Virtual
Gourmet
Myrna Loy and Cary
Grant in "The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer" (1947) HAPPY
NEW YEAR! ❖❖❖
THE BEST AND WORST
OF 2013
Good taste, bad
taste, no taste. Trends and trivia. Greatness
and gimmickry.
All part of American gastronomy, and in
2013 there was plenty of everything. Here are my
thoughts on the best and worst of food and drink
over the past year.
BEST
NEW RESTAURANT: Betony (left), a
sophisticated new two-tiered spot on West 57th
Street, not far from Carnegie Hall. Chef Bryce Shuman, manager Eamon
Rockey and sommelier Luke Wohlers are showing what it
means to set a culinary standard in New York’s
tradition of fine dining.
WORST NEW GOUGES: The return of the antiquated B&B charge at restaurants where you have to pay to get bread and butter. Next year maybe a G&S charge for glasses and silverware?. . . And dishes served “for Two Persons,” which used to be reserved for a few dishes like a whole chicken or bananas Foster. Where once you could order a thick slab of Prime rib, now you have to order—at up to $150—a côte de boeuf, proving the old assumption that any dish with a French name will be more expensive.
BEST
NEW BED AND BREAKFAST: The casually upscale Bespoke Inn
(below) in
Scottsdale, AZ, with just four idiosyncratic rooms, a
spa, a lap pool, bicycles, and a lavish breakfast of
freshly baked scones with crème fraiche, fruit
crumbles, pancakes, eggs, and housemade granola. The
excellent Virtú
Honest Café is downstairs. And if you’re
running late, owners Kate and Bob will drive you to
the airport.
MOST RIDICULOUS OBSESSION: Cronuts—a combo of croissant and doughnut, originating in New York—are gaining traction everywhere, so current three-hour waits outside the Dominique Ansel Bakery should subside.
BEST
NEW BREAKFAST ITEMS: The corned beef hash,
made right, made fresh, and served in wonderful new
American restaurants like Honey Salt
in Las Vegas, where it comes with farmer's toast,
breakfast potatoes, whole grain mustard and sunny-side
up eggs for just fifteen bucks. . . . and
the Hotel Wilshire Los Angeles’ Pancake Lasagna (left), a triumph
of American decadence to start the day off with a
groan of many pure pleasures. Created by chef Eric
Greenspan at the Roof restaurant,
it is an amalgam of three layers of pancakes
sandwiching eggs, bacon, ground sausage, with melted
cheese on top and just enough maple syrup to remind
you this is still breakfast.
BEST EGG DISH: At NYC’s Louro,
Chef David Santos combines a turkey egg with heirloom
squash, arugula pistou,
and tempura blossom.
WORST
NEVER-ENDING LISTICLES: Best hamburgers in
America, Best pizzas in New York, pho in Los Angeles.
WORST GAFFE BY A NEWS MAGAZINE: Time
Magazine’s cover story on the “Gods of Food,” all of
whom were men.
BEST
NEW INDIAN RESTAURANT: Pippali,
NYC, features the widest array of regional Indian
dishes to be found on this continent, with nary a
cliché among them. BEST NEW ITALIAN RESTAURANT: MC Kitchen,
Miami, brings the city its first modern Italian
restaurant via Chef Dena Marino and partner Brandy
Coletta, in a clean, stripped down décor
befitting its Design District location. What
distinguishes MC’s cooking is its elemental
simplicity—the first rubric of Italian cuisine,
adapted by Marino with all
the gusto she can muster in a dish like her pappardelle
of spring ramps and “forever braised” pork ragù,
and her crisp, charred pizzas topped with broccoli di
rabe, sausage, fontina
and caramelized onions.
Her food and Coletta’s savvy coalesce in a
sophisticated balance rare in a sunny city where glitz
too often trumps good
taste.
BEST
NEW SEAFOOD RESTAURANT: Spoon
in Dallas, a beautifully designed, very
comfortable restaurant where Chef/owner John Tesar
proves himself a chef’s chef in the choosing,
handling, cooking and service of the finest seafood. BEST NEW
HIPSTER RESTAURANT: Trois Mec in
Los Angeles, despite a total lack of décor
worth mentioning, no telephone number, and keeping the
last tenant’s sign--Raffallo’s Pizza—is a small astonishment
thanks to chef/owner Ludo Lefebvre, whose turned from
doing very haute French cuisine to an evolved form of
his own, based entirely on ingenuity married to
experience. WORST
NEW DISH: Three thin fingers of stuffed pasta
onto which the waiter pours strong black coffee,
brewed in a Chemex filter at your table, served at The Pass &
Provisions in Houston, TX. WORST
EXCESS: NYC’s Bice restaurant serving a
$2,000 dish of tagliolini
with lobster and black
truffles, served on a gold-leaf platter
designed by
late Gianni Versace. BEST NEW STEAKHOUSES: Polo Steakhouse in Garden City, NY, brings posh together with beef as near to its competitor Peter Luger as you can find. . . and Robert’s (left) in Atlantic City, which is now the best restaurant in Atlantic City.
MOST EXPENSIVE DISH THAT SHOULDN’T BE:
Veal Parm--$50 at Carbone in
NYC, served by waiters in burgundy tuxedos. It's good
and it's big but it's no better than you'd find at
dozens of other Italian restaurants in NYC, like Patsy's
in the Theater District and Mario's
in the Bronx and much cheaper.
Stella
34 (left),
a $15 million restaurant on the sixth floor of Macy’s
Herald Square store (itself undergoing a $400 million
renovation). With its grand view of the Empire State
Building and Chef Jarett Appell’s terrific traditional and modern Italian food,
this is a destination for out-of-towners and New
Yorkers alike.
CHEFS TO
KEEP YOUR EYE ON Joseph JJ Johnson (below), The Cecil, NYC
NEW YORK CORNER
Food
hipsters
who insist that Brooklyn is the new mecca for hot new
restaurants ignorantly neglect what’s happening on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Fact is, the “UWS” has
never been at a loss for terrific places to eat, and
in the last five years the exciting dining options
have soared, from Lincoln Ristorante at Lincoln Center
to Daniel Boulez’s Bar Boulud and Boulud Sud, from
Picholine to The Leopard, from Porter House to Ed’s
Chowder House. One of the newest to impress me are is run by young, energetic professionals whose menus are crafted to please, not challenge guests and whose service has a charming UWS tilt you won’t find across town or down in Soho.
Barley & Grain could not be a better-named
restaurant on the UWS, for its intense focus on
barley- and grain-based spirits—100 of them-- (there’s
no rum or tequila on the bar list). The bar is
certainly center stage in this tiny storefront
location. Indeed,
you could sit at the convivial bar and order some
grub, but my guests and I preferred to sit at a cozy
table on a packed Saturday night and to take our time
enjoying the hearty food Chef Eric Acklowitz is
turning out with considerable panache.
We began with some “Quick and
Easy” small plates that included addictive beef short
rib poppers lavished with white cheddar, bacon and
garlic mayo. We battled over the hot shrimp hush puppies (below), made with
buttermilk, and spiky flavors like jalapeño,
cayenne and aïoli dipping sauce.
How do you enrich an already decadent cured
pork belly? Slap
it on French toast, with spicy maple butter emulsion
and quail egg, which would probably cure a hangover in
about ten seconds. Make jicama salad into
a confetti-colored salad (right).
Smooth
and velvety was roasted eggplant with tangy feta
cheese, Kalamata olives, sesame tahini, red onions and
pistachios, and the mac ‘n’ triple cheese with bacon
can easily banish winter’s chill. These items
are smaller plates (sort of) and none runs more than
$15. The larger main course plates run only $17 to
$35—this last for a 16-ounce Delmonico steak with
Cajun fries, onion rings and a bourbon demi-glaze.
I
really enjoyed the unusual house-cured lamb pastrami
sliders with pickled red onion, Cajun fries and rye
bun, fighting off calls to share them. Our waitress
forcefully suggested we had to try
the roast chicken; we shrugged and did. She was right:
this was a boneless half chicken, impeccably roasted
to golden, crispy crust, with a cilantro dip and black
and white barley. In a city of great roast chickens,
this one –at $11!--comes in near the top. Let me
not fail to mention the wonderful turkey potpie, with
a buttery crust and plenty of big chunks of turkey in
a well-seasoned gravy.
If you’ve room for dessert, do try the Guinness
Stout ice cream for fun. But for sheer animal comfort
food, the chocolate pudding should make you weep a
little.
REMEMBERING JOE SANTO
His name may not be recalled by people who only
became impassioned about food and restaurants in the
past decade, but the name
of his most illustrious restaurant—Sign of the Dove
on the Upper East Side—still is. Except for a copyrighted photo
of Santo in the NY Times,
there is none I could find to
put into this remembrance; almost no photos
exist. Yet
at
one time he was one of a handful of restaurateurs
who, in the 1960s radically
changed the way we dine out and helped set in motion
the so-called “foodie
revolution” of the lat 1970s.
Santo never set out to be a restaurateur; he
was a young dentist in 1962 when
he took over a lease on an old rooming house at
Third Avenue and 65th
Street for $6,000, which he turned into a restaurant
called Sign of the Dove,
named after the story that patriot Nathan Hale was
said to have been executed
nearby at a place called the Dove Tavern. Within 18
months the restaurant had
paid off his entire $240,000 debt, and Sign of the
Dove was among the first
restaurants in that area of Manhattan—opposite
Bloomingdale’s—to attract the enormous
crowd of baby boomers with money in their pockets to
spend on fine food while
avoiding the entrenched snobbism of the city’s
elitist French dining salons.
Sign of the Dove, painted bright yellow, was
effusively glamorous, festooned with
flowers, greenery, wrought iron filigree and
candlelight, set
within arched brick walls under a
skylight ceiling.
Early reports from
the conservative food media, not least the Times,
were impressed with the décor but trashed the
food and service, but by the
1980s the restaurant was no longer considered just a
place for a celebration
but as a culinary destination, eventually earning
three stars from the Times and
16 out of 20 points from the
then influential Gault-Millau
Guide,
which praised its innovative New American cooking
under young chef Andy
D’Amico.
Joseph Batholomew Santo was born in Winchester, MA,
son of an
Italian immigrant.
He graduated
from Boston U., served in the
Army and got his degree in dentistry at Saint Louis
U. before opening his
practice in NYC. After his success with Sign of the
Dove, Santo was equally
successful opening more modest restaurants like
Yellowfingers (with a disco
upstairs) that were part of the singles’ bar
phenomenon of the era, then the
first Southwestern restaurant in NYC, Arizona 206,
as well as one of the city’s
finest bakeries, Ecce Panis. ``In each restaurant,
I`ve done what I wanted to
please myself,`` he told the Chicago
Tribune in 1987. “I like sensual, simple food,
complex but not complicated.
No bull. I feel the same way about people. But in the long run,
it`s not the food or the décor or the
service that makes a restaurant.
It`s the total experience.”
Few restaurateurs realized the
importance of that total experience for his guests,
especially 50 years ago when a
restaurant was primarily known for either its food
or its ambiance, its
clubbishness or its tourist crowd.
Santo made all those things count and did so
with a flamboyance that won
everyone over, even if at a very high price. Sign of the Dove was for so
many people just cutting their
teeth on upscale cuisine an educational experience
in both food and service,
even when at times the latter was a formulaic
recitation. Young
people who would have been
intimidated dining at Le Pavillon or La Côte
Basque felt entirely welcome at
Sign of the Dove.
In 1991 New York
Magazine critic Gael Greene
wrote “for cuisinary snobs and postgraduate
sensualists, the Sign of the Dove
is suddenly home.” The
restaurant lasted eight more years, an
astoundingly long run—four decades—in
a town where hot spots come and go within a year and
even classic restaurants
peter out after twenty. That Sign
of the Dove endured, even as culinary styles
changed, was entirely due to Joe
Santos and his family’s alertness to those changes
without sacrificing the
grand design that so awed so many people for so
long.
WINES AND SPIRITS 2013 by John Mariani
Woody Creek
Distillers Vodka ($40)--“It takes 13 pounds of fresh potatoes to
make a bottle of our vodka,” says Mark Kleckner, a
former DC-based mergers and acquisitions expert in the
defense business, now CFO and COO of Woody Creek
Distillers in Basalt, Colorado. “Most of the other
American distillers making potato-based vodka use the
kind you find in the bin with wrinkles and sprouts.
The ones you throw away.” Woody Creek
Distillers, which only began production last October,
gets all its spuds from the nearby 30-acre
Scanlon Farm, owned by Kleckner’s partners, Mary
Scanlon, CEO, and her husband Pat, President. She is a
small business owner, overseeing design and marketing
the distillery; Pat was a missile and space network
engineer for Lockheed Martin and IBM; the distillery’s
manager, David Matthews, WCD’s manager, had been a
Wall Street trader before sailing around the world
studying distilling and spirits production. They must
know something: this is a helluva flavorful
vodka in a world of flavorless examples.
Michter’s 10-Year-Old ($70)—Michter’s US 1 Straight Rye is
impressive enough for its depth and layers of true rye
flavors, but the 10-Year-Old shows just how strikingly
American whiskey can compete with the finest Scotches
and Cognacs out there. You want complexity, a nip of
oak and smoke, this is well worth seeking out and
worth every penny it costs. Privateer Rum
($36) is produced in Essex County, MA, which in
colonial times had a thriving rum trade. Privateer
is an amber rum, not so dark as a Pusser's and
without that kind of power; instead, it has a
delicious sweet component that dwells beneath the
complexities and layers of other flavors of oak and
acid. It ages in ages in 53 gallon barrels, slowly,
then cask-finish in used whiskey and brandy barrels.
Tenuta
San Guido Sassicaia 2010 ($105)—Marchesi Mario Incisa della
Rocchetta had been making this cabernet sauvignon for
his family since 1948 but brought the 1968 vintage to
market in 1971. Today it is considered as fine a
cabernet as the best in Bordeaux. It can be a
tannic wine in its youth, so I’d give the current 2010
vintage, which shows good, silky fruit, another five
years for it to blossom.
Vega Sicilia.
Spain's greatest wine label and an enduring standard.
These wines can take a long, long time to mature, but
the exception to this is their lighter, leaner Valbuena 5°, produced from somewhat younger
vineyards and composed of tempranillo, merlot, and
cabernet. The 2008 vintage I tasted was amazing for
its depth and brightness, benefiting from a year of
aging in new oak barrels, 3 months in older barrels,
and 6 months in large oak vats. It is just being
released and should retail for $160 a bottle. Viñedos Valderiz Ribera del
Duero ($34)—Bodegas y Valderiz’s Esteban
family prides itself on its commitment to ecological
and biodynamics processes. Their Juegabolos vineyard,
said to have a complex soil structure with a limestone
bottom, gives their Barricas Seleccionad 2006 estate
wine a rich minerality, made from 100 percent
tempranillo (also called tinto fino). Today you can
easily find it for $34, where just a couple of years
ago it hit $75 a bottle. For something bolder, though
with a little less finesse, the 2004 Valderiz Ribera
del Duero is a real delight, so good with pork and
beef, and a good buy for so well-balanced a red wine
of this age. Jean-Marie
Haag 2011 ($20)--A London sommelier at Social
Eating House served me this
luscious, pear-like, highly aromatic Alsatian pinot
blanc from , with a modest 12.5 percent alcohol, to go
with a salt cod fishcake with lemon butter and chive
cream, and a dish of Colchester crab with a roasted
tomato vinaigrette, ending with a very sweet
honey-almond sponge cake with goat’s curd ice cream
and orange, which the wine still had the body to
complement. Ornellaia 2010 ($220)—Piero Antinori’s brother Ludovico
made the first vintage of Ornellaia in 1985, and today
the estate is owned by another aristocrat, Marchesi
de’ Frescobaldi. Since 2005 Axel Heinz (below) has given
Ornellaia a softer edge, with a riper fruit component.
The tannic power of 53 percent cabernet sauvignon is
softened by a generous 39 percent merlot, as well as 4
percent cabernet franc and 4 percent petit
verdot.
Foris Rogue Valley 2011 ($13.50) If you love a good, crisp,
tangy apple, you might be forgiven for thinking this
bottling was full of apple juice. It is absolutely
delicious, a very deft balance of pale sweetness with
edgy acids. Foris, which started producing under its
own label in 1986, is the southernmost winery in
Oregon, and its bottlings are clear expressions of the
high elevation, cool Pacific terroir, allowing the
wine’s components to knit together without
complications from too much sun. They also sell a 2008
sweet late-harvest dessert riesling at $12 for a
half-bottle. 2008 Luis
Canas Rioja Crianza ($15) is a steal. Red
crianzas are wines that may not be sold till their
third year and have spent a minimum of six months in
oak barrels (in Rioja twelve), and Luis Canas is one
of the pioneers of modern Spanish viniculture.
This wine is 95 percent tempranillo, with ideal acid
and fruit and the flavors of a true
terroir.
2007
Cerequio Barolo ($79), from a First Category
Cru vineyard, was magnificent, reaching every
taste bud on the palate and revealing velvety
tannins and the scent of truffles in the nose.
Here you find the explosive power of barolo,
along with a finish of great elegance, all at
13.5 percent alcohol.
Livio Felluga Terre Alte 2006 ($85)—Proof positive that Italian white
wines cannot only age gracefully but retain their
freshness while gaining complexity. Very round,
voluptuous showing remarkable longevity, suggesting
all Felluga whites should be saved for a year or two
for true maturity.
MOST ABSTRUSE OPENING PARAGRAPH
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 2013 |