Marcello Mastroianni in
"Divorce Italian Style" (1961)
❖❖❖
THIS WEEK
SAN FRANCISCO by John
Mariani
NEW
YORK CORNER
CROWN by John
Mariani
❖❖❖
by John Mariani
As NYC and London wage war
to see which city can open the greatest number of
restaurants per month during a bad economy, San
Francisco always seems to have a few good new ones
opening throughout the year, more often than not
these days fairly small, often storefront places
run by individuals one or two owners or chefs who
put their heart and soul into the kitchen rather
than the dining room. The finest restaurants
in the city endure, even thrive, like Gary Danko,
Boulevard, Fleur de Lys, and Ame. Here are
some of the newest that have impressed me.
Good
Italian food is usually good enough, and when
things go a bit too fancy, some of its soul may
get lost in translation.A good middle ground occurs
when a San Francisco chef like Michael Tusk
develops a feverish passion for the food, so that
even if his grandmother wasn’t Italian, he tries
to cook like one while adding everything that
Northern California can offer in terms of meats,
seafood, and vegetables. Seven
years ago Tusk opened the still red hot Quince,
but Cotogna is far more rustic and downright
chummy; every bottle on the wine list is just $40.And—get out!--a
three-course fixed price menu runs $24?! The
pastas are all radiant, from the most delicate fagotelli
with ricotta and flowering blossoms to the triangoli
with corn and chives. A fearsome grill/rotisserie
turns out sizzling Gulf prawns with a watermelon panzanella
salad. And for dessert there’s a peach crostata that
would make Alice Waters weep with pleasure. So how do you cook like an Italian
grandmother?According
to Tusk, “My
first trip to Italy I was taken around Italy by a
barrel maker named Francesco Renzi, who was
generous enough to take me to see the production
of cheeses like Parmigiano-Reggiano, mortadella,
culatelllo di zibello and the boiling of
grape must for aceto
balsamico. This trip was my initial
awakening to the incredible diversity of products
available to cook with and definitely changed the
way I thought about food. “The Renzi family also invited me into
their home to eat, which is where I saw the
greatness of Italian regional cuisine and the
generosity regarding food and what it meant to eat
together as a family. “Great Italian food can’t be cooked by
following a recipe. The grandmothers never had
any. As products change, the cook has to adapt to
different flavor profiles. Great home cooking is
about following your intuition and following small
nuances that have been passed down from generation
to generation.”
Open Mon.-Sat. for
lunch and dinner, Sunday for dinner only.
Antipasti $12, pastas $15, main courses $22-$24;
fixed price menu $24.
Michael Mina
252 California Street
415-397-9222 michaelmina.net
I was delighted to be back in this
airy space, lighted by the soft, foggy San
Francisco sun, that had long been Aqua, which Chef
Michael Mina had helped open back in 1991.Since
then Mina has built an empire of mostly high-end
restaurants from Atlantic City to Vegas, from
Detroit to Seattle, not least four Bourbon Steaks,
a rampant expansionism that caused me to lose
interest Mina as a working chef. So Mina’s
return to his roots, at this stylish flagship
where he swears he will be cooking most of the
time, was promising news. After visiting the new
restaurant, I realized what San Francisco—and
I--had been missing all those years he was away. Mina is a chef for whom the word finesse
seems created. His website says his food features
his “sensibilities with Japanese ingredients and a
French influence,” which tells you little, like
describing a high mileage
Citroën with cup holders.Mina
has learned all the best lessons from the global
kitchen and here, in this civilized, adult dining
room he puts everything he knows to work in the
interest of delicacy and essential flavors. That means wild Alaskan halibut is warmed
in a ginger-carrot broth, with steamed dumplings
and snow peas.He makes a shabu shabu of foie gras in a
dashi broth with Asian mushrooms, and his Maine
lobster pie comes with smoked potato, corn
pudding, and oven-roasted tomatoes—the best New
England dish you’ll ever find on the west coast. I take Mina at his word that he will be
there when you visit.If so, you will have one of
the great meals of your life by a true American
master in a space that has grown more beautiful
than ever.
Grandeur
need not be rapturous. At 25 Lusk, in the
fast-developing South of Market/China Basin,
Chef-restaurateur Matthew Dolan and partner Chad
Bourdon found a huge 1917 smokehouse and meat
packing building and utilized all its massive
industrial timbers and exposed brick to create a
shadowy, two-story restaurant of daunting size and
cool, casual elegance. The two men met in
culinary school a dozen years ago, and with a
solid training on both sides of the kitchen door,
they opened this grand venture last year, and it's
been a hit and catalyst for the neighborhood.
Dolan’s food has the same
balance of expansive ideas and simple good taste,
obvious in dishes like his grilled prawns with
Japanese pepper grits and carrot puree with
horseradish vinaigrette, and his smoked beef short
rib with truffled corn mousse and summer
blossoms. This is very much contemporary
American cuisine, drawing on so many cultures that
make San Francisco such a dynamic city of great
chefs, few of whom
ever go into extravagant whirls of menus
designed solely to dazzle you with their
ingenuity. Chefs like Dolan know, first, how to cook
great ingredients and then how to respect them
ingredients, employing a few to great effect.
He'll do a fine red kuri squash
and ginger soup with a touch of basil and pimenton.
Local Dungeness crab gets a touch of ginger, too,
along with horseradish chutney for a spike, and
there's roasted bone marrow with a poached duck
egg, parsley and lemon that is straight-down-the
line classic bistro fare. He poaches lobster in
butter and serves it over fresh fettuccine with
pickled ginger butter, mint and cilantro, while
his duck breast is seared then served up with
Brussels sprouts and a tarte flambé with
Banyuls wine.
Desserts might be vanilla
tacos with raspberry salsa, sweet "imitation
refried beans" and kiwi avocado sorbet or a big,
luscious caramel swirl brownie with mint chocolate
chip ice cream and anise meringue.
There are wines of the week on
an extensive list that includes plenty of
bottlings under $50 that are bargains, both from
and outside California.
This food is
lovable, satisfying, highly creative and the kind
that makes 25 Lusk a place you'd put on speed dial
for a weekly visit.
25 Lusk is open for
dinner and for weekend brunch. Dinner appetizers
run $12-$18, main courses $23-$48.
The Fifth Floor is located,
as you’d expect, on the fifth floor of the Hotel
Palomar, and for about a decade now it’s been one
of the top restaurants in the city, under several
chef changes.The newest is David
Bazirgan.
The
195-room hotel, located off bustling Market Street
and near the Moscone Center, is actually on the
fifth to ninth floors, and the design is built
around geometric forms and formulas, with deep
colors in the fabrics and polished wood, with a
vaguely art deco feel.This is a Kimpton Hotel, so
it contains one of its signature Mind.Body.Spa
program (including in-room), featuring
complimentary yoga basket. They also promise to be
pet and child friendly, and they deliver live
goldfish to your room throughout your stay, not,
apparently, to be eaten as a snack but simply to
calm your nerves.
Which
may be needed if you book a room on the Market
Street side, because, thanks to San Francisco’s
indulgent city fathers, street musicians are
allowed to play all day until nine p.m., and
outside my window was a guy—every day—who
played a full set of drums that was as disturbing
as if they’d put a jackhammer out there.Ask for
an interior room or one facing away from Market
Street.
Every evening the hotel hosts a wine
hour from 5 PM-6 PM on the Fifth Floor Lounge, a
nice way to start before dinner (which may also
save you from spending money on aperitifs at the
restaurant). Although some reconfiguring of space
and décor has been done in the restaurant,
which was once oddly broken up, now modern, with
good lighting and semi-circular chairs, and a
definite romantic cast good for a first or tenth
date, as well as 25th anniversary. The Fifth Floor
is a serious restaurant but it manages to convey
that Northern California sense that you shouldn't
take the experience too seriously but relax and
enjoy yourself, perhaps putting yourself in
Bazirgan's hands.
The menus change all the time,
so I won't tell you much of what I ate several
months ago. Bazirgan was trained in Boston,
working at Barbara Lynch's No. 9 Park before
moving to San Francisco to work at with Elizabeth
Daniel at Jackson Square and at Chez Resto
Papa. His menus at Fifth Floor are
exactingly crafted, and I thought there was on some plates far too much going on
that didn;t all coalesce. Too many exotics like
"radicchio ash" and "nigella seeds" seemed more
contrivance that additions to taste, meaning I
couldn't really taste them to any significant
degree. Nevertheless, this is impressive
cooking: the current menu lists dishes like foie
gras burrata
with marinated chanterelles, nasturtium, truffled
vinaigrette and fried bread; mushroom risotto with
sylvetta, parmigiano and white truffle butter;
lamb with crunchy yogurt, rye berries, pickled
raisins, cauliflower and cipollini onions, and, of
course, the obligatory Kobe beef, the braised
cheek, confit of shimeji mushrooms, eggplant,
beet, gobo root, and barley.
The wine list at the Fifth
Floor has always been outstanding, now under the
supervision of Amy Goldberger. There is also an
extensive cocktail menu.
The Fifth Floor is open for breakfast daily and
for dinner Tues-Sat; Dinner appetizers run
$12-$20, main courses$29-$42. Tasting menu at $95.
San
Francisco has always drawn the cuisines of the world
to its belly, though it’s not exactly awash in Cajun
restaurants.The
Boxing Room fills that need well and does so within a
fine-looking, big open room with a very popular
28-seat counter where you can just drop in and eat in
front of the open kitchen where Chef Justin Simoneaux
works his spicy magic. He’s a Southern Louisianans
native who grew up eating—and sometimes catching—the
food of the region, and began cooking at 15,
eventually moving to California to attend the California Culinary Academy in 2005,
then worked his way around the Bay Area. The
space itself dates to the mid-19th
century, once the Standard Shirts Factory, utilizing
the original structure as a base for Douglas fir walls
and steel bracing, a zinc-top oyster bar, and bar
stools with faux-alligator-skin fabric. It can get
loud in there.
The menu ranges over the
Cajun-Creole map with ease, from boiled peanuts and
crisply fried boudin balls to shrimp Po’ boys and
excellent fried
chicken (right).
There's a hefty platter of boucherie, which the
night was there was porchetta, and the dirty
rice and cornbread muffins are good sops for this
hearty kind of fare. Salt, however, is heavy handed
though in some dishes whose spicing really doesn't
need so much.
Of course, there is also
crawfish etoufée, and for dessert, bananas
Foster cake with cream cheese frosting and bourbon ice
cream, and a pralines and cream ice-cream sundae, and
hot beignets with espresso cream.Like a
good Louisiana boy, Simoneaux serves red beans and
rice on Mondays, and there are daily specials
throughout the week.
This food goes as well with beer as
with wines, but the wine list of about 50 bottlings,
is sound with big rich varietals that can cut through
the seasoning of the food.
Boxing
Room
is open daily for lunch, dinner and weekend brunch.
At dinner appetizers run $8-$13, main courses
$14-$24.
Down in San Mateo,
about thirty minutes from San Fran proper, Chef Sachin
Chopra and his lovely wife Shohana (who herself helps
run her family's vineyard, Wolff & Father Wines,
in the Santa Cruz Mountains), working out of a
charming western Victorian house, have married a
North Cal sensibility to Indian food culture with
dazzling, novel results.The place is so pretty, inside
and out, very truly like a home, with fireplace,
small, trim rooms in bright colors and trim, and a
sense that you really have been welcomed to the Chopra's for a
home-cooked dinner. But the menus go much
further than the usual Indian menu of mulligatawny
soup, samosas, and lamb vindaloo. Mr. Chopra
does do a vindaloo, but it is a short rib with molten
goat’s cheese, baby bok choy in a roasted onion,
fennel, ginger sauce.
The food presentation is enchanting
too--none of those somber bowls of gray-brown stews;
instead there is radiance in the pea soup with an herb
and apple gelee and smoked chili candied bacon. Mr.
Chopra's "Ode to My Wife" is a rightly beautiful plate
of roasted beets served with lollo rosso lettuce and dill-scented
goat;s cheese ice cream. He does a succulent roasted
walu with summer melon risotto, watercress and a
reduction of passionfruit and mango, so you see how
his flavors are evocative of India but not rigorously
traditional. Indeed, his dark chocolate kulfi
with spiced macadamia nut brittle is a perfect balance
of what you might hope for but had not wholly
expected. This is very much cooking from the
heart, just as the greeting you will receive
from Shoshanna, who is the soul of the All
Spice.
All Spice is open for dinner Tues.-Sat.
Appetizers $8-$14, main courses $13-$25.
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NEW
YORK CORNER
Crown 24
East 81st Street (off
Madison Avenue)
646-559-4880 www.crown81.com
T here
are some food writers who will always lament the
quality of the restaurants on the Upper East Side,
despite the existence in that affluent stretch of
real estate of first-rate restaurants like Daniel,
Café Boulud, Café Sabarsky,
Caravaggio, David Burke Townhouse, JoJo,
L'Absinthe, The Mark by Jean-Georges, Park Avenue,
and others. Too often the criticism is aimed
at minor eateries that a certain type of UES
crowd has tended to favor, lackluster places
like Nicola and Swifty's, where the food is never
the point and money no object. It is easy
enough to satirize such people--just page through
any issue of the New
Yorker's cartoons--but I think it's
sufficient to say that if that's the kind of food
they want to eat and the prices they will pay for
a Waldorf salad, let them munch away. All
NYC restaurateurs should be so lucky.
Still, the clientele at the new
Crown on East 81st Street is eyebrow-raising if only
for its predictability, a vast number of skinny
society matrons and their stylish blond daughters, a
passel of blue blazered bankers and their younger,
tie-less investment banker sons, and the odd celebrity
here and there, all to soak up the cacophony of noise
from people whose voices, as F.
Scott Fitzgerald put it, "were full of money."
So many seem to know each other, with so many cheek
kisses deliberately missing their mark, that you can
readily see from the clubby, though curiously dark,
brown-and-taupe décor why they feel at home
here between Madison and Fifth Avenues in a Beaux Arts
townhouse (formerly the Italian restaurant Parioli
Romanissimo, then a private supper club) with
beautiful New York mouldings and well-set,
lamp-lighted tables, along with a new skylight in the
rear dining area (right).
The draw may well be social but
the food, under chef-partner John DeLucie must be of
the same appeal to his clientele as that of those UES
fine dining rooms listed above. DeLucie had been
chef at Graydon Carter's ultra-snooty Waverly Inn,
then struck off on his own to open The Lion, a
well-reviewed spot in the West Village. Here at
Crown, the menu is not radically different from The
Lion's--both serve California caviar and East Coast
oysters, squash soup, beef crudo, truffled gnocchi, côte de boeuf for
two, and other items. Except for Crown's more
expensive entrees, the prices are pretty close and
very high. The wine list at Crown is far more
extensive and is exceedingly top heavy in bottles
costing in excess of $150; indeed it's tough to find
much at even $70. The average white wine by the glass
is $17, a red $22.
I dined very, very well at Crown,
whose cooking is obviously based on first-rate
ingredients like the sweet, good-sized Nantucket bay
scallops now in season, served with snails, artichokes
à la grecque,
and a laurel nage.
A wild mushroom salad had various textures to increase
the pleasure of the mushrooms themselves--chestnuts,
arugula, aged goat's cheese and a sweet onion
purée. We tried two excellent pastas, a
bowl of tortellini stuffed with beef shortrib meat in
a red wine broth with celery leaf, croutons for
crunch, and a touch of thyme. "Silk
handkerchief" pasta (very very thin sheets called in
Piedmont mandilli
di saêa) were braced with a superb
white bolognese sauce enriched with hazelnuts and
assertive pecorino cheese. For
entrees we enjoyed perfectly cooked Pennsylvania rack
of lamb of enormous flavor, with rainbow Swiss chard,
chanterelles, and an enticing bordelaise spiked with
horseradish and ruby Port, the sweet and salty
elements all working with the richness of the
meat. There is also a delicious roasted and
braised Muscovy duck with shiitakes, pomegranate,
walnut, pumpkin, and winter spices, served for two (it
would have been nice but perhaps unwieldy in these
close quarters to slice it tableside); its breast skin
was wonderfully crisp, the braised meat tender and
juicy and sweet from absorbing the sauces. French
fried potatoes were impeccable. We shared
a light and vanilla-rich panna cotta for dessert, via
pastry chef Heather Berntinetti.
After all this sumptuous New
York-style food, all cooked with finesse, it is
troubling to report that the service staff needs a
thorough run through boot camp. Owing to Crown
being packed, I can forgive a certain lapse of time
trying to get a captain or waiter's eye, but, without
going into boring detail, the check I was presented
with included full portion prices for the pastas we
requested as appetizers, which we were assured we
could have. Worse, when I pointed this error
out, the waiter insisted it was not an error and he
would "talk to the chef"--the last person to be
consulted on such an issue. One bumbling captain and
one gracious manager later it was sorted out, but I
couldn't help thinking that I was one of the rare
people in the room who bothered even to look at the
check before paying what is a very high tab, where
full portions of pasta run $24 and up and entrees
$27-$65, with that duck-for-two at a whopping $97.
The incident curdled what would
otherwise have been a splendid evening, although the
noise is a factor they should address here, monied
voices or not. DeLucie is clearly a very
talented chef who knows his audience, and together
with kitchen chefs Jason Hall and Ted Rozzi,
he's proving the UES can be a destination for the most
finicky gourmands, even those who never think to
venture above 57th Street.
Crown
is open for lunch Mon.-Fri., for dinner nightly.
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THAT'S IT? FIVE PERCENT????!!!
A new study in the journal Addiction reveals
exactly how much you can
safely drink before having ill-conceived,
unprotected sex.
An increase
in blood alcohol level of 0.1 mg/mL increases the
likelihood of engaging
in risky sex by 5 percent. This means
approximately four drinks for
women and five for men.
MAYBE THE PLANET
URANUS?
"Earlier Kinch told me,
`When the Savoy cabbage is ready, we're prepared to
use it, because it's been growing in my head...,' and
again he trails of. At first you think he is
apprehensive about questions and answers, and then you
sense he is not completely present, that he listens
and speaks, he physically takes up space, but he is
actually somewhere else, in a secret world he explores
and from where he files little reports from time to
time, as menus."--Charles Bowden,
GQ.
❖❖❖
Any of John Mariani's
books below may be ordered from amazon.com.
My
latest book, which just won the prize for best
book from International Gourmand, written with
Jim Heimann and Steven Heller,Menu Design in America,1850-1985 (Taschen
Books), has just appeared, with nearly 1,000
beautiful, historic, hilarious, sometimes
shocking menus dating back to before the Civil
War and going through the Gilded Age, the Jazz
Age, the Depression, the nightclub era of the
1930s and 1940s, the Space Age era, and the age
when menus were a form of advertising in
innovative explosions of color and modern
design.The book is
a chronicle of changing tastes and mores and
says as much about America as about its food and
drink.
“Luxuriating
vicariously
in the pleasures of this book. . . you can’t
help but become hungry. . .for the food of
course, but also for something more: the bygone
days of our country’s splendidly rich and
complex past.Epicureans
of both good food and artful design will do well
to make it their coffee table’s main
course.”—Chip Kidd, Wall Street
Journal.
“[The
menus] reflect the amazing craftsmanship that
many restaurants applied to their bills of fare,
and suggest that today’s restaurateurs could
learn a lot from their predecessors.”—Rebecca
Marx, The Village Voice.
My new book, How Italian Food
Conquered the World (Palgrave
Macmillan) has just won top prize 2011 from
the Gourmand
World Cookbook Awards. It is
a rollicking history of the food culture of
Italy and its ravenous embrace in the 21st
century by the entire world. From ancient Rome
to la dolce
vita of post-war Italy, from Italian
immigrant cooks to celebrity chefs, from
pizzerias to high-class ristoranti,
this chronicle of a culinary diaspora is as
much about the world's changing tastes,
prejudices, and dietary fads as about
our obsessions with culinary fashion and
style.--John Mariani
"Eating Italian will
never be the same after reading
John Mariani's entertaining and
savory gastronomical history of
the cuisine of Italy and how it
won over appetites worldwide. . .
. This book is such a tasteful
narrative that it will literally
make you hungry for Italian food
and arouse your appetite for
gastronomical history."--Don
Oldenburg, USA Today.
"Italian
restaurants--some good, some glitzy--far
outnumber their French rivals. Many of
these establishments are zestfully described
in How Italian Food Conquered the World, an
entertaining and fact-filled chronicle by
food-and-wine correspondent John F.
Mariani."--Aram Bakshian Jr., Wall Street
Journal.
"Mariani
admirably dishes out the story of
Italy’s remarkable global ascent to
virtual culinary hegemony....Like a
chef gladly divulging a cherished
family recipe, Mariani’s book
reveals the secret sauce about how
Italy’s cuisine put gusto in gusto!"--David
Lincoln Ross, thedailybeast.com
"Equal parts
history, sociology, gastronomy, and just
plain fun, How Italian Food Conquered the
World tells the captivating and delicious
story of the (let's face it) everybody's
favorite cuisine with clarity, verve and
more than one surprise."--Colman Andrews,
editorial director of The Daily
Meal.com.
"A fantastic and fascinating
read, covering everything from the influence
of Venice's spice trade to the impact of
Italian immigrants in America and the
evolution of alta cucina. This book will
serve as a terrific resource to anyone
interested in the real story of Italian
food."--Mary Ann Esposito, host of PBS-TV's
Ciao
Italia.
"John Mariani has written the
definitive history of how Italians won their
way into our hearts, minds, and
stomachs. It's a story of pleasure over
pomp and taste over technique."--Danny Meyer,
owner of NYC restaurants Union Square Cafe,
Gotham Bar & Grill, The Modern, and
Maialino.
❖❖❖
FEATURED
LINKS: I am happy to report
that the Virtual
Gourmet is linked to four excellent
travel sites:
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: VISITING PHILLY; THE
PLAYBOY SKI GUIDE/
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).
The Family Travel Forum - A
community for those who "Have Kids, Still Travel" and
want to make family vacations more fun, less work and
better value. FTF's travel and parenting features,
including reviews of tropical and ski resorts, reunion
destinations, attractions, holiday weekends, family
festivals, cruises, and all kinds of vacation ideas
should be the first port of call for family vacation
planners. http://www.familytravelforum.com/index.html
nickonwine:
An engaging, interactive
wine column by Nick Passmore, Artisanal Editor, Four
Seasons Magazine; Wine Columnist, BusinessWeek.com;
nick@nickonwine.com; www.nickonwine.com.
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.