Soccarat at Atico 

(By the way, while tax and service are usually included in Madrid’s restaurantes, the old bread-and-butter charge is still in place.)

ATICO
Principal Hotel
Calle Marqués de Valdeiglesias 1
91 532 94 96

    The pleasantly quiet, 77-room Principal Hotel, across from the historic Metrópolis building and just a block from The Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums, has snared one of Spain’s most illustrious young star chefs,  Ramón Freixa, who is also chef at the Unico Hotel in Salamanca. His dining room Atico has already won high accolades it well deserves.
    The swank dining room and outdoor terrace, which at night is a starry vantage point to watch the city move and shift, seats 70, and there is also a charming cocktail lounge where you might begin your evening with a glass of cava.  The wine list is not large but impeccably chosen to show the best in Spanish viniculture in this century.
    Sitting outside on a clear autumn evening, my wife and I chose the €70 menu of six courses (with €24 for wine pairings), which began with a kind of surf & turf of octopus with Peruvian purple potatoes and a curry-scented mojo on top.  Next was cannelloni with black truffles and a carpaccio of beef with what resembled a Mexican mole. Grilled sea bass came lightly sweetened with mango, sided with saline marine algae and a quinoa salad spiked with a dose of ginger.
    For dessert Freixa served a lovely version of liquid dulce de leche coffee caramel with lollipop cakes dusted with sea salt.
    Each of these dishes referenced Spain’s involvement in the global spice market and paid homage to the food cultures of lands Spain once held. This was very beautiful, subtly refined cuisine, and, with glasses of contemporary Spanish wine, it all fit seamlessly into our first night in Madrid.

Lunch menu at €45; dinner €70.

Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

RESTAURANTE PALACIO CIBELES
Plaza de Cibeles 1
91-523-1570

                                                                                                                       Palacio Cebeles
     Among the restaurants in the world with fantastic views of their respective cities, I’d include Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, the Hassler in Rome, Sirocco in the Lebua Hotel in Bangkok, OXO Tower in London, the Signature Room in Chicago and several in Chinese cities, though not all for the quality of the food. The Restaurante at Palacio Cibeles would carry this same stature, if only for its situation in one of Madrid’s most spectacular buildings, but the cuisine of Adolfo Muñoz has garnered both Michelin stars and the praise of Spanish food media critics.
    Adolfo and his son Javier (left) also have a tapas place in Madrid called Colección Cibeles, a restaurant in Toledo (which I shall be writing about in the future), a new boutique hotel and a winery. Here, with seating inside for 100 and more on two terraces, their restaurante is on the sixth floor of what was formerly the Communications Palace, now Madrid’s City Hall. It is an ornate 20th century edifice that arcs around the Cibeles Plaza, looking up towards the Grand Via. By tradition, when the soccer team Real Madrid wins a game, fans flock to the Fountain of Cibeles to celebrate. Inside the building are municipal offices as well as CentroCentro exhibition hall and the Glass Gallery.
    At the restaurant there are set menus at €38.50, but we put ourselves in Javier’s hands for a more extensive sampling at €59.
   Javier, 36, a wiry, bearded fellow who reminds me of a Dominican figure from an El Greco painting, says that he is “making my grandmother’s food,” but either his grandmother was a very sophisticated cook or Javier has taken a great deal of leeway with the family recipes. What he meant was that he does not stray into eccentricity with his cooking, basing everything on the freshest local ingredients—the Madrid fish market, located twenty minutes away, is the largest outside of Tokyo —and he adds no salt to his seafood. The foie gras comes from Extremadura, and the figs come from his family’s farm.
    He began by serving us canapés of zucchini flowers and dried beet chips to nibble while we sipped a gin cocktail Javier suggested. Next came a ceviche of shrimp, mussels, clams, tuna and marinated salmon with red onion,  using the shell liquid as its base. Cod came carefully steamed with a sauce of roasted pimiento topped with tobiko eggs.
    Another wonderfully flavorful fish was turbot grilled over paper, then finished under a salamander with soy, sunflowers and just a touch of honey to give a sweet note. Two meat  courses followed. Venison was cooked in red wine for 24 hours, so it was fork tender, served with a chutney of apricot and figs, while very moist, creamy-textured suckling pig, beautifully presented after roasting at a low temperature for five hours, had a crisp skin and a nice smoky flavor that did not compromise the essential taste of the pig. It came with a confit of peppers and Lyonnaise-style potatoes.
    To end this remarkable evening we enjoyed orange ice cream with chocolate sticks in the style of Parisian chef Cedric Grolet.
    Below us in the plaza, car headlights raced in firefly patterns, while up the Gran Via the buildings gave us a shadow-and-light show against the dark foliage of the Retiro Park. But even late in the evening, the sounds of the city gave the scene a unique vitality that would go on for hours more.

Just as Americans go out for burgers and Chinese for dim sum, Japanese more often than not choose a place to eat depending on what they feel like eating, hence the ubiquitous array of counter eateries devoted to one style of cuisine—sushi, unagi, fugu, tempura, tonkatsu, kushiage, nabemono, teppanyaki, ramen and yakitori.
    To this last style of cooking—chicken on skewers over charcoal—belongs Toriko in Greenwich Village, the first outlet of a chain named Tokyo Restaurant Factory, which also runs Mifune and Amane in New York. In Tokyo and Osaka there are a dozen Torikos, but this is their first in the States.
    The darkened door of the restaurant opens onto a small, colorfully lighted bar counter, then to the right is the main dining room, together seating 46 people, most of them choosing the counters, with a few two-person tables set around the room.  The décor is highly typical in its minimalism: beautiful caramel-colored, polished woodwork and an open kitchen space where one cook puts dishes together and behind him the grill chef stands stolidly turning his wooden skewers over a charcoal grill. The Executive Chef is Shinji Odahara, a veteran of the Nadaman group in Japan and now Food Director of the Toriko brand.
                     Although not strictly an izakaya pub, the tradition of serving several courses over an evening is the motif here, but the pacing seems faster than is often the case in Japan, where a good deal of sake and beer drinking is part of a long evening out. When we dined there, courses came out the moment the dishes for the last were picked up by the affable crew.
    There is a very good sake list, several specialty cocktails, a reasonable number of wines, some local and international brews but only four Japanese beers. The one to try is the akanigori red beer with delightful spicy notes.
    Yakitori dominates the menu and the technique depends on split-second timing to retain the juiciness of the meat, mostly chicken, with just a slight searing on the outside. The chicken itself needs to be sourced carefully.  The skewers come with shio sea salt, tare soy sauce and freshly grated wasabi, which you sprinkle on the meats.
    There are two set menus available, at $70 for four courses and $85 for seven, plus à la carte.  Since portions are small and none of the food is heavy, it’s easy to go with seven-course meal and not feel stuffed at the end.    
    You begin with five small bites on one plate, which vary seasonally. This is followed by a scoop of creamy chicken foie gras chawavmushi with truffles, and then a small bowl of refreshing pickled vegetables.
    Then come the yakitori in flights: five of chicken on skewers, including chicken oysters, very tender, very moist; two vegetable skewers, which included lovely maitake mushrooms and cherry tomatoes with zucchini, as well as an interesting ice cold snowy ball of shredded turnip. Some very welcome tsukune meat balls added some heft to the meal, then cheese, and an even more welcome dish of sliced Japanese wagyu, whose fatty richness seemed by then like a reward for eating all that led up to it (left). Sunagimo was a skewer of marihatsu chicken hearts, rather mild in taste.
    The savory meal finished off with a salad and a choice of either oyako don chicken and egg (hard to tell which came first) in a rice bowl, or a shio ramen of silky, tender noodles in a rich broth (right).
    I can’t say the desserts of Japanese ice cream and matcha mousse were memorable.
    It must be noted that this kind of food hasn’t the intensity some might have come to expect if they’ve been used to chili pepper-laced dragon rolls or caviar-topped sushi. The flavors are really quite subtle, despite the shaved wasabi, and since izakayas in Japan are regarded more like pubs, the food at Toriko is akin to going to a Spanish tapas bar.  It’s a charming experience and a well-wrought, well-priced option.

WHAT I'M DRINKING NOW
By John Mariani

 

    The February blahs—cold weather, no football or baseball, TV reruns, movies dumped by Hollywood—are a very good reason to drink red wines that I haven’t tasted in a while in order to assess my current ideas about them. Here are some that impressed me.

 

MAISON ROCHE DE BELLENE CHAMBOLLE-MUSIGNY 2011 ($80)—If you wish to taste two distinctly different but admirable examples of French versus California Pinot Noirs, this “old vines” Burgundy and the Masút from Mendocino below provide for a good lesson. Maison Roche de Bellene is a negoçiant (merchant), not a grower, and buys from many of the best vignerons in Chambolle-Musigny, whose wines, if lighter than Vosne-Romanée, have wonderful fragrance and, given eight years of age like this one, they have settled into exquisite balance at 13% alcohol. 

MASÚT PINOT NOIR ESTATE VINEYARD 2016  ($40)—Ben and Jake Fetzer (left), grandsons of Barney Fetzer of Fetzer Vineyards, founded Masút Vineyard and Winery in Mendocino County to be Pinot Noir specific. Using five clones, planted in 35 acres of “dark, rich earth,” they’ve made a sumptuous but not plummy Pinot Noir, with 14.5% alcohol, that retains the flavor of the varietal and adds a boost of California power.

CHÂTEAU SMITH HAUT LAFITTTE 2001 ($125)—A Grand Cru Classé Graves of Pessac-Léognan, the chateau dates back to the 14th century. Florence and Daniel Cathiard have owned it since 1990 and brought to bear modern viticulture to every aspect of the estate, spending three years restoring a vineyard once called  “Sleeping Beauty.”  Their modus operandi, as explained by Florence, is that “Agriculture contains the word culture, artisan contains the word art, and aesthetic is similar to ethical.” That kind of breeding shows the vibrancy and depth of the wines of the Graves region along with a layered delicacy that flows throughout the palate.

NORTHGATE VINEYARD PETIT VERDOT 2015 ($32)—Petit Verdot is usually an element  in Cabernet Sauvignon blends and not often seen as a single varietal outside of Bordeaux. North Gate, located in Virginia’s Loudon County, shows how charming the wine can be and how much body it can have, with plenty of spicy, cedar-like notes. Very good with chicken or ham.

DRY CREEK VINEYARD OLD VINE ZINFANDEL 2016 ($35)—So much California Zin is dank or sweet, and too high in alcohol, but at its best, especially when made from old vines, it shows a spirit and texture few other wines can match. Dry Creek of Sonoma has championed the grape since the 1980s, using old vines (right) when others were ripping the vines out, and they have created a paragon of a rich, deeply fruited, complex wine at 14.5% alcohol that is perfect with pig in any form.

ROCCA SVEVA AMARONE DELLA VALPOLICELLA RISERVA 2013 ($60)—It’s hard to find old-style, leathery Amarones any more, unless they date back to the 1980s, but technology has made the wines far more stylish and easier to drink with more foods. At 15% alcohol this wine is also lower than many others, so you get a lush, powerful wine without the headaches. With baby lamb or suckling pig, you’ve got a blissful match.