Review of Marc Forgione, TriBeCa, Manhattan, October 20, 2011

Review of Mas (means farmhouse in French), Greenwich Village, Manhattan, October 22, 2011.

Review of Bar Jamon, Manhattan, October 21, 2011

Review of Locanda Verde in TriBeCa, Manhattan, December 8, 2011

Review of Landmarc, located in TriBeCa, Manhattan, December 7, 2011.

Don’t miss this one – we had a great time!

We kicked off my 48th birthday celebration this year with dinner at Zuzu in Napa, and picked up steam from there.  The crescendo meal for the weekend was a mid-day dinner at the French Laundry in Yountville, a three start Michelin restaurant owned by Chef Thomas Keller and often ranked as the best restaurant in the world by many magazines and industry groups.  Not only is it really difficult to get reservations at The French Laundry, I’ve resisted the place for a long a time based on the requirement to wear a jacket, the price, and the overall hype.

I hate stuffy restaurants, I hate long and boring tasting menus, and I hate being part of the mindless cheerleader crowd over whatever is the fad of the day.  While this last point is just part of my personality, the first two points became solidified in my mind based on two seminal events, one that occurred at Aria, located in Sydney, Australia and one in London at some highly rated French restaurant whose name isn’t worth mentioning or even remembering. At Aria, which is a fine restaurant with great food, we ordered a tasting menu that I swear to God took five hours to complete!  While the food was good, and maybe even great, the experience sucked.  For me, it put an end to most tasting menus.  At the place with no name in London, Laura and I ordered a very expensive bottle of wine, but since we weren’t especially hungry, we asked to share an entree.  You would have thought we asked them to commit illegal acts with furry animals based on the reaction.  Mistakenly, we held our ground even after a vociferous objection, and that was the end of anything resembling a good experience that night.  We didn’t see the waiter again for an hour, and that includes not getting our wine.  However, this restaurant happened to have a beautiful vase full of small pearls as the center piece on each table.  Somehow, at our table, that vase was mysteriously tipped over, sending hundreds of pearls shooting across the dining room floor.  While I don’t even want to think about how badly our food was likely sabotaged that night, those pearls certainly got us some attention, and fast.  I’ll always remember that waiter scrambling around on the floor trying to corral those pearls!  Regardless of the entertainment value, I decided then and there that I was done paying money to people who insist on coats, eating in a specific order, pairing only certain wines, etc.  Screw ‘em, I’d rather eat elsewhere.

So, that brings us back to Keller and The French Laundry, which requires a coat and is pretty darn rigid.  In fact, the only restroom for patrons at the restaurant  is up a flight of stairs behind a smaller second level dining room.  If any of the staff are heading up or down the stairs and a patron starts up or down the stairs, the staff immediately turn around and return to the top or bottom of the stairs to wait for you to pass.  While that might sound like pretty attentive and thoughtful behavior, I found it to be a bit silly for a lady balancing a half dozen glasses of wine on a tray to go bounding back up the stairs when she was only two steps from the bottom, just because I make an appearance at the bottom.  Let’s be reasonable folks.

In the garden at The French Laundry

Regardless of some of the silliness and the required coats and such (and by the way, they DO turn away anyone without a coat, which given the wait time to even GET a reservation at this place, must really suck …), the food and experience at The French Laundry truly deserves the hype and accolades.  Out of the 16-18 courses that are served as part of the menu, there wasn’t even a single miss.  And in fact, every one of the courses was a candidate for being the best example of that particular set of flavors I’ve ever had.  There are a zillion reviews of the French Laundry that you can read for yourself, and my input is that they’ve thoroughly earned their stripes!

To kill time between lunch and dinner, we decided to taste a few wines at Alpha Omega, a high end (read expensive) winery located just up the road from Yountville in the Rutherford appellation.  Reminiscent of Darioush winery, AO serves some really nice, big reds that mostly worth the $80 bucks or so that they charge.  On this visit, after a few samples directly from the barrels, we were proud owners of futures on some of the vintages.

Laura barrel tasting at Alpha Omega

After our mid-day dinner at the French Laundry, wine tasting at Alpha Omega, and a brief stop at Chandon for a celebratory glass of champagne, we queued up for a late-night dinner at Bistro Jeanty’s, just down the street from the “Laundry”.  Chef Philippe Jeanty previously owned a restaurant in the financial district of San Francisco called Jeanty at Jacks which we liked quite a lot.  That place has since closed, and we were curious how the Yountville restaurant was doing.  The night we were there, the place was packed.  The service was typical Parisian slow, but the food was simply amazing.  We started with some awesome quenelles de brochet (pike dumplings with lobster sauce).  For mains, Laura had a very nice quiche, while I ordered the coq ou vin.  That coq au vin was without any doubt, the very best rendition I’ve ever encountered, with thick, tasty gravy, falling apart meat, and an ample collection of vegetables served over fresh made pasta.  Absolutely terrific.  While Laura and I are mostly not dessert people, we splurged and ordered the mousse au chocolat brulee, which is pretty much the best rendition of a creme brulee either of us had ever enjoyed.

At Bistro Jeanty, home of the best coq au vin EVER!

Finally, on Sunday morning we capped off our weekend food fest with a visit to another Keller establishment, Bouchon, located just down the street from The French Laundry.  We’ve been to Bouchon at the Venetian is Las Vegas numerous times.  In fact, our somewhat annual “Display Team” dinner of a dozen or so people we worked with in the past is held at Bouchon in Vegas every year during the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), so we know the restaurant well.  It’s also where I first discovered chicken & waffles, during a late brunch one New Years Day a few years back (after a late of night the GooGoo Dolls, and generally tearin’ up the town).  In Yountville, the Bouchon performs at least as well as the one in Vegas, but on a smaller scale.  What’s sad is that I barely remember what I ordered for breakfast that day, because Laura’s quiche was so damned good!  The texture of the eggs in that quiche was a simply perfect.  Custardy, quivering and full of flavor.  Best I’ve ever had.  If the truth be told, I do remember what I ordered: the boudin blanc, which is a house made white sausage served over pureed potatoes that probably consisted of 50% potato and 50% cream and butter.  Even then, still not as good as that quiche!

The Bistro takes reservations; not true for the adjacent bakery!

With a final stop at Domaine Carneros for a last glass of champagne, we brought our weekend of gluttony and pleasure to a close, and with an even better understanding of why some of these Celebrity Chefs get so much attention.  Their food really is that much better than the other guys.

Laura and the vines at Domaine Carneros

- Chris

The Art of the Dog

I have a new thread coming soon that I call The Art of the Dog; a series of posts describing some unique, and some really good, hot dog recipes!  Two of the creations that are part of this series include a BLT Dog, which is a hot dog with bacon, lettuce and tomato and a Hummus Dog, which has hummus, cucumbers, pine nuts and more!  Both are waaay good, no matter how they sound.  Stay tuned …

But I digress…

On Incanto’s web site is an interesting essay on why OpenTable is NOT good for restaurants.  Their theme is that OpenTable doesn’t bring NEW business to the restaurant, but instead diverts over $10/table away from the restaurant (or drives up the prices the patrons pay).  Further, the customer’s direct interface to the restaurant is weakened or broken and replaced by OpenTable as the middle man taking their cut.  In even a small restaurant that serves 60 covers a night, OpenTable’s fees could easily be $200/night based on averaging 20 tables and using the Incanto estimate of $10/table paid to OpenTable and assuming every table is booked through OpenTable.  For a restaurant open six days a week, that turns out to be about $5,000 a month, or $60,000 a year.  That’s probably as much or more than many head Chefs are paid!

Here’s another way to think about it: Would you pay $10 directly out of your own pocket to book a table through OpenTable?  I know I wouldn’t.  But somebody has to be paying the middleman, and it’s either happening by driving restaurants out of business, or your paying for it through increased prices on the menu.  Read the article yourself here: Is OpenTable Worth It?

And let’s start picking up that phone next time we book a reservation at our favorite restaurant.

- Chris

Nobu, founded by Chef Nobu Matsuhisa and co-owned by Robert DeNiro, is now a chain with probably 20 restaurants world-wide.  Laura and I have eaten at the Nobu in Miami and my experience at Nobu New York wasn’t much different.  The food is great, but in our home base of the San Francisco/Bay Area we get such amazing sushi that Nobu doesn’t have the “wow” factor it might otherwise have.

More importantly, what the hell is going on with Nobu serving bluefin tuna, an endangered species, for dinner?  I kid you not, Nobu has several courses on their menu that feature bluefin tuna, claiming consumers “should be able to choose for themselves.”  Does that mean it’s ok to put some Cheeta capraccio on the menu?  Black-footed ferret fricasee?  Elephant shanks?  Even if one chooses to serve or eat non-sustainable food, making an “informed” choice to serve or consume an ENDANGERED SPECIES is past the point of reasonableness in my book.  Think bluefin aren’t really that rare?  One sold for almost $400,000.00 recently in Japan, which is about 500 bucks a pound.  They cost that much because there are so few left!  My rating for Nobu: Avoid.

Me & John BEFORE we saw the endangered species on the menu ...

WD-50 is a truly amazing experience.  Wylie, the founder and head chef, is renowned for pioneering the use of ingredients such as agar agar to form gels, liquid nitrogen, emulsions, foams, “caviars” and more in his cooking to create unique textures, forms and tastes that have transformed the world’s view of fine dining.  Wylie’s type of cooking is based on unique combinations of ingredients that surprise both the eye and the palate. Chefs such as Grant Achatz at Alinea have based much of their work on the foundations created by Wylie.  Not everyone agrees that this type of cooking is good for the world.  Italian lawmakers have been trying to ban many of the ingredients used in this type of cooking, and even want to ban liquid nitrogen which is used to “blast” chill foods!

Bacon & Eggs, WD-50 Style!

But back here at home in the good old US of A, the tasting menu at WD-50 includes whatever ingredients are needed to form foie gras into cubes, turn eggs benedict inside out, and much more.  Not for the faint of heart, we arrived at 9:30pm and didn’t leave until 2am.  I could rave plat by plate, but you can see some of my pictures below and then Google to your hearts content to learn more about WD-50’s menu.  The night I was at there, Jon Bignelli, the Chef de Cuisine was running the kitchen.  That was kind of cool since I’d just seen Jon on Chopped only a few weeks before.

For lunch, I was able to add to my Bobby Flay portfolio of visits with a stop at Bar Americain.  Laura and I had dinner at Mesa Bar & Grill several years ago on a previous NYC outing and remain huge Bobby fans, especially of his Throwdown series, whose opening scenes are filmed at Bar Americain.  Arriving about 15 minutes before service started, I propped myself up on a stool at the bar and watched the service team practicing the menu and reading out-loud some of the recent reviews of the restaurant as part of the pre-service “pump up”!  Very cool indeed!  For lunch, I couldn’t resist the lobster roll, which was terrific, and loaded to overflowing with huge chunks of lobster.

Pre Service "Huddle" at Bar Americain

Finally, for what was arguably my favorite meal of the trip, I caught lunch at Mario Batali’s restaurant Lupa.  My most recent experience at a Mario Restaurant was in Las Vegas at Carnevino.  I was unimpressed with Carnevino – a filet poached in butter for fifty bucks, no sides of any kind included.  And instead of butter for the bread they served lard.  I’m not kidding.  Lard.  And, the server attempted to convince us that LARD was not bad for you!  Wow, who knew that the medical profession had gotten this one so wrong?  Back to Lupa – not surprisingly for Mario, the theme of this restaurant is also carne, but with a more rustic and creative approach.  I started with a selection of house made head-cheese and salami, prosciutto di Parma and house-cured olives.  Really, really (I mean really) good stuff.  For my main, the house made tagliatelle with a no-tomato pork ragu set a new standard in my mind for rustic Italian.  The pasta was 2-3 times thicker than is typical, so only a few large pieces of pasta constitute a full meal, and the ragu consisted of shredded pork in a thin, delicate, transparent sauce.  Truly excellent food, and a definite “repeat” for the future!

View of the rustic interior at rustic Italian restaurant, Lupa

So there you have it: two days on the ground in New York City and four amazing restaurants, two of which rocked (WD-50 and Lupa), one of which solidly lived up to its reputation (Bar Americain) and only one (Nobu) that pissed me off, pretending that its ok to serve endangered species for dinner.  And by the way, bluefin is on their LUNCH menu too.  Make that doubly pissed off.

Hey, look at that: an Endangered Species! Let's put a ribbon on it and EAT IT!

- Chris