Notes from NY

Eataly

Despite what has surely been oodles of publicity about Eataly, I actually knew very little about itt.  Batali and Bastianich have certainly taken other projects seriously, but for whatever reason I half-expected this to be a mail-it-in, hype-over-substance capitalization of celebrity at the expense of the tourist wallet.  I was wrong, and blown away by the volume and quality of goods – everything from the raw fish and meat counters and charcuterie case to the pizza, pasta and wine restaurants looked fantastic.  I tasted only two things: an espresso, and some made-before-my-eyes fresh mozzarella.  Both were wonderful.  Here’s hoping that Chicago's soon-to-come version is something close to this.  It would have been nice if one of our own, like a Tony Mantuano, could have put together something serious like this, but we’ll take what we can get.

Moshe’s Falafel

Forget food lists, this cart on 46^th and 6^th should be on NYC’s  Top 10 Sites to Visit list.  Where else can you get falafel that are ultra-crunchy on the outside, airy and well-seasoned inside, and served on the street by long-white-bearded, yarmulke-wearing guy who looks about 110 years old?  The $2.50 admission price includes 4 big, delicious balls and some excellent tahini.  If your midtown hotel concierge doesn’t tell you about this place, he sucks.

Bagels

I’m not sure where people go for bagels in NY these days.  I tried a couple of random places on the upper west side, near Amsterdam and 79^th where my hotel was.  They were no better than the NY Bagel and Bialy stuff we get in Chicago.  One thing that NY bagel places definitely have over ours though is that they all know how to hand-slice nova to order.  That’s a pretty big deal.

Maialino

Danny Meyer and Bill Clinton are in the same category of people I liked before they decided to write a book.  Both wrote self-important, long-winded drivel that seriously dampened my opinion of them.  I was so annoyed by Meyer’s book that I almost decided to boycott his restaurants.  That, of course, would have been silly.  Add Maialino to a list of NY favorites run by Meyer.  Pastas were particularly wonderful, with a black-pepper-heavy, very rich spaghetti carbonara being my favorite.  A whole rabbit dish where the kidneys and everything else were included prominently on the plate was also delicious.

Yakitori Totto

I liked the simple, grilled skewers of meat here, but I liked the setting even more.  It’s a bustling, crowded place, but once you settle in the staff treats you well, pours some beer, and there’s instant camaraderie with the people sitting around you.  Everyone at Totto – from families with kids to young people on first dates was having a great time, and the place emanated warmth that’s a refreshing retreat from the cold, pressure-filled intensity of NYC. 

Bar Boulud

This was easily the best food I had on my NYC trip.  Onion soup was dark, sweet and super-oniony, with a rich, gelatinous broth that I could not get enough of.  Lyonnaise salad included the crispest, freshest frisee with thick, pleasantly chewy lardoons and slices of chicken liver cooked just-right.  I’ve never had a better version.

Frog n Snail

Frog n Snail is a beautiful, comfortable restaurant with roomy, gorgeous wood tables and terrific lighting that creates a simultaneously romantic, fun and practical ambience.  The staff were enthusiastic and friendly, and there were some delicious bites of food too.  So I hope that the missteps and bland dishes that stand out more in my mind right now were just new-restaurant kinks that will be worked out.

The best dish might have been the simplest: mussels cooked in a creamless, intensely citric and garlicky broth finished with absinthe and plenty of butter were the kind of dish you plan to share with companions, then subconsciously forget until they’re all gone.  Almost as good, the lyonnaise salad proved that in the deft hand of a chef who understand how to use it judiciously, black truffle oil can lend great complexity to a balanced, acidic dressing. Lardons, a runny poached egg on top and terrific French fries underneath make this a salad you might skip if you’re prepping, as a fair number of the beefy, skin-tight-shirt-wearing Frog n Snail clientele may have been, to participate in the Friday night shower show at Spin a couple of blocks away.

Unfortunately, my first bite of the night was a disastrous one.  The sweet pea risotto was woefully crunchy and chalky, having been either substantially undercooked or cooked too far in advance, allowed to dry out, and reheated improperly.  Restaurant risotto is often inferior to home cooked risotto on account of it being impractical for a restaurant cook on a busy weekend night to stir constantly while patiently adding liquid a little at time for 25 minutes, but there are techniques that manage this challenge while producing results far better than Frog n Snail’s.

The rest of the meal sat mostly in the middle of the mussels high and the risotto low.  A namesake dish of crisp, beautifully cooked frogs legs and minerally snails in a green peppercorn sauce showed excellent technique, but it was underseasoned and the frogs legs themselves were in especially desperate need of salt.  The broth in the French onion soup seemed too light in color and flavor, though some terrific, sweet spring peas lifted it, so maybe a certain light spring-ness was what the kitchen was going for with this traditionally rich, dark dish.  Two fish preparations – barramundi and trout – were good, though each seemed unfocused, with at least one too many ingredients.

For now Frog n Snail is byob, but a bartender said that will be changing soon with a cocktail list that he assured me would include “a lot of really awesome martinis”.  That, combined with the mixed bag of dishes, a well-meaning, hard working server who had no idea how to explain the word barigoule on the menu, and Spin shower show days that have long passed, left me doubtful that this will prove to be more than a very occasional spot for me.

Four Bowls, A Crock And A Jar

Four Bowls:

1) Salmon pasta with peas at Benny's Chop House. This disgusting thing was up there with the worst of Buca di Maggiano Garden. Limp, luke-warm noodles suffocating in a deep lake of heavy bisque flavored by dry bits of raunchy fish and starchy, tasteless peas. I should note that I once had a great steak at Benny's, served with an especially delicious Yorkshire pudding filled with oxtail jus. Why, you might ask, would I ever order pasta at a steak joint like this? According a prior visit's server, Benny's does or did share an executive chef with an Italian joint, and Italian cooking was, the server explained, the chef's true passion. She lauded the pastas in particular.


2) Seafood ramen at Ginza. Nausea and regret stemming from that Benny's bowl were cured by this one. The food at Ginza almost always has that effect on me, and this clean, light, seafood broth with fresh-tasting assortment including some of the plumpest, most delicious mussels in memory really did the trick.




3) Pea risotto at Markethouse. It's a shame that this place is where it is and doesn't do much to compensate, because the food always outshines the setting. The rice here was firm but gave easily to the bite, and was held in a creamy, buttery suspension flavored intensely by a wonderful pea puree. The peas themselves were tender and delicious, and the judiciously applied, earthy mushroom assortment were a nice little enhancement. As for the setting, for standard hotel-dining it's probably not bad; it's just that the restaurant absolutely screams WE'RE IN A HOTEL at you the whole time, from the name-plated staff and cheesy elevator music to the closed-off breakfast-cereal bar that sits prominently in the dining room during lunch and dinner service.


4) Linguini with clams at GT Fish & Oyster. I ate at Boka a few times when the GT chef was at the helm, and I always thought the food looked better than it tasted. I can't remember disliking anything, but every server's description that made me think, "Wow, that sounds fantastic," led to a taste that made me think, "Hmm., that's not bad." Would that this background info ended with me telling you that all has changed now that the chef has moved to a more casual place with less fine dining pretense. As with much of what I've had at Boka, the linguini was just too "refined" for me. The made-in-house pasta lacked the heartiness of dried, and I think of lingini with clams as a big, hearty dish. At GT it was loaded with butter - fine butter I'm sure - and the clams were quite good, but their flavor did not infuse the butter at all. In the end this was tender housemade pasta with an excellent butter sauce. Missing were toasty garlic, clam aroma wafting from the bowl, and good, pungent olive oil to finish the dish.


A Crock:

Chilaquiles at Xoco. Wood ovens may do great things for pizza and bread, but it turns out they are lousy at cooking chilaquiles. This crock of tortillas swam in liquid salsa, the two never coming together to improve one another. An egg or two which must have been pre-cooked before hitting the oven came out rubbery and dry atop the crock, once again not integrated at all into the dish. I understand that Xoco is limited by the fact that they don't have a stovetop or grill to use at service. What I don't understand is why, if that's the case, they chose to put something like chilaquiles on the menu.


A Jar:

Clam chowder at GT Fish & Oyster. This should have been called bacon-cream soup. Way too much heavily smoked pork in this chowder, and more of those tasty-enough clams that failed to infuse the broth in any discernible way. This looked and tasted like pure gimmick.

Ribollita at Publican Quality Meats and Bar Toma. A Pizza Too

Ribollita is the humblest of soups - often a bunch of leftover stuff that’s about to go bad boiled into something hearty that fills the stomach for another meal. At home, I might might haphazardly throw it together out of pantry staples such as stale bread and wilting produce when I don’t feel like leaving the house, and if it comes out looking clumsy and tasting fair I’m OK with that. But when I order ribollita at a restaurant helmed by a famous chef I think I have a right to expect more. One such famous chef delivered on that expectation and then some, while another came up embarrassingly short.

Publican Quality Meats puts far more care into their ribollita than would your average Italian Grandma, and it shows. The broth is complex, with deep, porky flavor and tongue-tingling acidity. Each bean has retained its shape, and is creamy while maintaining a bit of pleasant bite. Kale, bread and other ingredients are cut thoughtfully into sizes that fit comfortably on a soup spoon, allowing the eater to focus on eating and enjoying rather than dissecting or, worse, choking. Perhaps best of all, the soup is topped at service with a hefty drizzle of some awfully good, pungent, fruity olive oil. At PQM, this humble soup is elevated into something immensely satisfying and special.


Bar Toma has been serving ribollita as a special. They need to stop. Plating this horrible bowl of salty, sloppy nothingness would embarrass any cook who tasted what PQM is offering. The broth in Bar Toma’s ribollita tastes like nothing but vinegar and salt. 5-inch strips of tough greens that are impossible to eat in any reasonable way fill the bowl, along with big globs of cheese and bread. This is a miserable bowl of food by any standards; that it comes from a restaurant named for the chef of Chicago’s most famous Italian restaurant is disturbing.


I posted some time ago about Bar Toma’s characterless pizza crust. A reviewer I like recently said positive things about it though, so I wondered if things had changed. Indeed, the crust on my more recent pizza was less bready, thinner, and texturally more interesting than the first time. Still not great, but better. Unfortunately, the kitchen’s sloppiness carried over from the soup to the pizza topping. As is apparent from the photo, sauce was applied in an extremely uneven way, leaving some pieces too saucy and others brittle and dry. The gimmicky tableside grating of dried oregano left a couple of ineble branches on the pie, and I think the anchovies should have been either sliced smaller and applied broadly, or rinsed of at least some of their unpalatable salinity.

If you’re one of those readers who just skip to the summary, here you go: Publican Quality Meats is wonderful. Bar Toma’s bad, careless cooking has placed it on my avoid-forever list. I'm sure they'll miss me.

Bar Ombra

David Tamarkin recently wrote a TimeOut review criticizing Bar Ombra for some issue or other that only he would think matters. As usual, he also revealed in that piece the constraints facing a writer with poor work ethic and mediocre ability. I considered doing a whole post tearing apart his review, but then I remembered that Fuckerberg readers have great taste. As people with great taste, you already know that Tamarkin has little, so I need not bore you with details. Instead, this post will be a review of what you should eat when you go to Bar Ombra, a unique and fun place with delicious food.

At its core, Bar Ombra is a cicchetti bar. You do not want to make a Tamarkin-like mistake and miss what might be the 2 most iconic items in the cicchetti universe: baccala mantecato and sarde in saor. Having prepared these things more than once, I can tell you that as simple as they seem when you eat them, they are not easy to get right. Baccala mantecato is what some people call Italian brandade, but unlike brandade, this Venetian version has no cream or potato to ease the emulsification process. A proper baccala mantecato is made from little more than good cod and good olive oil, whipped together in a highly controlled frenzy to form a smooth emulsification where the taste of the fish and the taste of the oil shine. Bar Ombra gets it right, producing a luscious, uncomplicated and delicious spread that sits atop simple polenta squares or triangles. It’s adorned with, well, nothing.

Bar Ombra’s sarde in saor is not as true to tradition as versions throughout Venice, but I may have liked it even more. Traditionally, this preparation was used to preserve the bounty from Venetian waters; when people couldn’t eat the catch quickly enough to avoid spoilage, they’d preserve it in a vinegar and onion based marinade after giving it a quick fry. At every place I tried this dish in Venice, it was served after several days in that marinade, in various stages of pickling. At Bar Ombra, the fish seemed to have been lightly fried just that day, so while it absorbed plenty of the marinade in whatever time they had to meld, it also retained much of it’s fresh-from-the-sea quality. It was easy to tell that these were terrific, oily sardines, still crisp from frying and balanced wonderfully by a sweet and sour marinade that had raisins and, thankfully, a lesser bounty of onions than most of the Venetian versions.

I enjoyed many more dishes, but three were clear favorites. Arancini neri - risotto balls with crispiness on the outside and creaminess on the inside, had a black-as-night interior color that housed the pure flavor of squid ink. Perfectly hard-boiled eggs with tonnato sauce were great too, and had the kind of tongue-tingling acid, balanced by richness, that you want to whet your palate at the start of a long meal. Simple fried smelts with fried, thin slices of lemon were wonderful too, adding Bar Ombra to a growing list of places, including The Purple Pig, that do wonderful versions of Italian-style fish fry. I was less impressed by the calamari neri, which seemed too salty and a little flat – surprising in light of how good the arancini were. The only mild disappointment of the night.

Bar Ombra has a massive menu. My ordering strategy was, for the most part, to let the owner – whom I’ve gotten to know through visits to Anteprima over the years– choose our dishes. It’s possible that there are some relative duds somewhere on the menu, but from my seat at the expansive counter, Bar Ombra was one heck of a place that I look forward to frequenting.

Bar Ombra
5310 N. Clark
773-505-8600

Balena

A poor meal at Balena left me thinking that either the chef’s idea of what tastes good is widely different from mine, or the kitchen is having quality control problems in these opening weeks.

Pastas were the worst of the lot. Canestri - small, hanging-basket-shaped ridged pasta that I was excited to see - were served with what the menu called a duck liver ragu. I disagree with that nomenclature, as what ended up in the bowl were too-large pieces of dried out liver, not anything resembling pasta sauce. The beauty of canestri lies in their great ability to absorb and hold sauces, making every bite a delicious balance of whatever the dish contains. That beauty was completely lost by serving these shapes with big chunks instead of a cohesive ragu. Taglioline nero – flat, black noodles – were served with what the menu advertised as sea urchin, crab and chile. What the menu didn’t say was that the tastes of those things would be completely obliterated by a crazy-heavy hand with lemon juice. I like acidic food, but this was pucker-worthy sour. A major failure.

Our pizza fared slightly better on account of very good tomato sauce, but the crust was something of a disaster. It was way overcooked and dry, with the sturdy texture of cardboard packing material. As one of my dining companions pointed out, there was also a thick layer of raw flour that must have been used to line the peel, creating an unpleasant, chalky eating experience.

The one main-course-like thing we tried - a couple of wet-roasted duck legs served with dried figs and amaro – was decent but uninteresting. The duck supposedly had some kind of glaze, though I didn’t notice anything particularly tasty about the skin. The dried figs were fine, though probably bitter enough on their own that they did not benefit from the splash of barely reduced, amaro-infused thin liquid saucing the plate. Ultimately, this was little more than a nicely cooked duck leg that most people can do pretty easily at home.

Best of the evening were two selections from the appetizer section. Seafood salad had a variety of cold shellfish that were fresh and tasty, if not particularly unique or exciting. They had just a bit of grit. The smoked mackerel dish – with nice smoke penetration and a very luscious texture – was my favorite of the night. It had crunchy breadcrumbs and a soft-cooked egg. Very tasty, though it would have benefitted from some capers or lemon or sour cream – something with acid. I should have stolen a tiny spoonful of sauce from that crazy taglioline.

Because I’ve usually liked the food at The Bristol, I’m inclined to think that Chef Pandel, now at Balena, will work some of these problems out soon. Then again, Balena is a much bigger place and perhaps his forte does not lie in the quality-control measures required to serve dinner to these kinds of masses. Time will tell.

(note - photos all courtesy of Charlotte Tan)

Balena
1633 N. Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60614
Tel 312.867.3888

Burgers in Oklahoma City, Pizza in Wausau

Perhaps to distance myself from the attitude that underlies my NYC roots, I try hard not to think in a narrowly provincial way about where one might find the best restaurants. Sure, NY and Chicago have some of my favorites, but so do St. Louis, Indianapolis and Greensboro. That said, it was with relatively little hope that I started researching what to eat on my recent travels to Oklahoma City, OK and Wausau, WI. After these trips, I realized that I still have work to do to widen my NY-mindedness.

As skyfullofbacon, who knows a thing or two about both meat and Oklahoma, twitted during my trip planning, Oklahoma City is “the burger capital of the galaxy”. As I drove around the expansive city it indeed seemed hard to go far without seeing a sign for “Onion Burgers” that dozens of places have been cooking for decades. Onion burgers in OKC apparently started as a way to make meat go further when times were tough –onions were smashed into beef patties to extend their volume. As with many great classic dishes, this is an example of humble, necessity-based cooking that ends up producing something downright fantastic in its own right.

I tried a couple of the old time places that have been doing onion burgers for generations, including one popular and delicious stand that’s located in a gunshop, but I could not resist the appeal a recently-opened place called Tucker’s.

These guys are preparing things the classic way, but unlike their counterparts, Tucker’s is sourcing local, grass-fed beef, artisanal buns made down the street, and other quality, local ingredients whenever possible. The setting is hardly fancy though, and Tucker’s fits in well among the “real” old school places.


More importantly, the Tucker’s double onion burger was fantastic. Onion burgers are pressed with a heavy spatula on a flat grill, and cooks have differing opinions about how hard and how long to press. This is one of the things that makes going from place to place to try these things an interesting adventure. Hard, long pressing leads to super-crispy, tasty lacing on the exterior of the patty (this was the way of the gun shop cook), while lighter pressing logically keeps more juices inside. Tucker’s falls into the relatively-light-pressing camp – there’s still good, crispy lacing on the outside, but most of the meat is juicy and loose. It probably doesn’t hurt that they use a slightly larger patty than most places – about 4.5 ounces vs. the more typical 3-4 ounce patty. Also at Tucker’s, the onions took on a darker, more naturally sweet caramelization than at the other places. I think this was because they kept the grill at a slightly lower temperature, leading to a slower cook. The double was a delicious monstrosity; I polished off the whole thing, but on my next visit I’ll go with a single, which should be big enough to stand up to the super-fresh, local potato bun.


Burgers in Oklahoma are one thing. In retrospect it’s not hard to understand why that’s a thing. But what about pizza in Wausau, Wisconsin? Is there really anything better than the Papa Rococco or Papa Milano or Papa Napoli or whatever other middle of the road chain and chain imitator that’s all over the place. It turns out there is, and it’s located in a place that also serves something less surprising to find in the parts: great beer. Redeye Brewing Company is a snazzy looking place that’s hopping every night of the week. I had to wait 20 minutes for a seat at 5:30 on a school night!

The best beers here are the hop heavy American-style IPA’s, and they’re very good indeed, but the star of the Redeye Brewery show is what comes out of the pure-wood-fired 850 degree oven that’s the center of an open kitchen. The crust has great chew to it, and they use very high quality toppings, including a peppery fennel sausage that was among the best I’ve tasted.




Tucker's Onion Burgers
324 Northwest 23rd Street Oklahoma City, OK 73118
(405) 609-2333

Redeye Brewing
612 Washington Street Wausau, WI 54403
(715) 843-7334