Tag Archives: New York
West Village, Spring
The weather brightened for just enough time this week to give us a spring preview.
fedoras
a riff on Chuck Taylors
dresses
black and white
bright Nikes
black with a color accent
spring
granny boots
berets
canvas tote: the new man bag
men and women in hats
Morandi
Addendum 3/29/07: Now with Morandi’s controversial wine list! For an update on Morandi’s wines, please see this link.
When most people ask for restaurant recommendations, what they’re seeking isn’t about food at all. “It’s so-and-so’s birthday. Where should we eat?” “I’m only in New York for one night!” Or my favorite, “What’s the cool place to go now?” But if you respond by asking them East Side or West Side, Asian or Italian, you look like a dolt yourself. It’s not about just good food, good service, and a nice atmosphere. It’s an endless quest for a sophisticated, grown-up version of fun.
It’s apparent from the moment you walk in the door at Morandi that Keith McNally delivers just that, again, with his latest creation. As of this New York minute, the scene at Morandi is like Pastis’ in the good old days. There’s the trademark backlit bar with its glowing liquor bottles, accented this time by unfinished wooden beams instead of subway tile. Hearth-shaped brick arches inlaid with shelves of wicker wine casks define each wall. The surface of the bar is beaten copper, the tin ceilings are low – wait a minute, isn’t this just the ground space in a ’60 red brick building? Is Morandi really an Italian restaurant, or is it a McNally theme version of the same? Never mind. You’ll be too distracted by the undercurrent of jazz and the buzzy noise of conversation to notice.
Morandi’s chef, Jody Williams, wowed at Gusto with several dishes that reappear here, the carciofi (fried artichokes) and the polpetti (meatballs). I was a fan of her cooking at Gusto and still am here. But as for fried artichokes, call me a WASP, but they’re all smoke and mirrors to me. Artichokes are a vegetable. They’re good steamed and dipped in a bagna cauda. Fried plain, they seem underseasoned. I wanted to call a do-over and stuff them with cheese.
The olive ascolane, fried stuffed green olives, were like crazy Italian junk food, which doesn’t really exist. I’m not quite sure what’s in them, but they’re good. The focaccia gorgonzola e pere, focaccia with gorgonzola and Bosc pears, was somewhat misleading. It arrived on a cute little wooden board – was this a pizza or a focaccia? Though the pear and gorgonzola combination on top was great, an actual Italian would scoff at the bread, whatever it was, because it was floppy. Some things are always disappointing when floppy.
Sometimes a ray of pure genius would shine through, as with the polipetti e sedano, grilled octopus with celery and black olives. This seemed truly Italian. Why? Because, served whole on the plate, tentacles and all, it is identifiable as a once-live animal. My general rule of thumb with Italian food in New York is to order what sounds gross to most people, because it’s usually the best thing on the menu. A side benefit is that if you’re dining with girls, you often won’t have to share.
Back to the octopus: where, oh Lord, is the divinity in celery? I don’t know, but rarely has a chef elicited such a subtle, delicate flavor from a scattering of celery and olives, a warm vinaigrette, and a slightly charred octopus. I was transported. As at Gusto, Williams has an especially deft touch with seafood.
There were only two of us dining, due to a flu attack on the third, and the staff couldn’t have been nicer about the reservation change and the babysitter delay my mom friend suffered. In short, we were displaying the typical New Yorker pain-in-the-ass behavior that drives some restaurants crazy. Even though we were late sitting down, the waitress didn’t rush us after securing our orders. The busboys, though polite and efficient, were overly aggressive clearers. At some points I found myself literally gripping my plate so that no one would take my food away from me. I felt like a feral animal. This isn’t true of just Morandi though: the overly-aggressive-clearing trend is happening everywhere.
On to the entrees. The tagliatelle alla Bolognese was sufficiently Italian, but not anything to write home about. Sticking with my earlier rule, I ordered the coniglio in porchetta – that’s rabbit roasted in lardo and fennel pollen. Yup, that cute little bunny that’ll be coming round Eastertime. After he delivers your basket full of candy, I suggest you hunt him down and serve him up to Williams, because she really knows what to do with him. This dish was Mario-esque, what with the inclusion of lardo. Williams must have left the rabbit to roast for a long, slow time over garlic. Like the octopus, it was paradoxically complex yet straightforward, and very good.
Though he pings your subsconscious with bottles everywhere, I don’t like McNally’s approach to wine. Compared with even the most basic Mario joint, Morandi’s wine offerings are paltry – there’s not enough information about them on the list, maybe because they’re all pretty basic. The kitschy wine carafes with wicker bases are fun, but they’re also an indicator that wine isn’t exactly approached in the most reverential manner.
As the evening progressed and the place filled up and the noise level grew to a deafening din of beautiful people, I leaned in to talk to my friend and noticed that the table was small enough that we could still hear each other. But of course it was: McNally had anticipated this very moment. Somewhere, from behind the magic curtain, he knew that he would have to balance the desire for a buzzy place with the desire to have a conversation. Just as he knew how to make an excellent first impression: the glowing bar, the jazz hopping in the background, the smiling staff. 
Everywhere I looked, there were hearth shapes. Didn’t I just read in the Times that hearth shapes appeal to “the ‘reptilian mind,’ the preconscious part of the brain where archetypes and primitive associations are imprinted”? And don’t you think that McNally already knew such things without having to read about them in the Times? When I walked back to the restrooms, I was happy to see that he had reverted back to single-sex washrooms so that I wouldn’t have to put on lipstick in front of some gawking guy. As soon as I had the thought, I knew: McNally was thinking the same thing. It was almost eerie, as if he were always right there looking over our shoulders.
It’s no accident that “McNally” has been compared to “McDonald’s.” It takes a lot of thought to pull off something that seems so effortlessly successful. Don’t both
er comparing Morandi to a “real” Italian restaurant: it was never meant to be one. That would be like going to Disney World and complaining that Cinderella is an actress. Look at the exterior of Morandi: It’s practically a stage set, like the American revenge on Italy for the trickery that was the spaghetti Western.
But even when you can see the strings of the master puppeteer working in the rafters, it doesn’t affect the overall feeling of well-being you get from Morandi. It’s not a coincidence that when many people ask for a restaurant recommendation, they can’t describe exactly what they want. It almost defies description, and that’s where McNally steps in and executes expertly every time. With Morandi, he taps into the collective fantasy of what a fun Italian restaurant should be and makes it real.
Morandi
211 Waverly Place at Seventh Avenue
212-627-7575
Related article: More on Morandi
Posted in food, Italian, restaurants, West Village
Tagged Keith McNally, Morandi, New York, pizza, seafood
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Lower East Side
Snow flurries hit the Lower East Side.
Hooded jackets and parkas are the trend that won’t die in NYC, and no wonder: When the weather changes this quickly, they’re extremely practical.
color
fedoras and white sneakers
more leopard
skater kid with neon bright sneakers
yellow…
…as popularized by Oscar de la Renta’s Spring ’07 collection, below from Style.com
guitar as LES accessory
the “winter mohawk”
stonewashed jeans
electric blue
black and white with red gloves
military brass
teenagers approaching
neon bright sneakers
Picholine
Terrance Brennan is one of the few Superchefs who manages to be approachable without being, well, cheesy. If only more chefs (and fashion designers?) could be like him. His various spin-off brands make perfect sense. Huge stash of cheese in Artisanal’s cave? Line of cheeses dubbed “Artisanal.” Creator of innovative but simply constructed dishes? Microwaveable gourmet meals sold on Fresh Direct. And not once has he told his fans how to decorate a powder room.
His makeover of Picholine gave me a reason to travel to the wilds of the Upper West Side, to that faraway land just a few blocks north of the Time Warner Center. Since I hadn’t been to Picholine in any of its former incarnations, I brought a friend who is a regular at Picholine past and present. “They changed the sconces,” she said of the new decor. “That’s pretty much it.” The new paint that made some critics gasp “purple!” didn’t have the same effect on me. It’s a muted lavender, and it goes well with the beautiful chandeliers. Lavender could only be considered radical in a land north of 14th Street.
But there are some truly radical twists on the plate. The one we found most intriguing was the celebrated sea urchin panna cotta (photo from Grub Street, since I don’t take food photos at 3-star joints, sorry). It’s visually stunning, with contrasting black caviar, a perfect raised oval of orange-y sea urchin panna cotta, and the neutral color of the surrounding “chilled ocean consommé,” which did look like the bubbly tip of a wave running up the beach. “It tastes like the sea,” my chef friend sighed. The sea urchin panna cotta almost made me wish a new trend in aspic would result… would such a thing be possible, or even good? I’m willing to eat it, if more chefs are willing to experiment.
The warm Maine lobster appetizer didn’t win many points for originality, but it delivered on taste and decadence. Vanilla was a nice and subtle addition to a tried-and-true butter poaching formula. I went for a half portion of the squid ink linguini as an appetizer, because I’d read that was good. Though the sauce did have a nice paella-like quality as advertised on the menu, I experienced some order envy when surveying my dining companions’ choices. Mine just seemed boring by comparison.
Somehow we managed to locate a relatively inexpensive wine on Picholine’s expensive list. The excellent, complex 2005 Acacia Carneros Pinot Noir went for $66, though you can buy it for $24 at Sherry Lehmann if you want to try it at home.
When the entrees came round, my chef friend was enthralled by her wild mushroom and duck risotto. The rice itself was more al dente than the Café Gray version in my copycat chef recipe, but the risotto as a whole had a similar creaminess. Black truffle butter gave it an especially nice flavor that I can only categorize as bosca, which is the more evocative Italian word for “forest.” In Italy, woods, earth, leaves, the scent of mulch underfoot are all in one word.
Venison in parsnip “pain perdu” was also an excellent ode to the winter months. Deeply flavorful but not gamey, the venison came prettily sliced and spiraled out on a plate, dressed in a huckleberry jus, which seemed to be a creative twist on duck with cherry sauce – the two tastes complemented each other similarly. Again I went with what I read and ordered the skate choucroute garni. Surprisingly, skate makes a great “wrap,” which is good, because what else are you going to do with this fish? The sausage/sauerkraut wrap filler was nearly as good as Kurt Gutenbrunner’s at Blaue Gans. But I wouldn’t put this dish at the top of my own list of Picholine faves. It goes to show you: don’t listen to food critics. Including me. Had I just ordered whatever caught my eye, I may have ended up the Master Orderer of the night.
Then, the moment we’d been waiting for: the cheese. The dapper celebrity fromager Max McCalman came round with the cart and spent a generous amount of time explaining the cheeses. Without him and Brennan and their brainchild Artisanal, would New York be so obsessed with cheese now? I doubt it. We ordered a tasting of eight cheeses, and Mr. McCalman helpfully provided us with a cheese menu with our picks marked off, as well as pens to take our own notes. I wish more restaurants would do this, because I never remember the cheeses in the morning. The standout selections were an end-of-season sampling of Vacherin Mont D’Or, the sort of liquidy Swiss we tried at Gordon Ramsay, and an excellent cow’s milk cheese from County Cork, Ireland, called Ardrahan.
A flurry of sweets arrived at the end – little chocolate fudge squares sprinkled with a few flakes of sea salt, teensy little crunchy cannoli filled with almond butter cream. Throughout the meal, Picholine displayed a lot of generosity with these little touches – the garlic and fennel bread sticks that are expertly made in house, the sweets at the end, and the excellent service throughout. We rolled out of the new space and back into the wilds of the Upper West besotted with food and wine and very impressed with Picholine.
Picholine
35 West 64th Street, between Central Park West and Broadway
212-724-8585
Posted in food, French, restaurants
Tagged cheese, New York, Terrance Brennan
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Barneys, Inside and Out
Madison Avenue on a wet winter afternoon.
Chanel bag, above and below
in the windows
black and white
skirt with a center pleat
full-length Barbour coat
ankle boots
electric blue
fur coat and combat boots
military coat with brass buttons
thinking pink
Prada bags in “Celine Dion green”
Celine Dion photo from Just Jared
spring’s little white dress by Sea New York
slate and navy blues on the co-op floor
metallics at Prada
Death & Co.
Addendum: Eater reported on Thursday, March 1, that Death & Co. may be closed for good. We don’t know yet. I am embarrassed for my delusional East Village neighbors. Death is harmless – honest!
Addendum 2, March 19, 2007: Excellent news! Death has been resurrected…for now.
You need only turn to the recent news about Death & Co. to confirm that East Villagers are really as crazy as they seem. Seems the neighbors are against renewing the place’s liquor license next year not just because of people lingering outside smoking and talking, but because the exterior of Death & Co. reminds them of a Nazi train car.
Thrilled by this macabre piece of news, I rushed over to Death & Co. The exterior is indeed forbidding. There are evil iron bird wings and wooden plank slats, which I suppose, if you were Sylvia Plath, or if you were hallucinating on back pain meds and continually staring at the place from an apartment across the street, could look like a a Nazi train car, a really fancy, first-class one, say.
The velvet curtains at the door part to reveal a place that looks a lot like East Side Company Bar, Employees Only, Little Branch, or any one of a number of retro speakeasies that have opened up in the past couple years. Where was the death? I expected dinge and cobwebs, maybe the damp smell of the grave or of an East Village squat. But this place was clean and almost bright. On the bar stools, where there might have been brooding, anemic, stringy-haired rockers, there were happy clean people ordering expensive (but darn good) cocktails. My heart sank.
One recent evening, my friend and I joined the rank and file of young hipsters at the tables running along one side of the room. We compared notes on handbags with the girls at the table next to ours. We had some fancy cocktails – she the Blood & Sand, which was not on the menu, but which our waitress helpfully recommended, I the Bobby Burns, another scotch cocktail that wasn’t as sweet. The ice cubes at Death & Co. are the big, satisifying kind that keep drinks colder. Though these may also remind you of Little Branch, their provenance can be traced to Flatiron and Pegu, from whence the bartenders.
The chef should get major kudos for food presentation. They really take the phrase “small bites” to a new level here: nearly everything can be consumed in one bite, without the help of a knife or fork. The fish & chips arrived as little bites of fish wrapped in tempura. My heart went out to whatever guy in back had spent hours painstakingly tying the salad bites into little nubs of lettuce. The mac & cheese arrived on large spoons, as is the fashion. The delicious jarlsburg-parmesan combination was deepened with just a trace of truffle oil. Even the filet mignon was handily served in bite-size formation, cut into rounds, padded with bacon, topped with a petite potato and skewered with a pretty bamboo stick. As an added bonus, it also tasted good.
Unfortunately, the sauces that came alongside were a problem across the board. The salad dressing was low on taste, the fish sauce too goopy and mayonnaise-y for the tempura, and several sauces just seemed to go in too many directions at once, as if the kitchen were attempting fusion in one tiny little side dish. If the focus is going to be on dipping, the dips had better be good.
But let’s face it: Death & Co. isn’t about the food. It’s an excellent bar where drinks are prepared with TLC. To make a gin based Mig Royale, the fedora’d bartender shook up all the non-fizzy ingredients, decanted them into a martini glass, then, with much showmanship, lit a match and held it to an orange peel over the glass. He explained that it was to caramelize the orange. The result, topped with champagne, tasted like orange sour ball candy – sublime.
Though at one point beset by a large group that broadcast the vibe “I work in midtown!”, the crowd here is still cool. Let’s keep it that way. On another evening LeNell Smothers, the bourbon queen of Red Hook, sidled up to the bar with an entourage. (She’s the one in the hat in the shadows, center, in my stealth photo above.) “They’re here,” the bartender said reverently. “The biggest drinkers in the city.”
I was sad that this gin joint seemed disappointingly bereft of death. Alas, I found myself wondering: where are the rockers of yesteryear? In the 80’s, there was a punk rock club in the East Village called “Downtown Beirut Bar,” so named because it was meant to evoke a bombed-out hell hole of a place, which it truly was. Now, even death arrives in highly stylized form.
But I suppose we can all drink to that.
Death & Co.
433 East 6th Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A
212-388-0882
Albertine
I loved the dress I wore to my senior prom. It was Laura Ashley, hydrangea-blue, floral, and flattering – if you can imagine such a combination now. But the dress was ruined for me when I walked into the dance hall and saw another girl – a junior! – wearing the same exact one.
Since then I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid another dress doppelganger moment. “It’s such problem in New York to find something different,” the saleswoman at Albertine said, but this little West Village boutique aims to do just that. The ladylike frocks by local designers like Sir, Lyell, and Some Odd Rubies are often one-of-a-kind, which means no one else at that upcoming wedding/party/charity event will be wearing the same thing. Try getting that kind of peace of mind from a department store.
So go to Albertine. But if anyone asks you where you got the dress, remember: you got it at Barneys.
Albertine
13 Christopher Street between 6th and 7th Avenues
212-924-8515
Cafe Cluny
Much ado has been made of the female pedigree of Cafe Cluny, which is owned by Lynn Wagenknecht. She’s the ex-wife of Keith McNally! She’s trading in on his contacts! She has pictures of celebrities up on the walls! She expects people to come to her cool new West Village restaurant just because of who she is! Can you imagine? It’s unheard of!
You’d think that in this city of 18,696 restaurants, this was the only one started up and owned by a woman. Oh wait – that’s nearly true. (R.I.P. restaurant Dona – we loved you, and your truffled gnudi too.) Many critics seem to be completely flabbergasted by this woman who dared start a restaurant without her husband. 
Any minute now, a movie extra is going to pop up behind her and say, I told you, Miss Scarlett, don’t be ridin’ through that shanty town on that buggy by yourself… It’s dangerous!
Boy, that Wagenknecht sure is uppity.
The interior of Cafe Cluny is unapologetically feminine. Botanical prints abound, but they are more in the stylish John Derian/Fornasetti vein than the girly Shabby Chic one. The decor celebrates the subversive, from taxidermied birds and fish to a giant wooden bug lurking on the ceiling. The press descriptions of the restaurant’s pointed femininity have become self-fulfilling prophecies: on the nights I was there, the place was populated mainly by women and the men who love their shoes. Attention straight men of the West Village: proceed immediately to Cafe Cluny. You’ll be shooting fish in a barrel.
Several people I know are crazy about the food at Cafe Cluny. I’m not sure why. Wagenknecht does have the Odeon owner’s gift for anticipating just what customers want: tuna tartare, steak, short ribs, addictive French fries. But even casual dining in New York has undergone a sea change. As much as critics like to kvetch (as in Bruni’s well-deserved slap “You May Kiss the Chef’s Napkin Ring“) about the needless copy on menus telling you everything from which field your greens are from to what the pig ate for breakfast that morning*, many of us can now tell the difference between very fresh and local ingredients and ingredients that are not so. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that the quality of the ingredients at Cafe Cluny is terrible. The tuna tartare is dressed perfectly with mustard oil and cilantro, but the tuna itself doesn’t taste like much. And the frisee in the frisee salad (my handy bistro barometer) just hides under the lardons and egg without really adding anything but texture.
The short ribs were melt-in-your-mouth good. But this very cheap cut of meat was priced at $28. Sure, there was some foie gras thrown in there for good measure. But $28? The steak – hanger, another not-so-ritzy cut – was $25 and cooked medium-rare on the inside, as I ordered it, but charred to the point of complete carbonization on the outside. And it was a faux steak-frites! They wouldn’t give me fries with that – not unless I ordered them separately for $8. I loved the pan-roasted scallop special with pureed butternut squash and oxtail ragu. Loved it, that is, until I realized that two scallops set me back $27, and then I felt gypped. The place reminds me more of Village restaurant than Odeon or Balthazaar. So why aren’t the prices more in line?
In this too, Wagenknecht is the savvy business owner, who probably does not want to go the way of Grange Hall (sob). We diners want fresh, local ingredients. We want a cool interior. We want a lovely, romantic location in the West Village, one of the most expensive zip codes in New York. We want low prices. We want instant access. New Yorkers want everything our way. And for the most part recently, we’ve gotten it, and in the process we’ve gotten awfully spoiled.
At least Cafe Cluny goes a long way in gratifying some of these wishes. It’s a nice neighborhood restaurant full of taxidermied creatures, a place where you can see some of your friendly West Village neighbors like John Waters. It was so apropos to see him just as I was taking all these pictures of fashion week, because he wrote a few of my favorite lines on fashion in Serial Mom. Here’s the final scene, cribbed from IMDB:
Patty Hearst is talking on a payphone when Kathleen Turner comes up behind her and grabs the phone from her.
Kathleen Turner: You can’t wear white after Labor Day!
Patty Hearst: That’s not true anymore.
Kathleen Turner: Yes it is! Didn’t your mother tell you?
[She whacks her in the face with the phone]
Patty Hearst: No! Please! Fashion has changed!
Kathleen Turner: No… It hasn’t.
[She bludgeons Patty Hearst to death with payphone.]
Cut to Patty Hearst’s white high heel, now covered in blood and gore.
See? What’s so threatening about a woman in a position of power?
Cafe Cluny
284 West 12th Street at West 4th Street
212-255-6900
* The apex of this trend was a note at the bottom of the Waverly’s preview menu saying “All drinking and cooking water is reverse osmosis.” It made one wonder why, exactly, it was necessary for the Waverly Inn to reverse-osmose the water coming out of the inn’s pipes, which presumably do not originate in Mexico.
Posted in food, French, restaurants, West Village
Tagged Graydon Carter, Keith McNally, New York, steak tartare
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Fashion Week FS07: Vera Wang
The Vera Wang show is almost a
Fashion Week prerequisite because a) it wasn’t so long ago that she won CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year, and b) she still has a hold on the whole couture bridal thing. If you live in NYC and have engaged friends with a yen for fabulous dresses, or you are one yourself, you are most likely already familar with Vera Wang. The last time I was at her shop, a bride was getting the final fittings on a $60K custom-made Vera Wang gown. Yes folks, that’s $60K for one dress the bride will wear once. Which translates to: Vera Wang will be around for the long haul.
Here’s who came to the show.
Sadly, darlings, this is it for me for Fashion Week FS07.
- As for the fashion future, I am shorting:
- leggings worn with high heels (never a good look to start with, even more horrible now)
- leggings with flats…?
- silver handbags, except for the most expensive and difficult to replicate (mainly because I fear a plague of street vendor imitations)
- all black
- leopard
- flats (though summer will have its way with us in that regard)Long on:
- pale gold bags (because they’re harder to imitate)
- silver shoes
- leggings with ankle boots
- hot pink
- weird colors
- bright white
- platform wedges
- drab
- shiny black textural things
But right now I am feeling especially long on bikinis and poolside lounge chairs, and I have a pressing appointment in Marathon Key. Until next time…
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Tagged fashion week, New York, street chic, Tinsley Mortimer
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Fashion Week FS07: Catherine Malandrino
An arty downtown crowd showed up at the Catherine Malandrino show; Birkin bags were scarce.
Catherine Malandrino is truly the fashion person’s designer. Never afraid of the outré, she designs clothes that are safe to wear at even the most vicious industry party. All you need is daring, and she’ll supply the effortless chic.
Lynn Yaeger, below
the show
Catherine Malandrino
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Fashion Week FS07: Bill Blass
Who is the Bill Blass customer? It’s a question that has burdened the label in the past, but this season’s collection attracted a nice crowd. For fall ’07, a mix of socialites of all ages showed up, plus some familiar faces in the fashion pack.
There was something for everyone at the show. The Bill Blass stalwarts got their suits, which were swingy and modern, and the younger set got party dresses that were – are you sitting down? – drop dead sexy. Yes, that’s right: “Bill Blass” and “sexy,” in the same sentence.
Glenda Bailey of Harper’s Bazaar, above
Joe Zee of Elle, above
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Fashion Week FS07: Oscar de la Renta
The ultimate fashion power crowd descended upon the Oscar de la Renta show yesterday. There was fur, fur everywhere on this particularly frigid New York day, though none of it seemed to be flying, even in the middle of Fashion Week.
Oh yes: and lest you ever feel lazy for wearing the same thing two days in a row, even the editor of French Vogue has been spied sporting the same very fabulous coat twice. Now that’s confidence. And chic.
Carson Kressley
Barbara Walters
Meredith Melling Burke
Piper Perabo
Grace Coddington
Jamee Gregory
Olivia Chantecaille
Audrey Gruss
Rachel Zoe
Elizabeth and Judy Peabody
Bob Morris
Carine Roitfeld
Alex Kuczynski, center
Anna Wintour and bodyguard
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Tagged Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld, fashion week, Grace Coddington, Jamee Gregory, Meredith Melling Burke, New York, Olivia Chantecaille, Oscar de la Renta, Rachel Zoe, street chic
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Fashion Week February 07: DVF
Wrap yourself in black patent leather and grab a silver handbag: Fashion Week is back! Diane von Furstenberg fans arrived wearing blindingly bright white (like Glenda Bailey with monogrammed Goyard bag), big fur hats (Andre Leon Talley), and high-waisted coats with poufy skirts (Carine Roitfeld).
Glenda Bailey and bag
Carine Roitfeld
Andre Leon Talley
Joe Zee
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Gordon Ramsay at the London
Everyone loves to hate Gordon Ramsay. I may actually be biased as a reviewer by not being biased: I have never seen his reality shows Hell’s Kitchen or The F Word, where his profanity-laden hissy fits earned him a lot of detractors. There’s the rub of food television: When viewers love you, you’re Molto Mario, when they don’t, you’re Rocco.
My chef friend and I entered the restaurant the day after Bruni’s two-star dis in the Times with a certain amount of trepidation. Was Gordon Ramsay really that bad? At first glance, the restaurant seemed worthy of three stars. The pearl gray dining room, ringed with frosted glass paneling, has a shrine-like feel, so much so that my friend mimicked angels singing as we sat down. As the meal progressed, we respectfully disagreed with reviewers Bruni, Platt, and Richman. Gordon Ramsay at the London isn’t boring. It’s just British.
If you’ve ever been to the Gordon Ramsay restaurant at Claridge’s in London, where I went many a year ago, you’ll recognize the muted palette of the room, the French-inspired service and food, the hush, the lack of anything that might distract from the food on your plate. These are all signature Ramsay-isms. Love him or hate him, he is a brand, and a very London one at that. Gordon Ramsay’s New York outpost is posh. All sorts of displays are wheeled about: a huge silver punch bowl filled with bottles of champagne offered as an apertif, a comprehensive cheese tray, a petit-four cart bedecked with cakes and candies in glass jars. In a quirk that also seemed particularly British, there is an almost fetishistic attention to the massive array of sterling silver steak knives, forks, fish knives, fish spoons, teaspoons, and demitasse spoons, all of which are rotated in and out in a constant blur of service.
A three-star place doesn’t make you pick and pay for amuse bouche, and neither does Gordon Ramsay. The meal began with toasts and spreads – a velvety chicken liver paté, sweet and savory in one bite, and a more sophisticated version of bacalao in which the cod was mixed with leeks. We asked for more toasts for the paté. “I couldn’t make this at home,” I said. My chef friend said, “Maybe. But it would take a week.” We were very pleased to be served the BLT-esque parfaits that even Bruni liked. A delicate tomato coulis made up the bottom layer, then a layer of celery root, then potently smoky bacon topped it off.
My chef friend, the more adventurous diner of the two of us, ordered the veal sweetbreads. They arrived lightly battered and fried, set on beets and stewed cabbage and dressed with a wonderful Cabernet reduction at the table. “Tastes like chicken. Really good chicken,” I said. “And it doesn’t look like a brain on a plate,” she said, which has not always been the case at other restaurants. Lobster ravioli was our one foray into the fish realm of the menu, which disappointed other reviewers at least in entree form. The lobster appetizer was anything but: The one large ravioli (doesn’t that make it a “raviolo”?) was stuffed to bursting with lobster sauteed in butter and served with a celery root cream. It hit just the right notes of decadence and lightness, and Gosset champagne complemented it perfectly.
A palate-cleansing, inventive amuse bouche of pineapple granache garnished with crystallized cilantro arrived, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Marcel Vigneron on Top Chef. Presumably it was his attitude, not his penchant for molecular gastronomy, that landed him in the hospital after an angry fan accosted him at a nightclub and smashed him in the forehead with a bottle. I have seen that reality food show, and if Marcel cooked me a meal, I would be inclined to dislike it. But Marcel didn’t prepare this crystallized cilantro garnish, so I didn’t mind it at all.
The main courses are served and dressed with a small amount of sauce tableside. For my chef friend, the venison in a chocolate sauce, for me, the lamb with marjoram sauce, since, as I’ve mentioned here before, lamb is the new short ribs. This was a cut I haven’t encountered before, a “cannon” of lamb,” which our waitress explains is the rack without the bones, the best part of the filet. (The filet of the filet?) It would be a perfectly delicious cut of meat on its own, but the Mediterranean and Indian touches of eggplant spiced with cumin and marjoram sauce take it out of the realm of the purely French. With it I had a glass of the excellent 2000 tempranillo from La Rioja Alta, Viña Alberdi. Unlike Bruni, we did not find the chocolate sauce on the venison overwhelming; it was smoky and spicy, a proper mole. But the Times review had landed more than 24 hours before. Had Ramsay already changed the recipe?
I went a little crazy with the cheese cart when it arrived, ordering five different sorts of cheeses, many of which I’d never heard of before. The Swiss Vacherin was so creamy it was nearly liquid and came served in a little bowl (with a little silver demitasse spoon, of course). This and a Corsican Brindamour (a.k.a. Fleur du Maquis) were fantastic. We also had a fabulous apricot souffle, whose sweetness was offset by the crunchy roasted pralines speckled throughout. Its fluffy top was permeated by a large dollop of ice cream, an act performed tableside with much aplomb, of course. Then, candy and cookies, and more candy and cookies. The restaurant’s unabashed sweet tooth also seemed to me quintessentially British; Nigella Lawson didn’t rise to fame licking foie gras off a spoon, after all.
So what’s the problem? We saw Gordon Ramsay’s glass as half full, not half empty. I would have given him three stars. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the only glowing review I read was also penned by a woman, Moira Hodgson of the New York Observer – Ramsay relies on charming the diner with subtlety and sophistication. Leaving the shrine, I was reminded of the Robert Parker quandary. Which came first: Parker’s taste for wines that punch you in the face, or the typical American gourmet’s taste for wines that punch you in the face? Will it ever be OK again to say you’d like a nice, light, crisp white without cringing with embarrassment? In cuisine, what’s wrong with tradition minus the over-the-top flourishes? It’s as if everyone, chefs and reviewers alike, wants to be contrarian by deviating from the expected, but it’s difficult to do so when the expected is itself contrarian.
But Gordon Ramsay could have told you that.
Gordon Ramsay at the London
151 West 54th Street
212-468-8888
Posted in food, French, Midtown West, New York restaurants, restaurants
Tagged Gordon Ramsay, New York
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Blue Ribbon Brasserie
I am the only person in New York who hasn’t been to Blue Ribbon.
No, not the sushi place. And not Blue Ribbon Bakery. That doesn’t count, my friends inform me. You have to eat at Blue Ribbon, the restaurant.
Lest you have trouble distinguishing between these various Blue Ribbons, as I did, it’s called Blue Ribbon Brasserie, est. 1992, during Soho’s waning glory days, and it’s on Sullivan Street. The whole world seems to think it’s the best thing since Sullivan Street Bakery bread, sliced or unsliced. People like to say they eat at Blue Ribbon because they like the food, but who really cares? They like Blue Ribbon because they think it’s cool, and for the most part, it is.
Sadly, there was no table free for Les Moonves and Julie Chen on the night I finally visited Blue Ribbon, so they left. Vincent Gallo lurked around the bar area (though fortunately he did not offer to sell us his sperm). The lighting was flattering and the room humming.But after years of hearing the hype, I was disappointed that the interior looks like any other ordinary restaurant. I thought it was supposed to be…drum roll…Blue Ribbon.
The brasserie, which serves an eclectic mix of food, from pu pu platters to hummus, is famous for the fact that they stay open until 4 in the morning, a nice perk, but one that would have been more useful to me when I actually stayed up until 4 in the morning. It’s also famous for the wait. On a Saturday night at 9pm, we were told it would be 2 1/2 hours until we could sit down. It turned out to be 1 1/2, which was fortunate because one of us was about to devour the maitre’d by then.
The first course was fantastic. A dozen oysters, half Kumamotos, half PEI Malpeques, were the best oysters I’ve had in New York in recent memory. They tasted as if they’d been plucked out of the sea just a minute before. Alongside this came a cucumber in the tiniest imaginable dice, tossed in a vinegary dressing as a gazpacho-like accompaniment. Very creative, and a perfect complement to the oysters. The sauteed calamari was so good we ordered it twice. A simple combination of extra-virgin olive oil, sauteed garlic, and thin ribbons of calamari, it came tossed together like bucatini in a bowl.
Why do they bother? I wondered. Blue Ribbon could coast by on reputation alone, but here they were turning out excellent starters. It may be the reason celebritrons have stuck around here but abandoned most of the other Soho places.
No wonder Blue Ribbon’s raw bar is fantastic; they presumably share their purveyors with Blue Ribbon Sushi up the street. Alas, the second course was not as impressive as the first. Salmon was good but ho-hum, and weird planko-like potato flakes adorned the top of the mashed potatoes. The waiter recommended the fried chicken as one of the best entrees, but when the plate was set in front of me, I realized with slowly growing horror that I had ordered the exact same TV-dinner-esque meal featured in this highly disturbing Wonder Showzen video a friend showed me earlier that day. It was as if I’d walked out of Super Size Me and my subconscious directed me straight to McDonald’s. That awful coincidence wasn’t Blue Ribbon’s fault. I did wish, however, that the fried chicken hadn’t been so dry.
Something I never would have ordered, the tofu ravioli, was the best entree of the bunch. Made with rice flour, they were more dumplings than ravioli and came with two dressings, one of which was spicy. “Who thinks to do this for vegetarians?” my vegetarian friend cried.
We couldn’t stay awake for dessert. It was 1 AM by then, and we had been at the restaurant for 4 hours. Goodnight, oysters. Goodnight, Vincent Gallo. Goodnight, Blue Ribbon.
Blue Ribbon Brasserie
97 Sullivan Street, between Prince and Spring
212-274-0404
Posted in American, food, New York restaurants, restaurants, Soho
Tagged New York, seafood restaurants
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