May 2005 Archives

Doug sent me this little teaser about a food blog panel on June 16 at the 92nd St. Y:

For the Main Course, A Blog

Thu, Jun 16, 2005 7:30pm

The next best thing to eating well is reading about good food. Hear a panel of the most up-to-date culinary connoisseurs, food bloggers, talk about the web of virtual foodies and how they stay cutting-edge (pun-intended!).  Panelists include Adam Kuban of SliceNY, Alaina Browne of A Full Belly and Josh Friedland of The Food Section. Andrea Strong of The Strong Buzz moderates.

Hmmm....do you see anything interesting?  Or rather, do you NOT see anything interesting?  That's it, put my publicist on the speakerphone, that bitch is FIRED!

I will readily admit that I went to Babbo with low expectations.  My two previous experiences (sometime in the last two years) had been underwhelming.  My companion and I had ordered the pasta tasting menu once, a la carte once.  I always got a whiff of the emperor's new clothes syndrome.  What's the BFD, this stuff looks and tastes like dishes I can approximate at home, I thought.  And that's certainly not why I drop a day's (or more) paycheck on one meal.

But the way people's eyes roll into the back of their heads with ecstasy when they talk about Babbo, you'd think that he was serving up manna shipped directly from heaven.  My friends, whom I love and respect, all told me I had to go back.  It was because I was dining in the front room that I got service that involved the waitress giving my companion clenched teeth attitude about splitting our dishes of pasta, one said.  The pasta tasting menu is one of the best deals in town, another said.  Could I have been (knock wood) mistaken?

So when I found out my cousin Lynda was coming to town, I knew I'd have an excellent opportunity to figure that out.  I called a little under a month in advance at 10:30 a.m. to get a reservation.  Since it was busy, I called again.  And again.  Until I finally connected with...a machine.  And I pressed a button and was put on hold purgatory, where the answering service subjected me to the blowpipes of some (surely Italian) tenor.  Finally, I got a reservationist and asked what was available for May 17 or May 18 for four people.

"We have 5:45 available on May 17 and 10:30 available on May 18."

5:45 and 10:30?!  Such uncivilized times to have a long meal!  After some haggling with my dining companions, we settled on a 5:45 post-work Tuesday night. 

But then we figured out that when the reservationist had deigned to choose MY CALL out of all the pretty pretty personal assistants on perma-redial, I should have made the resy for 5, not 4!  Would I be worthy once more?

I called and had better luck making contact in the afternoon.

"Can I change my reservation to five?"

"Five is a completely different type of reservation.  We don't have anything available now, but I'll make a note that you are interested in a table for five and if anything comes up, we'll call you."

So weeks passed and the Monday before our resy, I called the confirmation line.   (I should note that not only is it hard to get one of these reservations, but the day before your meal, YOU have to call and confirm and not the other way around.)  Nothing had changed.  So, for political reasons, we downsized to three and made it a girls' night out.

I arrived a little early last night to go over the menu and have a little bubbly.  A super flashy black Rolls Royce had just pulled into the spot right in front of the restaurant.  A fully uniformed, white-gloved driver ran around the side to open the door for Mr. Tall Rich Man and the two bottle blonds flanking him.  I followed them into the dim beige room and ordered a glass of Franciacorta. 

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was being piped in in its entirety.  It's always bothered me that they play classic rock radio tunes at Babbo -- it feels like proletariat pretensions in a room with an ostentatious, engulfing cherry blossom arrangement and subdued sepia tones, not to mention patrons with white-gloved drivers waiting out front by the Rolls.

When Lynda and Julie made it in, I told the maitre d' that my party was complete.  I saw Lynda and Julie sort of walk towards the bar and said to them, "Oh, you guys are going to sit at the bar?"  The maitre d' barked at me, "No, I'm seating you right now!" which I found somewhat jarring but, whatever.  I was dressed in my grubby excuse for business casual.  I didn't look like much.

We sat down and went over the menu.  The pasta tasting menu looked pretty boring and safe, so we decided to go a la carte.  I've read so many raves about the more interesting offal dishes, and I definitely only wanted to order things that I couldn't (or wouldn't) really make at home. 

We started with the ceci bruschetta amuse bouche, a lovely, brightly flavored little bite of whole chickpeas and olive paste.  We took a nice long time choosing items that would allow us to try many different flavors.  Interestingly enough, our waiter suggested that we split pastas we all wanted to try.

Chowhounders had been raving about the tripe alla Parmigiana, so I had to try it.  The warm, sloppy bowl of "rags" (as Thai people call them) swam in a garlic-hinting tomato sauce, topped with two pieces of garlic-rubbed grilled bread.  The white strips had a nice jellylike chew, but the dish was overall somewhat bland.  I don't know who could stomach a whole bowl of it, either.  I got through about a quarter of it and pushed it away to save room for our other courses. 

Lynda got the lovely marinated anchovies with radishes and lobster oil, which were arranged like a silver daisy on the plate.  The shiny little strips were fresh and clean tasting, the tiny pile of thinly sliced radishes providing a little extra bite.   

Julie trounced us all with the warm lamb's tongue vinaigrette, which came with a poached three-minute egg, morels and tomato.  With excellent texture contrasts and just the right amount of vinaigrette, the slices of tender, fatty tongue were perfect. 

Pastas weren't nearly as exciting.  Julie once again chose best -- maccheroni alla chittarra with bottarga was surprisingly lovely, tender oven dried tomato bodies slightly tart, the bottarga adding just enough salt and the bread crumbs providing a subtle crunch to the spaghetti.  But my lamb's brain postage stamps and Lynda's goose liver ravioli with balsamic vinegar and brown butter were tough and rubbery.  I guess I was expecting the brain filling to be smoother, but it was curd-like and without any discernible flavor.  The postage stamps were also quite salty, the lemon sage butter very subtle.  The black balsamic sauce would have been a good foil for the goose liver if the little pockets weren't absolutely drowning in it.  None of us finished our pastas.

Our main courses were good, but not spectacular.  I once again picked our least favorite dish.  On first taste, I thought my barely pink duck leg was overcooked, but after consideration, I think it was just low fat -- the skin had been pressed and the fat almost completely rendered, giving it a very gentle crispness.  I like duck fat.  When I think duck, I think fat.  I don't think slightly livery chicken.  The whole dish was again quite salty, though, especially the green bits underneath.   

Lynda's two-minute calamari, Sicilian lifeguard style (which sounds like a medical procedure or something) came in a big bowl, the soft calamari bits stretching out in a large bowl of chunky tomato sauce with a couple of black olives.  It seemed like peasanty comfort food -- good, but not special. 

Julie picked the winner once more with her fennel dusted sweetbreads with duck prosciutto and sweet onion.  The sweet, juicy caramelized onion and wafer-crisp duck prosciutto were perfect textural and flavor companions for the rich sweetbread hunks.  "The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is a fried oyster," Julie said.

Desserts were worth ordering, maybe even worth returning for.  My ricotta chocolate chip fritters were hot, crisp, sweet little fluff balls piled next to a shot glass filled with a sweet lemon sorbetto slushy.  Toasty curls of coconut added depth to Julie's buttery warm blueberry crostata with coconut gelato.  Lynda got an darling sorbetti and gelati plate, the perky golf ball sized scoops nestling in little glass egg cups.  Our favorites were the silky apricot sorbetto and the extract-rich toasted almond gelato. 

As we lingered over our little petits fours plate, the maitre d' came by with an intense "How was your meal, ladies?"  I think he was trying to turn the table over for the mass of late diners cramped in the bar area. 

Our bill was reasonable, all things considered.  Julie chose some great dishes, but I still stand by my previous assessment of Babbo -- it just ain't all that.  Lynda summed it up best:  "I think I would like it better if it were my neighborhood place, and I knew what was good to order."  Babbo's pleasant food seems like the kind of homey village grub you'd get at the ideal immigrant eatery around the corner.  But Babbo is not your neighborhood place, because you wouldn't have to keep redialing your neighborhood place to get a reservation, and if you had one extra person, nobody would give you a hard time about squeezing in one extra person at the roomy four top.  While it's not quite the emperor's new clothes, it ain't the bees' knees either.

Total: $110 per person with tax and tip for one drink, app, pasta, entree, dessert, each with bottled sparkling water.

Will I return?  No, I don't think so.  I'd like to have those ricotta fritters again, but I don't think I'd go back for anything else.  I'd rather go to Al Di La, where I think the cooking is on just about the same level, but the atmosphere is hassle free.

****

Julie sent me an e-mail today that said, "I'm actually becoming very disillusioned with fancy restaurants."  I have to agree.  Where will we be wowed?  I still haven't been to Daniel, Chanterelle, Per Se, Masa, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin.  What $$$$ restaurant will show me the money?  Send your thoughts to gandas[at]gmail[dot]com.

[7:00 p.m., SRIPRAPHAI, 9 members of my extended family pore over the extensive menu.]

MY AUNT: How about duck?

ME: Yeah, sure that sounds great.

MY AUNT: Duck no coming?

ME: What kind of duck?

SIRION: She means DOUG, your roommate!

I’ve never understood the allure of the all-you-can-eat meatfest that is Churrascaria Plataforma.  It took me a long time to get into whole pieces of meat.  Steaks just seemed so savage and inelegant, with all that serrated sawing and chewing and bloody juice.  Now, of course, I can appreciate a nice fatty piece of charred meat, but I’d still rather split Peter Luger’s porterhouse for two with two other enthusiastic carnivores who will eat the lion’s share.

And I can’t trust any all-you-can-eat joint.  The quality of the food is often rather dubious (because how else are they going to make their margins?).  But more importantly, I cannot be trusted to keep from slipping into capitalist consumption mode, busting my gut to make sure I get my money’s worth.  It took years of ranch-drowned round trips at the Claim Jumper salad bar before I realized that no matter how courageously my stomach played chicken with the restaurant buffet, they could still make money off the cheap-ass pesto tossed tortellini and machine chopped iceberg that stodgily gurgled in my abused stomach.  It’s a lose-lose situation for all parties except my waistline.

But my cousin Sirion gets her M.B.A. from Columbia Business School this year and to celebrate, she made a reservation for 8 at 8 at the Churrascaria Plataforma meat trough, one of her cherished dining destinations.  I try not to be too picky/bitchy with my family because I love them dearly and they’re stuck with me for life.  After enduring a graduation ceremony involving a soporific student speaker who prattled on using every high school graduation speech cliché in the book (friends we’ve made – check;  come from different backgrounds – check;  thank you parents – check;  cherish these moments forever – checkmate!), we walk the 15 blocks from Madison Square Garden through an especially grimy and stinky section of Hell's Kitchen to get to the restaurant.  We are seated quite quickly at a round table close to the maitre d' podium, far away from the magic kitchen portal where the spit skewered meats emerge.

We all hit the salad bar, a surefire money-saver for the restaurant.  I watch the ladies next to me pile dull-looking, seemingly intestine-contentious sushi onto their plates alongside piles of limp mesclun, strange creamy fish casseroles, clumpy sun-dried tomato risotto and prefab cold shrimp cocktail.  I take some bits and bobs myself, knowing full well that if someone served the stuff to me at a restaurant, I’d never return.  But my little American game of Beat the Receipt has begun and I determinedly pick at my foraged goodies.  We turn our little placards from red to green and begin to make googly eyes at the carcass-bearers.

About ten minutes and two types of flesh into the meat orgy, a waiter gets bumped by a chair at the table next to us.  He steps back, tipping his tray and sending our third full bottle of Pellegrino straight onto my 4’10”, 90 lb. aunt's fragile head and shoulder, smacking her delicate little hand before it crashes into wet green shards on the floor.  Everyone is appalled.  We all turn concerned to my wee button of an aunt.  She says she's okay, but we are all shaken and worried.  While my cousin Atita stands and pulls her chair away, the mop boy spends about ten minutes sweeping up glass and mopping up our sparkling.  The captain brings an ice compress for my aunt's spidery little hand. 

They do not offer us a different table while they clean up, so Atita chews a sawed off chicken leg while we wait.  They do not bring us a new bottle of Pellegrino.  After ten minutes, we have to flag two different people down to get some for us.  My tiny, featherweight aunt, the only person in our big-boned party whose frame could have been damaged by a flying glass bottle, proceeds to eat a domino-sized portion of salmon for the rest of the meal, insisting that she's fine and that we carry on.

But it’s hard to gnaw on hunks of flesh with gusto when you’re trying to make sure your pint-sized aunt is not suffering from a CONCUSSION.  The captain and waiters, for all intents and purposes, seem to have brushed the incident off.  In our rainy parade of a dinner, we begin to taste flaws.  “Everything’s so salty,” Aaron says.  “I think there’s MSG in here,” Atita asserts.  “Nothing spectacular yet,” says Sakorn.  My poor cousin Sirion, who was so excited for us to have a good time, begins to dejectedly push the bits around her plate.

Little pork sausages are juicy, but the casing is so rubbery I’m afraid my vigorous slicing is going to send the chunks hi-bouncing on the table.  Turkey wrapped in bacon is so bone dry that no dousing of vinegar salsa can reconstitute it.  Flank steak, prime rib, and sirloin are cooked well enough, but they’re right – it’s salty and not much else.  I don’t know, when you eat meat in that quantity, it becomes less nourishing and enjoyable and more HARD WORK.  I’ve also noticed that the unbidden waiters tend to offer ladies the well-done bits and the men the bloodier slices.  I assume they do it from experience, which makes me sad for the overworked jaws of my sex.

The mashed potato sides are salty and buttery, but not a great foil for the already salty meat.  I don't bother with the rice, steamed broccoli or toasted yucca flour (another thing I can accept but don't really understand -- because if the salt hasn't sucked all the moisture out of your mouth, these dry little crumbs DEFINITELY will).  Bread crumb rolled fried ripe bananas are gooey and sweet.

Later, an impossibly loud fire alarm begins to whoop.  And whoop.  And WHOOP.  The waiters all roll their eyes.  "We're part of a hotel, and they have to do fire drills."  At dinner time on a Sunday night, apparently.

A voice comes over the loudspeaker as the music is turned off.  "Ladies and gentleman.  Someone tripped the security alarm.  It was a false alarm."  The alarm whoops a few more times before dinner resumes.  On another day, we might find this funny too.  But our good humor seems to have been swept up with the glass that FELL ON MY AUNT’S HEAD. 

After we have all finished tentatively eating our slices of meat, the captain comes by and says, "I'd like to offer you a round of drinks," as a half-assed apology for the waiter's gaffe.  I point out what should be obvious to anyone whose taken our orders for two glasses of wine and two beers between eight adults --  "We're not really drinkers."

Sirion says, "How about dessert?"

The captain says, hesitantly, "For that I have to ask permission."

Sirion says, "Well, if you could comp her [Sirion's mini-mom] because of what happened -- she didn't eat much."  The captain slips away.  He comes back to take down the name of our party's reservation, a phone number, and my little brittle aunt's name, only then pouring on the slippery sympathy, telling us that he'll be happy to "call an ambulance" if we need one. 

The hokey dessert cart rolls around.  I get an enjoyable fruit tart and Aaron (who generally subsists on Del Taco and Taco Bell) wolfs his cheesecake down, but the other desserts we have for the table –coconut caramel cake and chocolate mousse – get pecked at unenthusiastically.

We get our bill.  The captain has comped my bitty aunt's meal, but we have been charged for four Pellegrinos.  That's one more than we drank.  Which means we have been charged for the Pellegrino THAT NEARLY KNOCKED MY POCKET-SIZED AUNT OUT.

Talk about insult to injury!  I grew up with a mama who would say, “Oh, that tofu tastes sour and there’s something green and furry growing on it?  It’s okay, I’ll just pay for that and buy you something different.”  But when you are eight people out for a special occasion, paying $50 a head (which I’d like to note buys you two enormous “steaks for four”, two orders of lamb chops and about a dozen sides at Peter Luger), you want to relax and have a good time.  You don’t want to make a scene.  But make me pay for the DEADLY ASSAULT WEAPON that almost took out a member of my family and I’m going to have to get scrappy on your ass.

I call the manager over to chat and he quickly knocks the bill down to a more agreeable number, because he KNOWS they fucked up.  But WHY did I have to make a scene in front of my family for that to happen? 

THANKS FOR RUINING MY COUSIN'S GRADUATION NIGHT, CHURRASCARIA PLATAFORMA.

Bridge: Burnt.

Ladies and gentleman, my meatmongering days are over.

Some naughty Italian named these guys "strozzapreti" ("priest stranglers") because of their twisted up towel shape.  Try them with pesto or even some puttanesca (whore style) sauce, you cheeky monkey.  Murray's Cheese has these and other loose pastas, like frilly orecchiete and triangular trenne, for $5.99/lb.

West coast and East coast Times ran stories yesterday about the culinary Willy Wonkas aping Ferran Adria's wacky laboratory cuisine.  I don't have a problem with dehydrators and liquid nitrogen being used to cook dinner.  But I'm completely uninterested in the science of shrimp flavored air and inkjet printed soybean paper.  Give me the incredible chemistry of a grilled dry-aged steak over these poncy novelties anyday.

As if drive-thrus and the microwave weren't lazy fat ass-friendly enough, now "Iron Chef" Wolfgang Puck has lent his bedraggled name to a line of self-heating cans of "gourmet" latte.  The heating agent is quicklime -- that's right, the shit murderers use to quickly eat away the flesh of dead bodies. 

We don't need a new food pyramid, we just need to stop eating food that has a longer shelf life than we do.

From the ever fearless and real Gastropoda:

Maybe it’s because the San Francisco Chronicle kicked ass with its series on "The Taking of 167 West 12th Street," but my local paper is filling me with less hometown pride than usual, if you can imagine. Scornful as I am, even I was surprised to spot a headline that essentially read: Nyah, Nyah, Nyah. The estimable Christian Delouvrier is out of a job and the most embarrassing critic in the history of restaurant reviewing is allowed to piss all over him claiming the credit. It’s as if the only way the paper can justify hiring a joke is by holding up a little fanny-pack belt with a notch in it. Time was when the Times would have been more modest, even self-effacing; in both my stints on 43d (sic) Street any mention of the paper in the paper had to be cleared all the way up the command ladder. Now, a full year before he’s scheduled to retire, it’s clear that Al Siegal has left the building. But at least the world has been made safe for martini drinkers at Ducasse.

Mmmkay!

Check out Daily Gluttony, an L.A. food blog with a great pair of -- uh, I mean, sense of humor.  A quote I'm totally feeling:

I called my parents today when I got home from work. In typical Asian parent style, they asked me if I had eaten dinner already. I said yes. Lie #1. They asked me what I ate. I said rice. Lie #2. They asked "Rice and what?" I said chicken. Lie #3. All lies I tell you! Because #1, I hadn't eaten yet, #2, I wasn't going to eat rice, and #3, I wasn't going to eat chicken. So what, pray tell, did I have for dinner???

You see, I'm not the only over-25 yr old who still has to lie to her parents.

*Link courtesy of Adam

Dear Sally,

It seems you pay a high price for everything you love. Shopping brought me such pleasure. Until Mr. Credit Card Company came knocking down my door and forced me to live on a budget. Joe brought me another kind of pleasure. But then he stopped calling. Such mishaps led me directly to ice cream. And I was happy until I started packing on the pounds. What should I do?

—Bummed out in New York

Dear Bummed out in New York,

I know you wrote to Sally and not to me, Crabby, but I must buttinsky here.  Sally's a total enabler and she's just blowing sunshine up your ass with her answer because she always wanted to get with Joe the whole time you were together.  I know, she's such a slut!

Sally knows you'll never be satisfied by Haagen Dazs Light ice cream.  You'll just keep eating more and more until you are like a bloated whale beached on the toxic Manhattan shore.  Then she's going to move in on Joe while you're down and before you know it, she'll be another one of those basketballs on chopsticks carrying his malnourished child in her Strivectin-lubed belly. 

Lowfat ice cream is not the answer, just like shopping wasn't the answer, and that loser boyfriend wasn't the answer, you vapid mongoose. 

Let's face it, you'll never be as cute, as skinny, or as well-accessorized as those Daily Candy drawings.  So I say drink another pomegranate margarita or ten and start blogging.  Pour your pent-up sexual frustration into your writing and before you know it, you'll be shriveled, pale and hunchbacked over a computer, and your audience of tens will know what douchebags Sally and Joe were.  Then you'll really know what it means to hit rock bottom.  Wait, did I say that out loud?

Eat me,
Crabby