MARIANI’S
October 6,
2003
NEWSLETTER
Shawneetown, Illinois, circa 1935
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EDITOR'S NOTE: This newsletter is
also available on the very
comprehensive food site www.sautewednesday.com
which has dozens of other links to food articles
from
around the world, as well as at The Grumpy Gourmet at
http://www.grumpygourmetusa.com/links.html
Cover Story: What's Cooking in Beantown? by John Mariani
New York Corner: The Passing of La Côte Basque by John Mariani
Quick Bytes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WHAT'S COOKING IN BEANTOWN?
by John Mariani
Boston is a great walking city, one you can get to know easily and quickly, so familiarity becomes part of its immediate charm, from Back Bay to Faneuil Hall, from Old North Church to Fenway Park. The city seems meant for meandering, for very few streets go in anything like a straight line. "We say the cows laid out Boston," noted local lad Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Well, there are worse surveyors." And along any of those wriggling byways you are likely to stumble on two or three restaurants, especially in the North End--Boston's Little Italy--and its very small Chinatown around Kingston and Essex Streets.
I love the spic-and-span North End much more than I do New York's gritty Little Italy. For one thing, Boston's is still a thriving Italian-American community, with plenty of good bakeries and pastry shops, pizzerias and trattorias, the best of which is now Bricco (241 Hanover Street; 617-248-6800; www.bricco.com) , whose owners have now partnered with two ebullient Abruzzese women--Marisa Iocco and Rita D'Angelo, who used to own Galleria Italian and La Bettola.
I'd always liked
the cooking at Bricco under former chefs who broke free of the
clichés
of the neighborhood's menus, but Marisa (who does the cooking) and Rita
(up front) bring their own regional culinary traditions along with
exceptional precision and taste to the kitchen and dining room here,
which has a polished wooden facade (right)
that opens onto the North End's main
street, Hanover, so
you may dine al fresco on
warm Boston evenings. The enthusiasm of these two women is infectious, so listen when they tell you to try the evening's specials or the great creamy bufalo mozzarella that just came in or a wonderful bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo from a producer who is their cousin. Or you can pretty much point anywhere on the menu and be very happy. What's not to like about the sheer carpaccio of octopus with a julienne of endive, shaved Parmigiano, and a parsley condiment? Zucchini blossoms are given a crisp tempura treatment, served with frisée greens and a yellow tomato purée, and the northern Italian bacon called Speck and apricots are stuffed into quail and served with radicchio Trevisana and a Pinot Grigio consommé As I said, not your usual Italian-American fare.
Pastas are superb here, from the pappardelle with scallops and wild asparagus in a lobster broth to the rigatoni teeming with lobster meat with golden pea tendrils and a saffron sauce. There is also a "Big Night" timpano stuffed pasta with little meatballs and a rich ragù. Then you can turn to the secondi, main courses like a suprême of chicken stuffed with mozzarella and truffles, with orange pepper panna cotta, or a whole grilled sea bass with "Easter egg" potatoes, olives and herbs. Niman Ranch pork is served as a tenderloin with four peppers, artichoke hearts and baby mustard greens, and the beef is a Kobe-style rib-eye dressed with pistachios and sidled with a cauliflower gratinata and red pepper coulis.
Desserts are modern takes on old favorites like sfogliatelle with zabaglione and Godiva chocolate sauce, a Sicilian-style cannoli with a wonderful Marsala ragù, and a bread pudding with caramel sauce.
The wine list at Bricco is exceptionally well chosen for the menu, rich in Italian and American bottlings you certainly don't see up and down Hanover Street, from small producers, like Cataldi Madonna Malandrino '00 ($52) and Brovia Roero Arneis '02 ($42), along with big names like SummuS, Ornellaia, and Solaia. Prices tend to be higher than I reasonably expected, with too many well over a 100 % market over retail.
There's a $75 five-course menu worth every penny. Otherwise a three-course meal will run about $45-$50 for what I consider among the finest Italian cooking in the country right now.
I’ve been an admirer for years of chef
Daniel Bruce at the Boston Harbor Hotel, and now he has his dream
restaurant, Meritage (Rowes Wharf
The
88-seat dining room (left)
has been configured to showcase
both the Boston waterfront views and the hotel’s wine holdings of 850
selections and
12,000 bottles, with 1,500 displayed in floor-to-ceiling wine cases at the entrance, opening onto a small bar and
tables topped with shiny granite. Leather
banquettes and padded walls have a metallic sheen, and the floor is
done in
woods and mosaic marble and tile.
The menus change frequently, so my report on
this
summer’s offerings only reflects the kind of things Bruce is trying to
accomplish, creating categories of foods that go with similar wines.
For
instance, “Light Whites” include black
and white shrimp cannelloni with saffron
cream and sautéed spinach; wood-grilled Atlantic swordfish in a
spiced
Riesling, with orange and coconut Essence; and roast rabbit stuffed
with sweet
peas and accompanied by oven-dried peppers, pea shoots and cippolini. Recommended wines will be offered with each of
these.
“Full Bodied Whites: included grilled
sea scallops
with Oregon morels and sugar snap peas; steamed Maine lobster with baby
bok
choy in a ginger, green onion broth; and pan-seared wild striped bass,
basil,
clams and tomato chardonnay sauce. He
keeps rolling with “Fruity Reds” dishes like foie gras over braised
greens and a
pinot noir plum compote; and braising
greens and Pinot plum compote, and a slow-roasted Muscovy duck over
snow peas
and Ranier cherry sauce; the “Spicy/Earthy Reds” like black
pepper-seared yellow
fin tuna with zinfandel Butter; and “Robust Reds” like cocoa and
cardamom-crusted
ostrich fan fillet with creamy potatoes, Swiss chard and black currant
syrup.
There is then a selection of several cheeses
with toasted bread and grilled strawberries that go well with the
selection of
Ports, then “Sweets”—a series of tasting plates like citrus, with pineapples, Key limes and tangerines, and a
chocolate
trio of bitter, dark and white chocolates, to be enjoyed with a very
good
dessert wine selection.
As
is obvious, this is highly conceptualized food, and
in most of the match-ups I tried they made very good sense. Bruce obviously uses first-rate ingredients,
as many local ones as possible, and those who don’t like to work too
hard over
their meal choices or feel in a quandary as to what to pair with
different
dishes are going to be very happy here. My
only concern is that too many of the dishes from the
“Fruity Reds,” “Spicy/Earthy
Reds,” and “Robust Reds” have too many sweet components, which tend to
cloy the
palate quickly. They can work with wine,
but they do not work across the board, or even across the span of time
you’re
eating them. Savory is usually better
than sweet with all wines before the cheese and dessert.
There is then a selection of several cheeses
with toasted bread and grilled strawberries that go well with the
selection of
Ports, then “Sweets”—a series of tasting plates (right) like citrus, with pineapples, Key limes and tangerines, and a
chocolate
trio of bitter, dark and white chocolates, to be enjoyed with a very
good
dessert wine selection.
But the prices are very reasonable and the
thinking
behind Meritage sound. If you’re in the
mood for such an experience, this is a perfect place to indulge.
Nevertheless, even as Locke-Ober was being scrubbed and updated, Excelsior was in the development stages, eventually opening this summer with a new Adam Tihany decor of sumptuous deep reds and browns in fabrics and burnished woods and metallic accents, which gives it the cachet of a swinger's nightclub in London circa 1965. I like the wine cache you rise through in the elevator from the more casual first floor, which offers a bar menu. The wine list itself is one of the most extensive in Boston, a real screed of big and small names, with lots of high ticket prices throughout but enough below $50 for more reasonable budgets.
Sumptuous is also the operative word for the menu here, printed in Edwardian Script, and Shire delivers big flavors across the board in an international style that ranges from soupe de poisson ( a tad thin one night) with a steamed fennel custard to duck with jasmine spice and taro cake (overcooked one evening and rather chewy) cooked in a "vertical roast oven," along with a rack of lamb with favas, and Niman "crackled" bacon chop with spring peas. Portions are more than generous, as are side dishes, and prices are not out of line as a result, with appetizers from $13-$25 and entrees $24-$39. There is also a "grand menu" of five courses at $85, paired with wines $125. Downstairs the bar menu lists items like scallops wrapped in bacon, the lobster pizza, fried clams, a bacon sandwich, and salt-and-pepper shortribs, from $9-$22.
There may, however, be too much going on here for the kitchen to handle with finesse, and several dishes I had were not what I suspect they could be at their very best. A lobster pizza (a signature item at Biba) was all right, nothing more, and not the best thing to do with lobster. . . or pizza. A dish called "1 Minute Spaghetti" topped with an ounce of osietra caviar (this appetizer costs $85!) was a complete misconception, the spaghetti turned fishy from the caviar, the caviar compromised in taste and texture by the heat of the pasta. Wood-roasted porcini mushrooms and a tart of white asparagus was very bland. I was not at all taken with a big slab of fresh, very rare foie gras sauced with bittersweet chocolate--emphasis on the sweet--and fresh cherries, whose tartness helped. This odd conceit on the part of chefs to use candy bars on savory food is to me one of the sillier ideas of early 21st century gastronomy.
A charcoal broiled pigeon, cooked properly rare, had excellent flavor and succulence, but its sauce separated on the hot plate. It was accompanied by overcooked morels in butter supposedly laced with Armagnac, though it was hardly evident. A thick-cut wood roasted piece of swordfish was as fine a piece of New England seafood as you're likely to find in Boston, though the "fiery grits" weren't fiery at all, and for some reason my guests and I picked up a faint taste of stale pineapple.
Kilian Weigand's desserts ranged from very good caramel pots de crème with lightly whipped cream and a chocolate cookie and a honey-saffron vanilla ice cream with pine nut wafers that was pleasant to an almond dacquoise of espresso cream and rum mascarpone that was anything but crisp. All desserts are $10.
Just how Shire is managing her time with two restaurants, I'm not sure, but on the Friday night I visited (the front desk messed up my reservations by 24 hours), I was told she was at Locke-Ober, which needed her attentions. But Excelsior, which is one big deal of a restaurant, is going to require a stricter overseeing in the kitchen to make everything come out as right as I know they should.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NEW YORK CORNER
THE PASSING OF LA CÔTE BASQUE
by John Mariani
The
recent
announcement by chef-owner Jean-Jacques Rachou
that he was
going to close La Côte
Basque, one
of the venerable old line French restaurants of New York, and to
re-open in the
spring as a Parisian brasserie was greeted by many more with a sigh than a gasp. After
all, earlier this year the great Lespinasse had
shuttered its
doors, and La Côte Basque, which opened 45 years ago on different
premises, was
not quite in the league of the highly inventive, far more modern
younger
restaurant in the St. Regis.
La Côte Basque was originally opened by the
incorrigibly
rigid Henri Soulé, whose first restaurant, Le Pavillon, set the
mold—a very resticting
mold—in the 1940s for every New York French restaurant to follow in the
1950s
and ‘60s: La Marmiton, Le Chanteclair, Le Cheval Blanc, Clos Normand,
Laurent,
Le Madrigal, Le Chambertin, Georges Rey, Le Quercy, Le Lavandou, and
many
others, most with the same red banquettes and the same
continental-French
menus. The service staffs were all
French, the captains in tuxedoes, the waiters in white jackets, and the
wine
list 100 % French. And the clientele was
the rich and socially connected, the theater and fashion crowds, and
out-of-towners
lucky enough to get a reservation—often treated to a good dose of
Gallic
hauteur.
Many of the old timers
really weren’t very good restaurants to begin with, and the best of
them didn’t
differ much from one another. One can
read with drooping eyelids the reviews of such restaurants back in the
‘50s and
‘60s. In fact, most reviews merely went
through the motions of noting the décor, the dressed-up
clientele, then listing
the menu items—pâté de compagne, canard
rôti
sauce bigarade, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat, and on and on. They
grew
tired, American gastronomy moved on, and, most important, their
clientele died
off. Younger people felt neither
comfortable in such places nor drawn to them for the food.
I was always fond
of La Côte Basque because it was old fashioned
and predictable, although my earliest
forays in the original location often met with a supercilious attitude
so
withering as to make an evening there an exercise in low self esteem. As I became known to the maitre d' the greeting lightened
up. The dining room had a gaiety about the murals of the
French seaside and the little red-and-white striped awnings and sprays
of
flowers and little lamps on the table, and it was always exciting to
see who was there on any given
day or
night. When Rachou moved the restaurant
to smaller quarters across Fifth Avenue, things were somewhat
friendlier, and
the staff somewhat younger (indeed, many of New York’s great
restaurateurs and
chefs, like Drew Nieporent, Charlie Palmer, Gray Kunz, Waldy Maloof,
and Rick
Moonen trained here). And there were
even a few acknowledgments of how French cuisine was changing in the
‘70s, ‘80s,
and ‘90s.
One thing you could not deny
about La Côte Basque was that the cooking was impeccable and that
the classic
dishes were prepared with almost machinelike proficiency. Believe me, the kitchen had plenty of practice
during 45 years in business. There were even some
attempts at nouvelle cuisine back
in the '80s; I recall having my first
encounter with scallops and grapefruit here. The fault
was not in the cooking or in the old-fashioned goodness of the food
but, as
things turned out and changed in the New York restaurant world, in the
realization that so many of La Côte Basque’s dishes were not
really what could
be called haute cuisine at all, and
therefore didn’t justify haute cuisine prices. I
am looking at a recent menu from La Côte Basque
and find listed (as I
would at any of the old line French restaurants): snails in garlic
butter,
oysters in season, codfish and potato purée, cream of split pea
soup, grilled
sole with mustard sauce, veal kidneys with mustard sauce, roast chicken
with
tarragon, and broiled lamb chops—not exactly what I’d call food to die
for, and
certainly not dishes I couldn’t readily find in a thousand other
restaurants
around town or the U.S. done just as competently. Maybe
they just sound better and more expensive in French.
I assure you the
menus at places like Daniel, Le Bernardin,
Le Cirque 2000, La Caravelle and other French restaurants around town
are fare more
exciting, inventive, and individualized by their respective chefs. And I can pretty much guarantee that when
Rachou opens his new brasserie on La Côte Basque’s site, many of
those same
dishes will be on the menu.
So, in at least one sense, La
Côte Basque will survive, and I will be happy to attend its
opening. But the old La Côte Basque
had simply run its
courses—a very laudable run it was, too, but sometimes even the best
old
racehorses have to retire from the field.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WHOA,
TRIGGER!
“`Where’s
your wife?’” my
fellow diners invariably asked as they settled down into their chairs
at A.O.C.
Bedford, the cozy, incurably quaint new restaurant on Bedford Street in
the
West Village. As readers of this column,
they were acquainted with my wife’s taste in diminutive, incurably
quaint restaurants. I’ve written (not
entirely incorrectly) that
she favors petite tables dressed in crisp linen, clean, simple menus,
and rooms
roughly the size of a horse stable (my wife has a fondness for horses.)”
QUICK BYTES
* On Oct.
8
*
On Oct. 12 a group of San Diego
chefs “Celebrate the Craft” at
The Lodge at Torrey Pines (www.lodgetorreypines.com),
with
demos, discussions and tastes of premium food products from California.
Featured chefs: Jeff Jackson
of A.R. Valentien at The Lodge at Torrey Pines, Trey Foshee of George’s
At The
Cove, Amiko Gubbins of Parallel 33, Carl Schroeder of Arterra , Michael
Stebner
and Jack Fisher of Nine-Ten , Jeffrey Strauss of Pamplemousse Grille
and A.J.
Voytko of Chive. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to A Local
Organic
Farmland Trust. The event will take
place
* On Oct. 12 Chewton Glen Hotel & Spa (New Milton, England; www.chewtonglen.com) will hold a black tie dinner featuring the wines of Torres, priced at $147 pp. Call 1-800-344-5087.
* On. Oct 13 Chef Frank T. Kraemer highlights traditional German favorites for lunchand dinner at the Garden Café in The Kitano New York (
*Chef Patrick Ponsaty, from El Bizcocho at Rancho Bernardo Inn (17550 Bernardo Drive; 877-517-9342),
* Bill
Denevan's orchards in
* On Oct. 16 Carmelo’s (14795 Memorial Dr.; 281-531-0696; www.carmelosrestaurant.com) presents
a 4-course dinner with
John Mariani is a
columnist for Esquire, Wine
Spectator, Diversion and the Harper Collection. He is author
of The
Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink (Lebhar-Friedman), The
Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink (Broadway), and, with his wife
Galina,
the award-winning new Italian-American Cookbook (Harvard Common
Press). To purchase from amazon.com, click on the
image below.
copyright John Mariani 2003