Ritz Bites

Best Manners: Blue Hill NYC

A few weeks after our fabulous anniversary dinner at Blue Hill this summer, I was surprised by an extra gesture that arrived in the mail: a real, actual paper thank you note!

I've gotten thank you cards from stores and eager salespeople, but never a restaurant. Way to earn extra points in my book. Anyone who's ever given me a gift knows I'm a bit of an OCD fascist when it comes to thank you etiquette. (And to those with whom I have lapsed in this department, I'm sincerely sorry. I'm happy to mail you an apology.) I might be a quasi-environmentalist who prefers to eliminate paper waste, but I love pretty paper products and will never be offended by receiving a thank you card via US Mail, even if the message is on the terse and impersonal side.

  This unbleached recycled card made the memories of the farm-to-table meal at the cozy Village restaurant linger that much more deliciously in my mind: the poached egg salad with corn and mushrooms and gently blanketed with translucent crudo ribbons; pork chop served with a hunk of crisp pork belly and green peas; and rustic lamb. The pretentious, overly precious "cherry tomatoes on the fence" amuse bouche trick? A little less so.

I can't, however, remember when or how I gave them my home address; maybe I signed a comment card? Dunno. Too much Charbonniere 2004 Chateauneuf du Pape.

Update: my sister waited in line for the hay ride at the Stone Barns Harvest Festival today behind  behind Jon friggin' Stewart and his family. Clearly Blue Hill is pleasing important people in the right places. Forget about little ol' me. I wonder what Dan Barber & Co send Mr. Stewart...

Blue Hill NYC
75 Washington Pl
New York, NY 10011
212.539.1776

Now we pause for a moment of self-promotion

I wrote three non-food-related articles in the brand new LA Weekly's Best of LA: City Classics 2008 issue. Read more about Travel Town Museum, Judson Studios, and the Exposition Rose Garden, or pick up the super fat paper issue to peruse the many recs contained within.

On a related note, I've also recently started writing the dining and food news portions of the Weekly's "Gold Standard" e-newsletter. To get the newsletter emailed to you every week, go to the Weekly's site and sign up for the "LA Weekly Insiders" mailings. You have to register but they don't ask for inappropriate information. But be sure to ONLY check the "Gold Standard" (as in Jonathan) box, unless you want lots of other emails about news and clubs and live music and whatnot. Which maybe you do. If so, go buck wild with the newsletters, friends.

Happy reading and eating...

What's for lunch? Nae Go Hyang

My feelings towards whatever historic preservation fieldwork I'm doing are largely dictated by the available eats in the area. Long days in Pico Union were good. Days in West Adams, not so much.

I agreed to a project in K-Town largely because of lunch options. Sadly I'm not organized enough to compile a list of restaurants, but at least my first random choice worked out well.

Nae Go Hyang is in the block-long Oxford Square strip mall on the south side of 8th between Oxford and Serrano. It's a crowded jumble of signs, most of which I can't read for obvious reasons. Some Peeping Tom action had to suffice when picking a lunch spot.

Most people were eating big stainless steel and ceramic bowls full of noodles and soup in different colors and textures. Turns out Nae Go Hyang essentially specializes in buckwheat and whole wheat-based goods. They mixed chewy buckwheat noodles with julienned veggies and a pickly sweetish red sauce at a good tolerance level for me. The leek and veggie pancake was super tasty too, especially for all of $5.54. Big shared buckets of kimchee and tongs are part of the deal.

So far, so good on this work project. At least the eating part.

Nae Go Hyang
3516 W. 8th Street
Koreatown
213.381.0022

The higher end of a weekend in San Francisco

Because I haven't spent a ton of time in San Francisco, especially in recent years, it was time to hit some of the classics. But asking for advice from friends and colleagues was quickly overwhelming.

Too many places. Too much good food. Too hard to decide. (Big problems, I know.) So I left it to fate, and my  trusty eater brother-in-arms MOP noticed a rez at Jardiniere on the Saturday night. I'm glad to cede OpenTable.com stalking to someone whose taste in food I trust.

Jardiniere's been around long enough that the taxi drivers know where it is, but it's not played out. At least not to my foreign SoCal eyes. The Nouveau touches, like the swag iron railings, make it feel like Fancy Special Occasion Place but also fun. I wish more restaurants had a balcony with such panoramic good views of other eaters and the room.

The menu again presented more tough choices, a situation for which the tasting menu took care of everything. And thankfully, everything was great. If only there weren't so many other restaurants to hit up on the next trip, I'd gladly go back just to order the luscious potato gnocchi with lobster, chanterelles and shallot jus topped with just about the best bread crumbs I'd ever tasted; the duck breast with blackberries, farro, and foie gras terrine; and the interesting wine pairings that totally did us in.

The meal felt like a perfect meeting of Northern California and France. If only international relations were this triumphant.

When I told Cicely that our other dinner plan included dinner at Zuni, she pointed out its CP-equivalent iconic status in her mind. Shame on me for never having been! (She didn't really say that. Instead I thought it.)

Compared to Jardiniere, Zuni's menu was well, not as exciting. But it's an impeccably sourced, sustainable apples and oranges comparison. Zuni is closer to the level of what a highly competent home cook can make, many of whom I know are Zuni fans.

Yet its comfort and sincerity is 100% Bay Area (4% "health surcharge" for the city's universal health care program!), and the food will never go out of style. Roasted chicken with bread salad, mustard greens, and pine nuts and currants (a Catalonia-inspired riff I often borrow) is indeed firmly in the Judy Rodgers canon. The crazy $48 price tag for a chicken who lived a happy life is also pure current day S.F. 

I've done my foodie duty. And just shot my street cred by using that word.
 

Quick Fix in Echo Park

Any neighborhood would be lucky to have Fix Coffee. Echo Park really scored.

The beans: Portland's Zoka or Intelligentsia. Machine: La Marzocco. Sandwiches, salads and pastries: Susina.

It's obviously a big ol' Gentrification Symbol, so I can't exactly say it will definitely become an all-inclusive community gathering spot. But the outdoor area screened in with bamboo is lovely and holds a lot of potential (perfect for a play area, hint hint; others might agree). The pretty patina metal panels that extend from the outer wall to the low ceiling articulate the roof angle in a way that cleverly nods to Googie architecture. Love the orange recessed lights and the wood veneer touches. A couple Speak & Spell machines help entertain younger (or not, if that's still your thing) customers. 

Baristas could use some more training. Cups are too big for the hardcore Third wavers, and the milk in my capp was more seafoamy than microfoam. No latte art. Sorry, but it's becoming sorta standard in a place like this.

At least they got the right equipment. The rest just takes some time and practice.

Fix Coffee
2100 Echo Park Avenue
Echo Park 90026

The best kind of vacation

My favorite type of travel -- and way of living, really -- is hanging out with good peeps and spending days going from one eating and drinking establishment to the next.

San Francisco makes doing that very easy. Even in a mere 48 hours you can get a lot accomplished.

Blue Bottle was ground zero for all social and caffeine-oriented activity. We didn't try their siphon brew because it's hard to wean us off the cappuccio, and apples vs. apples makes for better taste testing. But the apparatus is quite a thing to behold, as is the clean interior tucked inside an historic building at the edge of newly redesigned Mint Plaza. Limited seating means a focus on the coffee and friends (or strangers sitting next to you given the forced-friendly arrangement), not spending $3 to fritter hours away on the laptop. I also like the name of the intersection.

No trip to SF is complete without a visit to the Ferry Building. Check. Purchases at the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant (Tintilla de Rota and Malvasia from Lipari), then a carafe of rose with charcuterie plate. Done and done.

Judging by the line spilling out the door at Tartine on a late Sunday afternoon, you'd never know that a major chunk of the Mission's residents have decamped for Burning Man. I get it. Pressed cheese sandwiches and perfect desserts are always in demand.

I never ever thought in a million billion years that there could be such a thing as too much insanely creamy smooth meringue. Tartine's blow torches are getting put to very good use for this noble cause. Yet as much as it hurt to leave some over on the plate, I couldn't finish all of the miraculous meringue frosting that encased the layers of cake and mild lemon curd. Truly a top 10 dessert for this citrus lover.

Now I can't think past the cake. Will cover dinners later.

   

Shut out of Slow Food Nation (sort of)

Here we are in San Francisco for the weekend. Slow Food Nation was the original impetus for the trip, but since I botched my chance to get tickets to the Tasting Pavilion -- which were being sold on Craig's List for upwards of 5X face value, apparently -- and other events, that wasn't happening. So, no tasting pavilion for us, but our font-of-SF-food-tips friend Tracie told us over delicious, perfect cocktails at Bourbon & Branch that it was like, ridiculous waits for a few bites of food. That made me feel a lot better. 

Instead we're spending a lovely, relaxing, pre-birthday, friend-filled, child-free, food/coffee/booze-soaked weekend up north, albeit one with a little too much time being spent along Market Street. But the open-to-the-public SFN Marketplace gave us enough of an idea of what the whole festival thing is about. (Proximity to Blue Bottle just around the corner helped get me over the initial disappointment, and it totally kicks Ritual and definitely Four Barrel's asses.)

To summarize: it was basically like a big farmers' market with better graphic design and lots of maps. Plus a nearly oppressive amount of geographically detailed information. I can't say the selection of products totally blew me away, since a lot of it was familiar: Weiser Family potatoes, Far West Fungi that I visited at the Ferry Building this afternoon, Let's Be Frank, etc. But we had some tasty bites of edifying eats, including the hand pulled noddles made with unbleached organic flour from Giusto's of South San Francisco (you get the idea about locational specificity overload) from the Imperial Tea Court.

Certain design elements were the highlight, like the shipping container turned info booth, the convivial group tables that used scaffolding components, and the awesome earthworks-y outdoor garden. Food plus public space is the most pleasing type of formula, and this one added up to something pretty cool.

Update: Turns out the Victory Garden will stay until November.

Bye Bye Benito's?

Though admittedly it's been years since I've been to the Benito's location on Santa Monica Blvd., I felt a tinge of sadness when I noticed it's no longer. It appears a hot wings joint has opened up in the modest structure on the northwest corner of Santa Monica and McCadden. The 3rd Street location immortalized in the Big Lebowski was razed a few years ago, and now the Hollywood branch once featured in a "This American Life" episode is also gone.  Hard core taco lovers will hardly shed a tear, yet...

The Shakey's down street (where the "Ye Olde Public House" sign written in Gothic font are numbered, given the chain's recent rebranding efforts) and Benito's seemed to be the eateries of choice among some of Hollywood's  tranny youth. Will H&W Express be embraced as an acceptable substitute?

Not quite as pretty as the cover of Gourmet

Good Gawd, do I think that picture on the cover of Gourmet's April issue is pretty. The dish simply shown -- 
pasta with spicy anchovy, dill and breadcrumbs -- screams perfect easy weeknight dish. It might even be a contender for a place in our the regular pasta stable.

It only took me about four months filled with sincere intentions, and many rotted and discarded bunches of unused dill, but I finally got around to it last week. I don't think those months have been wasted living without this pasta.

I liked the unusual combination of flavors and textures well enough, but it won't be usurping my signature porcini pasta, spaghetti alla carbonara or bucatini all'amatriciana from their rightful places. It could also have been my fault for going very heavy on the onion-to-anchovy ratio in favor of the former, and adding shallots. Which, in general, is never a bad thing.

The recipe calls for perciatelli or bucatini. I'd use spaghetti instead, actually, because the other textures get sort of lost in the heavy tubular pasta. (Or, as Marissa would want me to say, the "tasty tubers.") Definitely reserve a hefty amount of breadcrumbs for serving, and to add throughout eating. Otherwise they all get mushy, and that's not so fun.

She's gotta have it: Viet Noodle Bar

My mind is usually scattered among too many things to let food cravings inch their way in like they used to.

But for a few months there's been one major exception. On some afternoons I start thinking about the petite spring rolls and mildly warm noodles with soy skin rolls and shitake mushrooms at Viet Noodle Bar in Atwater, and I CANNOT STOP.

I find ways to acquiesce. Some days I'm alone and able to eat, read and think. Other times I call ahead, grab my food to go, and balance take-out containers with wiggly James in my arms. On such days, often the sublime spring rolls with tofu, fried shallots, basil, carrots and jicama are gone by the time I'm home. Their chewy and crunchy textures psyche me up for the sweet tang of the noodles and delicate tofu to come. Not the most flavorful dish in the world, but a few dashes of siracha push it along.

Though the original Soy Cafe's minuscule location on Hyperion had its charms (and its challenges; try balancing an infant and your own tush on what felt like 8" diameter stools), the second expanded location breathes easy. I usually sit at the communal table best set up for single diners, which is narrower than the more social table that lines the other side of the restaurant. Plus they try to like, feed your mind, man. Alas, the selection of smarty pants and culturally with-it books that filled the continuous rectangular niche in the north wall have been taken back by their owner. 

Best of all, the room's white-on-brown serenity and the meal serve to quell the intensity of my jones. Equilibrium and focus are then restored.

Viet Noodle Bar
3133 ½ Glendale Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90039
323.906.1575