...more recent posts
first of all, my advice is don't even bother to _try_ getting vegetarian food in Madrid; I swear I am telling the truth when I say that at La Gallette, the cute, chic, "best vegetarian" place in town, they have _bacon_ in the so-called macrobiotic special...having said which, man, they have some good bacon in spain...in Madrid we did much better with incredible tapas at La Trutta: octopus, artichokes, squid, etc providing great vehicles for mass quantities of garlic ...Spanish roses -- both Garanacha and Cabernet -- _rule_, even better than the bandols and c.d. provences in southern france... best meal of the whole trip: a perfect, fresh charcoal-grilled whole daurade at a tourist trap opposite the casino in Cannes... in Barcelona, try the Boterofumero, which is a kind of seafood peter luger, with amazing stuffed crab, grilled langostinos, endless raw bar, etc etc...the big barcelona dish is a kind of paella with noodles (i forget the name), which I do NOT recommend, it's a little smelly and boring...i didn't have a single anchovy in spain that wasn't fantastic, and not from lack of experimentation...great white bean soup and fried artichokes at Nino's on the Via Bourguinoni near the spanish steps in Rome, next to which there is a building under construction which is a perfect place for enjoying a preprandial Smoke...oh, and some other important advice: after you've had a shitload of red wine? DO NOT drink a half-bottle or more of grappa. believe me. please. oh yeah, and that debate about where's the best food? italy. in case anyone still has doubts.
roe vs. wade (not to mention gill-netting)
bottom-feeding in the upper crust
Drinking moderately (one to three drinks a day) halves your chances of getting alzheimer's. Cheers.
anybody eaten here?
heres a couple of wines featuring grapes from the vineyard my father has a small stake in. comments?
1999 stagecoach vineyard merlot
erich russell stagecoach merlot
Had lunch at Jean Georges and it was delish, really delish (the Cod w/ 5 Flavors, Pencil Leeks and Raspberry Vinegar worked with the old Sancerre so well it was one of the greatest food wine combos anyone at the table has had and the table had some heavy's!!)
i have been searching Singapore restaurant sites....The Imperial Herbal Restaurant had been recommended as one of Singapore’s finest examples of Chinese cuisine and a good place to go to overcome jet-lag. It’s a place frequented by health-conscious Epicureans who have out-yanged their yin [or vice versa] and by the clients of the proprietor, herbalist Li Lian Xing, who prefer to take their medicine in a sweet and sour sauce rather than the usual tonic of bitter tea.
At the back of the restaurant is a grand old-fashioned teak pharmaceutical counter with banks of drawers and shelves full of bottles. Mr Li presides over it like a lean-shaven Confucius, grinding up powders and weighing remedies on a delicate pair of scales before dispatching them to the kitchen.
His specimen bottles are not for the faint-hearted. Macbeth’s witches would have had a field day with the contents: dried geckos and caterpillars, antler velvet, pickled snakes and seahorses, ox tendons and duck’s webs, and an array of deer penises or ‘pizzles’ that would makes Santa Claus’s eyes water.
Then there are roots, fungi, bulbs and herbs that look as weird and unappetizing as their animal counterparts but are also prescribed for a catalogue of complaints: American ginseng, for example, for ‘spontaneous perspiration and shortness of breath’; polygorum multiflorum for premature aging; fritillary bulbs for smoker’s cough; and birds’ nest for the complexion.
None of these look the stuff f the local take-away and under Sybil Fawlty’s direction there was no chance of avoiding them for a simple spring roll.
“First you will have famous appetizer - quick fried egg white with scallops and ladybell root in fried noodle basket. Good for ‘qi’ - more energy. Also,” she added, with a pointed look at my companion, “good for over-weight.”
She tugged at my hair. “Now need something for this,” she said. “Going grey already. I give you bowl of crispy black ants. Special imported from Northern China. Also good for Hepatitis B and arthritis.”
I tried to look grateful.
She continued prodding her finger at my menu. “Next you like black chicken for PMT or special Whip Soup for aphrodisiac?” By the time we had fought our humiliating way to the end of the list she had prescribed an additional course of deep-fried scorpions on prawn toast, “for the brain,” two portions of a bizarre potluck panacea called Buddha Jumps Over The Wall, and a dish of menthol jelly for desert. We managed to steer clear of her final recommendation for double boiled snow frog’s glands with rock sugar to, “improve functions of liver and kidney.”
As soon as her back was turned we ordered a couple of Tiger beers to settle our stomachs.
It is not only the medicinal aspect of food that is dished out with headmistressy insistence at the Imperial Herbal. The Chinese believe that whatever you eat has a direct effect on the body. To be in perfect health the internal ‘yin’ - the cool, contemplative forces - should be kept in equilibrium with the ‘yang’ - the more active, hot energies.
Every food has its own energy, so eating ‘cold’ foods like mussels, cucumber, snake and bean sprouts, has a calming effect on your macho hothead, while ‘hot’ foods like chocolate, beef, butter, onion and chillies can invigorate the wimp.
And some foods have a direct effect on different organs in the body. Egg yolk, for example, affects the heart, peppermint the lungs, wine the liver, salt the kidneys, and sugar the spleen. The small intestines are affected by spinach, the large intestines by pepper, the gall bladder by chicory, the bladder by watermelon, and the stomach by rice.
Every dish at the restaurant is a balanced combination of ingredients and each one should be chosen to complement the next. It’s a hypochondriac’s heaven and might have proved pleasantly diverting were any of it edible. For sheer disgustingness I rate only Fernet Branca and school cabbage higher.
Some of it was virtually impossible to put into your mouth without stomach-churning panic. The scorpion, for instance, flipped its tail up as I bit it and hit me on the nose.
Our waitress returned with gusto to see how we were doing. She was clearly disappointed to see our unfinished plates.
“Eat your soup,” she commanded, fishing about in my bowl with a spoon. “See, here is nice lotus seed - make ginseng taste better. And sliced sea cucumber, and abalone - good for sex life.”
“Will it do anything for jet lag?” I asked queasily. “For jet-lag,” she said helpfully, “you need plenty sleep,” and bustled off to persecute the next table."
Happy New Year to All
In 2001 some of the best meals I have eaten were in Brooklyn at Al Di La and Locanda Vini e Olii, one of my favorite 2001 meals was a tasting menu at 71 Clinton FF with a table of 3 tasting 17 different dishes in all, Grand Sichuan International, Lupa & Felidia, also eating in Italy at the homes of winemakers, small village trattoria's and the wild meal at the two star Da Vittorio in Bergamo were all highlights....
I feel lucky that my work includes tons of meals all over the world but in general I feel let down by the dining experience, having had so many just ok meals this year. Yes one great dish here and one there but the expence invovled is ridicuolous if its not a bizz write-off.
My tastes are for more simple dishes and Italian food. Luckly I can finally cook ok for myself but this makes paying alot for just ok food a bummer . I tried this year to eat more raw foods (one of my phobia's), and eat more meats to add variety in 2001.
The search goes on and Q1 2002 will bring me to Loire, Paris, Italy, maybe Barcelona, lots of NYC restaurants in search of a great meal. Maybe a summer trip to SouthEast Asia as Asian food to me rocks.
All the best to you and lets eat together soon!!
The big question is where??
Typical year-end list from the Post, but I was struck by this item:
GOOFIEST ITEM IN A DISH: Popcorn - actual popcorn - in $14.50 corn-and-lobster soup at the Carlyle Hotel restaurant. It's even less successful than it sounds.AKA used popcorn (successfully, I thought) in a corn soup earlier this year. I thought it was novel, but I guess it was a trend. Or was it a ripoff? Or is there any difference in the food world? Inquiring minds want gossip, not gastronomy.
Celebrity Chefs Dish Up Dinner Party Neurosis
The Daily Telegraph London
Richard Alleyne
December 14, 2001
THE great British tradition of the dinner party is coming under threat from an unlikely source: unrealistic cooking standards set by celebrity chefs, a survey shows.
Culinary experts such as Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Ainsley Harriot are undermining the public's confidence and giving rise to a phenomenon known as Kitchen Performance Anxiety.
The survey carried out by Prof David Warburton, of the University of Reading, showed that more than two thirds of the public had stopped giving dinner parties because of the pressures.
Most people still holding them said they were often more stressful than a first date or an interview. One in eight people felt such anxiety when entertaining friends that it made them physically ill.
Prof Warburton said: "Cooking for guests has always caused slight worry and some `butterflies' because it is natural to want to give guests the best one can.
"Unfortunately, my research shows that for many people it had moved beyond this and they had become tremendously stressed because they burdened themselves with irrational and unrealistic expectations of their cooking skills.
"For these people `butterflies' can become physical sickness and nervousness can become extreme irritation and impatience. They may even avoid giving dinners altogether."
More than a thousand people were interviewed in the survey, which was commissioned by Piat d'Or, the winemaker.
Prof Warburton defined Kitchen Performance Anxiety as the fear of one's cooking and entertainment being judged and evaluated negatively by other people, which would lead to feelings of embarrassment, inadequacy, humiliation and the avoidance of entertaining.
But there was some relief for the party-giver. Ninety per cent of those interviewed said good company and good wine were more important than good food.
all i will post from dinner tonight [and we would have joined you yatters at aka but we were only available late tonight] is that, aside from yet another extremely yummy meal at locanda vini et olli, en route home, wheel and the cabbie were ROCKING out to a highly caffeinated merengue band, which i am listenting to as i write b/c we somehow got the cd from rubin the driver in exchange for a slight increase in fare, sounding like a cross between salsa and polka, BLASTING from the car driving down atlantic avenue, from which there was quite a lot of hooping and hollering from rubin and wheel. needless to say we will only be taking rubin's car from now on and he has an even better cd for us next time.
i think Captain Wylie will be cooking for only 8 more nights at 71CFF, than its nothing public till summer 2002 i hear, time for seats at the bar next week, we did this week--YUMMY STUFF!!!
jim whats the possibility of a bloody dead bird on the top of this page?? another yum yum in brooklyn we ate at last week is...Al Di La Trattoria 248 5th Ave, 7187834565...need to try more but we eat every bite and had to get one dish repeet on the spot...nice wine list...."baby Lupa"....i hope to go back Tues 12/11....
Jean-Louis Palladin, a fearless and passionate cook who helped to free French cuisine in the United States from a hidebound orthodoxy while influencing a generation of chefs and food lovers, died yesterday in McLean, Va. He was 55.
November 21, 2001
Up there with best meals ever, which I normally don’t associate with fine dining situations being more prone to romanticize the sausage and bread by the side of the road in Italy over any starred situation: Mju in the Millennium Hotel, London on Sloane Street. The Japanese/Australian chef Tetsuya Wakuda serves his fare in a hotel room reminiscent of some starship bridge crossed with a crusty hotel dining room, i.e. ugly, but this did nothing to detract from the tasting menu whose courses ran into two digits. In fact I began to enjoy our strangely incongruous surroundings. The tasting itself was beautifully orchestrated (I usually balk at these assaults on the taste buds and digestive process) with modest portions that built in flavour to a crescendo leaving us all uncharacteristically speechless. Some of the courses came two at a time. He is one of those smart chefs, reminiscent of a certain hirsute one on Clinton Street, that understands perfectly the harmony of flavor, texture, and the visual elements of food. I kept thinking of Huysmans; I’m not ready for redemption—y et. You eat whatever is being served but the kitchen will accommodate requests/allergies. Here is the full confession: tomato tea consomme; oysters with ginger & mirin dressing; salad of tuna, orange, shiso sauce; some mousse/lobster concoction; tataki of venison, truffle peaches with rosemary & honey; roast langoustine with tea & shellfish oil; confit of wild Scottish salmon with marinated celery; carpaccio of sea scallops with foie gras & citrus soy; lobster ravioli with seaweed vinaigrette & shellfish essence; shitake & buckwheat risotto with grilled foie gras; steamed razor clams with cauliflower and broccoli florets; double cooked de-boned spatchcock (Scottish poussin) with braised daikon & bread sauce; Scottish Black-Angus beef with shitake mushrooms on truffle mash; sorbet of lychee & strawberry; floating island with vanilla bean & praline anglaise. Great wines too, one of which was apparently absurdly underpriced, a Rousseau Grand Cru that the wine detective spotted and which they were gracious enough to serve at the listed price. 50 English pounds for the tasting. Go while the fares remain low.