...more recent posts
just ate my first tomato of the year out of the garden. an orange cherry tomato. forgot to take a picture but you know.
Well I'm a little nervous to post here now that my two favorite restaurants (11 Mad and Corton) have been panned by our resident expert (and my food mentor.) But in any case, here goes: We had a great meal at A Voce the other night. The pasta is just amazingly superb. The somewhat new chef, Missy Robbins, is a friend of some friends, and comes from Chicago's Spiaggia restaurant and is steeped in Italian cooking. Did I mention that the pasta is unbelievably good? Really you should try it. Okay, sure, it's expensive, but I think in this case you get what you pay for.
Donning asbestos suit for rebuttal...
food art
via vz
after three days sans alcohol and being a veggie a great friend of mine (and wylie's) had a fantastic meal at wd50 with a large selection of old vino that went awesome with the "always best meals in NYC"
new tastes since last time were sensational with a few fav's below
Shrimp noodles, zucchini, mousseron mushroom, chamomile yogurt
Duck leg, popcorn pudding, kalamansi, lovage
Scrambled egg ravioli, charred avocado, hamachi
this wasn't new to this visit but it rocked again
Cold fried chicken, buttermilk-ricotta, tabasco, caviar
and yummy for the more veggie and a first try for me
Parsnip tart, quinoa, hazelnuts, bok choy
you rock chef wylie
Rouge Tomate's Drink Menu
"Cocktails on the Lighter Side"
Rhubarb Crisp
Ten Cane Rum, Fresh Rhubarb, Lemon, Vanilla, Prosecco
Rhubarb Bellini
Spiced Rhubarb Purée with Prosecco
Grass Hopper
Vodka, Sugar Snap Pea, Mint, Lemon, finished with Valrhona Chocolate Shavings
Queen’s Cup
Pimm’s, Cucumber Purée, Mint, Lemon Juice
Spring Rouge
Vodka, Campari, Blood Orange Juice, Lemon Juice
this should be cool, from NYTimes
EATALY This giant supermarket from Turin, Italy, is to open in New York in a year. Its 32,000 square feet will include restaurants and market areas. Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali’s restaurant company are partners: 200 Fifth Avenue (23rd Street).
ad hoc goat spit
home grown container herbs
the herb society
(this place just opened, below is from blackbookmag.com, not sure about this in 2009, "Word on the street says Mari Vanna will be kept secret, with owners handing out keys to approved customers")
Mari Vanna
New York Restaurants » Gramercy » Russian
41 E. 20th Street
(Park Ave. and Broadway)
Selected private openings through July. Russian myth has Mari Vanna as an old woman who took in strangers, cooked elaborate dishes in classic Russian tradition, and served on her finest china. The strangers were eventually given keys and treated like family. Hence this cozy resto. Russian owners took their time perfecting this homey place; interior's filled with pepper grinders, lamps, books, teakettles, and other authentic Russian antiques. Bit on the precious side. Food on a grand scale, heaping portions of flaky chicken Kiev, beef stroganoff, and salade Olivier are not to be missed. Candy dishes abound, just like the ones you couldn't touch at Granny's. Word on the street says Mari Vanna will be kept secret, with owners handing out keys to approved customers.
must try his chocolate
grand cru food (flavors, textures, colors) @ aldea west 17th
space is designed by lady that did corton
marea, locanda verde, and now aldea opened in 09, nyc never sleeps....
finally getting to corton next week
water water everywhere...
Ate at Locanda Verde, delish from head to toe, and a really nice oven roasted chicken (cooked perfecto)
((village voice))
Counter Culture
Surfing Bay Ridge at Asmak Taama with Gibby Haynes
Matching fish with rock stars in Bay Ridge
By Robert Sietsema
Tuesday, January 13th 2009 at 3:32pm
Cook like an Egyptian
Asmak Taama
413 Bay Ridge Avenue, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, 718-921-3200
My guests, on a last visit to Asmak Taama, included Butthole Surfers frontman Gibson "Gibby" Haynes and legendary Rolling Stones scribe Reverend Charles M. Young. Six of us found ourselves wedged into Scooter's compact hybrid—Gibby's wife, Missy, sprawled across his lap—bombing down Third Avenue in the night shadow of the Gowanus Expressway. Anticipating seafood, I was flashing over the Surfers' "Pepper" video, in which a woman with a bouffant hairdo scales a fish with a ferocious cleaver, all the while smiling into the camera. You keep expecting a finger to fly in your direction.
Our destination was one of the new Egyptian fish-market cafés in Bay Ridge, where you can view the raw catch glistening in the window, then step inside and devour it. With difficulty, we extracted ourselves from the blue Honda and burst into the pink interior of the restaurant. On the monitor overhead, 100 violinists dressed in white tuxedos accompanied a gentleman tinkling on a white piano—hey, I want Egyptian TV in my apartment! In fact, the proprietors of Asmak Taama ("Tasty Fish" in Arabic) hail from Alexandria, a port on the Mediterranean famous for its seafood cafés.
After we'd settled down at one of the long tables, I rendezvoused with our proprietress at the fish display and mulled over the selection. Arranged cheek-by-jowl, the fresh fish ranked in the front window were beguiling: big striped bass, their bulging sides crazed with a delicate black herringbone; slender pink snappers; sardines larger and milder than you've ever encountered before; gleaming silver barbounia, sometimes called mullets; bulbous foreshortened porgies, their eyes gleaming; and plainspoken tilapia, a fish often farmed in a sustainable fashion. I selected a porgy, two barbounia, and a giant striped bass, then watched as the specimens were whisked away to the kitchen at the rear of the restaurant. Wisely, we left the method of preparation up to our hostess.
As the apps began to arrive, Gibby regaled us with rock-tour tales, including one about trying to cook a fish in a rented RV somewhere in Indiana as it jounced down the interstate. First to hit the table was the fried eggplant appetizer ($3.50), which swam in a dark tomato sauce with lots of hot green chilies. "Shit, this is good," intoned Gibby in his nasal north-Texas accent, as he contemplated a piece of eggplant planted on a pita. We could only nod our assent, as our mouths were stuffed. Also among the early arrivers was a basket of golden French fries sprinkled with ground cumin ($2.50); a rudimentary salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and parsley slicked with olive oil; and a plate of dirty rice strewn with toasted pine nuts. The starters were so good that we were emboldened to order more—though we were disappointed to discover that "potato salad" is the name bestowed on plain roasted new potatoes.
But whatever the apps, salads, and sides, the fish arrive with a drumroll at Asmak Taama. In the Egyptian fashion, our hulking striped bass ($15) had been coated with whole-wheat flour and spices, dampened with seawater, and flame-grilled to coal-mine blackness. The intention is that the skin be stripped off and discarded, revealing the acres of smoky pink flesh. But Scooter dissented: "This skin is even more delish than the fish," he exclaimed delightedly.
The porgy ($13) and barbounia ($7 each) appeared next. They'd been deep-fried with a crunchy coating. While the porgy was large-boned and coarse-fleshed, making it easy to extract the bland, snowy meat, the tastier mullets had fine bones and took more work to eat. In addition, we were frankly freaked out by the fierce faces of the barbounia, which had two rows of teeth like white sixpenny nails. After a discussion of rock sainthood, in which I mentioned seeing Kurt Cobain T-shirts for sale outside the Assisi Cathedral in Italy, Gibby sheepishly noted he'd been in rehab with Cobain right before his self-offing.
After pushing back from the table, we washed everything down with steaming cups of sage tea and an assortment of pastries that the hostess had excused herself to go down the street to get. But the biggest surprise was yet to come. After comparing nightmarish stories about going to high school in Texas, where both he and I remembered being beset by Bible-thumping Christians, the venerable rock surrealist mentioned he'd graduated from Dallas's Lake Highlands High School. "Holy crap!" I exclaimed. "I went to the same penal institution! You must be its most famous grad."
"No," he replied modestly. "That would be Morgan Fairchild."
wylie's going to be a contestant on top chef masters. yay wylie. sadly the host is not quite padma...
slate food "issue"
goode on you
wonder if its any good here??