135 E 62nd Street (near Lexington Avenue)
212- 988-9021

    For 25 years now David Burke has been a highly respected fixture of NYC’s restaurant scene, sometimes riding high, sometimes scrambling. Born and raised in New Jersey, Burke (below) worked with some of the best chefs in France, where he won the coveted Meilleurs Ouvriers de France Diplôme d’Honneur at the International Culinary Competition, the only American to achieve that honor. 
    In the U.S., he distinguished himself at the age of 26 upon taking over at Brooklyn’s River Café  through 1992. He then capitalized on his rising rep by putting his name on many restaurants, including david burke townhouse, David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, Fishtail by David Burke and David Burke Kitchen, all in NYC, and David Burke’s Primehouse in Chicago. Cookbooks were written,  and he appeared on TV’s “Top Chef Masters” and “Iron Chef.”  For various reasons several of the restaurants with his name on them closed, and last year he became branded under the  restaurant group ESquared, best known for its BLT chain.                                                                   Photo by Susan Mazzullo
    Tavern 62 is the newest iteration of this lovely townhouse space on East 62nd Street (previously Fishtail by David Burke), and there’s good reason to think this one will have a long run. It’s a smart-looking place, keeping the handsome downstairs bar (left) and reconfiguring the main upstairs dining room (above) in vivid colors, with red banquettes, dark brown walls, sconces and fine striped carpeting; sadly, tablecloths are absent, so the current noise level (which Burke told me they’re working on) blunts civilized conversation, requiring instead that guests add to the din by raising their voices several notches.
    The menu shows the solidity of the Burke repertoire, with several dishes that long had a place in other venues, not least the clothesline of candied bacon (below) with maple, black pepper and sour pickle ($18), which tastes every bit as good as it looks.  I suppose the easiest moniker I can apply to Burke’s current cooking would be Contemporary American, meaning the menu has a global reach, from excellent dishes like wheatgrass noodles with ten vegetables, Parmesan and black pepper ($16/$28) to a fabulous dish of huge flavors—Peking pork shank with plum sauce, crȇpes, shrimp and lap chong fried rice ($36), although the crȇpes were brittle when they should have been moist (below).
    As a starter Burke’s salmon pastrami is a winning, signature item, placed atop gaufrette potato chips.  Pretzel-crusted crab cakes ($18) look little like the crabcake most people would expect, but the inclusion of greens within the crust is pretty and tasty as well. “Angry lobster dumplings” with spicy tomato, lemon confit and basil ($21) missed by being wrapped in gummy steamed dough.
    Among the meat entrees, “Duck, Duck, Duck” ($38) is a hearty masterpiece of fat breast, duck foie gras dumpling and a juicy meat loaf on the platter, and, knowing Burke's’ long-time devotion to the best meat money can buy—he once had his own breed of steer working for him—the Prime NY sirloin ($45) was first-rate and perfectly cooked.
    There are five seafood dishes. The sea scallops with grilled zucchini, baby leeks and sweet-and-sour rhubarb ($39) was the stand-out, owing largely to the quality of the scallops and the balance of the other ingredients in seasoning and texture. Everything at a Burke restaurant is going to be generous, and you’ll likely take some food home with you.
    “David Burke’s Lollipop tree” ($18)—most certainly a dessert suited for a table of two to four—comes with raspberry bubblegum whipped cream. The coconut banana cream pie with a rich dulce de leche sauce ($12) needs an upgrade; it’s ... O.K.
    The one-page wine list is more than adequate and the offerings very well selected, though mark-ups are high: a Ponzi Pinot Gris 2014 you can buy at the store for $15 runs $65, and a $55 Nicolas Jay Pinot Noir 2014 at retail will cost you $155.
    David Burke is a chef who’s seen it all, the comings and goings of fads and trends, the flash-in-the-pan cooks and the overhyped shabby eateries in distant zip codes.  Burke’s restaurants have always had heart, the money shows in the décor and on the plate, and the staff is never less than professional in every respect.  This, his newest, is one of his best efforts, honed in on what people really want to eat rather than simply try.

Open for lunch and dinner daily.

    It happens far more than it should. I am at a wine tasting or dinner with a winemaker, I taste a wine and it is clearly off.  Smells funky. Doesn’t smell like much of anything. Hasn’t any semblance to the varietal on the label. A white wine the color of bourbon.  A red wine both murky and brown.  Bad wines.
    The odd thing is, while I don’t think my olfactory receptors are superior to others’, the obvious nastiness of some of these wines had seemingly gone unnoticed by the people pouring them.  Just weeks ago a wine poured by a prominent California winemaker was clearly corked (more on what that means later), and I, trying to be diplomatic, said, “It has an odd bouquet.”  Only after being so informed did the fellow who made the wine say, “Oh, yes, it is corked.”
    On another occasion, while dining with an editor-in-chief of a major food and wine magazine, I could see from its color and from a stench coming from the glass that the Burgundy had been wholly oxidized.  Yet the editor took a slug and pronounced it marvelous.  Again, trying to be discreet, I noted the wine’s smell of rotten eggs and the color of a rusted can (left). “Ah, yes,” said the editor, “Now that I taste it, the thing is a bit over the hill.”
    Worst incident of all was many years ago when Sicilian winemakers brought an array of their wines to New York for the wine media to taste, and every single one was oxidized. When their host—himself a Sicilian—told them that obvious fact, the winemakers bristled, contending, “This is how we’ve been making our wines for a thousand years.” Which is exactly what they tasted like. (Fortunately, the Sicilians have caught up with the rest of the world of viniculture and now make excellent modern wines.)
    Such incidents have always baffled me, although I’m aware that picking up the smell and taste of cork or oxidation is always a matter of degree.  My wife has a much better nose for detecting corkiness, and everyone has a different level of recognition.  But when you smell it, you will always know it.  A corked wine smells, well, like cork, sometimes rotted cork, and is found in at least 5% of wines—some winemakers say up to 15%—even if the stopper was not cork. The taint can also come from storage of the wines, sanitation, or even the cardboard boxes in the winery.
    The chief cause of cork taint is the presence of the chemical compounds 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) or 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA), usually transferred from a cork stopper that has been treated with chlorinated phenolic compounds as an antimicrobe agent. TCA is measured in parts per trillion but can still be detected by the human nose.
    Cork producers, usually from Portugal, insist new processes have cut down on taint, but the jury is still out among winemakers and scientists. (At another time I’ll consider alternatives to corks and why they are still used at all.)
    More obvious to our sense of smell is oxidation or maderization.  The former is caused by the interaction of the wine with oxygen, which is always present during fermentation, but aging in casks can produce the smell of something burnt or rubbery. Maderization is similar, but may be caused by heat or poor storage, making the wine taste like bad Sherry or Madeira, from which the word derives.  Deliberate maderization is, however, part of the charm of Sherry, Madeira and Marsala, but, when there is too much, the wine is unappealing or worse.
    Ironically, as with those Sicilians who insisted their wines should taste oxidized, the wine producers of Burgundy used to praise their wines for smelling like cat urine, which we now recognize as a very unappealing flaw.
    Sediment in older red wines is mostly dead yeast cells that settle to the bottom of the bottle. Filtration and clarification can help alleviate the condition, but the sediment does not harm the wine’s flavor, unless it is shaken up throughout the wine.  Which is why, with older vintages, sommeliers decant the bottles (left).  Decanting a red wine from a two-year-old vintage is unnecessary and mere showiness.
    What about those white crystals in white wine?  Those are tartrates (right), formed during fermentation and aging.  They are almost always harmless and tasteless, just not very attractive.
    Last, there is what is called a “dumb period,” when a wine that is perfectly sound and tasted just great six months ago suddenly tastes flat, lacking any complexity or fruit.  The science behind why this happens—sometimes called “bottle shock”—is not conclusive but seems to suggest that transporting wine can sometimes cause the condition.  Others suggest that just-bottled wines need to adjust to being agitated during bottling, packaging and shipping.  Usually the wines come back into focus and reveal more complexity, and the dumb period does not happen to every wine.  If it does, you just have to wait it out.
    For the occasional wine drinker, all these maladies may go unnoticed, and simply not liking the taste of a wine is not the same as its being flawed. But I guarantee, once such taints are pointed out to a wine drinker, it is likely to be recognized henceforth, even by the winemakers themselves.

DOTING MOMS, NANJING-STYLE

A man was stopped at the Nanjing Airport on his way back from visiting his parents for Chinese New Year, when told his luggage was 33 pounds over the limit. When opened, the contents of the luggage was stacks of jianbing pancakes his mother had made for him to take back.  He removed the pancakes and brought them onboard as carry-on.