Tag Archives: Daniel Boulud
DBGB Kitchen & Bar
When you think of tenacity and Daniel Boulud, maybe you think of the effort it takes to keep up four-star restaurant Daniel, launch Bar Boulud, or generally run a multi-national food empire. But no: the Boulud project that seems to have required the most effort in recent years is opening a restaurant on the Bowery. After being denied a liquor license in 2006 by Community Board 2 for a spot on the Bowery and 4th – bafflingly, because they thought a Boulud place would be some kind of nightclub – Boulud went back to bat for a space on Bowery between Bleecker and Houston and finally won in 2007. (Lord knows we wouldn’t want to attract the wrong element to the Bowery.)
But it’s clear from the outset: This ain’t no Mars Bar. (more…)
Posted in Austrian, food, French, New York restaurants, Noho, restaurants
Tagged Bar Boulud, beer, Daniel Boulud, New York, seafood
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Heavy Metal: Boulud Goes OTT Industrial
Eater has just released photos of the new Daniel Boulud restaurant DBGB Kitchen & Bar, to open on the Bowery in two weeks time. Apparently the place is “meant to evoke the restaurant supply stores that are fast going extinct on the Bowery,” but it looks like an army barracks. Even after construction is finished, the walls will consist of industrial metal shelving – which will eventually hold copper pots donated by famous chefs around the world. (Because more metal will add to the warm and fuzzy atmosphere?)
I was hoping mess hall decor would stop at Hill Country, but now it’s trickling up to a Daniel Boulud spot? Make it stop! Also, it seems kind of ironical that one of the wealthy new Bowery tenants pushing out the old restaurant supply stores is paying homage to the dying culture of restaurant supply stores.
Let’s hope the DB sausage and beer makes up for it all?
Go to Eater for the actual photos of the interior of DBGB Kitchen & Bar: Sneak Peeks: DBGB Unleashed to the Media!
Bar Boulud
When Knucklehead was going to be too late to join us at a recent dinner at Bar Boulud, High Maintenance suggested he meet us afterwards at the bar.
“Oh no,” I said. “There’s not actually a bar there.”
Therein lies the conundrum of Bar Boulud – and many other new places about town. Dining at the bar, which started as a solution for the reservation-deprived at places like Babbo, has now superseded drinking at the bar. So much so that you can’t even get a damn drink. What is the world coming to?
For one thing, the bar-less bar makes waiting awkward. At Bar Boulud, you’re standing uselessly at the edge of the room, like the kid left out of the slow dance during a school mixer. Add to that the lack of alcohol, and you have the entire junior high feeling. Fortunately, there are plenty of cool people to ogle here, like Sandy Weill, Martha Stewart, and Thomas Keller, all of whom were under one roof on the night we visited.
After a brief scuffle between High Maintenance and a hostess, we were led away from the drafty tables up front and past the long bar, which is inlaid with a lit glass display of hunks of meat in a Damien Hirst-like effect. Definitely ask for a table in back. The front area shouldn’t even be a seating area in the winter – for one thing, that’s where everyone’s standing around waiting. Daniel Boulud, why not put a foosball table and a TV in your bar instead? They have foosball in France…
We were greeted by glorious gougeres. These were supersized to tennis ball dimensions, light and fluffy, with just the right tang of cheese.
Bar Boulud, where Gilles Verot is the chef de cuisine, has just opened and is one of the most anticipated new restaurants of 2008. The menu is extensive, impossible to cover in one visit. We couldn’t try many of the dishes, but many of the ones we did still needed some fine tuning.
High Maintenance ordered the mushroom salad without the mushrooms – don’t ask – so that one can’t be covered here. Gibson’s Mom went for the mesclun provencal salad, which was quite nice. The small tomatoes were carefully blanched and peeled to bring out a true tomato flavor in the middle of winter.
The St. Jacques au chou, grilled Maine scallops, were disappointing. They did not seem to be overcooked, yet they were rubbery and stringy. This was particularly strange since scallops are in season now. The accompanying Orleans mustard winter slaw is a sort of sauerkraut, but ironically, I liked the Guss’ Pickles sauerkraut at Fette Sau better.
At least the cuts of meat were excellent. Black Angus sirloin had just the right mix of char and juiciness, and it was accompanied by delicious frites, beautifully presented. Unfortunately, someone had forgotten to salt or pepper it before putting it on the grill. This cardinal sin of cooking shouldn’t be overlooked just because the chef is taking the high road. There is even a folklore tale or two about how much meat loves salt.
The roasted chicken breast suffered the same saltless fate, though it too was a juicy cut of meat. Garlic mashed potatoes were subtly garlicky and quite satisfying – we ate them right up. Cauliflower gratin was served in a little cast iron dish. All it needed was some salt. And there was none on the table.
There was one star among our entrees, though: one of the signature dishes of this high-end charcuterie, the boudin blanc. This was perfection. Meltingly tender, this white sausage was made with a subtle but effective seasoning of herbs. Bar Boulud definitely owes a debt to Kurt Gutenbrunner, who’s been doing sausage right for years now at places like Blaue Gans. But as Boulud points out in the menu preamble (yes, there’s a preamble), he’s the sausage king of Lyon. Bar Boulud is like a Gutenbrunner place pushed to a new level of culinary esoterics and flashy interior design.
The wine list bears mentioning – it’s extensive, resourceful, and gently priced, with classics balancing out sommelier Daniel Johnnes’ new finds. Service was quite good – our waiter seemed like just a charming young guy, a little scruffy, until he broke out in perfect French. While it’s famously hard to get a reservation here now, we noticed that a couple tables were no-shows, and there was availability after 9:30 (even at the bar!).
Would we go back? There’s a catch 22 here: by the time the kitchen finds the salt, the celebrities may be gone. If you’re after the scene, go now. If you’re going for the food, wait.
Bar Boulud
1900 Broadway between 63rd and 64th Streets
212-595-0303
Posted in food, French, New York restaurants, restaurants, Upper West Side
Tagged Daniel Boulud, New York
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BLT Market
CLOSED
The proliferation of “chain” restaurants in New York can be unsettling. I don’t mean Ruths Chris or the Olive Garden – disturbing in and of their own right – but the high-end type like the BLT empire.
What isn’t a chain these days? Will Daniel Boulud endure criticism at Bar Boulud for starting up yet another place with the word “Boulud” in the title? Unlikely. Laurent Tourondel isn’t alone in hocking his cookbook at the register or hopping on the latest bandwagon, market-driven fare. Back when BLT Fish opened, Tourondel got slammed for these tricks. But given the current environment, you have to wonder if he was just ahead of the curve on the in-your-face self-promotion that’s everywhere now.
BLT Market‘s version of rustic – in the Ritz, no less – feels a little slick, like Marie Antoinette playing country house. As soon as you walk in the door into this attractive, pleasant array of rooms in vanilla colors, you see the telltale signs of a barnyard that’s very haute indeed. But if you can suppress the urge to roll your eyes at the cutesy colanders on sale in the mini-mart at the register or the painstakingly-curated farm tools hung on the wall, Tourondel’s latest venture has a lot to offer.
One night last week, after a quick drink at the Ritz hotel bar, which is fabulous by the way – witness the live piano music as played by a live piano player! – Marie Fromage and I settled in to our seats in BLT Market’s bright and airy dining room, which is decorated with huge vegetable murals suspiciously like those at Gramercy Tavern, but pleasing nonetheless. The napkins are dishtowels, the water carafe an old glass milk bottle.
We were thrilled by the pigs-in-a-blanket amuse bouche. Crafted from seemingly homemade frankfurters and sauerkraut, encased in a crispy, light pastry, they were scrumptious. Had they been on the menu, I might have forsaken the whole rest of the dinner and ordered about 10 more of these. That must be why they’re not on the menu.
Also served alongside was garlic bread, not the fussy crostini kind but the carb-o-rama kind laced with a buttery garlic parsley spread. More haute junk food – love it. The bread was more of the focus here than the spread, which was fine since it was freshly baked, crusty outside and squishy within.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at Cynthia Stevenson, who was seated next to us. You may know her from Men in Trees, but I’ll never forget her performance as the bossy, know-it-all oldest sister in Happiness. You know, the one who ends up being married to a pedophile. Brilliant.
Ordering is a tough decision here, because the menu is divided into three parts, yet it seems foolhardy to attempt to eat all three courses and save room for dessert. We opted for the pastas. One thing that impressed me about BLT Market is that the concept isn’t all hype; you can see it on the plate. The colors and tastes of all the different ingredients are very bright and fresh, thanks to the efforts of chef de cuisine David Malbequi. In the delicious pappardelle with a venison bolognese, kale, and pecorino, each of the elements retained its individual character, but the whole was very well-balanced, not to heavy or oily as some bologneses tend to be.
The poached Maine lobster gnocchi with fennel and lemon beurre blanc was sublime. I liked the classic combination of flavors here, elevated to a new level with such carefully sourced ingredients. Not too fussy, but not so simplistic that you would think, hey, I could make this at home. More like Jacques Pépin could make it at home and the rest of us could all die trying.
At this point we were unexpectedly served dessert menus, when we said out that we hadn’t gotten our entrees yet. Our duo of servers was embarrassed by the error, which actually was no big deal. One waiter immediately asked what sort of wine we’d been drinking at the bar and ordered us up another round. While some might see this as an example of botched service, something to be expected in a place that’s only been open a couple of months, I actually saw it as an example of good service. Anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant knows that mistakes are going to happen; bad service is when the server does not take responsibility for an error and instead blames the customer. More on that in a future review.
Marie Fromage’s spiced orange-glazed maple leaf duck was so pale in color I actually mistook it for the other meat-of-the-moment, pork. It was an excellent cut, not at all gamey, and seared with Chinese spices that put an interesting spin on an otherwise Western dish with foie gras and bacon and collard greens as sides.
Not so for the venison, which was a little tough and not cooked to medium rare as requested. To be honest, I didn’t really notice the toughness until Marie
Fromage pointed it out, because I was loving the sides of chestnut braised red cabbage and cranberry, plus the pistachios on the venison. It’s a relief to encounter traditional flavors – even little celery leaves – when most chefs can’t suppress the urge to throw a wrench in every dish. As for the toughness of the meat, coming from a family of hunters, I am used to roughing it when it comes to eating game and consider the dish a triumph if it’s free of shot. Note to self: adjust expectations when dining in a restaurant. Maybe it would have been better to stick to the regular menu instead of an item from the “blackboard menu”?
Tragedy struck when the waiter informed us they were out of bananas Foster. It’s so hard to find this old-school dessert that I always order it when it’s on the menu. We settled for chocolate feuilletine, which was not particularly chocolatey, but the accompanying coffee ice cream was delicious – made so by the addition of pralines, ground so fine that you detect their taste but not the crunch of individual nuts.
The bill was somewhat painful, despite the free round of wine. The irony is that Greenmarket ingredients are almost always cheaper than what you’d find elsewhere, at least for home cooks, yet here the prices were at Dean & Deluca levels. The bargain conscious should steer clear of the Ritz-Carlton when roughing it with market fare.
Will an exact replica of BLT Market land at various cities across the U.S., including, as Marie Fromage said darkly, the Short Hills Mall? It’s too soon to tell. But if you can summon up the suspension of disbelief necessary for dining out these days, BLT Market might just charm you into submission.
BLT Market
1430 Sixth Avenue, between 58th Street and Central Park South
New York, New York
212-521-6125
