Virtual
Gourmet
❖❖❖ ANNOUNCEMENT For the next two Tuesdays, in NYC, the French Institute Alliance Française, John Mariani, and special culinary guests will be hosting films (with English subtitles) that celebrate the importance of food and wine in French culture. The series is as follows: Oct. 23: "Romantics Anonymous" (2010) with a chocolate tasting with Lauren Gerbaud (at 5:30 PM); Oct. 30: "Entre les Bras" (2010) with guest host chef Jean-Louis Gérin. All screenings will be held at at Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street at 7:30 PM, followed by Q&A with host. Tickets $10. For info click here. ❖❖❖ THIS WEEK
PHILLY'S
NEW FOOD BOBO
❖❖❖ PHILLY'S
NEW FOOD The Swann Fountain
For reasons that
have more to do with a sheer lack of awareness
than an empirical knowledge, too many people don't
give Philadelphia's restaurant scene anything like
the credit it is due, despite a long history of
restaurants dating back to the 19th century.
Indeed, if you want to sense what it was like to
eat out in Philly with some of the Founding
Fathers back in 1776, you might try the
replication of City Tavern on South 2nd Street,
and to gauge just how varied the contributions of
various European food culture has been to America,
a trip to the vast Reading Terminal Market will
show the indelible marks made by Pennsylvania
Dutch, Italians, Chinese, Middle Easterners,
Japanese, and others all in one marvelous place.
Local entrepreneur Stephen Starr can rightly be
called one of the real innovators in the
restaurant business for launching Alma de Cuba,
Buddakan, Morimoto, El Vez and others. In
addition, never a year goes by when Philly doesn't
have a bunch of fine new restaurants or some fine
new chefs taking over at established places.
Here is what's happening in the city right now.
At a time when a few
media-fueled American cooks believe their customers’
discomfort is a way of “challenging” them, Kevin
Sbraga (below)
is a chef who regards his clientele as guests who
deserve a genial respect for choosing to dine at his
place. You are greeted warmly in the kind of homey
place of which Mitt Romney might say, “The ceilings are
the right height.” You are then served a four-course
dinner you won’t soon forget, and at a
remarkable price--$49. (It was one of my top 20
New Restaurants for 2012 in Esquire
this month.) Sbraga
is open for dinner Mon.-Sat.;Dinner $49 plus
optional $35 wine pairing.
DAVIO'S
111 South 17th Street 215-563-4810 www.davios.com
Of all the chain concepts in
America, none seems to do a more consistent job
than the steakhouse genre. Maybe it's
because the rubrics of the menu were set so long
ago and because the expectations of manly
customers are high when they're willing to pay top
dollar for a piece of good beef. But the
Davio's chain, started in 1985 by Steve DiFillippo in Boston’s Back Bay,
goes a good deal further with the genre, by
offering more of the kind of Italian dishes that
are only on other chains' menus by default. There
are now Davio's locations in Foxborough, MA,
Philadelphia, and a new location in Atlanta.
The Philadelphia restaurant takes advantage
of the city’s historic cast. Set on
the second floor, the huge, long dining room
retains an intimacy by being intelligently broken
up but not closed off, and the Federalist-style
windows, columns, and tapestry upholstery give you
a sense of easy refinement, which is also part of
the modus operandi of the staff, led by manager Ettore Ceraso. In
the
kitchen veteran chefs David Boyle and Bennett
Hollberg oversee a menu that ranges widely, from
crispy fried oysters and Hawaiian tuna tartar to a
trademarked Philly Cheese Steak Spring Roll with
homemade ketchup (they sell these packaged), from
pappardelle with jumbo crab meat and artichokes. It was a sumptuous meal,
beautifully served in a style that is often in
contrast to the machismo of many steakhouses still
bound to a 1930s tradition of decor and shrugging
hospitality. Add to that Davio's extensive
menu and you have a template for what a steakhouse
in 2012 should be.
Davio's serves
breakfast and lunch Mon.-Fri., dinner nightly.
Dinner appetizers $9-$18, pastas $17-$33, main
courses $27-$51.
FOUNTAIN RESTAURANT
For
decades
this has been the finest, most sophisticated
restaurant in the city, excellent for business
breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a superb panorama
on the beautiful Swann Fountain.
The décor has been modified over the years,
brightened and given a bit more casual appointments
(though the new servers’ outfits need rethinking),
and there have been only a few chef changes in the
last 25 years. The new-ish guys
are exec chef Rafael Gonzalez and chef de cuisine
Peter Rosenblatt, who have cannily maintained the
haute cuisine of the menu with American swagger, and
the lunch menu, which
enjoyed recently, is full of choices,
including sandwiches and a burger rendered with the
same sophistication as the entrees in the evening. A must-try is “Lobster
chopped” (below),
brimming with poached Maine lobster, heirloom
tomato, smoked bacon, avocado and a buttermilk
biscuit you will want
more than one of. There’s even a matzo ball soup
here, of course, made with Amish chicken. Wild rick shrimp
tempura is crisp and the right texture, with
avocado, yuzu, sriracha
rémoulade, and Truleaf purple cabbage. If you are just up for a salad, your
choice is well rewarded with a defining way with
good old Iceberg lettuce, crisp and cold, with
Maytag Bleu, pancetta bacon, grape tomato, sweet and
salty pinenuts, and balsamic vinegar. Another
of those Amish chickens is seared under a brick in a
hot skillet, becoming crispy and juicy, served with
Gouda-infused grits, baby spinach, buttermilk onions
and a tangy caper jus. As for that burger,
well, it’s way more than a mouthful—with truffles,
mushrooms, Sottocenere cheese, and a black truffle
aioli just to gild the lily. As
noted, the sandwiches are terrific here, including
my favorite American invention after the hamburger,
the club sandwich, here done with crispy chicken
paillard, pancetta, butter lettuce, tomato, and chive
mayo on excellent toast. It’s all in the details, as
is the case with everything at Fountain. Fountain is open for
breakfast daily, for lunch Mon.-Sat., dinner
Tues.-Sat. Lunch appetizers $11-$26, main courses
$24-$37.
opa
Opa is open
for lunch Mon.-Fri., dinner Mon.-Sat. Dinner
appetizers $8-$14, main courses $13-$17.
RITTENHOUSE
TAVERN Rittenhouse Tavern
certainly has one of the loveliest settings in
Philadelphia, inside the historic Wetherill
Mansion, one of the grand houses left on
Rittenhouse Square and now home to the Art
Alliance of Philadelphia. As such, it takes
advantage of all the decorous woodwork, lighting,
and design of the majestic structure, with
four indoor and outdoor spaces—a main dining room,
salon, bar area and cobblestoned, al fresco
garden. Do
check out the beautiful 1920s mural of geese by
Richard Blossom Farley in the main dining room.
The kitchen has impressive credentials, beginning
with local chef chef Nicholas Elmi, who
collaborates with NYC’s highly regarded Ed Brown (below), so
the style is definitely contemporary American with
some regard for the melting pot food culture of
Philadelphia.
You may begin with some pleasant bar snacks like
crispy frogs’ legs with Philadelphia cream cheese,
or the white bean toast with Speck
oven-dried tomato, and arugula. Among
the appetizers, I liked best the roasted
sweetbread salad with tiny carrots, mustard seeds,
carrot butter, and sherry vinegar. An
ivory-colored wild mushroom soup was lovely to
look at, but didn't have much flavor, not helped
by a cocoa nib or mild walnut milk. Nor was there
much flavor in the polenta soup with ricotta.
Saltiness plagued several of the dishes I tried,
which meant the more natural flavors were masked,
but I loved the scallops with a rhubarb reduction,
sweet white asparagus, and English peas, and wild
bass was nicely cooked, with chewy Tuscan kale,
mushrooms, and a hibiscus-red wine sauce. A rack
of Berkshire pork with crisp belly, purple
mustard, quinoa crust and endive was a splashy
dish but it didn't add up to all that much in
taste or texture.
There is a separate spot on the menu for “Sunday
fried chicken supper” at a remarkable $18 per
person, giving you half a chicken with buttermilk
biscuits and, the night I was there, marshmallow
sweet potatoes, a dish that need not be brought
back. The
fried chicken was good and juicy, as it should be
after being salt-brined for many hours and cooked
Sous-Vide, but frankly, I can't imagine going to
all that elaborate process when most fried chicken
cooks elsewhere would make a crispier, less salty
dish than this.
For dessert, I recommend the dark chocolate tart
with milk crumble, and caramelized milk ice cream.
The wine list is surprisingly short, only about 30
bottlings, when a place of this serious purpose
should have a serious list. The restaurant
serves lunch, Tues.-Fri., dinner Tues.-Sun.;
Brunch, Sat. & Sun. Dinner appetizers
run $9-$16, main courses $19-$28.
❖❖❖ NEW
YORK CORNER 181 West 10th Street (corner of 7th Avenue) 212-488-2626 Bobo.com
Charm
is not so easy to come by these days, when
cramped, loud, barebones lunch counters pass for
restaurants, so sitting down to dine at Bobo is as
restorative as it is delicious. Owner
Carlos Suarez (who also has the new Rosemary’s across
the road) was inspired to create at Bobo the “joy of
having friends over for dinner,” and arriving at the
top of the stairs at this Greenwich Village and
entering the small dining room you may well think that
us exactly the case.
Bobo looks like the dining room of a friend
with impeccable, highly personalized taste, with
family photos on the walls, crisp linens and napery on
the tables, an ornate turn-of-the-century fireplace
and mirror, tall windows with long curtains, and glass
beads hanging from the ceiling. The tufted banquettes
are just asking to be occupied all night long.
Add to this an extremely courteous waitstaff
and a serious commitment to well-made cocktails, and
you have the kind of place that one would like to
think Greenwich Village is full of, which is no longer
the case at all.
Suarez has brought aboard a fine, well-known
young chef, Cedric Tovar, formerly at Town and Peacock
Alley, and his cuisine is of a sort that he might well
serve at his home on Sunday afternoons, especially now
in autumn when flavors like butternut squash soup with
cardamom whipped cream, salted pumpkin
seed for crunch, and a sweet-sour huckleberry coulis
come into bloom.
There are classics here like steak tartare
(below) with fresh potato chips, frisée salad
with crisp bacon lardons
and pork belly, topped with an oozy poached egg.
Ravioli is stuffed not with ricotta but with very rich
Comte cheese, adrift in a creamy mushroom broth and
dusted with Parmesan.
Main courses range from scallops that have been
crusted with pumpkin seeds, with braised spaghetti
squash, and a delightful ginger carrot sauce, to steak
au poivre very with French fries. I love
skate, and here it is à la grenobloise, with
parsley root, braised salsify, and preserved lemon
coulis. Tovar
poaches lobster in butter and thyme and teams it with
sauteed mushrooms, watercress veloute, and grilled
broccoli di rabe, while the big splurge on the menu is
a piece du boucher,
a 12 ounce, 28-day dry aged strip steak with bone
marrow, bordelaise sauce, and your choice of a side
dish like pommes
purée of pommes frites.
❖❖❖ NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
So You Wanna
Run a Wine Tasting? Such a slog is not only hard work but palate fatigue sets in early, so that the 46th wine you taste is never going to have quite the luster of the third, and by number 75, you are in agony and in need of a shower. Still, the idea of holding your own wine tasting at home or in a restaurant can be one of the most convivial of pleasures, as long as you go about it the right way, starting with whom you invite. Basically, there are three kinds of people who drink wine: those who kind of like it, those who truly love it, and those who regard it as a study in one-upmanhsip. Only the second type is any fun at a wine tasting, especially if you’re going to be serving some expensive wines that the first group will shrug at and the third will sniff and go into discourses about the wines’ Ph level and the vineyards’ trellising techniques. Once you’ve chosen your jolly group (please skip the black tie request!), there are certain guidelines that make such tastings a great deal of fun.
1.
Never serve more than six wines. Less is
hardly worth the effort and more becomes a bore. 2.
Will it be a blind tasting? If so,
cover the bottles with a paper bag to hide the labels,
making sure the shape of the bottle is not evident.
(Pinot noirs and rieslings always come in
distinctively shaped bottles.) Number them and keep
the list out of sight. 3.
If
it’s not a blind tasting, rather than have a random
selection of wines, choose one region, say Tuscany, or
a single estate, say, Jordan cabernet. If the former,
a horizontal tasting of a single vintage will give
interesting insight into the differences of wines from
the same region; if the latter, have a vertical
tasting, that is, from different vintages of the same
wine. 4.
Use
standard wineglasses for all the wines and pour only
about an ounce or so to begin with. Later your guests
can enjoy whatever they like most. 5.
Have
plain water available to help clear the palate between
wines.
7.
If
you are serving the wines with dinner—and I heartily
recommend you do so—keep the food very, very simple,
like mild cheese, chicken broth, a steak, or, if
you’re tasting white wines, fillet of fish. 8.
You might have guests taste all the
wines prior to dinner—remember, you’re only sampling
six—then match them with dinner. For the real point of
tasting wines is that they go best with food, and with
few exceptions, aren’t worth much without food, not
even a glass of Champagne without at least a canape. 9.
During
the discussion, try to keep the conversation lively
(remember, you didn't invite the wine snobs to lecture
anyone), and it’s a capital idea to have a few choice
observations from great writers handy for toasts like
these: -“No nation
is drunken where wine is cheap.”—Thomas Jefferson. --“Let us
have wine and women, mirth and laughter,/ Sermons and
soda-water the day after.”—Lord Byron. --“Wine,
madam, is God’s next best gift to man.”—Ambrose
Bierce. --“It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy
without any breeding, but I believe you’ll be amused
by its presumption.”—James Thurber (left) --“It was a
very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half
with water and still receive its message.”—Ernest
Hemingway.
10. Print out the names of all the wines for
guests to take home. 11. Finish every drop of every wine you open.
❖❖❖
NEWS FROM
GREAT BRITAIN:
WELL, SO MUCH FOR
NORDIC AND A British teenager named Gaby Scanlon had her stomach surgically removed after drinking a cocktail made with liquid nitrogen at Oscar's Wine Bar in Lancaster after allegedly drinking a "Pornstar Martini," consisting of passion fruit, vanilla vodka, pineapple juice, Champagne, and Chanson, and liquid nitrogen, to create a smoky effect. . . . Meanwhile, in Miami, FL, a man collapsed and died after eating dozens of the live bugs like cockroaches and worms. ❖❖❖ Any of John Mariani's
books below may be ordered from amazon.com.
❖❖❖
FEATURED
LINKS: I am happy to report
that the Virtual
Gourmet is linked to four excellent
travel sites: Everett Potter's Travel Report: I consider this the best and
savviest blog of its kind on the web. Potter is a
columnist for USA
Weekend, Diversion, Laptop and Luxury Spa Finder,
a contributing editor for Ski and a frequent contributor
to National
Geographic Traveler, ForbesTraveler.com
and Elle Decor.
"I’ve designed this site is for people who take
their travel seriously," says Potter. "For
travelers who want to learn about special places
but don’t necessarily want to pay through the nose for
the privilege of staying there. Because at the end
of the day, it’s not so much about five-star
places as five-star experiences." THIS WEEK:
Eating Las Vegas is the new on-line site for Virtual Gourmet contributor John A. Curtas., who since 1995 has been commenting on the Las Vegas food scene and reviewing restaurants for Nevada Public Radio. He is also the restaurant critic for KLAS TV, Channel 8 in Las Vegas, and his past reviews can be accessed at KNPR.org. Click on the logo below to go directly to his site.
Tennis Resorts Online: A Critical Guide to the World's Best Tennis Resorts and Tennis Camps, published by ROGER COX, who has spent more than two decades writing about tennis travel, including a 17-year stretch for Tennis magazine. He has also written for Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, New York Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Esquire, Money, USTA Magazine, Men's Journal, and The Robb Report. He has authored two books-The World's Best Tennis Vacations (Stephen Greene Press/Viking Penguin, 1990) and The Best Places to Stay in the Rockies (Houghton Mifflin, 1992 & 1994), and the Melbourne (Australia) chapter to the Wall Street Journal Business Guide to Cities of the Pacific Rim (Fodor's Travel Guides, 1991).
MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET
NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Editor/Publisher: John
Mariani.
Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani, Robert Mariani,
John A. Curtas, Edward Brivio, Mort Hochstein,
Suzanne Wright, and Brian Freedman. Contributing
Photographers: Galina Stepanoff-Dargery,
Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.
© copyright John Mariani 2012 |