By John Mariani

239 West Broadway (between White and Walker Streets).

212-219-2777

myriadrestaurantgroup.com

    Bâtard has now had its year in the spotlight, including three stars from the NY Times and a Michelin star, so it seemed time for me to see how things are going, what’s changed, and how owner Drew Nieporent is maintaining his own unique form of ebullient hospitality.

          Nieporent and his Myriad Restaurant Group have been reckoned among the most respected entrepreneurs in their industry for the three decades, beginning with the opening of the French restaurant Montrachet on the same premises that are now home to Bâtard. The location had once before been re-cast as Corton, but that experiment did not win wide favor among guests.  Now, with partner John Winterman (right to left) and Austrian-born Chef Markus Glocker, the place is hopping again.

    The spacious room, now with fewer tables, has a golden shimmer in the walls, and good soft lighting allows you to see everyone in the room. The lack of tablecloths or any soft surfaces has unfortunately amped up the noise level here, making conversation  difficult.

    Menu prices have inched up a smidge—two courses are still $55, three are now $69, and four $79—but for this kind of cuisine and panache Bâtard is without doubt among the best bargains in NYC. (Consider that an app, a steak and dessert at a place like Minetta Tavern will easily run you $75, and three courses, without dessert,  at Carbone can cost $85.)

    The wine list, under sommelier Jason Jacobeit,  is wholly admirable, high-ended but with good selections in the less pricey ranges.  Its most impressive holdings are aged Burgundies of fine provenance.  There are several good selections by the glass under $15 and an admirable number of bottles under $60,  including Austrian and German wines that marry well with Glocker’s cuisine.  There’s also a Château d’Oupia Minervois 2012 for $37, a La Antigua Clasico Crianza 2010 for $45, and a Château de Rauzan-Séglas 2006 for $167, which are less than  100% markups from retail. 

    On my return, with three people, I re-tried dishes from when Bâtard opened as well as new items showing off Glocker’s penchant for big flavors done with finesse. His octopus pastrami (below) with braised ham hock, Pommery mustard, and new potatoes hearkens to Glocker’s Austrian heritage, and it’s has been on the menu from the beginning, with very good reason. It’s a signature dish, imaginative, lusty, deeply flavorful, with great side components.  Tender sweetbreads—and a good portion of them—came with sweet delicata squash, spicy ras el hanout, and a perfectly reduced veal jus. 
And since every menu now has to have a pasta, it might as well be Glocker’s delicious agnolotti stuffed with celeriac and Castelmagno cheese, spied cashews for texture and apple for citric spark.

    I often use cod as a measuring stick for the way a chef can ennoble a humble species, and the mild flavor of Glocker’s impeccably roasted cod is wonderfully enhanced with not-too-hot Hungarian paprika, briny clams and velvety, sweet eggplant. Only one dish didn’t quite live up to the lavish praise I gave it when I first dined here—and I was not alone in my praise: A classic Austrian pork schnitzel with salad, cucumber, lingonberry and sea buckthorn
 was every bit as good as many I’ve had in Vienna, but I just think Glocker could make it more specially his own with a little tweaking.

    For your third course you must decide between a superb selection of perfectly ripe cheeses or any of four desserts, all of them excellent, like duck egg-enriched crème brûlée with spiced pineapple, verjus, and a tangy yogurt sorbet to a caramelized milk chocolate with hazelnuts in flaky puff pastry.   “Coffee & Milk Kardinal” is a delightfully light mélange of French meringue and unusual milk jam.    Odd that there's no form of cake or tart on the menu at the moment.  Cheeses are supplemental, three for $15, for for $18, and five for $21.

    As I’ve had reason to mention recently, despite ignorant media reports that fine dining no longer thrives in New York, I believe it is more vibrant and fascinating than ever, and, at places like Bâtard less expensive than it used to be for a whole lot more.

Bâtard is open Tuesday through Saturday.

     Few people in the past half century had such an influence on the course of American cuisine as the legendary chef Paul Prudhomme, who died this week at the age of 75. 
    A proud Cajun who grew up poor on a Louisiana sharecropper's farm, the youngest of 13 children, in Saint Landry Parish.  With no culinary training he opened Big Daddy O’s Patio hamburger eatery in Opelousas in 1957 before moving to New Orleans in 1970, where he cooked in various Creole restaurants and met his wife Kay Hinrichs.

      Five years later he was appointed executive chef at Commander’s Palace, then in the forefront of so-called “New New Orleans Cuisine,” whose owners, the Brennan family, urged Paul to bring more intensity to the kitchen without distancing their loyal clientele.  His success at doing so allowed him to go his own way, opening up K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen on Chartres Street, with Kay as manager, in 1979. 
     There he showcased his own brash style of Cajun cooking—shocking to many in a Creole town like New Orleans—whose spice and pepper levels were as high as the amount of butter and fat used to cook just about everything, including his signature dish, blackened redfish.      Subtlety was never a word used in connection to K-Paul’s menu.

    Before long his star soared, after NY Times food writer, himself a southerner, paid K-Paul’s a visit and declared Prudhomme’s food a revolution in American taste, which was then considered a rather bland one. The lines went around the block after that, and within two years K-Paul’s was voted by food writers around the country as one of the “25 Best Restaurants in America” by Playboy Magazine.

    I was fortunate enough to write that article, and at the time, when the list was crammed with deluxe French restaurants like Lutèce, La Grénouille, Maisonette and Le Bec Fin, K-Paul’s was a downhome storefront, no reservations taken, a drop in place where you had to share a table with other guests.  Imagine the shock and awe when I sat down with two good old boys from Oklahoma and told them I was going to order and pay for everything on the menu.  That was their lucky day.

      The publication in 1984 of Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen made for a huge bestseller and its influence on professional and home cooks around the country was enormous.  Suddenly cooks were dousing their food in hot sauce, ten spices, and oceans of butter and cream, in stark contrast to the oncoming storm of so-called “healthy eating” and the Mediterranean Diet.  So popular was his blackened redfish—a drum species few cooks had ever heard of, even in New Orleans—led to a federal ban on commercial fishing of the species for years.  Prudhomme himself switched to other fish for the recipe.

    His product line of Magic Seasonings Blends became a big seller, first in New Orleans then across the U.S.  Many more cookbooks followed.

    There were good times and bad after that for Paul: Kay’s death in 1993 was a great blow, and Paul receded from the spotlight afterwards, though he kept up his local TV show each week and kept K-Paul’s running. (It was hard hit during Hurricane Katrina, and though closed down, Paul contributed to serving thousands of meals for the military and residents staying in the French Quarter.  It took a year to re-open K-Paul’s.)

    All his life Paul struggled with immense obesity, and though he lost a great deal of weight after Kay’s death, he still rode on a cart to get around and walked, when he could, with two canes.  But his own joie de vivre and well-cultivated Cajun persona was evident whenever he cooked in front of people, always encouraging more spice to create more flavor, never cutting back on good taste because it was the only taste he knew.

    I met Paul on several occasions over the years and always found him affable but shy.  He would sit with me as I ate his jambalaya and drank one of his Cajun martinis in a Mason jar, but he wouldn’t eat anything. Nor was he cooking much by then. My interview questions received short, focused answers, and he well knew that his mantra and background were at the basis of his popularity.

    Once time he recalled how he couldn’t figure out why the best potatoes he could possibly buy for his restaurant never tasted as good as his mama made them. “The it came to me,” he said, his eyes brightening. “It wasn’t just nostalgia for my mama’s cooking. I remembered that when we ate a potato, we went outside and plucked it right out of the ground, brushed off the dirt and ate it minutes later.  It didn’t have time to lose any of its natural flavor.  And it was like that with everything we ate.  We were poor and there were a lot of us on that farm, so we used everything and had to eat in season because we didn’t have the money to buy store-bought food.  So, whatever I do, I’ll never be able to get that flavor in my own cooking.  But I keep trying.”

VIK Winery Goes Holistic

By John Mariani

         Ten years ago I wrote of Chilean wines, “I suspect that if most winedrinkers think at all about Chilean wines, they think of Concha y Toro, whose fans down enough of its $5 Chardonnays and Cabernets to make it the number two wine import to the U.S.”  Since then Chile has emerged as one of the world’s premier wine regions, with a slew of names like Veramonte,  Los Vascos, Le Dix, Cousiño Macul, and Montés Alpha earning high marks from the wine trade and media.

         The appeal of modern Chilean viticulture, especially among foreign investors, is that the country’s isolated geography of oceans and mountains protects its vineyards from pestilents like phylloxera, and to this day Chile’s strict agriculture laws prevent importation of any foreign plants.

         One of the most talked-about new wineries is the oddly named  VIÑA VIK, which has just opened a holistic retreat in Millahue  Valley (above), which means “place of gold,” to join others  that include Estancia Vik José Ignacio, Playa Vik José Ignacio, Bahia Vik José Ignacio and La Susana, all in Uruguay, owned and managed by Alexander and Carrie Vik. The new resort is part of the growing agro-tourism business worldwide, and  Millahue is part of the purchase in 2006 of 11,000 acres of land spread over twelve valleys.  Here Alexander Vik, along with winemaker Patrick Valette, did extensive research into the finest soil and terroirs and clonal rootstocks to produce European varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon, Carménère, Syrah, Cabernet Franc and Merlot. The winery was designed by one of Chile’s foremost architects, Smiljan Radic.  

    Weather stations monitor climate changes, special irrigation systems provide plenty of water,  and harvesting of the grapes is done at night when the air is cool. The majority of the winery building is located underground to allow for a naturally cooling process during the winemaking, at a consistent temperature of 57 degrees.  The roof of the winery features a stretched, transparent fabric to allow for natural sunlight. The wines are then fermented in stainless  steel tanks, with aging done in new French barrels, for 20 to 24 months.

    “Making wine in a new terroir is a slow evolution,” Valette told me over dinner in New York. “You have to feel free to make good wine. It literally becomes your life to the exclusion of all else.”  Nevertheless, Valette and his wife have managed to raise nine children.

    Valette is son of the former owners of the illustrious Château Pavie in Saint-Émilion.  Born in Chile,  educated in France (he speaks French, Spanish and English) and trained at the Robert Mondavi estate in Napa Valley, he spent years as manager of various wineries in France, becoming owner of Château La Prade and CEO of Château de Musset. Presently he owns Château de Rougérie in Entre Deux Mers, and still consults for several other French wineries.  He joined VIK in 2006.

    This year VIK has released its 2011 vintage in the Bordeaux style, and at a Bordeaux price: $140, making it perhaps the most expensive wine made in Chile today.  Valette insists it is worth the price because he believes it ranks with some of the best crus in Bordeaux and because he knows how much time and effort has gone into producing it.  The winery’s mantra is from Aristotle: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” applied to every aspect of the interaction between man and nature, which includes technology and careful regard for the elements of soil and climate.

    “We make wine to drink, not to taste,” he said, meaning he is not interested in winning awards from tasting panels but to allow winedrinkers to savor the wine slowly, enjoyed with food that is complimentary.  Upon tasting a terrine of foie gras with fruit preserves, he declared that  “The sweetness of the preserves does not work with the wine. They fight each other.” 

    Indeed, VIK 2011 is a wine best enjoyed with simple foods,  not least beef, sweetbreads, and game like squab or rabbit.  I found it a delicious wine that I would never drink on its own, without food, which proves that the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts.

       It is a big wine but not high in alcohol, proving that you can achieve richness along with elegance, so that the wine is a pleasure when sipped, from the tip of the palate to the back of the throat.  Its components of  55 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 29 percent Carmenère, 4 percent Syrah, 7 percent Cabernet Franc and 5 percent Merlot give it both breadth and depth, and the unusual addition of the Syrah brings out a higher fruit component, while the Merlot softens the wine, whose tannins are already loosening.

    The fact that the vines are so young—just three to five years old—proves two things: First, the best Chilean soil and sun, combined with irrigation (the valleys get little rain) are capable of producing exceptional, healthy varietals, and, second, a wine like VIK 2011 shows how total commitment, an holistic ideal of balance from many components can be achieved in a modern winery whose dependence on the state-of-the-art technology must be backed by centuries of tradition, and perhaps paying a little homage to the Chilean sun gods.