MARIANI’S
May
10, 2004
NEWSLETTER
Dining
Out in Rome circa 1850
Cover Story: Florida in May by John Mariani
Who Is the New New York Times Restaurant Critic? by John Mariani
New York Corner: Landmarc by John Mariani
Quick Bytes
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Florida in may
by John Mariani
You can still find a slew of deadly dull faux-trattorias along Ocean Drive, and the seafood houses up and down the coast still pack 'em in for fried fish, fried shrimp, and fried potatoes. But one of the best new places is run by a couple long distinguished among Florida's best and most congenial: Andrea Curto-Randazzo and her husband Frank Randazzo both work the kitchen stoves at Talula (210 23rd Street; 305-672-0778; www.talulaonline.com), which opened a year ago on Miami Beach near the City Ballet.
The name of the restaurant was Andrea's childhood
nickname, because her mother thought her headstrong like
actress Tallulah Bankhead. There is a lot more gusto in the food here than you'll find elsewhere in the neighborhood, where theme restaurants rule, and the Randazzos happily reflecting their own Italian-American background in dishes that do indeed seem cooked with true love.
The one big dining room (right), with 75 seats, is simply done in brick, undraped tables (tsk-tsk), and Moroccan sconces, with mirrors that open up the room by reflection. The open kitchen blazes away, and a handful of people may sit at a counter there and watch their food being cooked. The bar--whose bartender could use a refresher course--is done in a comfortable combination of wood and oxidized copper cabinets. The TV set I could do without. There is also a Garden Patio when the weather permits.
Where to begin with a menu so rich in savory possibilities? How about a lovely, faintly sweet parsnip soup, rendered to taste wholly like the vegetable. If you're feeling very hungry or wish to share a starter, order the terrific grilled Sonoma Valley foie gras with caramelized pears blue corn cakes, chile syrup, and candied walnuts in a portion so large you could have it as an appetizer, entree, and dessert all on one plate. There is a nightly risotto, and I was very happy with the mix of creamy arborio rice with sausage, mushrooms, a balsamic glaze, and Parmigiano. A grilled shrimp tamale was a nice change of pace from the Italian fare, enhanced with roasted poblano chilies and a tomato vinaigrette, not overpowered.
For main courses consider a marvelous example of modern Florida cuisine--lemon sole stuffed with rock crab, a roasted root vegetable ratatouille, and a coconut-curry fume. Crisp-skinned yellowtail snapper comes with sweet potato and wild mushroom risotto, wilted organic arugula, and a very tangy, tasty kaffir lime butter. There's also an o.k. ribeye here, generously accompanied by pancetta-and-cheddar "smashed potatoes," Swiss chard, and onion rings in a cabernet demiglace, but this is not a place you come for steak.
You would come for Key lime pie, a Florida obsession, and Talula's is one of the finest I've ever had, with just the right amount of sweetness to sour, an ideal crust, some fresh berries, and an unexpected Thai basil syrup that did pinned all the textures and flavors together.
Talula's wine list is ideal size for a restaurant this size, abundant with big, chewy cabs and zins, a good selection of Italian varietals, and a few international wines for good measure. There's a lot of choice under $50, and very few wines top $100, and on Sundays many wine prices are reduced.
For the moment Talula is open for lunch and dinner, with complimentary appetizers are served on Friday nights from 5 PM-7 PM. Dinner appetizers run $8-$18, main courses $18-$28.
Up the Florida coast in the section of Fort Lauderdale,
Chef Johnny Vinczencz has established his restaurant Johnny V (625 East Las Olas Boulevard; 954-761-7920)
not only as the new Las Olas hotspot but also as a place well worth a
drive from
Miami or down from Palm Beach. Vinczencz has always been is one
of
the most innovative of contemporary Florida chefs who make optimum
use of the color and provender of South Florida to create an effusive
cuisine that depends as much on good ingredients as it does on pizzazz
and lavish presentations. You'll never leave hungry from Johnny
V, and you'll probably leave dazzled. The 200-seat, L-shaped room
(left) is snazzy, with a long
wall of banquettes, tapas bar, and a big open rear room.Vinczencz made his rep over the last few years at hip hangouts like Maxaluna in Boca Raton, Astor Place on South Beach, and De La Tierra in Delray Beach, but here he's really pulled out all the stops. It's hard to imagine him adding one more thing to any plate without the dish getting bizarre or just breaking the plate. That he has handled this delicate balance in dish after dish shows he is both a craftsman and a showman, starting with a dish like skillet-seared barbecue-spiked jumbo shrimp with rock shrimp potato salad, corn salsa, and chipotle cocktail sauce: that's an appetizer! Another example of largess is his leg of duck confit cakes with mango slaw and salsa in a berry demi-glace: you'd think the sweetness would be cloying but it's muted just enough to perk up the rich duck meat. A nifty idea here is his wild mushroom "short stack" pancakes made from roasted portobellos, with a balsamic syrup, and sun-dried tomato butter. By comparison, smoked tomato soup, with little grilled cheese of goat's, Brie, and Parmesan, seemed like a sandwich made by a loving mother for a kid home from school. It was definitely my favorite among the starters.
Main courses are even heftier. Take a deep breath now: Corn-crusted yellowtail snapper with lemon boniato mash, roasted corn sauce, and smoked pepper relish. Or how about "duck, duck, duck," a combo platter of seared duck breast, confit, and foie gras with wild mushroom stuffing, wilted spinach and baby carrots? Or ancho-cinnamon grilled pork tenderloin, sweet potato has, baby green beans, and a chunky papaya-mango sauce?
Obviously, Johnny isn't holding back, and although the sweetness factor can build up in a meal here (making wine drinking less than ideal), for the most part everything has plenty of taste, peppery, fruity, starchy, and meaty. For dessert have the three-berry crême brûlée "pot pie" with whipped orange cream, or the astonishingly rich dulce de leche cheesecake with spiced caramel popcorn.
The wine list, by the way, is huge--600 selections--overseen by sommelier Steffen Rau.
Appetizers run $5-$18, main courses $19-$32.
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SO WHO IS THE NEW New York Times RESTAURANT
CRITIC?
by John Mariani
The announcement of a new New York Times restaurant critic is
always cause for a flurry of worry and tongue wagging, along with
rampant fear among NYC restaurateurs who were just beginning to
understand the idiosyncrasies of the last reviewer. Five years
has been about the average span of years for a Times restaurant critic (though
unyielding longevity seems to plague the arts section), with both
William Grimes (now on other assignments at the paper) and, before him,
Ruth Reichl (now editor-in-chief of Gourmet)
each putting in their half-decade before burn-out, and The Times always seems surprised
when self-imposed retirement comes. So the paper takes a long
while to replace the critic, seemingly scouring the world and, I assume, riffling through piles of
unsolicited applications for
contenders for what is arguably the most powerful restaurant critic's
job in America, which involves a relentless and total commitment to
eating out nearly every meal of the week in NYC, leaving little time to
find out what's going on elsewhere in the world's gastronomy.This, indeed, is one of the problems with all newspaper restaurant reviewing, which is of necessity focused on the local eateries, not on what might be going on in Paris or Los Angeles or Sydney. Yet critics and reporters in other departments of major newspapers are both encouraged and paid to cover other cities and countries in an effort to gain a better world perspective. The fashion critic goes to Milan and Paris at least once a year, the theater critic covers the most talked-about new productions in London, the art critic will fly to Chicago to report on a blockbuster art exhibit there, the film critic flies off to Cannes each May, and most certainly the boxing reporter will cover a heavyweight event as far away as the "Killa in Manila" if necessary.
Feature writers like The Times' ebullient J. W. Apple, Jr. feed food stories from anywhere on the globe, and the paper uses freelancers around the world for stories on individual topics or travel pieces. Yet the poor restaurant reviewer rarely gets out of town except on vacation, when he or she may file a story from Tuscany or Provence. So after four or five years of finding new ways to describe yet another local take on foie gras or crème brûlée, city critics find they've had enough of the beat and either leave or ask for re-assignment. The late Craig Claiborne, who reviewed restaurants for The Times for nine years, wrote of his decision to stop, "the restaurant column of The New York Times had become for me an intolerable burden on several counts. . . . The awful truth is that, to my mind, at least, restaurant criticism under the best of circumstances is by no means all cakes and ale, champagne, truffles, and caviar. I disliked the power. It burdened my conscience to know that the existence or demise of an establishment might depend on the praise or damnation to be found in The Times. . . . And, to tell the truth, I was bored with restaurant criticism. At times I didn't give a damn if all the restaurants in Manhattan were shoved into the East River and perished."
Claiborne was the first of The Times restaurant critics and he set a high standard of fairness and tact for every critic everywhere in the U.S.--which is a far different standard than that used by the deliberately vitriolic, even vicious reviewers in London and Paris newspapers. After Claiborne left (he returned as food editor two years later), The Times went through several critics with varying degrees of gastronomic knowledge, though writing elegantly was usually not among the virtues sought. Some, like John Canaday were excellent writers but showed appalling ignorance of food; others, like Mimi Sheraton, were the exact opposite, possessing encyclopedic knowledge of food but writing as if her words were being translated from Hungarian. Bryan Miller had youth and vigor, Reichl manifested a tremendous enthusiasm and respect for restaurants, and Grimes had a reporter's instincts for a good story. Now, after a five-month interim when Marian Burros, then Amanda Hesser took over what read like chores, The Times has announced that Frank Bruni, 39, most recently Rome bureau chief, will be writing his first review as of June of this year.
It is a curious choice, simply because neither The Times nor Bruni claims he has any particular aptitude for food writing; the only reviewing he's done was as a film critic for the Detroit Free Press. Nor was he apparently the first choice for the job: The Times reportedly also considered novelist Jay McInerney, who refused the offer--probably a good thing, since McInerney had once written of a wine writing gig at House & Garden, "When my editor told me that I could write anything in my first column so long as it was Chardonnay, I thought briefly about killing her."
In hiring Bruni (whose photos are already all over the Internet), Barbara Graustark, editor of the Times' Style department, which includes the dining section, said in a press release that Bruni's "writing will serve not just members of the food elite, but the reader looking for voyeuristic pleasures." I'm not at all sure what that means, although I hope it does not suggest there will be the kind of endless introductory paragraphs riffing on what celebrities, loudmouth developers, and demi-mondaines are engorging a hot new restaurant.
I had hoped that either Apple or the dining section's former editor Eric Azimov might take over the job. Apple has the gusto and vast experience of the world, and Azimov is a careful, tasteful writer. But Apple is too happy reporting in from the rest of the world on The Times expense account, while Azimov has just been appointed the paper's new wine columnist. (For the record, I have never been formally approached about the job.)
So I wish Bruni well: He's a good writer, who did a study of our sitting President, Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. Of course, living and eating in Rome for the past two years can't but help a man to appreciate the finer pleasures of the table. I just hope his digestion is up to the job. And I hope that he always remembers that restaurateurs and chefs are people who work very hard to please the greatest number of people night after night after night. They deserve respect and their best efforts applauded; their lesser efforts should be put in context, not dismissed with a flippant gag. I offer him two morsels of advice, neither mine: "The critic," wrote T.S. Eliot, "if he is to justify his existence, should endeavor to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks. . . and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment." Or, as Anatole France put it, "A good critic is one who tells of his own soul's adventures among the masterpieces."
NEW YORK CORNER
LANDMARC
179 West Broadway
212-343-3883
www.landmarc.com
by
John Mariani
Marc Murphy is
such a
superlative chef
that his seriousness leaps out at you the moment you taste your first
morsel of
his food--and it doesn’t much matter which morsel, from a menu that
is just
the right size, offers just the right balance of tradition and
innovation, and
costs just what it should. Add to that a wine
program of 200 selections offered at prices considerably below the
usual mark-up in NYC, and you've got a place you can go back
to again and again without fear of breaking your budget.
Murphy, along with his wife Pamela
Schein, took over a two-story space (which used to be
the Independent) and by using semi-industrial metal and concrete and
rough-hewn wood made a striking design statement that nevertheless
has an amazing homey-ness. True, the steel door is
not
exactly inviting, but once inside you will find that
designer Natalie Loggins has managed to utilize brick,
plank wooden floors, exposed ductwork, and warm brow, green and
gold colors in the upholstery and banquettes to soften the edginess of
the decor. The semi-circular downstairs bar (above, right) provides a focus of
intimacy, and against one wall is an open grill where they cook the
meats and seafood. Upstairs is always tricky for restaurants,
simply because people tend to think of it as immediate Siberia.
But the 50-seat room up a flight of stairs lined with rebar rods has
such a terrific floor to ceiling window opening onto West Broadway that
both twilight and city lights make this an enchanting space to be too.
Murphy, who says he started cooking because he
couldn't afford to become a race car driver, has considerable kitchen
experience on both sides of the Atlantic, including stints with
Terrence Brennan, Alain Ducasse, and Sylvain Portay, before becoming
exec chef at Windows on the World, then at La Fourchette. At
Landmarc it is quite clear that he is cooking his own food, with the
help of chef de cuisine Frank Proto (formerly at Layla, Scarabee,
Tonic, and La Fourchette), and whatever he turns his hand to manifests
his sheer insight into what makes a dish--any dish--really click, by
doing as little as possible (which is a lot) to insure the flavors come
through in traditional favorites.
Indeed, the menu reads as a fairly standard list of
American and Mediterranean favorites, but Murphy has thought them all
through and made them all taste fresh and natural. Even a platter
of fried calamari is impeccable, served with roasted tomato
sauce. His foie gras terrine is as creamy as any anywhere, sided
with pickled red onions, and his spaghetti
alla carbonara is a textbook
version of this lusty Roman classic, with its sauce of Parmigiano,
Italian bacon, and eggs cooked by the heat of the pasta. Neither
will you be disappointed by the mussels here, which come with a choice
of five different sauces, and very well made French fries.
You can pretend Landmarc is a steakhouse and enjoy
some very, very good beef, including hanger, strip, skirt, filet
mignon, and ribeye cuts, also with a choice of five sauces like green
peppercorn, bordelaise, and dijonnaise. But the fine rich flavors in
dishes like his crisp sweetbreads with zingy horseradish and green
beans, or a grilled pork chop with sautéed spinach, caramelized
onions and apples, or duck confit with white beans, chorizo, and
spinach ragoût will convince you that here is a place where you
could eat once a week and always want to order more than you can
possibly consume. So
you share. Appetizers here run a very fair $6-$12, pastas $15-$19 (as a
main course), and entrees $17-$24; the steaks are priced
between $19 and $26.
The desserts are straightforward bistro French--crème
brûlée, chocolate bread pudding, tarte Tatin, lemon tart,
fruit clafouti, and chocolate mousse--but the really wonderful thing is
that they are served in small portions at $3 each, so you can easily
order two or three for the price of what a single dessert averages
elsewhere around NYC. Or you can order the whole bunch for $15.
So you share.
Murphy and his colleagues have provided
TriBeCa with an American bistro that tries not to be innovative, except
in the sense that it is almost a shock to realize all over again how
utterly delicious such food can be. It's the kind of place I love
to find and love even more to tell people about.
Blackrose Pub in
FOOD WRITING 101
Lesson 376: Do not write down every thought that comes into your head.
Almost
no one setstables with these outside of
* On May 11 at NYC's
* On May 13 Chef Jean-Louis Dumonet and Eric Fourault, Ambassador of Château Calon Segur, will join forces in celebration of NYC's dumonet at The Carlyle’s first anniversary with a tasting menu coupled with rare and special wines from this well-known winery.
* On May 15 "A Cuilinary Evening" with California Winemasters benefiting the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation will be held at the
* On May 17 Chef Marcus Samuelsson and Håkan Swahn of NYC's Aquavit join forces with Alessia Antinori from the Antinori Family Winery for a 6-course pairing of Italian wine and Scandinavian cuisine, incl. 4 vintages of Tignanello, Toscana, IGT. $150 pp. Call 212-307-7311.
*
From May 17-21 NYC's Payard Bistro
& Patisserie will feature a "Monaco Takes NY" menu, with
dishes from Monaco prepared by chef Philippe Bertineau. $28 pp.
Call 212-344-0515.
*
From May 18-31 Chicago's Bistro 100 will
celebrate its Fourth Annual Morel Mushroom Festival. starting off
with a Morel Wine Dinner, featuring
morel expert and Johnson and Wales
graduate, Chris Belus, from
* On May 18 Share Our
Strength will celebrate its 17th year in Philadelphia
at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel, with 50
of Philadelphia's leading restaurants, wineries, microbreweries and
coffee houses. The chefs will be judged on their culinary
creations, which all guests will be invited to sample, and their table
display. Additional festivities include
music from The City Rhythm Orchestra and a raffle for gift
certificates donated by local restaurants and prizes from retail stores. Tix $60 in advance, $70 at the door. Visit www.sosphilly.org or call 215-548-4000.
*
On May
18 Women for WineSense
invites you to an evening showcasing American pinot noirs as presented
by Michael Bonadies, founding partner of NYC's Myriad Restaurant
Group and author of "Sip By Sip -- An Insider's Guide To Learning All
About Wine." The wines will be paired with a fusion
menu of Jake Klein, Executive Chef of Pulse. : $45 Members/$55
Non-Members
RSVP at WWineSense@aol.com .
* On May
24, an all-star lineup of NYC pastry chefs will transform the Black Door
bar into "A Sugar and Champagne Affair," incl. chef
Todd Gray and pastry chef Lisa Scruggs of Equinox
in
DC; Michelle Antonishek of Gramercy Tavern; Jean François Bonnet
of
Daniel; Jason Licker of The Peninsula Hotel; John Miele of Aureole;
Vicki Wells of Mesa Grill; and William Yosses of Citarella. Proceeds
benefit the ASPCA. Tix $75; call 212- 876-7700 ext. 4652.
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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. TNew York Corner reviews are also available at
www.nycvisit.com/johnmariani
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MARIANI'S VIRTUAL
GOURMET NEWSLETTER is
published weekly. Editor/Publisher: John
Mariani.
Contributing Writers: Robert Mariani,
Naomi
Kooker, Kirsten Skogerson, Edward Brivio,
Mort Hochstein, Lucy Gordan. Contributing Photographers: Galina
Stepanoff-Dargery,
Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry
McLoughlin.
copyright John Mariani 2004