Zetetical Society Meeting Notes

Sar mailed me from Paris last night to mention having gone to Le Relais de Venise with a relative. It’s a restaurant that’s famous for its Steak Frites and only serves that. She mentioned the New York branch opening and I had read about it earlier in the week. I met Wilmar for lunch today and found we were standing outside of it. I refuse to be outdined, even if Sar is on a fancy trip overseas.

Fortunately for a place that only does one dish, they serve a really good Steak Frites. You get some bread and a salad. You get half your Steak Frites. When you’re done, they bring you the second half. Excellent. I’m not quite sure what the sauce was… butter.. . pepper… something something. I really enjoyed it.

And it’s kind of like going to dinner with her, even if she is overseas.

It seems inappropriate to post a long-overdue restaurant review with a hurricane in the Gulf, but we’re just waiting.

We went to Apiary with a friend the other night. They’re on Third Ave near 10th St. Promising name, right?

We were originally supposed to go somewhere else in the neighborhood, but the menu wasn’t right for the friend and I remembered Apiary as “that place with that guy who was doing that thing with those guys.” That turned out on later review to be a chef from Bar Americaine who was cooking for the furniture line which owned the place. So, anyway, we tried it after the friend approved the menu.

The furniture company ownership shows, the place looks pretty swank. I liked the modern lampshades with chandeliers cut into them over the modern tables,  complimented by the outline of chandeliers around the wall lighting.

Sangria was good. I had a crab cake appetizer that was far better than most. Then came a braised rabbit entree which was really terrible. The meat was well-cooked, but it had a sauce that tasted mostly of grease and an incredible amount of salt. It came with spatzele and some mushroomy veggie thing which also had the bad sauce all over them.  I’m going to assume the chef was off for the holiday, it was a little late, etc., but it just wasn’t a good dish by any measure except for the rabbit itself.

We went to Kang Suh for dinner last night. As I was just remarking, it’s  like a pregnant she-yak ate a bushel of rancid garlic and died. In my stomach.

I still recommend the place!

Blue Hill is a small restaurant in the village specializing in produce grown at their farm in the Hudson Valley. The produce and, indeed, the whole menu live up to that promise. I had the tomato appetizer, and the tomato sorbet in it was out of this world. The pork and brussels sprouts with chorizo were also very good. The highlight of the way the food is prepared is that while it’s filling, it doesn’t seem like it was filled up with butter, cream, hog fat, etc. The stuff just tasted good on its own. The waiter was a little out of it, but the sommelier had some enthusiastic good choices.

Cru is famous for it’s wine list. Their red and white lists both run about 130 pages each. Of course, it’s impossible to pick wine from a list like that anyway, so we ended up having the tasting menu with wine pairings. The food was good for the opposite reason than Blue Hill’s. The first few dishes were Japanese inspired, fresh, healthy and paired with whites. Slowly the amount of butter, cream, hog fat, etc. involved in each dish increased and increased. Dishes grew bigger. Wines grew redder. We were full with three courses to go. The wine pairings were good, one or two very good. And it just kept coming. More wine, more food. This is a tasting menu for a 350 pound guy who hasn’t eaten all week since getting the news that he has two months to live and now is ready to go all out. A dinner like that stays with you. You now have the GI tract of a 350 pound guy who just go the news that he has three months to live and a hangover that rivals the pain in your gut. The next day, as you sip tea and eat toast, you vow: Never again. Never, never again.

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there and they were ordering and having fun… And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

Amazing news, Bill! Black people dining in restaurants?! In 2007?! With silverware?! Unsupervised by local Cheesecake Factory management?!

You really should have kept it more of a secret, Bill.

If you (and that makes you one of four people) have been following the, shall we say, narrative thread of this blog closely, you’ll notice, perhaps, that I eat out at nice restaurants from time to time. It perhaps receives a little disproportionate amount of coverage here, but that’s a polite alternative to “today I spent 8 hours tearing Cat 5 cables from switches and piling them up on the floor.” Besides, it spares you my dull observations on fatherhood, or at least replaces them with my dull observations on overeating.

I’m not complaining. I feel truly lucky to be able to eat out as often as I do and I will miss it one day when I cannot.

Unfortunately, eating out in nice places tends to really leave one jaded. When I was twenty, a decent order of General Tso’s chicken could get me to talk about a place for weeks. By the time, I’m sixty, I really fear that it might take an actual Krugerrand cooked in Saffron and Ghee.

Insieme

Our stuffed saga begins with dinner at Insieme about a month ago with Alex (not work Alex). Marco Canora was executive chef at Craft, the man behind Hearth and then he opened an Italian place. The catch, the theme, is that the menu is divided in half and you can order from the old school side or the new school side. The disclaimer: my best friend has something to do with the wine there, but since I’m not a journalist, I still get to comment.

Let’s first talk about the wine: in a moment of irony, my friend suggested and served us the Kalin Cellars Cuvee LD 1994, the single worst bottle of wine I have had in my life. Imagine a sour bowl of pickeled hot peppers that ’s been sitting at room temperature in a steel bowl on some deli’s table for an afternoon turned into a Chardonnay. Truly awful stuff. Let this not reflect badly on the wine list itself, the Chateau Kefraya from the Bekka Valley more than made up for the Kalin. Prestone would have made up for it.

I ordered the Fish crudo (salmon belly, hamachi, oyster), Arista di Maile (roasted pork loin), and Alex and I split a Lasagna Verdi Bolognase. In between that were blurs of amuse bouches and mini courses (egg drop soup, something on a cruton with goat cheese and some sort of cheesy butter, desserts, etc.). The food was fantastic, fantastic without exception. Something like 15,000 calories were consumed. I could have been rolled home.

Can you complain if you ate too well one night? That might be a sin.

L’Atelier du Joel Robuchon

Then, Sar and I went to L’Atelier du Joel Robuchon, a restaurant that must recruit staff from OCD drug trials. Everything served there was impeccable. I had the Carmelized Eel layered with smoked fois gras, Asparagus soup, Maine lobster in sherry vinegar mayonnaise over iceberg lettuce, Roasted Japanese hanger steak and Signature Grapefruit Dessert. The steak was accompanied by potatoes with so much butter that you could write the Gettysburg Address clearly in the top with a sewing needle. There was nothing out of place in the entire meal. Nothing. If they garnished with surgical equipment, I would not be surprised. For example, the eel came with miniature chopped scallions (or something that looked like miniature scallions) sitting in a tiny pile. Each scallion slice was the same size. Each scallion slice was perfect. 20 of these slices could fit on your small fingernail. Someone can cut some serious onions back there. I could see doing it with a small razor blade. They have a very focused staff.

They also seem to have an annoying habit of pushing various things on patrons though: the tasting menu, an extra small plate. It’s just slightly past the polite recommendation and slightly closer to the “So, can I start everyone off with chicken wings and margaritas?” that introduces service at chain restaurants.

But in the end, I think we just felt foolish about the expense and the precious, affected food. No matter how good it was, it just felt silly to have eaten there.

Fleming’s

A very satisfying contrast was dinner at Fleming’s, a chain steak house with an outpost in Boston near the theater district for a family member’s birthday. Service was very good, and it was the best service in Boston that I’ve had. The salads were excellent. The wine, a Malbec, was very, very good. I had a bone-in New York Strip that was out of this world. The sides were also great: asparagus, mac-n-cheese, that sort of thing. An acutal meal in Boston without a single complaint.

To compare it to the Robuchon place, the prices weren’t really all that different if you add up sides and salads and that sort of thing, but nothing felt silly.

Boqueria

Last, we have Boqueria, a tapas place in Chelsea. It’s a tapas summer. I went with Alex (not work Alex) on Sunday for a quick bite. We had some white anchovy on olives and goat cheese, some Jamon and other miscellaneous little Spanish sausages, a plate of croquettes, and some dates wrapped in bacon.

This was also a very satisfying meal.

So, in the end, the scale tips back to the simple food. It always does. The next time we book at someplace that’s just too fancy, I’ll have to remember that the simple stuff can be the best and we’ll go for pizza or continue the Tapas summer.

Sar took me to Donguri for my birthday. The food and service were fantastic and I love Japanese food, so it was a great find. A highlight was our discovery of the best Japanese appetizer that I’ve had recently: sweet corn tempura. Sweet corn tempura combines the subtle Japanese appetizer with the hillbilly appeal of fried sweet corn. Yee haw.

Last week, we went to Blue Ginger, Ming Tsai’s famous restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

I’ve wanted to go for a long time. I read a New Yorker profile of Tsai years ago that made me aware of his reputation and I moved up to the Boston area around the time Blue Ginger opened, so for almost ten years I’ve believed that there was some place near Boston where there was simply better Asian food. Asian food of near-mythic quality is a draw for me. This place has been on my list of places to try.

For an appetizer, I tried the wonton-crusted colossal shrimp with wild mushroom ragout and Chinese black bean salsa. I remembered what’s funny about Boston-area fine dining of the Blue Ginger era.

There’s some recepie for the perfect Boston gourmet appetizer circa 1998 and it goes something like: take a piece of flat bread, pile up a mixture of vegetables cut very small and oily vinaigrette, add some sort of cheese crumble, put it next to a side of fruit salsa in a tiny metal bowl, decorate with pesto, red pepper sauce and some sort of mysterious white sauce from squeeze bottles, and then top with Kalamata olives.

Glancing over at the open kitchen, I saw the familiar squeeze bottles. The flat bread was instead the big crust on my giant fried shrimp. The vinaigrette and vegetable combo was the mushroom sauce and black bean salsa. My hopes began to vanish with every gloppy bite.

Sar had the Sesame Caesar Salad with Chinese Cruller Croutons. It was better. Sesame and caesar salad is actually a good combo and the croutons were very good, but they were not mythic croutons. I was not transported to another land by their powerful crunch.

We both had the same entree, one of Ming’s signature dishes, Garlic-Black Pepper Lobster with Lemongrass Fried Rice and Pea Tendril Salad. Contemplate garlic-black pepper sauce for a moment. No, please, you’ve read this far. Indulge me. Garlic and black pepper. It’s a nice combo in an Asian sauce: spicy, tangy, earthy. Imagine it as a subtle glaze over lobster meat, a foil to the meat’s light sweetness. Brilliant, no? Ok, let’s up the ante a bit. Let’s not make it a subtle glaze. Let’s say the lobster is sitting in some of the sauce and you have a lot more garlic and black pepper. Or we up the ante a little bit more: let’s say the lobster a whole lobster in its shell, cut into sections and it is drowning in the stuff. The pea tendrils are nice, but soon they are drowning in the sauce as well. The rice is, well you get the picture. All that sauce is compelling, but a little bit sickening too. The signature dish is more of a signed declaration of war.

Dessert was great. The pastry chef won us back briefly. I had the cookie plate and Sar had the Sesame Macadamia Carmel Nut Tart.

I might go back if I were in the area and friends wanted to go, but I would try to find things on the menu that were a lot more subtle. I wouldn’t go out of my way.