MARIANI’S

  August 15, 2004                                                          NEWSLETTER

 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                                                                                                                                
EDITOR'S NOTE:  Readers may now access an Archive of all past newsletters--each annotated--dating back to July, 2003, by simply clicking on   ARCHIVE .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                                                                                                           ~

Cover Story:  Menu for a Desert Island by John Mariani

Requiem for a Grande Dame by John Mariani

New York Corner: Park Avenue Café by John Mariani

Book Review: Mimi Sheraton's new memoir bites by John Mariani 

Menu for a Desert Island by John Mariani

Of course the best thing about getting older is no longer giving a damn about what people think of your likes and dislikes. I just don’t care to discuss my loathing for Ralph Fiennes, cuff-less suit pants, and ouzo, nor defend my affections for Yoo Hoo Chocolate Drink, vintage Mustangs, and Xena, Warrior Princess. 
    I want what I want when I can get it, and when it comes to restaurants, I favor those that make one dish so perfectly that I shudder to think they’d ever take it off the menu. Who cares about chefs who change their entire menu once a week? Why should I be a guinea pig for a dish of sea urchins in a lemon grass foam that reminds me of the pods in “The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers?”
    So, to answer the incessant question as to what one thing I’d like to eat if stranded on a desert island--Angelina Jolie excepted--here are several dishes in specific restaurants I believe every civilized person should experience before the doctors put you on intravenous.
 

* The Dover sole cooked quickly in English butter and deboned by a very deft waiter at the Grill at the Dorchester Hotel (left) in London (Park Lane; 44-020-629-888). Its meat white as Dover Beach, the sizzling butter sealing in the flavor of the nice fat fish, accompanied by boiled potatoes or pommes soufflé and a cold bottle of Corton-Charlemagne, this is pure heaven on earth.
 
* A raviolo (that’s one big ravioli) containing a barely cooked egg yolk that gushes forth upon cutting into it, flowing into a clarified butter sauce with generous shavings of outrageously expensive, highly aromatic white truffles--the signature dish of San Domenico (240 Central Park South; 212-265-5959), New York’s most exquisite Italian restaurant. With a glass or two of elegant Barbaresco, you may have to be carried out of the restaurant mumbling.
 

* The pink, succulent, lightly seared, tender-as-Elizabeth-Hurley’s-thigh roast lamb at Chez Georges in Paris (1 Rue Mail; 33-01-42-60-0711), which has the added value of having the best chocolate eclairs in France and a very amiable attitude towards American guests.
 
* Banish all thought of ever tasting anything more delicious than the gold standard for costeletta alla milanese at Milan’s Alfredo Gran San Bernardo (14 Via Borghese; 39-02-331-9000).  Here a plump veal chop on the bone is flattened into a thin circle, then lightly battered with egg and breadcrumbs and sautéed gently in butter until you can almost break away a morsel with your fingers. You’ll eat it down to the bone, then gnaw like a lupa on the bone, alternating with forksful of creamy, wavy saffron-yellow risotto sprinkled with Parmigiano.  Friend, this is bliss.
 
* Whether or not I’ve knocked back one too many tequilas the night before in some San Antonio cantina, I always head for El Mirador (722 South St. Mary’s; 512-225-9444) in the morning to join the line out the door to receive the Holy Communion of soups--Mary Trevino’s gloriously restorative broths teeming with chunks of chicken, chile peppers, and cilantro. The steam clears your head, the tortillas are warm and comforting, and the coffee strong.  You are a good person again.
 
* New Orleanians do not know the meaning of the word “over the top,” especially when it comes to food. They are never content with a simple dish when you can just as easily  stuff crabmeat into and pour Bordelaise sauce on top of. Specific case in point, the outrageously rich pecan-crusted trout at Commander’s Palace (right; 1403 Washington Avenue; 504-899-8221), which has been on the menu forever. Pecans are fat nuts to start with, and they get crushed into a paste with butter and Worcestershire, then heaped on top of a fillet of trout that has been lavished with a Creole meunière sauce made with a stick and a half of butter for six fillets. Such a dish almost gives you pause to order the restaurant’s  bread pudding soufflé, which should have been one of the shalt-nots of the Ten Commandments.

Remembering a Grande Dame

      It's tough enough to keep up with all the new restaurants opening in New York--places with names like Boi, Megu, LCB, BLT, One, Zeytin, Extra Virgin, Link, the Spotted Pig, 5 Ninth, Galanga, Kiev, Sui, Public, L'Asso, and Cru--without getting back to old favorites.  But the obvious fact of the matter is that the reason a place is an "old favorite" is because it has pleased you so many times in the past but gets relegated to the "I-used-to-love-that-place" folder, right on top of the bulging "Jean-Georges Vongerichten new-restaurant-of-the-month" folder.
     I was happy, therefore, to run into Alan Stillman, head of the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group that owns Park Avenue Café, a twelve-year-old restaurant off Park Avenue that has had a long and successful run, for most of that time under celebrity chef David Burke (who now co-owns Burke & Donatella near Bloomingdale's).  Alan's insistence that I sample PAC's new chef elicited an immediate, "I can't wait to go back" response from me that led, a week later, to a splendid lunch and a few weeks after that to one of the best dinners I've had in New York this year.
       The place has never looked better, redecorated but still decked out with wonderful American folk art, flags, cherry red booths, and now a wine table stacked with 130 tagged that you may go up to and choose for your meal, guided by food/wine match-up notes on the bottles and by wine director Robert Smith.   Stillman has always stocked terrific wine lists in his restaurants; indeed, Smith & Wollensky was among the first steakhouses in NYC to mount a formidable wine list, which is now all American selections.  The PAC's list has heft without pretension, mostly American, with about 30 French wines and a few New World Wines. Most are priced well above $50, but there are several good, less expensive items, like Onix Priorat '01, Murphy-Goode Cabernet '00, and Markham 02 Chardonnay. Mark-ups, however, are high: the Markham, for instance,  sells in NYC at a top price of $15 retail; at PAC it's $45.
      The new chef is Neil Murphy, a Long Islander who was once cook on a Navy sub.  His cooking is based on the not-at-all novel idea--but one that so often eludes lesser chefs--that a good dish must start with a single, primary ingredient, then everything else must coalesce around it.  So you don't see strange concoctions or custards of some unidentifiable Burmese root vegetable set next to Chilean lamb's tongue wrapped in a Tahitian citrus leaf.  What you do find are plenty of long-cooked, braised and simmered dishes that exude enormous flavors.  You find  a well-sourced ingredient like Chatham cod cooked to succulence, with a crispy top, served with braised Savoy cabbage, lemon parsley chips, and a tartar sauce infused with crab.  You might begin with summer's fattest softshell crabs as crispy as they are sweet, accompanied by a cucumber-radish salad and spicy curry vinaigrette,  or sautéed sweetbreads with cannellini beans and the tangy-saline flavors of roast tomatoes and chorizo, in a sherry vinegar reduction. 
      I loved a starter of goat's cheese ravioli with toasted walnuts, chorizo, and a ginger-apple jam that went amazingly well with the pasta, and  his housemade cavatelli with mushrooms and black truffles is a harbinger of early autumn goodness.  He grills quail to a turn and serves it with lushly sweet peaches, summer squash, and a three-herb pesto, and his moulard duck foie gras terrine with black Mission figs, smoked morels and a red onion confit makes one wonder if terrines are not a better use of foie gras than serving it fresh.
    The salmon here is the wild King variety, and it is grilled and served with a dash of horseradish, baby carrots, and a mix of honey and Pommery mustard, a dish of delicate but impressive flavors this fish can take.  My very favorite dish of the dinner was a chicken that had been brined with bourbon, giving it a fabulous juiciness beneath the crisp, buttery skin.  This came with corn gnocchi, smoked bacon, chives and the pan juices of the chicken--as perfect a poultry dish as I've ever had.  I shudder to think how many of Murphy's great, sizzling French fries with truffle mayonnaise I put away that night, matched by great gobs of creamed spinach and leeks.
     There is always a selection of eight cheese (three for $10, five for $12, and seven for $15), and pastry chef Richard Leach (winner of a James Beard Foundation "Pastry Chef of the Year" Award) takes everything that is wonderful about American desserts and ups the ante with classic French precision, all quite obvious in his sautéed blueberries with lemon curd and a buttermilk-chamomille panna cotta; peach parfait with warm peaches and Muscat wine; and the chocolate cube--thin chocolate filled with caramel mousse and chocolate sorbet.  The ice creams here are first-rate, with 14 different flavors each night.
    Park Avenue Café has never followed the trends; rather, it set many years ago when it championed this kind of marvelous American cuisine at a time when other chefs had gotten off the bandwagon.  If you've never been there, by all means don't miss it; and if haven't been there in a while, it's better than ever.
    Dinner appetizers run $11.50-$16.25; entrees $19.50-$37; desserts are all $11.50.
  

GEE, GIRLS, DO YOU THINK HE'S ALREADY MARRIED?

Congratulations are due to Don Gorske (right), who has been eating at least one McDonald's Big Mac each day--and sometimes as many as nine--since 1972 (he missed a week when his mother died) , and has just surpassed the 20,000 burger mark this month, putting him safely into the Guinness Book of World Records. Gorske is six feet tall, weighs 180 pounds, and says his cholesterol level is 160.  "I admit I'm obsessive compulsive," he says. "I have so many compulsions."  For a video of Gorske actually chowing down a Bic Mac, go to:

BIG MOUTH: A Review of Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life by Mimi Sheraton (Morrow, $23.95)

    Just about everything you need to know about Mimi Sheraton's new memoir is contained in the book's very first sentence: "As a writer who loathes writing and does it only to pay the piper for the life I love to lead. . . . "  A writer who loathes writing is no writer at all, no matter what the goal, and in her long life of typing out her thoughts about food, Mimi Sheraton proves the point.  Never a stylist, but possessed of a feverish need to be first and to be right, Sheraton has always been an indefatigable researcher, jetting off to California to check on olive growing, eating her way through every item (1,196) on the shelves of Bloomingdale's Food Department  or scouring the countryside to savage a restaurant a New Yorker writer had dared to say was one of the best in the country, Sheraton has been nothing if not dedicated and controversial.
    But dedicated to what exactly?  As her memoir shows, page after page, it is a commitment to making her opinion and her opinion alone the only acceptable one, time and again dismissing anyone else's assessment of the best Italian bakery in Greenwich Village,  the finest chocolates in Belgium, the worst hams in Poland, or the most overrated restaurant in Paris.  While restaurant critic for the New York Times she battered innovative new restaurants while gushing over dreadful old-line French restaurants whose idea of an hors d'ouevre was  cold asparagus on a sideboard.  She antagonized New York's restaurant community by wrapping herself in the authority of the Times,  driving restaurateurs to tears of laughter whenever she'd show up in some hapless disguise in an attempt to remain "anonymous," which, at over 205 pounds, was not easy.
    Sheraton makes much of her weight in this book: Having once declared she trusted neither a chef nor food critic who was thin, she is now quite giddy--and obnoxiously proud--of her own recent 60-pound weight loss through a low-calorie diet, followed by a spin on the Atkins diet.  "Thinking back," she sighs, "I must a admit to having subliminally felt a sense of power that went along with being heavy, as though the more mass I had, the more space I occupied and so controlled." 
     And just why did she eat so much and gain so much weight? Alas, it's the same old tiresome story: Nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn grows up to be a food critic after living with a mother (who did not keep kosher) who called her daughter "a maven of dreck" and who once criticized Mimi's cooking by saying, "Now! First, don't feel badly, but you should know there was no petrouchka [parsley root] in with the greens, so the soup didn't have that nice, sweet taste, Then I want to tell you how to pick out a really good chicken soup, Mrs. Gourmet!"
     Mothers who speak constantly in exclamation points usually goad their children to extremes, and Sheraton was as much a victim of insecurity as she was determined to prove her worth to her mother.   Following her father's advice to become an advertising copy writer, she soon found herself writing gags, then magazine articles as  home furnishings editor at Seventeen, while freelancing for mags like Eros, for which she wrote "My Search for the Perfect French Tickler" in Japan.  She also learned how to get other people to pay for her "travel boondoggles," as when she undertook to write an international cookbook by using free airline tickets on SAS; later, when she wrote her authoritative German Cookbook, her photo appeared on the back cover coming off a Lufthansa Airliner and waving to no one in particular.  She was also a consultant for restaurants prior to writing for New York Magazine and, as of 1975, the Times, after which she pronounced herself above all the riff-raff and freeloaders in the food and travel media who did not have the benefit of a dining out expense account in excess of $100,000 a year, which she certainly ate her way through.  She went to Le Cirque at least a dozen times before giving the restaurant its fourth star and gobbled her way through 150 lunches at public and private schools in New York for a two-part story.  Later, after leaving the Times, she was sent around the world by Conde-Nast Traveler in the first-class sections of various airlines (imagine what that cost) to survey airline food, and--guess what?--found most of it pretty poor!
       Her Times editor, Abe Rosenthal, once cautioned  her, "It's okay to slap a man in the face, but you don't have to cut his cheek with your ring.  Remember, have a little rachmones [compassion]." But she never took his advice. Operating with not the slightest notion of regret or--God forbid!--humility, she details how she alienated her fellow food writer, Craig Claiborne; embarrassed Federico Fellini by printing his off-handed remark about a Roman restaurant; blasted a little restaurant in the Poconos that The New Yorker's John McPhee had dared to discover and praise; and went out of her way to dislike just about everything she ate at the three-star restaurants in France.  Yet she relentlessly overpraised outdated New York restaurants for their allegiance to her own idea of "French classicism," dismissing the arrant snobbism of such places like La Grenouille and Le Cygne back in 1980 as "human nature" while going ga-ga over pâté de campagne, lobster bisque, steak au poivre, and oceans of chocolate mousses made with cheap chocolate--dishes that never left such menus year in and year out.   She had little use for Italian restaurants, rarely bothered with Chinese, and overpraised stultified Middle European restaurants.
      There are some funny stories in the book, and her characterizations of her dining partners over the years is hilarious--The Reluctants (diet- and health-conscious people), the Grabbers (who always ordered the most expensive dishes), the Indecisives (who take forever to order), and the Alrightniks (people with "no style" she deliberately took to snooty restaurants--this from a woman who weighed over 200 pounds and dressed accordingly). 
    Fortunately the writing in the book is more or less free of the clichés Sheraton that clog her newspaper and magazine work (good book editors apparently still exist), although there's ample evidence  that she's telling the truth about loathing writing.  Often her prose sounds as if badly translated from Rumanian, as with this syntactical nightmare: "Minor regrets after twenty years away from the New York Times have to do with few people inviting us home to dinner and those who do generally making embarrassingly abject apologies for what they will serve, putting pressure on me to seem pleased."
    After 240 pages of this Sheraton has used up a great deal more paper than the great food writer A. J. Liebling (whom she admires) needed to write his beautiful gastronomic memoir, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, which came to 182 exquisitely crafted pages.  But then, Liebling loved writing and had so much more to say but knew how to trim the fat, which, despite her admirable weight loss,  is something Sheraton has never really managed to do.
                                                                                                                                            --John Mariani

* On Sept. 18 & 18 Wine South 2004, Atlanta’s annual festival of food, wine, art and music,  celebrates its fifth anniversary at the Gwinnett Center, with  more than 500 different wines and food from dozens of top Atlanta area restaurants along with celebrity chef cooking demonstrations, educational wine seminars, wine-related artwork, and continuous live musical entertainment. Special guests include wine educator Kevin Zraly, who will present his popular seminars at the festival, wine artist Thomas Arvid and barbecue/grilling expert Rick Browne. Tix are $50 a day or $95 for a weekend pass in advance or $60 and $110 at the door. Visit www.winesouth.com or charged by phone at 678-985-9494.

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, and also at www.Gayot.com. New York Corner reviews are also available at
 www.nycvisit.com/johnmariani

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, Suzanne Wright. 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.

copyright John Mariani 2004