food  is made with both the authority of American cooking traditions and the precision of a well-trained young chef.
         Main courses range from a very reasonable  $19.95 to $28.95, with lobsters at market price.

     

NEW YORK CORNER by John Mariani

Le Bernardin
155 West 51st Street
212-554-1515
www.le-bernardin.com
 
                                               If ever there was a restaurant equally French and New York
in style, it is Le Bernardin. One part is all Gallic charm and refinement, owed principally to partner Maguy Le Coze (below) and her dining room staff, who are mostly French; the other part is in the New York sophistication you simply find nowhere else in the U.S.--even if half the guests on any given night are out-of-towners. People dress up for Le Bernardin.
        Indeed, it’s unimaginable to me how Le Bernardin could exist anywhere but New York, despite its origins in Paris, where Maguy and her brother, Chef Gilbert Le Coze, garnered two stars from the Michelin Guide back in the 1980s--exemplary for a restaurant that served only seafood.
          Upon opening in New York in 1986, the Le Cozes kept the Paris original going for a while  but closed it when it became impossible to maintain both at their self-imposed high standards, insisting (unlike so many notable chefs these days, French and otherwise) that one owes one’s clientele your entire effort, personality, and presence. 
   Soon after opening in New York, Le Bernardin got a rave four star review from New York Times critic Bryan Miller, and it's maintained them under successive Times reviewers ever since. Soon the handsome Le Cozes were the toast of Gotham, and Le Bernardin had packed houses every day and night.
          Sadly, Gilbert passed away at a young age some years ago, putting Le Bernardin’s future in doubt only among those who did not know Maguy’s resiliency and dedication to her brother’s memory.  Together with chef de cuisine Eric Ripert (below), now a partner in the restaurant, Le Bernardin kept going and kept thriving, winning every major culinary award in America, including James Beard Foundation honors as Outstanding Restaurant and Ripert as Best New York Chef.  The beauty of the place has always been magnificent, soft, formal without stiffness, elegant without frou-frou.   The  service staff is nonpareil.
        Le Bernardin's menu has always evolved yet it is still precisely the style that is its own, preserving Gilbert's original precepts of seafood cookery—the best, freshest American species cooked tenderly and with very little enhancement beyond a few intense flavors.  The subtlety of Ripert’s cooking, backed by a superb kitchen brigade, takes extraordinary exactitude, like the creation of a perfect haiku.
          The menu format has changed somewhat in the past year: for one thing, it's now up to $92 for three courses (the same as at Daniel, with La Grenouille at $87.50, Le Périgord  at $62, and Alain Ducasse at $150.)  Now the menu is all in English and set up in categories of  "Almost Raw," "Barely Touched," and "Lightly Cooked," so people who like their fish cooked until blackened and stuck to the pan are out of luck.  Le Bernardin pioneered this soft approach to seafood, and it clearly is the right thing to do with most species. Even if something is fried here, it will be always be crisp, light, and greaseless.
      At my most recent meal I began with thinly pounded layers of fat-rich yellowfin tuna with a layer of foie gras on a toasted baguette, dressed with chopped chives and extra virgin olive oil--perfection in a balance of fats that seemed ethereal yet deeply delicious. Alaskan wild salmon came as a ceviche with watermelon and grapefruit whose acids "cooked" the lustrous fish.
     Under the "Barely Cooked" category was plump soft-shell crab sautéed quickly and set atop lump crab meat, with a Brazilian muqueca sauce, lime, coconut, and dende oil, all of which added mere fragrance to the delicacy of the crab.  Lobster is poached in a lemon-miso broth and accompanied by shiso and hon shimeji mushrooms, while under the "Lightly Cooked" section, juicy skate and crispy pork belly made for a marvelous surf-and-turf dish, with gingered squash mousseline and a traditional brown butter lavished on it, which is as rich a dish as Le Bernardin turns out.  Pan roasted monkfish came in a bubbly casserole of morels, early summer ramps, fava beans, asparagus, and a cherry tomato confit--a simple, elegant dish for June.
      The desserts are always superb here, from a dark chocolate, cashew and caramel tart with a red wine reduction, banana, and malted rum milk chocolate ice cream to what may be the best French ice creams in New York.   The restaurant's wine list is one of great distinction, though pretty pricey across the board.

OH, JUST THROW A ROCK AT THE DAMN CLOCK AND ONE AT LORD LAMBTON AND PASS THE GRAPPA

BOOK NOTES



Since I was editor on the first edition of Italian Cuisine by Tony May  (St. Martin's Press) 15 years ago, I cannot objectively review this book by the owner of NYC's San Domenico restaurant, except to say that it was written as a standard text for the Italian cooking school at the Culinary  Institute of America, which continues to use this revised, up-to-date edition.  I was very honored to have helped with the original; this new edition, the third, revised and edited by Louise Matteoni, is even better, tuned more for the home cook. By clicking on the cover on the left, you can go to Amazon.com to purchase a copy.
                                                                                --John Mariani

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).  

 Any of John Mariani's books below may be ordered from amazon.com by clicking on the cover image.

copyright John Mariani 2005