Virtual Gourmet

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It never ceases to amaze me that chefs in America, some of renown, others up-and-comers, are forever proclaiming their commitment to buying the best possible ingredients and, when possible, the best local ingredients. Desire for the latter must be restrained by seasonal limitations or by the simple fact that they don’t make foie gras in Kansas and you don’t find stone crabs plying the rivers of Arizona. And very draconian government regulations make it impossible for a New Hampshire chef to serve venison from deer shot right outside his door or a Montana chef from cooking up the mess of trout he caught in the stream that runs by the restaurant. All game, including game fish, must by law come from a game farm or fishery, unless it's imported from Scotland where game inspectors have already one their job of making sure the animal was healthy..

There is always justifiable pride in serving American products, whether it’s Iowa beef,

Georgia

onions, Oregon wild mushrooms, or Virginia ham. And there is every reason for chefs to promote their local products, like Vermont cheddars, Nantucket bay scallops, and Napa Valley wines. Indeed, ever since Alice Waters pioneered the sourcing of good local products at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the quality of so much now in the market and available to chefs has increased exponentially and made for a much better American gastronomy. So many chefs are now printing their ingredients’ provenance on their menus so that names like Niman Ranch pork, Jamison Farms lamb, and Hudson Valley foie gras--all of which cost a good deal more than alternatives--have become hallmarks of quality.

Why, then, do so many good chefs in

America

continue to serve imported lamb and farm-raised salmon? Why would a chef who wouldn’t be caught dead serving frozen beef, veal, pork or chicken from another country buy frozen lamb from

New Zealand

and

Australia

? Recently I had a back-and-forth e-mail discussion with a representative of New Zealand’s lamb industry, which has been extremely successful in convincing American chefs not only to buy their product but actively to promote it, and I learned a few things: First, contrary to my belief, New Zealand lamb lam

is not price supported by the government at a loss, and that there is now a little fresh lamb coming in from New Zealand; Australia already ships a good deal of fresh lamb. But the majority is frozen meat from animals younger than American lambs at slaughter and therefore having a milder taste and a lower fat content. The eye of the chop is also smaller. But

New Zealand

and Australian lamb is much cheaper than American lamb from states like Colorado--which I believe produces the best lamb in the world--well fatted, full of flavor, and worth every penny.
I understand American chefs reasons for wanting a cheaper, more consistent product, but then why do they have no problem charging top dollar for their American beef and Maine lobsters, even to adding supplements on their fixed price menus? The old jingoist slogan "America First!" seems to me a capital idea when it comes to certain foods, if those foods are better here than from over there.

In speaking with chefs who buy South Pacific lamb, I usually also ask where their salmon is coming from. It's a funny thing about salmon: Legions of chefs don't particularly like the fish--or at least the farmed variety--but salmon is so popular, especially with women customers, that they have to have it on their menu, and it's a big money-maker, especially if it comes in from Norway or Scotland or Ireland already smoked. (Despite claims to the contrary, on-premises smoking of fish is very, very easy and costs next to nothing.) Yet true wild salmon is getting extremely difficult to find in the market, and of course it's much more expensive than the farmed variety, which to my palate, almost always tastes muddy or overly fishy, owing to the diet the farmed fishes are given. Now comes disturbing reports (this, after years of being told salmon is full of goody-goody omega-3 fatty acids that boost our immune systems and prevent heart attacks) that farmed salmon contains significantly higher concentrations of PCBs, dioxin and other cancer-causing contaminants than salmon caught in the wild and should therefore be eaten infrequently, according to a new study of commercial fish sold in North America, South America and Europe. The study, using Environmental Protection Agency health guidelines, concluded that while consumers could safely eat four to eight meals of wild salmon a month, consumption of more than one 8-ounce portion of farmed salmon a month in most cases poses an "unacceptable cancer risk." Whoa!

I never recommend anything to anyone when it comes to what we eat, except to say that I truly believe the very best quality of food--be it organic or raised on small farms or taken in the wild--is always better than processed foods susceptible to manipulation and disease from close quarters. And fresh is, almost always, better than frozen. Thus, if I sit down at your restaurant and wave off your offer of frozen lamb or farm-raised salmon, I'm not just being picky, or even patriotic; I just prefer to eat the best you can provide.

There's no doubt about what veteran restaurateur Ken Aretsky had in mind when he opened Patroon back in 1996. Just look at the restaurant's menu cover to the left (a current one)--a flash photo of Joe DiMaggio at a time guys like him owned New York. Patroons, as a matter of Gotham history, were Dutch land barons of the 17th century, though the term lived on into the 19th to describe New York's well-established gentry. Add that all up and you get a sense of Aretsky's vision for a restaurant intended for powerbrokers and glamorous figures like Joltin' Joe.
At first it all clicked like a Dutch lock. Patroon was one of the most talked-about restaurants of the late '90s and did indeed attract the same people who might otherwise be found at `21' (where Aretsky had previously been CEO) or The Four Seasons, with the added attraction of a rather spectacular custom-built humidor room on the second floor where patrons could store their stocks. Well, you can imagine what happened to that after the cigar boom leveled off and Mayor Bloomberg put the kibosh on smoking in restaurants. Patroon had a good run before losing steam, and Aretsky re-configured it once or twice, then closed it some months ago for a re-hab and a new chef, John Villa, whose résumé includes stellar stints at Judson Grill and his own Pico (itself recently transformed, under Villa, into Dominic's Social Club). Villa brings a consistency and a finesse to Patroon it had lacked since the leaving some years ago of chef Geoffrey Zakarian (now at Town), and while the menu hearkens back to the early days of Patroon, with a solid grounding in steakhouse fare, there's plenty else here to draw anyone who believes that American food at its best is some of the best food in the world.

The dining room (below), once done up in rather feminine Fortuny fabrics, is now cast with more masculine toffee-colored felt paneling, luxurious leather banquettes,

and some of the most comfortable chairs I've ever sat down on--remarkable because it's the type of thing I usually don't notice unless the chairs are uncomfortable. The vintage photos from NYC's golden days give additional swagger to the room, and the service staff has none of that offensive steakhouse macho you find so readily elsewhere around town. Oddly enough, the wine list is only fair--good labels, a little of this and that, but nothing with real breadth or depth.

The menu is straightforward, but wait to hear the specials, which one recent evening included superb sautéed foie gras with a blood orange sauce, the ideal balance of sweet and sour. New England clam chowder proved to be a nonpareil, creamy and rich but not cloyingly so, and nice and chunky with clams. With just a little Old Bay seasoning and mustard for bite, a jumbo lump crab cake made for a fine starter, and shrimp cocktail was as good as any in the city.

   Patroon's beef proves to be right near the top of those strip steaks and filet mignons you find in a city very competitive about the subject. The beefiness, the aging, the richness of marbling in the strip was first rate, and the filet had more flavor than this cut characteristically possesses. This is the way beef in New York used to taste, when USDA Prime meant a lot more than it does today. (Don't get me started!) Also excellent was a massive T-bone veal chop (not really much enhanced by grilled portobello mushrooms and oven-dried tomatoes) and magnificent Colorado lamb chops (see my jeremiad about lamb above) with just a gloss of a thyme-garlic marinade. But the real tour de force here is a very retro item--duck à l'orange, which long ago lost its luster as a relic of those days when every mediocre continental dining room turned this classic dish into a dried-out, incinerated piece of fatty, cloyingly sweet fowl, pre-cooked and served with steamy wild rice. Villa turns his duck slowly on a rotisserie so that the bird cooks evenly and achieves crisp skin and a juicy interior with the full flavor of the duck held in its fat. The orange sauce had the correct bittersweetness to it that made this a French classic in the first place.
   It's impossible to choose among the side dishes, so we pretty much took one of everything, from very good creamed spinach and crispy, thin onion rings to impeccable French fried potatoes, and really, really delicious truffled whipped potatoes.
The desserts have a certain cheery flair to them, but none of them was outstanding, including a cute root beer float and a too-sweet apple tart. Cheesecake was good, but a butterscotch pudding didn't have the intensity of butterscotch I'd hoped for.
   Patroon is a handsome, sophisticated restaurant all right, and the rapport Aretsky has with his clientele is impressive. You're not shuffled in and out as you would be at Peter Luger's, and you surely won't feel like you're dining in a chain out of Chicago like Morton's where the raw steaks come to the table in plastic wrap. Patroon is distinctly a New York kind of restaurant. But you're going to pay for it. I'm not sure why Aretsky is charging $44 for a strip steak without a side dish when Spark's nearby is charging $35.95 and Palm $35.50, both comparable to their highly competitive competitors around town. Such a price spread cut short Terence Brennan's posh steakhouse foray of last year, so I worry that carnivores may consider an $8-$9 difference when dining at Patroon too much for the pleasure. But that is the point: At Patroon you really will dine, while at the other beef emporiums around New York you kind of just sit down, knock back a Scotch-and-soda, eat fast, pay yer tab, and leave. There are guys waiting for your table.

“We began our meal with Seppioline alla Veneziana. These squidlike marine mollusks have two very endearing qualities: when alarmed, they change colors with the same rapidity that Jim Carrey's face expresses extreme emotions--red, indigo, aqua-green, yellow with green polka dots--and they secrete a dark inky fluid, which chef Jerome painstakingly extracts from their mollusky little bodies to prepare this exquisite dish.”

--Lorraine Gengo, Review of Di Sopra, in the Fairfield County Weekly, Nov. 14, 2003.

According to Associated Press, three men who streaked through a Denny’s restaurant in Spokane, WA, wearing only shoes and hats returned to the parking lot to find their car had been stolen. The temperature that day was 20 degrees.

* On March 8 the first annual Pre-St. Patrick's Day Irish Whiskey dinner will be held at NYC’s Seppi's by owner-chef Claude Solliard and bartender Patrick O'Sullivan, a 6-course/five-whiskey dinner (incl. limited production Midleton Rare). $95 pp. Call 212-708-7444.

* From March 19-21 the Boca Bacchanal Winefest & Auction will feature vintners’ dinners ($300 pp) held in cultural sites and private residences; a luncheon for the arts at Mizner Park ($40), auction and dinner at the at the Boca Raton Resort & Club ($250), and Champagne brunch ($75) . Proceeds to Children’s Place South. Call 561-395-6766 or visit www.bocabacchanal.com

* On March 20 Paso Robles Vineyards hosts the 12^th Annual Celebration of Zinfandel with a live auction at the Paso Robles City Library, followed by a zinfandel grand tasting and silent auction at the Paso Robles Inn. For info visit www.pasowine.com . . . . From May 14-16 the 22^nd Annual Paso Robles Wine Festival will be held at Paso Robles City Park Downtown, with more than 670 wineries, 2 live bands, food by local vendors. Call 805-239-8463.

* From May 20-25 Angling Unlimited is offering a “Women’s Gone Fishing Package,” with sport fishing in Southeast Alaska, gourmet seafood cooking classes, tastings and dinners with one of Chef Hubert Des Marais of the Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach. $1295 pp, based on double occupancy; Lodging at Sitka Rock Suites, with daily breakfast and lunch. Call 1-800-297-3380 or visit www.AnglingUnlimited.com

* On March 23 Circa 1886, on the grounds of Wentworth Mansion in Charleston, SC, , celebrates the rich flavor of Gullah culture and culinary fare “Gullah Food and Folk Tales” 3-course dinner by Executive Chef Marc Collins with resident storyteller Tim Lowry. $55 pp.Call 843-853-7828 or visit www.circa1886.com.

* From March 26-April 3 Quebec is Cooking!, in Chicago celebrates the culinary heritage and locally grown products from Quebec, with a variety of book signings, cooking demos, retail food promos and unique menus offered by Chicago restaurants. Chefs from Quebec will be paired with their local peers, including: Janick Bouchard, Les Remparts, Montreal; with Gabino Sotelino, Anselmo Ruiz and Christian Eckmann, Ambria; Marie Chantal Lepage, Manoir Montmorency Beauport, with Francois de Melogue, Pili.Pili; Laurent Godbout, Chez L'Epicier , Montreal, with Paul Kahan, Blackbird; Anne Desjardins, L'Eau à la Bouche, Saint- Adele. Daniel LaGarde, of Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton, will lead the culinary program.

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Editor/Publisher: John Mariani. Contributing Writers: Robert Mariani. Naomi Kooker, Kirsten Skogerson, Edward Brivio, Robert Mariani, Mort Hochstein. Contributing Photographers: Galina Stepanoff-Dargery, Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.

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.