Happy Presidents' Birthday!



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THIS WEEK

Is Houston Bound for Glory?
by John Mariani

Is Drinking Old Wines a Gamble or Just Old Hat?
 by John Mariani

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Is Houston Bound for Glory?
by John Mariani

EL REAL TEX + MEX
1201 Westheimer
713-524-1201
www.elrealtexmex.com

    Houstonians will argue endlessly about which hole-in-the-wall Tex-Mex place is the best in their city— Teotihuacan Cafes for the $4.99 Breakfast Grande, the original Ninfa’s on Navigation for the signature tacos al carbon, or Mission Burritos for their overstuffed namesake item.  None, however, has the breadth and depth, not to mention Texas white guy swagger, that El Real does.  Award-winning Chef Bryan Caswell, restaurant developer Bill Floyd, and Rob Walsh, author of The Tex-Mex Cookbook, didn’t want to upgrade Tex-Mex food, they just wanted to do it better than anyone in Houston and, with a lot of decorous respect, they succeeded admirably and with plenty of fun.
    Located in the restored Tower Theater (above) in the Montrose neighborhood, done up in Texas and Mexican kitsch, and playing Clint Eastwood movies against the wall, El Real is the real deal, with a menu way too long, but I ripped through as many dishes as possible and would return any time for the queso flameado with chorizo; green chile posole; the San Antonio Puffy Taco Plate; the Enchiladas #10, with cheese, chile con carne and chili con queso; and Chingo Bing, a smoked chicken relleno, chicken enchilada with salsa verde, and a pork tamale.
  Caswell's rep, after a stint with Jean Georges Vongerichten, was made at the seafood restaurant REEF, which Floyd ran, and Walsh had been food critic for the Houston Press before going over to the restaurant biz.
    The menu casts a very wide net, with 15 side dishes alone, including a fried egg.  There are some very well-priced lunch specials, like the #4--tacos al carbon, fajita, green chile posole, tamale, rice and refried beans for thirteen bucks.
    Tacos here are puffy "San Antonio style," which means nice and chewy. You can go for an appetizer or two, but, as usual in Tex-Mex, so many flavors and preparations overlap, like chile and guacamole, it's better to move right to the heftier courses.  The five-label wine list is not worth mentioning, and I'm a little surprised there aren't more beers offered.  The margaritas, by the way, are first rate. A pitcher of them is $29.50--about what two cocktails would cost at some swanky Houston bar.

El Real is open daily for lunch and dinner.

 QUATTRO
The Four Seasons Hotel
1300 Lamar Street
713-276-4700
www.quattrorestauranthouston.com

    For decades now The Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston has tried to find a winning formula for its upstairs dining room, and I think I've tried all the incarnations over the years. Its newest, Quattro, strikes me as its best and certainly most lively, rescuing this space from neglect by giving it sunshine, Mondrian-like colors, Murano glass and an Italian chef who knows well the Four Seasons style, having worked with the group since 2000 in hotels from Hawaii to Budapest.
    Maurizio Ferrarese was born in Vercelli, Italy, arriving in Houston two years ago, imprinting his own stamp indelibly on a menu that had long been a mishmash of Tex-Mex and continental cooking with no personality. There is also a wine bar here that works well especially after 5 PM, with a long list of wines by the glass.
    His menu, which even includes pizzas, hits many expected notes but he marks little chef's hats next to those dishes he calls "Chef Maurizio's Toque Top Pick," and he offers guests a chance to have him cook a tasting menu, too. 
    You might begin with buffalo mozzarella with glazed shallots and tomato confit, or a very good, creamy vitello tonnato that is all about subtlety.  There is always a risotto among the pastas, and the one I tried, with four cheeses and black truffles, would easily slip onto any menu in Ferrara.  I was not in love with the bland duck ravioli in a murky lentil ragôut.
    It's always hard not to order cotoletta of veal alla milanese when I see it on a menu, and Quattro's is first rate, the breading crisp and buttery, the veal full of flavor, with bright salad and tomatoes on top. Nothing could improve on an impeccably cooked branzino alla piastra, grilled, with mixed vegetables.
    I very much like it when a substantive wine list is written on the back of a menu, as is Quattro's, and, while understandably rich in Italian bottlings, there are global offerings too, and at least 30 wines by the glass.
   
Quattro is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. Antipasti run $10-$18, pastas (half/full portions) $13/$22 to $15/$26, main courses $28-$49.  There is also a new children's menu.

NEW YORK CORNER
by John Mariani 

RedFarm
529 Hudson Street (near West 10th Street)
212-792-9700
www.redfarmnyc.com

    First, a few words about Ed Schoenfeld: Back in the late 1960s, when most Chinese restaurants in America were still serving egg foo yung and chow mein, Ed Schoenfeld, a nice Jewish kid from Brooklyn, developed a passion for authentic Chinese food that went far beyond Neil Simon’s contention that “All Jews know two things: guilt and where to find a Chinese restaurant open on Sunday.”
         And with his help and guidance, an odd thing happened: Starting around the mid-‘70s, NYC’s far east side, near the U.N., saw one, then two, then more very upscale Chinese restaurants that featured the cooking of Sichuan and Hunan, known for their fiery chile-spiced dishes—the best known being General Tso’s chicken.  Milder Cantonese cuisine faded fast, even in Chinatown, and by the end of the decade you were as likely to find dishes (which Ed Schoenfeld helped pioneer as a consultant) like hot-and-sour soup,  lobster soong, Hunan honeyed ham on white bread, cold noodles with sesame sauce, crispy walnuts and others became totemic overnight in Chinese restaurants around the U.S., most, for some reason, located in strip shopping malls.
    Schoenfeld was involved with famous restaurants like Uncle Tai’s, David Keh, Pig Heaven, and Auntie Yuan, and, throughout the next two decades always seemed to be the consultant to new Chinese restaurants everywhere. Still, this newly popular cooking style developed a sameness on menus that did nothing help the cuisine to evolve. So, when Schoenfeld and Chef Joe Ng (left), with restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, decided to open RedFarm, there was no attempt to be authoritative; instead, they’ve composed a menu that is fascinating for its global reach, if always with Asian and Chinese underpinnings.  Thus, you’ll find a pastrami egg roll on the menu, alongside mushroom spring rolls crafted to look like a chanterelle. 
    The small dining room is set in an 1828 West Village townhouse, with white brick walls, exposed wooden beams, five booths and two communal tables, totaling 42 seats.  It’s bright and colorful, kind of like a Cracker Barrel done with urban cool. Owing to its size, the drawback here is that RedFarm doesn’t take reservations, but if you show up, they’ll give you an estimated waiting time, take your cell phone number, and text you 20 minutes before they expect a table to turn.  Show up at  5 PM or after 10 PM and you have an even better shot.
    The menu changes frequently, so I asked Schoenfeld, who has more than once been likened to Rob Reiner with big glasses, to send out whatever he wished that night. We began with those crunchy mushroom and vegetable springs rolls and the pastrami egg rolls—both delicious—along with lightly smoked salmon and eggplant bruschetta, and Kowloon-style filet mignon tarts (above). The food is fun and not to be taken too seriously, with none of the pretensions of “modernist” chefs who think they are creating artwork.
    Steamed lobster dumplings came with a lush mushroom ragôut (and Schoenfeld is an authority on Chinese dumplings; see his guide below) from a dim sum section of the menu (enlarged at brunch). Main courses followed: amazingly juicy grilled, marinated Prime ribeye (left) with baby bok choy; okra and Thai eggplant yellow curry; Dungeness crabmeat and rock crab with “long life” noodles; and soft and crunchy vegetable fried rice—better than any version of that dish I’ve ever had.  We finished off with a singularly New York style chocolate pudding with whipped cream.
    We were happy as clams feasting on this family-style array of novel dishes, and it was doubly enjoyable because I got to renew my acquaintance with Schoenfeld, whose tales of the history of Chinese food in America could fill a book—one I hope he writes some day. 

RedFarm is open for dinner nightly and for brunch Sat. & Sun.  Starters and dim sum $7.25-$19, main courses $14-$39.

 

     I'm delighted to include here Ed Schoenfeld's guide on how to find and eat the best dim sum.--J.M.

Five Ways to Up Your Dim Sum IQ by Ed Schoenfeld

1. Go early: Most large Cantonese restaurants that feature dim sum have two teams of chefs: the ‘cooking’ chefs who work the woks, and whose day starts at 10 to 11 a.m., and the dim sum chefs, who arrive at sunrise and finish up by mid-afternoon. In cities like Hong Kong and Guangchou, where dim sum reigns, the locals think of dim sum as an early-in-the-day meal and many diners are enjoying ‘yum cha’ (literally ‘drink tea’) by 10 a.m. In the United States, the busy period for dim sum usually starts at 11 a.m. and begins to slow by 1 p.m. By 2 p.m., the chefs are packing up and getting ready to leave. So suggestion number one is this: dine on the early side. It should be less hectic, easier to get a table and the food will be at its freshest. And rule number one is this: if it’s close to 2 p.m., eat something other than dim sum; you don’t have to leave the restaurant, just order from the regular menu, say, some barbecue or a noodle or rice dish."
2. Look for the fresh stuff : One of the biggest dim sum dining challenges is determining which items are freshest. In particular, hot carts containing steamed items may keep your food warm and immediately available, but also continue to cook it. Dough and fillings can easily be past their prime after just a few minutes of dining room circulation. So here are a few tricks: 
 ● Look for kitchen runners (servers whose job it is to transport freshly made food from the kitchen to the dining room) carrying trays stacked high with steam baskets. Chances are they’ve been sent out to replenish diminishing supplies of whatever that particular cart is hawking. Feel free to take your check and walk over to the newly stocked cart to score a freshly cooked item.
• A related strategy is to pay attention to how many orders of a particular item are available on passing carts. If there is only one of something, chances are excellent that it is the last of a batch and therefore less fresh than one would like. Conversely, if there are many orders of something, chances are that it’s fresh.
• Look closely at the food. If it looks like the seams of a dumpling are detaching from one another or the item is broken in any way, it’s likely to be past its prime.
3. Choose your beverage: All dim sum restaurants charge for tea on a per-person basis. Basically, it’s a cover charge that everyone pays whether they drink tea or not. Certain customers who are known to the house may have their checks stamped with a red ink message that says, 'free tea,' a mark of a true VIP in that restaurant’s universe. Second, most restaurants have different kinds of tea, and if you’re a known regular they may (should) ask you what kind of tea you would like. Another thing to know is that many dim sum restaurants make delicious coffee that you can request instead of tea. It costs more than the tea, is often served in a paper cup, and if you don’t drink it black, you should direct the server to put in milk and sugar - and say how much of each. Dim sum restaurants with creamers are rare.
4. Holidays and weekends have more variety: There are traditional but unwritten rules about when the freshest and greatest variety of dim sum are available. It’s pretty straightforward. The best variety is on weekends and holidays when there are frequently many more preparations available than at any other time - in some restaurants this may mean 100 percent more things. And between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. most dim sum restaurants produce the largest volume of food and the greatest variety of items. Go early and you get the standards: shrimp dumplings, filled rice noodle crêpe, shu mai (steamed dumplings) and rice porridge. By 11 a.m. the number of offerings is likely to double. The more uncommon dim sum are made in smaller quantities and when they run out, the kitchen reverts back to the basics - and a smaller number of items.
5. Don’t be afraid to order from a menu: Should you be lucky enough to be enjoying dim sum in a high-end Hong Kong hotel, don’t be upset when you can’t find a rolling cart. In the best venues, where the chefs take great pride in their craft, all the dim sum is ordered off a menu, not chosen from a cart. Some of the fun and immediacy of a rolling cart is sacrificed, but the trade-off is that your food is cooked to order and should arrive in perfectly a point condition.

 Guide above from Ding Tai Feng restaurant, Taipei, Taiwan.

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR