day-after-xmas dinner in nyc

locanda verde / 377 greenwich st / nyc / (212) 925-3797 / dinner mon-sun, 5:30-11p; breakfast mon-fri, 8-11a, sat-sun, 8-10a; lunch 11:30a-3p / reservations recommended / dinner ~$50-60 per person (no wine) / 2 1/2 stars out of 4

it's not often that hyped restaurants live up to the hype. especially restaurants that are minorly owned by celebrities. in this case, locanda verde, part-owned by robert deniro (whose previous restaurant in the same space, ago, folded), lives up to the food hype, but falls short in other ways that prevent it from being the whole package.

i read up on the restaurant shortly before we walked over, and let me just say that a lot of the yelpers who reviewed this place are a little...well, let's be clear here: robert deniro may have invested in the restaurant, but he does not run this restaurant. when writing your review, should you feel a need to address a specific person, try the chef, the sous chef, the pastry chef, the manager, etc - not the investor who just wants a return on said investment. also, please employ correct spelling, and do not address anyone as your friend or "buddy" unless they are, indeed, your friend or buddy.

on to the food, which was quite good. it's slightly better than craigie, if i say so myself. there are not many good italian restaurants that are modern, and in any case, italian restaurants structure meals differently than the typical american meal. in any nouveau american restaurant, you're likely to do the traditional appetizer, entree, dessert sequence. in an italian restaurant, dinner is a longer affair, encompassing primi (appetizers), secondi (pastas), entrees, and dessert. when i went to babbo with shirley and lilly, we did the whole four courses: two appetizers, three pastas, two entrees, three desserts. not even a "full" four-course dinner for each of us and we were totally stuffed. so in that sense, it was a good idea not to do the full four courses at locanda verde - we still ordered enough food to be quite pleasantly full.

for appetizers, we shared the sheeps milk ricotta with grilled bread; marinated beets with goat cheese and gorgonzola; steak tartare with crispy guanciale; and lamb meatball sliders. the ricotta is almost worth the hype - you've certainly never had ricotta like this, and i'm not even sure what they did to it. it's silky, creamy, almost like mascarpone, with just a tad too much richness, actually. maybe they strained it, then whizzed it in a food processor? i wanted to believe that it was just made in a way that produced silky, creamy ricotta, but i know better. points off, too, for not providing the correct amount of bread for the amount of ricotta served. the marinated beets were good as well, especially with gorgonzola - not a combination i'd had before. the lamb meatball sliders were good, but not particularly memorable. however, the steak tartare was absolutely fantastic - perfect texture, perfect temperature, perfect seasoning, with a bit of tang from some scallion or cilantro or something like that. i like steak tartare and have had it in a few places, and this was the best of the bunch. it was completely unadorned - no cornichons, mustards, fig jams, etc - and it needed no adornments.

for entrees, i had the fennel glazed duck with tuscan kale, yukons, and concord grape conserve. this was nearly as fabulous as the steak tartare. it was perfectly cooked, but more importantly, the combination of flavors was stellar. the fennel was understated, coming through with bites of duck, while the duck jus saturated the kale. i was surprised by the concord grape conserve, though - you hear about these mythical ingredients that tie a dish together, but you rarely encounter them. this was one of those mythical ingredients, beyond tasting like someone had put a lot of love into it. i think it was cooked in some sort of red wine reduction, and it was deliciously juicy, a textural contrast to the solidity of the rest of the dish. i do wish there had been a few more potatoes - these days, restaurant potatoes are so deliciously potato-y in flavor, yet dwindling in number on the plate. i don't really understand this fear of starches, and i think everyone should just get over it - as long as you balance starches, proteins, veg, and fat, it's ok. really, put the starch back on the plate already.

my parents had the fire-roasted garlic chicken for two and i grabbed a bite of it before i was irrevocably stuffed. it was delicious - and somehow, so much more vivid than any chicken i've had recently at a restaurant. it wasn't boring, it wasn't mild - it was every bit as daring as any other entree at the restaurant. perhaps it lacked nuance of the duck, but its vibrancy made up for that - just depends on what you're in the mood for. my sister had the veal shank (a special that evening) and man, was that thing huge. you don't think of veal having such large shanks - but apparently they do.

my parents and i shared the maple budino with candied pecans, cranberry sorbetto for dessert. this was a bit of a letdown, actually - i love pot de creme, i love maple, and it should have been a home run, especially with the cranberry sorbet to cut the intensity of the maple. but somehow it wasn't - it was too sweet, too much of a confection.

all in all, the food was great - a little uneven, and nothing was a home run, but with flashes of actual brilliance. unfortunately, the service and decor were enough of a distraction that the overall dining experience rates lower than at restaurants like craigie, babbo, and alinea - all restaurants which i would go to first over locanda verde. notes on the negatives are below:

service: i am so tired of pretentious service. to all restaurants i may patronize in the future: i am not a rube about food and i am going to not only behave, but tip well. i am not an overly demanding or picky customer. so stop kicking my chair as you walk by, acting as if i know nothing about food, being inattentive, and pretending that we're hicks. please remember who ordered what, too - i would understand if the restaurant were totally in the weeds, but that was not the case when i was there. in short: don't be a jerk, because that's just going to make me want to be a jerk back.

on the decor - well, it's all oddly mismatched, and not in a good way. it's part pub, with piney wood paneling and lots of ugly mirrors, but has the arched plaster ceilings and chandeliers of a more ritzy restaurant. the back of the restaurant is a more family-style area with long tables, whereas the front is more slick and modern with shiny black tables and a bar. the height of the space is nice and airy, but i would have preferred an interior without the occasional broken mirror. further about these mirrors, which line the back and side walls of the room - they are obviously a relic of the previous restaurant's interior, which presumably had booths that matched the mirrors. now that those booths are gone, the mirrors seem out of place.

it's all about the table

do you ever find that when you're having a dinner party, and you're finally sitting down to eat, you...don't actually feel like eating? it's one part adrenaline from getting everything done, and one part nervousness about people liking what you've made - especially when you're cooking for people you haven't ever cooked for. it's not like cooking for friends back home, where you've already been tried and vetted. granted, i don't think anyone's going to be judgmental about just a dinner party, but when i do give one, there is always that competitive spirit that aims to impress, vying with the more social desire to feed people.

i think i've mentioned this before, but really, the best part of the dinner party for me is the cooking part; of course, when you cook something, somebody needs to eat it, so naturally it makes sense to invite some people over. and the social phenomenon of a dinner party really appeals to me: a group of people gathered around a table, talking and idling the evening away. take note of the table: it actually makes a huge difference, having now entertained for four years without one. it really surprises me just how much having the table matters - just having this physical thing that everybody is sitting around, and that you can rest your elbows on.

back to the matter at hand: a recap of last night's dinner. i know you're all waiting with bated breath. i was going to be cooking for more people than usual - typically i cook for four to six, on a given weekday in cambridge, but it was going to be a party of ten. i wanted to improve on the previous dinner party with respect to logistics, where it wouldn't be late and where i could set everything up ahead of time. i thought that dessert (vanilla panna cotta) slowed me down last time, and i also didn't give it enough time to set. i had been wanting to make a cheesecake for a few weeks - i just bought a good set of stainless steel springforms from sur la table, for cheap - so there's dessert. i also didn't want to make as many separate things as i did last time - salad, meat dish, veg side - but i did want to maintain the robustness of having lots of vegetables, since it's summer (aka produce season) and i do believe in both butter and vegetables. so, in the interest of time, space, and economy, i decided to make a big all-inclusive pasta with some sort of veg side/salad.

i don't know why this is, but i always seem to be better at making desserts, even though i spend more time thinking about the dinner part. cooking (as opposed to baking) is the more essential skill, because you've got to eat dinner, but you don't have to eat dessert; because cooking is the survival skill, i've tried to cultivate it. perhaps it's just the logistics of cooking for more people than i'm used to - apparently i can really only do 4-6 people or 25 people, well - but i think that in both dinner parties, dinner has been a bit of a letdown, but dessert has always been good. last night, for the salad, i did a green bean salad - i had been thinking green beans, and was sold when the green beans at whole foods looked uncommonly good. they were really green, a little waxy in sheen, crisp, and just very attractive. the salad is a cherrypicked combination of two different salads i've made before (for those who know them, the wheatberry salad and the dilled warm green bean salad). so: green beans, smoked mozzarella, tomatoes, oranges and their zest, and a little bit of balsamic vinaigrette which i couldn't get to emulsify correctly (oops). i was going to add some cilantro too, but i thought there was enough in the salad already, so there you go.

for the record, i've been superbusy this week - longish hours at the office followed by 6-7 hours for my other job - so i didn't even decide on what to make until friday night. i was a little worried about making enough food for ten people, so i thought a pasta with meat and veg in it would be doable. specifically: sweet italian pork sausage, a little bit of bacon, onions, garlic, thyme, and peas. verdict: so-so. the stuff:pasta ratio was a little too low for my liking, and i think one more veg would have been good - mushrooms, or maybe sundried tomatoes to add a bit of acidity. oh, i also added a couple pinches of the smoked salt (smoked alderwood salt from whole foods, from the bulk foods aisle), and i thought it was pretty good. i think it would be better in stews, or long braises, but it went with the bacon pretty well - it would be out of place in a vegetarian dish. i also think that the sizes of things were a little off - the sausage was a little too big (i took the casings off and tore the sausages into bits before browning them), and i thought the pasta was as well, so it was a bit hard to get a bite with everything in it. if i did this again, i would probably use a different pasta - maybe an orecchiette or acini de pepe, or at least pipette - i used chocciole or something like that, from whole foods, because they didn't have pipette (a barilla brand pasta shape that i really like - it's a little smaller than the chocciole).

i also thought that the pasta lacked something saucy to bind it all together. i had originally been thinking that i'd make a pesto to fulfill that purpose, but then i remembered that i have neither blender nor food processor in this apartment, so that was out of the question. i briefly considered buying premade pesto, but i wasn't really ever serious about that. i was hoping that the surfeit of onions and combined, concentrated meat juices would be enough to sauce the pasta, in combination with parmesan cheese, but it just wasn't quite there. i also considered tomatoes, because the pasta is essentially an all'amatriciana with a couple of extras tacked on, but tomatoes are super-expensive these days, and i didn't want to use canned. in retrospect, a pesto would have been perfect - a little bit of vegetal freshness to contrast the meat flavors - and i should have at least gone with some tomatoes. consider this my mea culpa.

i thought dessert was pretty good, though - i ended up making a gingered plum compote to go with the cheesecake, for a few reasons: (1), for color; (2), to bump up the net volume of a serving of dessert because there would be so many people; and (3) because fruit is always good with cheesecake. i realized far too late (ie, now) that this is the second time that i've made something with yogurt and forgotten to tell c, who is allergic to yogurt (oh, crap) and i'm hoping that he's not really sick today. perhaps the bacteria cultures in yogurt die when they're cooked? i sure hope so, although i'm not sure that that's the case at all. well, anyway, the fact that i had to use anna's lemon things (not the ginger-flavored thins that i generally use) did not detract from the cheesecake, although i do think that ginger flavored thins are a little better. the plums - which i typically make for plum shortcake - were pretty good. i grated the ginger this time, which eliminated the problem of the gross texture combination of sauteed plum and minced ginger. we also had some farmer's market ufo/donut peaches that y+g brought, which were really good - peaches are one of those things i would actually buy at a farmer's market, because you know they haven't been artificially treated with ethylene to make sure they ripen at the end of their thousands-of-miles-long journey to your supermarket.

despite the hiccups and poor choices, i thought that dinner went well - i'm slowly getting the hang of dinner parties at a table, for more than four (and, budgeting for this many people). oh, and iced tea, take 2 went well - i used the harney + sons peach iced tea, slightly sweetened. i might go buy some more before the summer is over - that's how much i like this tea. anyway, this dinner had the right amount of things - everything fit well on the table, including a couple of ramekins with lemon slices in them - yes, i did buy meyer lemons at whole foods just because they were beautiful. plus, you don't find them all that often on this coast, although they're common in california. they were this gorgeous, brilliant egg-yolk-y yellow. one of the things that i do miss about cambridge, though, is that it's so much easier to have spontaneous dinner party (these tend to be more dinner, less party) in cambridge because i can just send out an email in the afternoon and stop by the supermarket on the walk home. there's no having to contend with completely variegated schedules because almost everyone i know is in school; no having to spend an hour and half going to the grocery store; no having to wait for people to travel from more than 20 minutes away. if i'm wandering around the city, i don't mind when it takes forever to get anywhere or do anything, but if i've planned something, the time that it takes to do anything in this city really get to me.

notes
in the boston globe's (not that great) interview with tim cushman, the chef/owner of o ya, he reports that the restaurant is booked solid for 1 1/2 months. right now i'm feeling pretty good about having made a reservation the day the review came out. when i made i wondered if i was being silly, but now i'm glad i didn't have to have dinner surrounded by obnoxious yuppie foodies. p.s. i am completely aware that most people would consider me to be a yuppie foodie. and to those people: i defy you! i'm not a foodie; i just happen to like food. and food science.

also, about the chocolate bundt cake - looked fabulous, tasted not bad. i really should have bought toothpicks to test the cake, which i thought was slightly overdone. whoops. these are the problems attendant to using a 10-cup bundt pan instead of of a 12-cup bundt pan. so the cake really needed an extra day for its flavor to develop, because i thought the brown sugar was a little too prominent over the chocolate, but it was pretty good anyway. a chocolate glaze - i'd been thinking of making one, but judged it to be too easy to mess up the glaze when transporting the cake - would probably have been a welcome addition. i made one last summer when i made this cake for my office then.

i stopped by whole foods in union square with my mother on saturday; they don't sell cocoa nibs, but they do sell bittersweet callebaut chocolate. it mystifies me why they don't sell the bittersweet at whole foods tribeca. and i've really soured on new york grocery stores in general, given this whole cocoa nib fiasco. granted, they're somewhat hard to find in cambridge too - i walked all the way to christina's once, only to find that they were out, and the next time they had them, they didn't have the same ones - but you're supposed to be able to find anything in new york city, right? i would have liked to have done a taste test between the cocoa nibs i have - locally processed tazo brand nibs, organically grown in the dominican republic - with another type of cocoa nibs. i really liked the ones that i got at christina's before the tazo ones - they were smaller and have a purer chocolate smell. perhaps one of these days i'll happen upon them, and let me tell you, those will be happy days.

home and homesickness

i've been kind of grumpy lately, because i've been trying to figure out whether or not to take a semester off, but more, i suspect, because i'm starting to get homesick. don't get me wrong, new york: i like you fine. even more than fine, really. i really like you. but living out of a suitcase for a few months, regardless of how much of your stuff you've surrounded yourself with, just can't compare to being home: there's this permanent sense of your life being temporary.

i think i've felt as much at home as i can this summer, and in truth it really has felt like a vacation. you know, a vacation where i've got multiple jobs, but a break from school is a break from school. so now that i've finally had enough vacation, i'm starting to get antsy about feeling like i'm at home. part of this is cooking, and it's just been so long since i've gotten to do any therapeutic cooking. this sounds pretty stupid, but it's actually a great way to relax: basically i just do something that's really complicated or unnecessary, just for the sake of doing it. my standby is roasting a chicken to use the meat for chicken pot pie; usually people just buy a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket (ugh) or poach some chicken breast (uninspiring). after you roast the chicken and pull all the meat off the bones, you get to make chicken stock. and somehow the chicken and the food it's turned into all disappears within a day or two, courtesy of your friends.

i like the involved nature of doing something like this, and also the physical exhaustion that comes with it after you've been on your feet for hours. your kitchen smells good, and you've washed all the dishes so there's no mess, and you can go to sleep feeling that you've done something for the day. all of this is very satisfying.

so i'm making dinner for the roommates tomorrow, as you know, so today i made dessert (chocolate pudding) and the chicken stock for the risotto. really i should have made veal stock, but i'm sure the flavor of the sausage will overtake the risotto anyway, so it doesn't matter. anyway, i roasted a chicken while making the pudding, and then put the stock on the stove to simmer after finishing the pudding. i also made some peach iced tea, which i picked up at balducci's - it's harney + sons, and it's really quite good (it's a blend of fruit infusion and black tea).

i'm actually pretty excited about the risotto (which will be have to be timed carefully to be done in time for dinner). i was too lazy to make the oven-roasted tomatoes, so i'm going to do a tomato relish with lemon zest that's cold, to go with the warm risotto. the risotto will have sausage and morels in it, with fennel and sage. so the meatiness gets balanced by the fennel and sage, and the morels and the creaminess of the risotto get balanced by the acidity of the tomatoes and lemon zest. i think it'll be pretty good.

i did my shopping at fairway this time, and frustratingly came away with fennel (an impulse buy) but without cocoa nibs. i've now been to whole foods, citarella, and fairway, without success in sourcing cocoa nibs, and their unavailability is really starting to bother me. what gets me is that i know exactly where to get them in cambridge (christina's) and although i know i can get them at the scharffenberger store, i don't actually like scharffenberger chocolate, so that's kind of a no go. ah well...i guess there won't be any buckwheat cookies this week unless i suddenly acquire cocoa nibs. it's actually possible that fairway had them (they're the only grocery store to carry my callebaut bittersweet - whole foods and citarella only carry unsweetened and semisweet), but it was such a madhouse that i didn't really try that hard to look. in general, i like fairway, but apparently when you go after work, you catch the after work crowd. i never really mind waiting at the cash register, but i do mind having to navigate around people constantly because i like to do a nice, leisurely circuit of the whole place so i can remember what's on the shelves and what they don't have, for future reference. fairway seems to be organized so that people are always banging into each other - it's some combination of what's on the shelves and where, and the narrowness of the aisles. i wonder if it would be better if i went early in the morning? i'll have to see.

food, logic, and my ocd

do you ever think about food as a puzzle? because sometimes i do. i don't know if it's because it's some subconscious need to elevate cooking to some other level as a justification for doing it so frequently, or if it's just because that's the way my mind works; probably some combination. i mean, let's face it: normal people don't plan things out as thoroughly as i often do. i'm not a total nutcase, but i definitely have above average oc disorder.

problematizing (to use a fake archispeak word, sorry) food and cooking is basically the selfish part of why i like having dinner parties: getting to set a menu. i like this part of planning a dinner party so much that i probably derive a little too much pleasure from it. first you think about when you will be eating: is it going to be nice weather? what would you want to eat in that weather? how will people be eating, at a table or standing around, or just sitting on couches? because certainly you wouldn't want your guests to have to cut anything while standing up unless they were all four-handed people, right? i've definitely never made that mistake before...er, moving on.

and then you get into what's in season right now and available at the supermarket, which helps constrain your choices more. you have to balance the meal, so you start with something and it's actually good for you, rather than being likely to set off heart attacks. if you do have something rich in one course, then you'd balance it with something lighter in another course.

i'm making up a menu right now, for dinner on tuesday with my roommates. in fact i kind of need to prep some things tonight. i think i'm going to make a risotto, because it won't take too long (um, hopefully). i was thinking of doing a sausage risotto with morels in it, but that seems a bit rich, so i'm going to add in some oven-dried tomatoes for acidity. it occurred to me that i could make the tomatoes, so i need to do that tonight. oops, i just looked at the recipe (search this blog for "oven-roasted tomatoes") and it says 200F for 6-8 hours. i guess i remembered that time wrong. gotta get on that then. maybe i'll try 4 hours at 300F, that's still pretty low...

so anyway, i went to whole foods today and bought some of the ingredients. i was intrigued by the prospect of using fresh morels (i've already got dried morels from balducci's), so i bought a few for comparison. i also got a chicken because it costs the same amount to make your own chicken stock as it does to buy 3 packages of it. and then you also get the chicken meat, so i guess i may actually bring my lunch a couple days this week. i suppose i could also make chicken pot pie. at any rate, i'm going to roast the chicken, pull all the meat off, and make stock out of the bones. it'll be good. while i was at whole foods, i also bought a few pork chops; i actually haven't decided if it will be a sausage risotto plus some roasted veg, or just risotto with pork chops and roasted veg. i suppose it would be easier to do just a risotto, and less cleanup too. perhaps i'll freeze the pork chops in that case; as i think about this more, it seems to be the appropriate thing to do. regarding herbs, i'm thinking sage, to go with the pork; i saw some cheap and good-quality sage at citarella this afternoon.

i was also going to make a cheesecake because i just bought some nice and cheap springform pans at sur la table, but i think that may have to wait - the thought of using the oven so much tomorrow is kind of daunting. i might do just berries and whipped cream, which i can do with a whisk and a good bowl. i could also do a pudding, since i've been wanting to make pudding forever and now have the chocolate pudding recipe in hand. hmm. i should think more about dessert. i don't think i'm doing a first course, since this is just a simple weekday dinner; if it were friday, maybe. i had been thinking about making these parmesan basil zucchini muffins i made a while back, but that might be a bit too much work for just a weekday dinner, right?

i've also been thinking about what to make next for the office. i really like having an office where i can bring stuff in and people will eat it (i mean, nothing gross or ugly or anything, just the successful things...). i remember being really frustrated the summer i was in seattle, because i didn't know enough people at work to bring stuff in (and there was nowhere to put it, anyway) and my roommates were allergic to gluten. i've been meaning to make the buckwheat cocoa nib cookies again, but i have yet to find a source for cocoa nibs. actually, this is really pissing me off, because citarella doesn't have them, i didn't see them at the tribeca whole foods, and fairway is really far away (also, i don't know if they have them, though egullet reports that they do). and that's the only exotic ingredient in these cookies (the other ingredients being flour, buckwheat flour, butter and sugar)! hmph. i've also been toying with the idea of making the chocolate cupcakes again. they're so good, and would be great cold from the fridge, but really, where does one put 50 cupcakes anyway? are there really that many people in the office? 50 cupcakes is also a lot to transport, and i'd have to make up a special box to put them in, even. i've thought about making tiny cupcakes, but that would require a special pan, which i don't have here. i guess rocco is coming this weekend and i could ask him to bring my mini muffin tins...but anyway, it would be hard to find a place for these cupcakes in the office kitchen. it would be fun, though. i could bring in a half gallon of milk, too, as a whimsical, fun accompaniment for those who wanted it. i wanted to bring in milk for the chocolate chip cookies, but i didn't know if people would think it was stupid or just not want it. anyway, the most likely thing for work this week will be the buckwheat butter cookies, as soon as i can get my hands on cocoa nibs.

lab report: ny times v. toll house

i haven't done a lab report since high school chemistry (10 years ago!), so here you go.

purpose/problem: i used to use the chocolate chip cookie recipe from nick malgieri's cookies unlimited; however, as i stopped making chocolate chip cookies as frequently, i forgot the recipe (i basically had it memorized) and then reverted to the trusty toll house cookie recipe. i have been using the toll house recipe for some time, though it's not the best chocolate chip cookie in the world, to be honest. it's just the easiest and simplest to remember. then i saw the new york times article and had to know: does the new york times chocolate chip cookie recipe really beat out toll house chocolate chip cookies? a corollary question: if the new york times beats toll house, is the extra effort required to make the cookies outweighed by the better flavor of the cookies (ie, do you actually gain utility from the new york times cookies)? specifically, the new york times recipe differs in the proportions of ingredients (most notably, the flour-butter ratio) and also in the inclusion of a chilling period. which of these differences has the most effect on the cookies?

hypothesis: this is a taste test, so positing a hypothesis would probably unduly influence the outcome of this experiment.

materials: here is the new york times recipe and also the toll house recipe. i don't really believe in using an electric mixer to make cookies so i used a bowl, wooden spoon, and measuring cups. i couldn't find the measuring spoons, so i just estimated with a non-standard metal spoon from the silverware drawer.

procedure: i made a batch of the new york times recipe and a batch of toll house at the same time (well, not exactly at the same time because i only have two hands), and chilled it for 24-ish hours. i also made a batch of toll house before i started baking the other cookies; it sat in the fridge chilling for about 2 1/2 hours before i baked it. it was still a little softer than i would prefer when i baked it, but it was late and i was tired, so there you go.

i made a few substitutions in the batter: all batches omitted vanilla extract, because vanilla extract is gross. no, really, i find it quite disgusting these days. in addition to not liking the flavor of vanilla extract, i'm treading the locavore/clear flavors/higher yuppie moral ground when i posit to you that omitting the vanilla allows the butter-sugar flavor to come through better. why muck up something that's already fantastic? i mean, we eat butter cookies for a reason: because butter and sugar is a wonderful flavor. i'm sure there's some reason why we use vanilla that has to do with trade and nations manipulating what we eat. because really, what if some enterprising nation wanted us to eat a lot of almond extract and started providing subsidies to almond extract producers? yeah, our cookies would have almond extract in them. so i view vanilla extract as an unnecessary, capricious inclusion in these recipes. i will also say that i love real vanilla, as in vanilla beans scraped from the pod; i like both the flavor and the very slight crunch you get when you eat the tiny vanilla flecks.

um, ok, more substitutions, now that i'm done ranting about vanilla. i used light brown sugar for the first two batches and then dark brown sugar for the last batch, because when i went to whole foods to buy sugar they were actually out of light brown sugar. i generally use dark brown sugar for chocolate chip cookies anyway, but in terms of keeping the sugar variable constant, i've kind of failed miserably. for your records, i also used ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips for all of the cookies - i like the shape and size of these chips. they just make your cookies more attractive - they have a nicer sheen than other chocolate chips, too. lastly - for the new york times recipe, it stipulates a combination of cake and bread flour. i'm guessing that this is a measure to prevent too much gluten from forming when you stir the dough, since it has a high flour:butter ration. i didn't really care to buy cake and bread flour, though, since then i'd be stuck with cake and bread flour. accordingly, i just used regular unbleached flour instead.

analysis/conclusion: yeah, this is getting combined because this experiment does not totally conform to the lab report format. sorry for you purists out there.

effect of chilling the dough
i do typically chill the dough before baking it, but not for flavor reasons. it's simply a measure to prevent the cookies from spreading too much as they bake: the colder the dough is, the more slowly the butter will melt and you'll have prettier cookies. it's also easier to handle if it's not sticking more to your hands than the baking sheet - all the more easily to make perfectly shaped cookies without bothering with a cookie dough scooper.

so i'm bothered by the new york times article, actually, in which david leite talks about the recipe. it seemed to me that the article was mostly about extolling the virtues of chilling the dough, and the miraculous effect that has on the dough. well, i didn't read the recipes before making them, and after looking at them a little more closely, i see that the new york times' recipe actually has a much higher flour:butter ratio - ie, more flour per tablespoon butter. and i think that chilling the dough does have an effect, but this effect is mitigated in the new york times recipe by the fact that it has so much flour in it - the dough needs more time in the first place to chill, because there are more dry ingredients than there are in the toll house recipe. so the article is actually being a little facetious in the way that it plays up chilling the dough, since the recipe it gives automatically needs a long chilling time, and thus the effect of chilling the dough is partially negated.

at the end of the day, it's true that chilling the dough seems to have some effect on the flavor. or so people tell me: having brought the vast majority of the cookies to work, it seemed that the chilled-dough toll house cookies were the favorite. alack, my palate did not detect enough of a difference between the 24-hour-chilled toll house cookies and the chilled-until-firm toll house cookies. it's up to you to decide what you want to do when you make the cookies, then.

effect of the flour:butter ratio
let's return to the ingredient proportions and the flour:butter ratio. toll house does 2 1/4c flour for 2 sticks butter, while the new york times does about 3 2/3c flour for 2 1/2 sticks butter. that's 0.14 cups flour/tbsp butter for toll house v. 0.18 cups flour/tbsp butter for ny times, or 2.24T flour/T butter for toll house and 2.93T/T butter for ny times. a significant difference: that's 30% more flour in the new york times recipe. of course, i did a straight substitution without weighing things out, as my electronic scale is in cambridge, so there was probably some adjusting to do that i didn't do. but still: that is a noteworthy difference.

ok, so it's true that somehow this higher flour content made the new york times cookies a lot more attractive. a lot more attractive. but it also made the cookies a little chewier with too much crumb - i have to say that i prefer a cookie with more butter and sugar, so that it's a little candy-like in the caramelization of sugar and butter, rather than being a more bready cookie. all things considered, more attractive cookies is not an acceptable tradeoff for less flavorful cookies unless you're not planning to actually eat the cookies. or if you're giving them to someone you don't like, or who you know won't be eating the cookies.

effect of weather
i'd like to put in a word about the weather here. i generally haven't baked all that much in hot weather, and i recall vaguely that at cutcat, we would have the air conditioning on while i was baking so it was never really hot when i baked stuff there. (i know it's not a good strategy with respect to energy and sustainability, but nobody's perfect.) in this case, i was baking at night when it was cooler, but it was still pretty hot, and i'm fairly certain that this had an effect on the cookies - they spread faster than they normally would. i say this because in every other case when i've made chocolate chip cookies, they have not looked quite so...flat as these did. in short, they looked like an amateur made them, and that was certainly a little annoying. i mean, if they were going to have the gall to look so ugly, then why bother to chill the dough at all? hmph. that's what i think of you, new york weather.

effect of attractiveness of cookies on eating utility
it's nice to know that people (including myself) like chocolate chip cookies so much that even if they're kind of crappy looking, people will eat them. chocolate chip cookies positively ooze nostalgia for childhood - or, at the very least, other people have memories of making chocolate chip cookies as a child. i don't, really; perhaps this is why i really like them now. however, this brings up an interesting issue: how much are we affected by how good the food looks? i mean, i was really disappointed with these toll house batches because the last batch i made a few weeks back were the most gorgeous cookies i had ever seen. they were golden brown from the dark brown sugar (billington's brand), perfectly puffed but still soft and chewy in the middle, and the chocolate chips looked so pretty in the mass of the cookie that they positively glowed. they certainly had a very pretty luster to them. and because these cookies were so beautiful, they were actually more pleasing to eat. i can picture those cookies now, and it frustrates me that the next batch didn't look like them either. i know it wasn't the leavening, because it was new; i know it wasn't the dark brown sugar, either. the only thing that was different was the butter: i used plugra in that batch last month because it was cheaper to buy a half pound of plugra than it was to buy a pound of regular american butter. but wouldn't you expect that using butter with higher fat content would cause the cookies to spread more? i sure would, yet the converse of that happened. search me; i have no answers for you except to say that i would probably have to do another experiment between regular and european butter to figure out where the culprit lies. i think it's most likely the weather, but i do wonder if the plugra had an effect on the dough. to come back to cookie attractiveness: i suppose i'm lucky that people are so forgiving with chocolate chip cookies; only my ego is bruised.

and the winner is...
i almost forgot to render my verdict regarding the recipes! whoops. well, everyone, the new york times is a little like per se: pretending to be all posh, but not really delivering in the end (let us just say that per se delivers more than the new york times, though). i really don't think it's worth all the trouble to make the new york times cookies. i do think that toll house can be improved - the cookies are really a little too sweet for me - but i have yet to find the recipe that does that. i guess now we know?

the "i hate gristedes" post

ever since the new york times posted its definitive recipe for chocolate chip cookies, i've been meaning to do a taste test between those and our trusty standby, toll house. we all know i'm a sucker for taste tests; the best ones that come to mind include the shaws whole chicken v. chinatown whole chicken (the chinatown chicken tasted surprising like a chinatown chicken you would get in a restaurant, which was really surprising to me) and the apple pie taste test, after which i swore off cinnamon in apple pies.

so, gristedes. i had decided to do three batches of chocolate chip cookies, since the gimmick of the new york times recipe lies in both proportions of sugar/flour/butter and also in how long the dough is chilled. the three batches are then: (1) the new york times recipe; (2) toll house, chilled as long as the ny times recipe; and (3) toll house, chilled the normal amount (about an hour, until the dough is firm enough to use). i went to gristedes to get ingredients, assuming that a supermarket would definitely have all of the ingredients i needed for my experiment. (because that's what this is, folks: a geeky experiment. so sue me.) of course, i was wrong, and this is why gristedes makes me hate new york. because they don't carry the chocolate chips i use in chocolate chip cookies, which is not an exotic brand and is basically carried in every other grocery store known to man. the brand, incidentally, is simply ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chips. i like the size and shape of these chips in particular - they're chubbier, and a little bigger and flatter, so they're more pleasing to the eye and consequently make them more attractive to eat. kind of like the way that arborio rice is more pleasing to me to eat than basmati rice.

gristedes: you cost me a day, and my curiosity has increased accordingly as time has elapsed. i'd like to point out that whole foods did not disappoint me, and that i was able to procure my non-exotic chocolate chips there. technically, the ny times recipe calls for feves, which are the flat chocolate disks sold with all of the bulk chocolate, but i didn't really have that much faith in my ability not to break them when stirring them into the dough, so i just used regular chocolate chips.

so right now, two bags of chocolate chip cookie dough are slowly chilling in the fridge. the rationale is that the liquid ingredients absorb better into the dough with a longer chilling period, which i know to be true: the buckwheat cocoa nib cookies require overnight chilling because they consist of flour, butter, sugar, and cocoa nibs. you have to wait for the dough to get to the right consistency or it won't bake correctly. i'm curious to see just how much of a difference it makes, since i often chill my dough for up to 12 hours anyway, so that the butter doesn't melt too fast when you bake the cookies. for some reason, i find chocolate chip cookies with really flat edges to be kind of unappetizing. i don't really know why, and i know it's weird, but that's just the way it is.

my initial thoughts are that the doughs really are significantly different. the ny times recipe has more flour per tablespoon butter than the toll house recipe - you could tell with the two doughs that the toll house recipe was a lot goopier and harder to handle than the ny times recipe. i wonder if i should have used the typical brown sugar that i use - just dark instead of light - because the dough looked really pale to me, too. the last batch of chocolate chip cookies i made were at s+l's place, and i made those with billington's dark brown sugar, since that's what i'd bought at the supermarket (not a gristedes). they were a rather pleasing golden brown; using dark brown sugar definitely helps color-wise. i also happen to like the flavor of dark brown sugar, which is especially nice since i don't use vanilla extract. i can only stand to use real vanilla beans these days - i've discovered that i don't really like the flavor of vanilla extract, and that i don't want to obscure the flavor of sugar and butter with the vanilla.

well, that's about it. i'll report back about how the cookies turn out tomorrow.

per se: on being jaded

i've just returned from a lovely, languorous lunch at per se. initially i had doubts that i even wanted to try to go to per se; after all, i've been to the french laundry, and it seems that the two are not particularly different (especially given thomas keller's extreme attention to detail). to me it has always seemed that per se is just the east coast outpost of the original. if i had to choose a place to go where it's hard to get reservations, it would probably be momofuku ko. (a note on reservations: did i just luck out when i called babbo to make a reservation? i mean, i guess it's a wednesday, but it's at a convenient time and everything. i suppose it was three weeks later than i had been thinking to make the reservation.)

as fate would have it, one of jessica's friends managed to get a lunch reservation. then they had someone drop out of their party of four, and voila, suddenly i was going to go to lunch at per se. why the sudden change of heart? well, at the end of the day, i really was curious to see if per se is different from the french laundry. and i also wanted to hang out with jessica, since i hadn't seen her in a while. for those who are wondering how i can justify that much on one dinner, well, i really do enjoy eating food that is interesting and prepared with impeccable technique. much as i like to believe i'm a good cook, i'm really just a good home cook - i've got nothing on these four-star restaurants. and i know enough about food to know when the kitchen is doing something really spectacular, and with every posh dinner i've had (about once a year), it has been worth it. i think that what i'm getting out of the dinner is more than just food; it's the opportunity to see what someone else is thinking about food: what it is, what it should be, and how you should eat it. i love high-concept food when it delivers, when a chef is thinking about a certain problem and that a particular dish is the solution to that problem.

so, lunch. per se is rather nouveau riche with respect to interior design. it's as if the interior designer made a list of all of the different styles and objects that were of interest, and then just threw them all together in the restaurant without any restraint. there are all-glass tables, french-style blue doors, walls made of rough-hewn stone, a reception desk that's a chrome spiral, a glassed-in wine cellar...you name the style, per se has it. still, i do always love a restaurant with padded armchairs, as if you're in someone's very posh living room, or are going to spend a while at the restaurant (or all of the above) - it automatically makes me feel like lingering.

we all got the chef's tasting menu, and shared a bottle of navarro vineyards' gewürztraminer juice (yeah, it's nonalcoholic - it's made from the same grapes as the vineyard uses to make wine, but it's not fermented). so there you have the basics, and now i'll do my rambling recounting of lunch by course and random musing.

to start, we had the traditional thomas keller amuse bouche: gougeres and the marinated salmon cones. i could have sworn that the gougeres i had at the french laundry were hollow; the ones at per se had some sort of creamy, cheesy filling that had obviously just been piped into the gougeres. they were lovely, as usual, and the filling was really wonderful. the marinated salmon cones sparked copycats all over the country, but are always fun and tasty. the cone is a savory tuile that has black sesame seeds in it, and is filled with creme fraiche and topped with a small ball of marinated salmon ... paste? it's not exactly a paste or puree, since the salmon is raw; it's just...ground as if it had been ground by an ant-size meat grinder. this actually kind of grossed me out the first time i had it, because it's a familiar shape that causes me to expect a certain flavor - ie, sweet - to come with it when i eat it. it's also a little weird to be eating cured salmon as a puree. but this time i wasn't fazed at all, for some reason. it's interesting, too, to see the same ingredients in a dish at alinea, but with a preparation that's totally different - grant achatz does frozen creme fraiche topped with shaved frozen salmon, topped with a chive stem that you use to pick the whole thing up with. so it's the same ingredients, but the preparation totally changes the way they taste.

"oysters and pearls" (sabayon of pearl tapioca with island creek oysters and sterling white sturgeon caviar)
this first course is a gold standard of thomas keller's repertoire, and for good reason - it's consistently fantastic. the sabayon is creamy, the caviar is salty, and the oysters are divine. also, it's fun to eat with a caviar spoon. let's revisit those oysters - i still have had oysters just a handful of times, and have only recently come to like mussels. the oysters in this dish are poached in butter, and they're wonderfully tender, with the most fantastic flavor. if you aren't sure if you like oysters, these oysters will convert you. i get a slightly crazed smile on my face just thinking about them.

sauteed hudson valley moulard duck foie gras (tokyo turnips, tellicherry black pepper shortbread, watercress and mulberry "gastrique")/salad of marinated "topinambours" (glazed bing cherries, petite sorrel and sicilian pistachio butter)
two of us had the former, and two of us had the latter - i had the former, but tasted a bit of jessica's sunchoke salad. "topinambour," incidentally, is merely the french for "sunchoke." not really sure why the french is required here, other than to make the restaurant seem more posh. our waiter described it to us as a sunchoke salad, probably because he correctly assumed that there was no chance that we would know the french for sunchoke.

so at the french laundry, there was also a foie gras course, but it was the peach melba foie gras, where i believe the foie gras is poached rather than seared, as it was here. i've only had foie gras a couple of times, the first being at the french laundry, and the most recent before today being at o ya. i must say that while the texture of poached foie gras is wonderfully smooth, the joy of eating seared foie gras is pretty much always superior. when it's seared, the interior gets all melty but there's still a crust to the exterior, so it's like eating a chunk of really delicious fat pretending to be meat. there are people who don't like the idea of eating fat, but they obviously haven't had seared foie gras. the turnips and berry puree (i believe we had a huckleberry gastrique, not mulberry, but i could also have just misheard) were nice with the foie gras, especially the berry puree, but the foie gras was clearly in the spotlight. of no particular use to me was the black peppercorn shortbread - it was very buttery and given the fatty nature of the foie gras, i didn't feel a need for the added richness of the shortbread.

this course was a choice between the foie gras and the sunchoke salad, and i am always lucky when i eat with people who like to share tastes of differing courses. i'm not really for or against sunchokes, but they were fine here. of more interest was the cherry with pistachio butter - just the correct balance of sweet and salty. plus absolutely beautiful color on the cherry, contrasted with the green of the pistachio butter. the pistachio butter marks the first time i've really liked pistachios, and the texture of the butter was unrivaled: unctuous, silky, somehow very substantial on your tongue. just beautiful.

extra course: um...a tuna-like fish (texture-wise) with pickled ginger and radish. something like that. it was good. i don't really know why we were given this course, but i know that it was good. pan roasted fillet of gigha island halibut (violet artichokes, compressed lemon cucumber and grapefruit "ravigote") i am not really sure how the term "ravigote" applies to this dish, given the wikipedia entry for ravigote. we can dwell on that later, though, after i describe this to you. first of all, the colors were lovely, with the pink grapefruit and the orange-yellow seared crust of the halibut. the halibut was fantastic: perfectly cooked, but more impressive was the seared crust. this is why these restaurants are so impressive - when the food is cooked in such a way that i can't even figure out what technique they used. the halibut had no coating of any kind, yet the seared surface was crisp and caramelized. i mean, seriously crisp, almost as if just the very surface of the halibut had been deep fried. i have no idea how they did it - is it just a matter of searing the fish at the right, very high temperature for the right amount of time? i know that i can't cook like that. the grapefruit was a perfect pairing for the fish - i'm really liking grapefruit these days. the artichokes and lemon cucumber seemed a little superfluous to me, but maybe that's just because i liked the fish/grapefruit combo so much.

butter poached nova scotia lobster (caramelized mission fig, heirloom beets, and wilted butter lettuce with summer truffle emulsion)
i have also only recently started liking lobster; i flirted with liking it on and off, all throughout my childhood. now i'm very sure that i like it; the deal was sealed when i had a lobster roll at pearl oyster bar. in fact, that lobster roll still stands as the fondest memory i have of lobster: cool, lightly dressed, sweet, tender...gotta hit that place up again. back to per se: the shape of the lobster they used was just so pleasing to the eye, you have no idea. i just wanted to pick the hunk up with my fingers and cram it in my mouth, bite by bite. it was glossy with sauce, and in the shape of half a plump doughnut with no hole, and it was so beautiful. when i was eating it, it was a little difficult to cut, actually, and i don't know enough about lobster to be a particularly good judge of texture, but i thought it was slightly stringy. beautifully tender, but somehow still a little stringy; i know that lobster in general does have strands the way mammalian meat does, but it was still just a little bit disappointing. i really liked the butter lettuce and the summer truffle sauce - the butter lettuce had the absolute perfect amount of bite to it, and the summer truffle sauce was just delicious with the lobster.

cavendish farm's "caille en crepinette" (confit of young fennel, medjool dates and fennel root puree with quail jus)
wikipedia tells me that "crepinette" is a type of french sausage made of chicken, veal, pork, or lamb, wrapped in caul fat. crepinette does not describe this dish at all, unless the quail leg was wrapped in caul fat? it did seem to me that the quail leg was deboned and then rearranged around one slender leg bone, so perhaps it was wrapped in caul fat to keep everything together, like a ballotine. it reminds me of the chicken wing ballotine that i had at o ya - the chicken wing was deboned, and then stuffed with more chicken. that idea still blows me away, you know. back to our quail - the quail leg came with these tiny dates that clearly had been shaped from original medjool dates (which are quite large - these were the size of a smallish green grape), and were lovely and sticky and hard to cut. i like fennel, but it didn't seem particularly successful here, and i hate when chefs throw around the word "confit." why, exactly, is this a confit? i hear the word and i think of duck legs cooked in duck fat. anyway, this was fine, but not exactly mind-blowing. that chicken wing at o ya wins pretty handily.

marcho farm's tenderloin of nature fed veal (greenmarket carrots, young pearl onions, and kendall farm's creme fraiche "pain perdu" with veal sauce)
let's talk a bit about veal. i have to say that i never really eat veal, because the thought of eating a baby animal that's been kept from moving to ensure the tenderness of its meat is kind of revolting. normally i have no qualms about this sort of thing, but i generally draw the line at veal. well, i definitely didn't read the menu carefully enough because i had no idea there was veal on it. i don't really like the flavor of veal, either; it's not a strong dislike, just more of a preference to eat something else. if i had noticed that there was veal on the menu, i would have asked them to substitute something else. but you know, it was there, so i ate it. i suppose i could have sent it back, but in terms of etiquette i felt that the window for that had shut quite some time ago. i think that for me, the best parts of this dish were the veal, the bits of veal...cheek? (it was braised, so it had more bite to it), and the pain perdu. the pain perdu seemed to be cubes of a soft, buttery bread - most likely brioche - that were soaked in creme fraiche and sauteed until golden. i'm not really sure how anything can really be soaked in creme fraiche, but that's my best guess. the fact that i didn't particularly feel a need to eat the veg (but i did) brings up the issue of unnecessary elements of a dish. i felt that these were a rather generic way to get some sort of vegetable into a meat dish. and i say this: if you want to have a dish that's all meat and no veg, because it simply doesn't need any, then go right ahead.

di bruno brothers' "burrata" (marinated jewel box tomatoes, arugula coulis, and nyons extra virgin olive oil)
the name of this dish annoys me in its use of quotation marks. of all of the things i hate about thomas keller (and this list is very short), i hate his use of quotation marks. we know that the menu is an interpretation of the techniques that are listed; i do not need quotation marks to tell me when you are being more playful with a technique. that's why i'm eating the food: to find out what your interpretation is. even more annoying is this quotation mark situation: the word burrata does not need quotation marks because the dish genuinely included a slice of real burrata. there's no interpretation there: it. just. is. was there something fake about the burrata? something not genuine? seemed pretty much like a burrata to me. i'd never had burrata, actually, so this was a treat for me - the interior creamy part is pretty awesome. cool, creamy, just slightly mozzarella-flavored...i could definitely eat this all day. let me also say that this dish came with two tiny little toast points that were perfectly crispy, and that the tomatoes were the best tomatoes i have had in about a year, easily. the last time i had good tomatoes was when i had heirloom tomatoes in a tosci's blt, when they were taste-testing them and gave us samples. you know you've got a good tomato when you can taste that it has spent oodles of time in the sun. and did you know - the tomatoes were peeled! who peels tomatoes?! in this case it was totally warranted, because it allowed you to just taste tomato without having to chew through the skin of the tomato.

plum sorbet (santa rosa plums, ginger pudding, plum consomme and gingerbread crisp)
this was quite nice, and i love sorbets (this was a creamy sorbet, so really more like ice cream) and plums. plums and ginger are always a fantastic combination - i've done a gingered plum shortcake in the past - and this was no exception. there was a bottom layer of something gingery - it could have been a poached slice of ginger - that i wasn't a huge fan of. the ginger pudding was an english-style pudding, though, which more than made up for said strange slice of stuff.

"peanut butter and milk" (bitter chocolate mousse with salted peanut cream and reduced milk ice cream)
this was almost a showstopper! i mean, it was great, and i thought it was perfectly executed; i just wanted it to somehow be slightly more exciting. the peanut butter was fantastic - roasted, salty, absolutely beautiful perfect texture: unctuous, buttery, but still somehow substantial. the reduced milk ice cream was also quite wonderful - it tasted very simple and familiar and was the perfect accompaniment to the peanut butter and chocolate. the chocolate was probably the weak point for me - there was a mousse and also a chunk of chocolaty stuff that was almost ganache. the mousse was good but forgettable, while the chocolate chunk was a little too dense. but flavorwise, this delivered pretty well.

"mignardises"
thomas keller, you punctuation maniac, there you go with the extra quotation marks. please stop. if you want to broadcast that this word is french and not english, just put it in italics like the rest of the world - no need to be fancy (and...wrong). the mignardises at the french laundry back in 2006 were not quite as spectacular as they were this afternoon, which seems somehow wrong since we're more in a recession now than we were then. the mignardises are kind of like the end of a fireworks show: the crew is done with all of the carefully orchestrated stuff, and now it's just time to bombard the crowd with all of the leftover fireworks. so first, they brought us mini creme brulees and pots de creme. then, coffee and tea. then, chocolate truffles on a silver platter, flavors pointed out by our server with a very tastefully shiny brown card instead of her finger (i had grapefruit and fennel, which were really good). then, a bowl of chocolate covered, cocoa dusted hazelnuts, and a bowl of tiny, striped, house-made sugar candies wrapped in twists of cellophane. then, a silver tiered dish containing caramels in the top, cherry nougat in the middle, and more truffles (coconut, dark chocolate, caramel) in the bottom. i'm pretty sure we sat there for an extra hour just talking and stuffing our faces with sweets.

the scene
a word about the all-important scene: i am always interested to see who exactly waltzes into these posh establishments. even the group i was with was rather unorthodox: four grad students. i mean, where do grad students get the kind of money to pay for a lunch like this, on the stereotypical grad student's budget? i don't know. i mean, i do: thank you, us government, for my stimulus check. i am always surprised, though, when i find fellow students who are interested in food at this level, because it's an expensive habit.

about other people: i love to see how people dress for places like this - people break out their sunday best. there was a woman with the most inappropriate black velvet sack-shaped purse (in my opinion, even lunch at per se does not require that kind of fake formality), a woman in a super-trendy draped sweater dress (awesome), a girl in a chiffon-type polka-dotted summer dress (very pretty but somehow out of place). the woman who takes the cake, though, was the one sitting at the table next over from us. first of all, i do think that bra straps should stay hidden at nice restaurants, and that any exposed lingerie should at least be very pretty; i also think that see-through dresses are a faux pas at nice restaurants. this woman struck out on both counts. i didn't really want to know exactly what kind of thong she was wearing, but i do know. and the lighting in the restaurant was dim; i would hate to know what happens in broad daylight. let's just not go there.

was it worth it?
i guess you really have to qualify "worth it" when you answer this question. i don't actually think the food was worth it - i remember the food being more interesting at the french laundry, to be honest. but i do think it was really wonderful to relax away from the bustle of new york with people who were great to talk to. it was also really wonderful to be able to hang out with scientists, because it's nice to get a break from architecture now and then. so in terms of company, and as an experience, it was worth it, but the food fell short. the food just seemed too conventional for new york, and i found myself wishing it was more creative. i really wanted to like per se, but i don't think i'll be back.

review: annisa, or, on being overcritical

annisa / 13 barrow street, new york / 212-741-6699 / m-sat 5:30-10:30, sun 5:30-9:30 / appetizers $9-18, entrees $27-33

when i was in chicago, i always felt awkward having dinner by myself - i always have that problem, when not in cambridge, where i can't find people who share my predilection for eating out at nice restaurants. luckily i have (a) grown out of this phase; (b) know a couple of people who will go with me on occasion; and (c) feel more comfortable eating out by myself in new york than in most cities. it's also true that i'm a student and can't afford a whole lot of nice dinners, but this summer i'm in new york and i want to make the most of it. this is partly why i currently have three jobs (yeah, don't ask...i just have trouble saying no).

most of the time, though, i do prefer to eat out with other people. yesterday's partner in crime: j, who lives in brooklyn and is also interning this summer. we went to annisa, which is actually just a few blocks from my apartment. additional sidebar: i feel really weird when i come and go from my apartment since it's right in the middle of a busy, trendy area - all of these people have come to the neighborhood to go out, and i'm going up to my apartment to stay in because i don't feel like going out when everybody else is out too. yes, i am living in new york despite my aversion to large crowds of people. i'm avoiding times square like the plague.

dinner at annisa brought up an interesting question: what do you value more, the company you have at dinner, or the food itself, and how does that affect how you perceive the dining experience you had? for me, it's a little complicated. i usually pick a place because there's something interesting about the food - chez henri, for example, has french-cuban food that i have yet to try - but i also want to have good company when i'm at the restaurant. so i do want both, but there is a significance to the order of operations. and once i'm at the restaurant, good company goes a long way towards covering for subpar food. sometimes, the food is really that good - like when we went to o ya - and sometimes, just the act of going out and relaxing at dinner with someone makes you ignore any shortcomings until later.

reflecting on this a couple of days later, i think annisa falls in the latter category for me, because i found myself being really critical of the dinner itself. part of this, surely, is due to my expectations being higher for new york restaurants because of its vaunted reputation as one of the best restaurant cities in the country. i suspect that the strength of new york's food scene is more about the range of food, though. because i have been to the vast majority of restaurants worth going to in boston, and i can tell you that we eat pretty well there.

back to annisa. i had been grumpy all week, so it was really great to go to a nice restaurant that wasn't cramped and didn't rush you. with respect to service and decor, annisa does quite well. it's nothing to knock you out, but it acquits itself well notwithstanding. and we were there for over three hours, and they only rushed us once or twice at the end.

so now you've been reading for a while and you're wondering about the food, especially after this ridiculously long exposition. well, we started with an amuse bouche: a tiny little fluted cup that had chicken liver puree piped into it, topped with a couple of currants. the cup was edible - it seemed to be some sort of savory tuile, and i assume it was at least made with that technique, where the batter thins out while it bakes and then you mold it right when it comes out of the oven. i suppose it could also have been made by brushing the batter into a mold and baking it, but the batter would have to be the perfect consistency and the oven a very precise temperature in order for the batter not to pool before setting up. this was very nice, if not particularly original; it had a fantastic contrast in texture, with the crunch of the cup. and you can't argue with an amuse bouche that actually triggers an entire conversation about the joys of eating liver.

i'll mention the bread here too, since i harped on that in my review of banq. the bread is uninspired here - i prefer an amuse bouche to bread. i've thought a bit more about this and here's my position on bread at restaurants: unless it's something interesting, or particularly good quality, i don't really want it. to restaurants everywhere: i hope you're trying to impress me with your bread, because i'm paying attention. i don't need it to be spectacular, i just want it to make sense. i'll even give you an example: bringing around a roll is a ploy used at pigalle to pace your meal, so you have something to do while you wait between appetizer and main course. in general, i'm just not a big bread eater: i'm used to starting a meal with soup, an amuse bouche, salad, etc. i also prefer to eat my bread with butter, and sprinkled with sugar, and usually you don't get a sugar bowl at restaurants with the bread. i'm just not a fan of a cold roll with a hard crust to start off a dinner. exceptions to this rule: if the bread is interesting or just plain good (a la restaurant pava, or even just the soft foccacia-like bread they serve at central kitchen with hummus); if it's served with interesting accompaniments like antipasto or really good butter; if i've ordered a bowl of soup and want to pretend i'm french and wipe the bowl with the bread; if the bread is toasted; if i'm really, amazingly hungry and can't wait until the food starts arriving. that's how i feel about bread: now you know.

at annisa, they do the nondescript roll thing. not only do they come by once, they come by about every 20-30 minutes. this is nice for the people who have ordered something that they want bread with - a very saucy dish, etc - and it recognizes that your preference may change within the course of the meal. but it's also kind of annoying, in all reality, because the bread's not even that great. i can't really be mad, because i do actually appreciate that people who may feel awkward or greedy asking for more bread are accommodated. i think i'm projected my dislike of the bread itself onto the practice with which it was distributed. i mean, seriously, annisa: you can do better than this. kudos for butter being at the correct temperature, though! and it was really lovely - those shell-shaped curls of butter with gorgeous luster. you know i ate some bread just to eat it with that butter.

first course: we split an appetizer - the soup dumplings with foie gras. you know, i heard good things about these, and i was a little disappointed. first of all, the dumpling skin was the wrong one for soup dumplings - it wasn't very pliable, and it was more like a thickish wonton wrapper. i'm not an expert on soup dumplings, but i do know that the skins are stretchier and softer than these were. if they were handmade, and i hope they were, the dough was kneaded too much or the skins were undercooked. the basic preparation, before you get totally confused, was this: a square plate drizzled with some sort of soy reduction, four half-moon shaped dumplings placed on the reduction, a piece of foie gras placed on each dumpling. if you're reading "half moon shaped" and thinking "soup dumpling?" you're correct: no soup dumpling i ever ate in china or chinatown was missing its distinctive flower/fluted top. the soup dumpling technique is one i haven't tried and know would be relatively difficult to master, what with the complicated folding. so yeah, the technique, or lack thereof, annoyed me. and one of the dumplings had a hole in it already! would thomas keller have let the dish go out like that? i don't think so.

after all was said and done, though, these tasted pretty good. they needed a little bit more soup to really warrant the name soup dumpling, but the pork inside was excellent. i really fail to see the necessity of the foie gras, but it was nice anyway. i think it should have been crispier on the outside, for more textural contrast. in case you haven't noticed, i'm a big believer in contrast, be it textural or flavorwise. i think a little bit of something acidic or sweet would have balanced the dish better - a bit of pickled ginger, or a little bit of rice vinegar. and in fact, soup dumplings are served with pickled veg and vinegar.

the main course that i got was chicken with a white truffle sauce, asparagus, and pig's foot. in all reality, there were more interesting things on the menu with respect to flavor combinations, but i saw pig's foot and my decision was made for me. you know i love any kind of pork product. j had roasted lamb tenderloin with szechuan peppercorns and some other accompaniments. i thought the chicken was quite good - certainly it was roasted very deftly, with the requisite crackly skin and tender interior, though not too tender. it turned out that the pigs foot was diced - both gelatinous tendon and meat - and the chicken was resting on top of it. it was pretty good, but i thought it was a little unadventurous for the merits of pig's feet. i know that most chicken dishes on restaurant menus are for the unadventurous, but i always hope the chicken is good anyway. and this was good - above average, really - but i felt a little like it was just very good bistro fare. j's lamb tenderloin was great, though - perfectly cooked and really interesting spices.

ok, dessert: j didn't feel like dessert, but i do like to have dessert anytime i go out - i've got a sweet tooth just like everyone else. desserts looked pretty standard, but i got the poppyseed bread and butter pudding with lemon curd. i've made a lot of bread puddings and eaten a lot of them at restaurants, and the best one used to be a tie between a chocolate bread pudding i make and a white chocolate-blueberry bread pudding i had once at central kitchen. this one has joined the top ranks - it had a crispy top layer of bread cubes, and a bottom layer that was saturated with egg and had perfect custard consistency. the lemon curd was a nice touch, too - this is not a new flavor combination, but its use in a bread pudding was great. and to go back to textural contrast, having the crunchier top and mooshy bottom was pretty awesome.

after the table had been cleared, we got one last course of mignardises, like at the french laundry. or the tiny cookies that perilla gives you...with the bill. i'd advise you to skip the ones here. we had a mango popsicle, crystallized ginger, and a mint chocolate truffle (two of each). all three were too sweet - i think the mango should have been more like a frozen sherbert, though the crystallized ginger was definitely the best i've had, with quite a kick to it. i found the truffle to be too sweet as well, which is just a waste of good chocolate.

overall, i enjoyed my dinner at annisa because of the good company, and great ambiance on the restaurant's part. but if we're talking food, i can think of a lot of restaurants in boston that are better. the menu here is supposed to be asian-inspired, but it's a bit lackadaisical in its inspirations. although i'm sure this isn't the case, it felt to me like the chef has a rather one-dimensional perspective on asian flavors, because they really are kind of staid. i don't know if i'll be back - perilla is a lot more honest with itself about what it is, and how far it's reaching - but it was, despite everything, a lovely evening.

--

side note: i'm going to per se tomorrow for lunch! i'm excited, because i'm curious to know how it compares to the french laundry. i know this is an expensive way to find out, especially with the increases in food prices, but it's now or never - turns out jessica is visiting this weekend and there was an open spot in her reservation. awesome. i wish i could bring myself to take photos, but i just can't be that annoying girl.

spring break : going, going, gone...

i think everyone, myself, included, thought i would be cooking more than i have this spring break. considering my finances, which took a hit after outlet shopping, you would better understand why i haven't cooked that much this spring break. on the upside, i now own a beautiful trifle bowl (i have coveted a trifle bowl for about two years now), many t-shirts and button-down shirts, silver leather sandals, and a beautiful yellow raincoat to keep my iridescent lime green rain jacket company in my closet. i didn't need the sandals, but i find shoes that i like (and can afford) so infrequently that when i do, i am generally compelled to buy them knowing that i will wear them enough to justify the cost (case in point: my black leather flats).

back to food. i have a couple of quickies to impart. in fact, to impart again because blogger really hates me right now and i'm rewriting this post. sadly, it will be abbreviated since i do not desire to rewrite the entire thing, but i encourage you to soldier on, anyway.

i had intended to do more work during break, but of course that's never the way it goes. first, on monday, i departed bright and early with luis for new york city, in order to visit MoMA per my 4.104 TA's instructions. sorry, leo, we didn't make it to dia, but at least i know what it is now. if i could have had my way with spring break, i would like to have gone to marfa, texas, to see donald judd's "100 untitled works in milled aluminum." i think that's what it was called. anyway, see the new york times magazine from last saturday if you're confused.

back to MoMA. the line was looooong. MoMA and the guggenheim are the only museums open on mondays, so go figure. the building itself is gorgeous - all perfect proportions and perfectly placed windows in the way that a beautiful actress is all legs. and because this is my food blog, i will digress and move onto the food. did i mention that every inch of this museum is gorgeous? yoshio taniguchi, i love you and will marry you unless tadao ando asks me first. to get to the point, even the cafe on the second floor - the plebeian, proletarian level eating (as opposed to the restaurant on the top floor for the high rollers). step into cafe 2 and order your food, then sit down at the long, minimalist wooden tables that are delightfully communal. the communal thing was completely unexpected, and we discovered that there are nice people in new york city. or, nice tourists; the people next to us offered us their extra cookie before they left. the food is, of course, expensive, as museum food is wont to be, but it was worth it. plus, i hope part of the price inflation went to the waiters, who don't really get tipped because the turnover of diners is so frenetic. anyway, for lunch i had possibly the best panini of my life. well, not just possibly - i'll take a stand like i'm always being encouraged to do in studio. i had the best panini of my life, in a museum cafe in new york city. if you're italian from italy, you probably want to slap me for saying this, but at least know that i have been to italy and had panini there. the panini i had was a simple prosciutto, fontina, and rocket deal. but it was hot and the bread was wonderfully crusty, and the fontina was so good and melty...rarely do i like designer greens, but the rocket was actually good. i had never actually had fontina before, and now i understand why other people like it so much. and i wasn't really that hungry, so you can't accuse me of enjoying it just because i was ravenous enough for anything to look good.

this isn't food related, but the people who offered us the cookie left shortly after we sat down. they were replaced by two old women. i usually try not to perpetuate stereotypes, but they sat down and immediately wondered (a) where their food was and (b) if one of the waiters was going to come clear the dishes that were still on the table (after looking at us and wondering in a non-subtle manner if they were ours). the previous party's number was still clipped to the spot, and i started to take it off, to help them, but one of the women stopped me and left it there. and of course, about a minute later a waiter comes with food for table #91. except the old women really had a different number - #91 was the number of the previous party. the wrong food was brought and the two women tell the waiter what they've ordered. he leaves and one woman starts complaining to the other: "really, ursula..." another waiter came by and asked ursula for her receipt. she gave it over extremely reluctantly, testily demanding that he bring it back tout de suite; he looks at the receipt, immediately discerns the problem, and gracefully pretends it's all his fault. oh, ursula.

a note about the lighting - even the lighting in the cafe was perfect. there is no direct light in this building, which is wonderful. yoshio taniguchi, i love you and i will marry you, unless tadao ando asks me first. the lighting in the cafe is such that the fixtures point upwards and the light reflects off these white square panels that extend about 6 inches from the ceiling. the result: square expanses of warm white light.

the second quickie is really a quickie. jessica and i can cross lala rokh off our list of restaurants we need to go to before jessica leaves for oxford. it was pretty good - exotic food is always fun - but slightly less well executed than, say, cafe baraka, which is slightly more exotic than lala rokh. if that's because it was lunch and not dinner, i don't know. the restaurant itself is a nice place to eat, and the food seems to be authentic and wonderfully exotic, but at the end of the day i could have made the same thing myself, at home. i had a great barley soup with shreds of carrot in it, then a wrap with saffron chicken and saffroned potatoes. jessica had this fabulous appetizer of a flourless herb cake, which was great if not quite my speed - it will take me a bit longer before i really like anything that has so many herbs in it. but what lunch at lala rokh really made me do is wish that celina had done another persian menu at lmf before she moved.

and finally, a short plug which i would generally not make. every now and then, my favorite food magazines turn out really spectacular issues. like that issue of gourmet with the extensively footnoted article about the maine lobster festival (footnotes! in a food magazine!) and gorgeous, gorgeous photos of food in the summer. the new issue of gourmet has a great article about a woman who starts celebrating passover just so she can make her grandmother's brisket (a funny parallel: jessica and i are having an easter brunch expressly to have mimosas), and an entertaining article by calvin trillin about two dinners in Paris, one of which involves a deep love for perfect dumplings. then, the new issue of saveur is all about american artisanal cheeses. i love cheese and i hope you do too.

p.s. to my mother: i adore chicken pot pie (and you know it), and i adore it when you bring me your chicken pot pie, which inexplicably gets better every time you make it. thanks, and much love.