MARIANI’S

January 7,  2007                                                       NEWSLETTER

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In This Issue

by John Mariani

 
Hunter Thompson’s gonzo spirit may still linger at the Woody Creek Tavern off Highway 82, but dining out in Aspen has become serious sport, with more good restaurants than cities far larger than its three-and-a-half square miles.
     The natives have mostly kept fast food restaurants at bay (there is a grotesque McDonald’s on Mill Street), although the city’s been inundated by branches of upscale chains, including a Nobu offshoot called Matsuhisa,  a mediocre Todd English Olives at the St. Regis Hotel, and, next year, Il Mulino out of NYC. The historic Hotel Jerome opened in 1889, changed hands for a major overhaul but Chef George Mahaffey, brought in to modernize the menu, has already left the enterprise, so only time will tell what happens to this beautiful dining room.
      Longtime local star chef Charles Dale sold his Rustique bistro and moved to Savannah to make meat stocks, and Chef Barclay Dodge shuttered Mogador and moved out of state. That subterranean restaurant (with 35 patio seats) has been replaced by the casual American eatery Dish Aspen (430 East Hyman Avenue; 970-925-7119), which serves many dishes—lobster corn dogs with an agave nectar and mustard dipping sauce, Jamaican jerk chicken, and beef short ribs with mac-and-cheese—family style. Chef Matthew Zubrod, formerly of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and partner Mitchell Sher are devoted to the Slow Foods Movement and to securing as much local provender as possible (their "credits" are listed on the menu, e.g., Sunny Breeze Farm cheeses, Gates of Heaven honey, and lamb from the Rosen Lamb Farm).  The menu is eclectic in the happiest American way, so you'll find mini-crabcake sandwiches with lettuce and tomato and chipotle tartar sauce right next to lobster-basil ravioli with a ginger broth. A New England-style smoked trout chowder co-exists with beef stroganoff and seafood paella. Wild salmon gets graced with maple syrup and smoked antelope comes with a sweet potato puree. There is always a well-priced--$21--dish of the day, which might be a lobster pot pie or Kobe beef bolognese. The winelist is solid, with a lot of spicy syrahs and zins that go well with Zubrod's flavors.
      Appetizers  run $7-$19 and entrees $21 to $59 (for Kobe beef);  The owners also offer a kids' menu and a bar menu.  The restaurant is open daily for dinner only.

     Over at the Sky Hotel at the base of Aspen Mountain, at the sexy lounge named 39 Degrees (702 East Durant Avenue; 800-882-2582), you can enjoy a “Pimptini” fireside or poolside (right)--it’s 80 degrees year-round--along with sushi nachos, juicy strip steak and the chickpeas fries, and mussels cooked in Fat Tire beer.  Most dishes run $10 or under; it's open daily for dinner only.
  Chef Dena Marino (below) has settled into D19 (307 South Mill Street; 970-925-6019) on the mall, next to the town’s beloved Popcorn Wagon. She, and partners Jonathan Stoller, and Judith Craig had planned to open  their new venture on December 19 of 2005, thus the name D19, though it took a week longer to debut.
      Marino is doing the same big, gusty Italian food she gained a reputation for at Ajax Tavern, where she cooked for six years. Before that she honed her skills at Tra Vigne in California's Napa Valley, so her cooking  still sparkles with similar lusty flavors in dishes like braised pork ossobuco with corn cooked three ways, and charred octopus with chilled vegetables atop smoky bruschetta lavished with chili salsa, ending off with caramel gelato drowned in espresso.  Still, at least on the busy night I was there, some of the food lacked the seasoning and excitement I'd come to expect, and the waitstaff was harried.  The winelist is  good, but red wines need to be cooled down because they are stored in racks against the wall in a warm dining room. The premises (above), with the kitchen to the rear, are friendly if unexceptional in decor, basically a long  room with a brick archway and a hopping patio section. 
        D19 is open daily for lunch and dinner, with pastas $12-$18 and entrees $25-$36.

      The finest food in town right now is at Montagna at The Little Nell hotel   (65 East Durant: 970-920-6330), which has had a succession of notable chefs.  Now they have the best yet in Ryan Hardy, 30, whose stints at Rubicon in San Francisco and the Coyote Café in Santa Fe grounded him in a distinctive western style now crystallized as Colorado Rocky Mountain cuisine, drawing on game, wild mushrooms, and river trout for a menuteeming with great flavors, like spring lamb braised slowly in milk and served with a bright pea risotto; his hand-rolled noodles with wild boar; and grilled red deer loin with pancetta-wrapped fennel and salsa. You won't find a finer Prime rib in town, perfectly cooked, juicy, and full of good beefy flavors. Nevertheless, the menu is riddled with Italian dishes: I  loved a dish of risotto with orange zucchini blossoms, and there's a selection of Italian salumi, grilled fresh prawns with avocado and pickled chile, and even a first-rate tripe Tuscan-style, with veal cheeks, tomato, and pepper.  There are four housemade pastas, too, including goat's cheese ravioli with arugula and walnut pesto.  Don't pass up the side dishes like mountain morels with rosemary or peas and prosciutto with chile and mint. It is all buoyed by a great 1,500-label winelist overseen by the ebullient sommelier Richard Betts, one of only 56 U.S.-based Master Sommeliers. (To download this extraordinary, award-winning winelist click here.)
      The room itself casts a balance of elegance with casual chic (although some men show up dressed as if they were coming to check the gas meter), certainly not rustic but not overly posh either; the seating and tablesettings are first-rate, and service has always been the restaurant's forte here. The adjacent bar is probably the town's most sophisticated watering hole, and adjacent to that is the renovated Ajax Tavern, where I have not yet had a chance to eat.
     Montagna is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily. At dinner appetizers are $12-$17, main courses $32-$39.

      The ever inventive Myriad Restaurant Group, under Drew Nieporent and Michael Bonades, which owns or manages such disparate restaurants as Montrachet (French), TriBeCa Grill (American-Mediterranean), Nobu (Japanese), Nobu Fifty Seven, and Centrico (Mexican) in NYC, Nobu London, The Coach House on Martha's Vineyard, and the new Proof on Main in Louisville, has taken a particularly curious diversion into Vietnamese cooking with Mai House, right around the corner from their other TriBeCa restaurants.
      Mai House is one of their more casual efforts, set within a former warehouse that once housed Myriad's bakery, now an L-shaped, shadowy lay-out with 120 seats, hard-carved fixtures from Vietnam, walls textured with crushed sunflower seeds, banquettes with a zebra-patterned fabric, a butcher block made from mother-of-pearl and bamboo, and hanging lights in the shape of lotus flowers.  It can get loud in there as the night progresses, and the bar is long and very convivial--a good place to try some of the tasty cocktail concoctions like the Saigon Sling and Delta Dream.
     The chef onboard is Saigon-born Michael Huynh, formerly at the estimable Bao 111 and now a partner at Mai House, and he is doing his own imaginative cuisine within the traditions of Vietnamese food culture wedded to modern ideas of presentation with a fairly large menu.  Having spent my twenties trying to avoid going to Vietnam, I claim no familiarity with restaurants in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City, so I cannot speak about authenticity, although Vietnamese cuisine is very much an amalgam of Southeast Asian and French influences (from its days when it was called Indochina).  Huynh seems to be taking the sensible tack with  easy-to-love appetizers that include cool shrimp rolls with vermicelli and  a hazelnut bean sauce (right).  Hot spring rolls contain pork, crab, and shrimp and take the ubiquitous nuoc cham sauce as a dressing. Manila clams are cooked in a spicy broth of beer, while fried frogs' legs come as "lollipops," with a dipping sauce of hot jalapeño aïoli, which these bland critters need.
     Almost everything has a tantalizing little surprise in the preparation.  So lamb  is given the tingle of lemongrass, put on skewers, quickly seared, then served with pickled vegetables and a light anchovy sauce.  Barbecued quail, nice and fat, are sided with pickled lemongrass with sticky rice and crispy shallots, and there is even a wild boar sausage with a green papaya salad.  You scoop this food up, pop it in your mouth, lick it off your fingers, and, reluctantly, share it with your friends. (Portions are not huge, however, so you might have a fight on your hands.)
     Among the entrees are spicy beef cheek from wagyu beef, with lotus root and curried cauliflower puree. Tender pork belly is braised with pickled red cabbage and coconut juice, and it's wonderful how zesty these flavors are far more interesting than so many European preparations of the same ingredients. The claypot chicken with quail eggs and spices definitely begs to be shared. 
     I found the seafood somewhat less savory, like the cloyingly sweet-and-sour whole red snapper with tomatoes and Chinese celery that tasted too close to Chinese  take-out.  Other seafood items were fairly bland, including  Dungeness crab with garlic and chives, although that's a dish where you want the delicacy of the crab to be eminent. Noodles are wonderful--try the crab fried rice with egg and Chinese sausage or the duck fried rice with smoked duck, duck confit, and duck egg.
     Don't forget the very savory side dishes, including sticky rice with Chinese sausage and wonderful, refreshing steamed mustard greens that help cut the spices in the other food.
    The winelist more than complements the difficult seasonings here, with plenty of aromatic whites and spicy reds, and many under $50 a bottle.
     Of desserts I cannot rave, but stick with the sorbets and you'll have a fine ending to an exotic and deliciously different meal.
    I have read some ill-informed reviews or comments in the blogs about the prices being high at Mai House when you can eat some of the same dishes for five bucks in a Chinatown eatery.  Believe me, however enjoyable it is occasionally to nosh in some  storefront Vietnamese restaurants with tacky decor and few amenities, there is no way their owners can buy the best ingredients and charge $5 for a dish. Mai House's ingredients are top notch and it shows in the texture and taste of dishes that elsewhere taste frozen or left over from the previous day.  Cheap does not equate with good, and beside, with appetizers at Mai House $9-$13 and entrees $18-$28, you are getting plenty of value for your money and a helluva lot more atmosphere and service, not to mention good English.
Mai House serves dinner Mon.-Sat.

 

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

STICK A CORK IN IT?
by John Mariani

                           Ah, the pleasure of splurging on a great wine at a great restaurant! A vested sommelier cuddles the bottle, deftly cuts away the foil wrapper, carefully extracts the cork, and pours the wine into your glass. You observe its ruby color, swirl its contents, then bring it to your nose, and—Agh! The damn thing smells like that corner of your garage you’ve been meaning to clean out. Bummer: the wine’s corked.
    “Corkiness” is the halitosis of the wine world—a dank, musty smell—and there’s nothing you can do about it.  The odor comes from mold within the cork or picked up from nearby surfaces. Ironically, after corks began to be sanitized in the 1980s with a chlorine solution, “corkiness” has increased, owing to chlorine’s tendency to produce the chemical compound trichlorophenol, detectable by the human nose if present in a only few parts per trillion.
   “Cork taint is a real scourge,” says Nigel Platts-Martin, owner of London’s posh restaurant The Square, which stocks 1,200 labels and 15,000 bottles, of which he estimates between 5% and 10% are tainted. “The cost is unacceptably high, and the tide is turning against cork.”  As a result, even as the cork industry, centered in Portugal and Spain, tries to come up with chemical alternatives to chlorine, wineries have been testing alternative stoppers.
     Obviously, using a non-cork stopper eliminates any prospect of corkiness, but therein lies a delicate question of marketing: Will a sophisticated wine-lover accept anything but a cork in a $300 bottle of Bordeaux, or even a $25 bottle of California Chardonnay?  According to Jamie Moore, sommelier at Boston’s wine-driven restaurant Meritage, “A lot of people, especially the older crowd, would not respond well to anything but a cork in a wine bottle. I think the younger crowd just getting interested in wines may be more open-minded and, I hope, less resistant.”
    Also, winemakers, who are nothing if not dogged traditionalists, regard anything but cork for wine bottles the way a luthier regards acrylic varnish for violins. After all, using corks as wine stoppers dates back to Ancient Greece and has been standard procedure since glass bottles became available in the 17th century.
     Two alternatives have been in use for some time, but until now only with cheaper commercial wines.  Synthetic, that is, plastic, stoppers work well, but no long-term tests have been done to see if oxidizing air might seep into the bottle while aging. Plastic stoppers have also been criticized for fitting too tightly, sometimes requiring major exertion to extract.
     Then there’s the metal screwtop, long associated with cheap plonk and soda pop, even though the evidence suggests they are first-rate stoppers, particularly one called the Stelvin closure and another, newer one, called TOPP (Torqued on Pilfer Proof, made by Global Cap in England. Indeed, several premium wineries have boldly taken up the cause of screwcaps, including California’s R. H. Phillips, Kendall-Jackson, and Plumpjack, whose Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is offered with either cork or screwcap (right), and sells for $150.  New Zealand wineries have led the switch to screwcaps, including Mills Reef Winery in Tauranga, which uses them on their $15 Reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2003 and whose winemaker, Tim Preston, insists, “The screwcap not only solves the cork issue, but the wines are also brighter, with livelier fruits, especially with aromatic wines such as Sauvignon Blanc.”
     Now, however, comes a stopper that might solve all problems—both chemical and esthetic—associated with cork.  Alcoa Deutschland, in association with scientists and wine experts from the Geisenheim Institute for Applied Enological Sciences and the Oppenheim/Rheinhessen State Teaching and Testing Institute, have developed a glass stopper called Vino-Lok that forms a tight, completely sanitary fit that is “guaranteed to hold firmly in the bottle opening and can be resealed.” To prevent any possibility of the glass breaking or scraping into the wine, the stopper is invisibly coated with a plastic so that glass is never in contact with the bottle’s neck. It is also recyclable.
    Introduced at the Dusseldorf Wine Fair in March 2003, Vino-Lok (left) roused enormous interest, both for its utility and for its good looks: It looks like a stopper  you’d find in a fine crystal decanter.  Plus, it has an aluminum cap, available in various colors, to give traditionalists something to love.  Several wineries have been testing Vino-Lok, including German producers P.J. Valckenberg in Worms and Schloss-Vollrads in Oesterich-Winkel, and Weingut der Stadt Krems in Austria.
    At the moment Vino-Lok is more expensive than other stoppers, needing a specially formed bottle to accept it, but Alcoa insists the price will be competitive as soon as mass production kicks.
    Whether traditionalists will refuse to drink wine without a cork stopper remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the only way currently to prevent corkiness is not to use one. We have nothing to lose but the nostalgic sound of a cork being popped.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

   The following signs and notices were collected from restaurant, hotels, and resorts around the world by alphadictionary.com.














Airline ticket office, Copenhagen: WE TAKE YOUR BAGS AND SEND THEM IN ALL DIRECTIONS.









Hotel, Vienna: IN CASE OF FIRE, DO YOUR UTMOST TO ALARM THE HOTEL PORTER.





At a Budapest zoo: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. IF YOU HAVE ANY SUITABLE FOOD, GIVE IT TO THE GUARD ON DUTY.






Hotel lobby, Bucharest: THE LIFT IS BEING FIXED FOR THE NEXT DAY. DURING THAT TIME WE REGRET THAT YOU WILL BE UNBEARABLE.




A laundry in Rome: LADIES, LEAVE YOUR CLOTHES HERE AND SPEND THE AFTERNOON HAVING A GOOD TIME.
  







In a Swiss Mountain inn: SPECIAL TODAY - NO ICE-CREAM.



On the menu of a Swiss restaurant: OUR WINES LEAVE YOU NOTHING TO HOPE FOR.









In a New Zealand restaurant: OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, AND WEEKENDS TOO.




On a highway sign in Australia: TAKE NOTICE: WHEN THIS SIGN IS UNDER WATER; THIS ROAD IS IMPASSABLE.
 






In the lobby of a Moscow hotel across from a Russian Orthodox monastery: YOU ARE WELCOME TO VISIT THE CEMETERY WHERE FAMOUS RUSSIAN AND SOVIET COMPOSERS, ARTISTS, AND WRITERS ARE BURIED DAILY EXCEPT THURSDAY.






In a hotel, Yugoslavia: THE FLATTENING OF UNDERWEAR WITH PLEASURE IS THE JOB OF THE CHAMBERMAID.
 

Included with the package of complimentary wares in a Chinese hotel was a pair of workout shorts marked: UNCOMPLIMENTARY PANTS.








Booklet about using a hotel air conditioner, Japan: COOLES AND HEATES; IF YOU WANT CONDITION OF WARM AIR IN YOUR ROOM, PLEASE CONTROL YOURSELF.





Tokyo hotel's rules and regulations: GUESTS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO SMOKE OR DO OTHER DISGUSTING BEHAVIORS IN BED.












Hotel, Japan: YOU ARE INVITED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CHAMBERMAID.










Car rental brochure, Tokyo: WHEN PASSENGER OF FOOT HEAVE IN SIGHT, TOOTLE THE HORN. TRUMPET HIM MELODIOUSLY AT FIRST, BUT IF HE STILL OBSTACLES YOUR PASSAGE THEN TOOTLE HIM WITH VIGOUR.








In an East African newspaper: A NEW SWIMMING POOL IS RAPIDLY TAKING SHAPE SINCE THE CONTRACTORS HAVE THROWN IN THE BULK OF THEIR WORKERS.
 




Hotel, Acapulco: THE MANAGER HAS PERSONALLY PASSED ALL THE WATER SERVED HERE.

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

 John Mariani is a columnist for Esquire, Wine Spectator, Bloomberg News and Radio, and Diversion.  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 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.

My newest book, written with my brother Robert Mariani, is a memoir of our years growing up in the North Bronx. It's called Almost Golden because it re-visits an idyllic place and time in our lives when so many wonderful things seemed possible.     For those of you who don't think of the Bronx as “idyllic,” this book will be a revelation. It’s about a place called the Country Club area, on the shores of Pelham Bay. A beautiful neighborhood filled with great friends and wonderful adventures that helped shape our lives. It's about a culture, still vibrant, and a place that is still almost the same as when we grew up there.     Robert and I think you'll enjoy this very personal look at our Bronx childhood. It is not yet available in bookstores, so to purchase a copy, go to amazon.com or click on  Almost Golden.                                                                                                                     --John Mariani

copyright John Mariani 2007