NYC Restaurant Reviews – donuts4dinner.com
Despite being a hick from the heartland, I’ve never cared a lick for fried chicken. We didn’t eat it when I was growing up on the farm, because we were too busy enjoying the beef and pork we raised, and then I became a princess who liked all of her meat already off the bone. But after visiting California a few years ago and forcing myself to order the eponymous dish at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, I realized that maybe it was worth a little bone to have a juicier, more flavorful chicken.
And then I became blogfriends with Han of Handi-Eats, whose every other blog post is about fried chicken in NYC. She recommended the year-old Bobwhite Lunch and Supper Counter most recently, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the pecan pie bread pudding the menu promised, so I fought against my natural desire to not leave the house before 8 p.m. on Saturdays and met my boyfriend and our friend Nik there for brunch.
My first impression of the place was all about relief. The reviews online had made it seem like some divey place with no tables and a wait that would make lesser women gnaw on their hands for nourishment. Instead, it was this rustic-looking open room with white walls, dark floors, plenty of sunlight, five or six tables lining one wall, and a counter for eight or ten diners in front of a bar on the other wall. And people, the bathroom smelled good. I was immediately in love and daydreamed about myself living in Alphabet City and coming every Saturday morning to sit by myself at the counter, eat some bird, and chat with the super-friendly waitress.
The three of us ordered the fried chicken supper for four with ginger ales and sweet teas all around, and here’s what we got:
Twelve pieces of white and dark meat spread across two platters that sort of overwhelmed us when they arrived at the table. The skin was so well-seasoned and crisp, and the meat underneath juiced all over my hands. The huge, perfect pieces of breast were my favourite; peeling the skin back and revealing the smooth white meat felt like unwrapping a gift, and even the very centers of them, so far from the bone, were still succulent.
For the three sides included in the meal, we (I) chose macaroni and cheese, potato salad, and cheddar grits. Each of them was better than expected, with little extras like the crunchy topping on the mac & cheese and the scallions on the grits that made them special. We all loved the potato salad with its chopped peppers, agreed that the tangy cole slaw was too good not to be mentioned on the menu itself, and couldn’t get enough of the warm biscuits with honey.
We were way too full for dessert (and had enough leftover chicken to feed a fourth person), but we bravely forged ahead and ordered the pecan pie bread pudding and the banana pudding. The bread pudding truly was reminiscent of pecan pie, right down to the nuts that don’t get stuck in your teeth and the sweet, sweet caramel drizzle. But truthfully, I liked the banana pudding even more. My boyfriend thought it was too thin and soupy, but even he couldn’t deny how delicious it was. Even the whipped cream on top was something special.
From what I saw of its uncrowded tables at prime brunchtime on a Saturday, Bobwhite Counter is one of those rare New York City restaurants that’s doing everything right without anyone noticing. Maybe it’s the Avenue C location far from the subway, or maybe it’s just that East Village kids can only go out at night, but whatever it is, I’m sorry for Bobwhite and happy for me. I’m going to take all of my friends here in groups of four until I’ve had every combination of fried chicken, sandwiches, sides, and desserts that exists. Your invitation is in the mail.
New York, NY 10009 (map)
Eleven Madison Park: The Best Restaurant in NYC?
Regular readers will remember my first trip to Eleven Madison Park for the tasting menu last July and the resulting hullabaloo. We had a very good experience but not one that I put on par with the greatest dinners in NYC, and I gave the restaurant four out of five stars (er, donuts). Never a restaurant to rest on its laurels, however, EMP invited us back for a second tasting on the house, and we were so blown away by what the kitchen was capable of that I actually felt embarrassed about my first review.
A little over a year later–last August–we decided to repay their kindness by visiting once again. This time, we had proper expectations: it couldn’t be anywhere close to our over-the-top second experience, but we would ask for the things we needed to make it better than our first dinner there. This was our chance to see which of the two meals was the real EMP.
Chef-owner Daniel Humm has created a menu that riffs on some of the dishes most associated with NYC, much like the tasting at Torrisi Italian Specialties. This first amuse was a take on the black and white cookie, made savory with black truffle and Parmesan shortbread. The flavor was largely truffley with a hint of Goldfish cracker.
black and white cookie
tomato tea, lemon thyme
Delicate, barely-there acidity from the tomato with subtle herbal undertones from the steeping bundle. Paired with the Parmesan crisp, it was umami overload. In a good way.
parmesan lavash
Marie-Noelle Ledru, Cuvee du Goulte, Brut, Blanc de Noirs, Ambonnay, Champagne, France 2007
mackerel
On a horseradish chip with mustard that was the best part of the bite.
scallop
On a light-as-air hollow scallop chip with daikon and my favourite, yuzu.
chickpea
I don’t want to call this a chickpea log, but it was. Lightly fried crisp on the outside, with a burst of dill and yogurt on top.
yogurt
Frozen on the outside and creamy on the inside, with browned crunchy lentils.
trout roe marinated with dashi, cantaloupe, zucchini, watermelon snow
I love a dessert in the middle of the savory courses. This was all nice and cold and melty with varying sweetnesses, but then the funk of the roe hit, and it became salty and gazpacho-like.
Professor Fritz Briem, Grodzskie, Bavaria, Germany
A hazy dome revealed a sturgeon just saturated with smoky flavor. I don’t even care for smoked fish, and it made me mmm out loud.
smoked sturgeon
An amazing everything bagel crumble, super salty and oniony, so good with the celery leaves.
Lemony caviar over cream cheese
with rye bagel chips to spread it on
and full sour and nearly naked pickles to accompany it all. This was the Russ and Daughters course, a nod to NYC’s nearly 100-year-old appetizing store known for its bagels, smoked fish, cream cheeses, and caviar. (If you don’t know about appetizing, as I didn’t before I moved here (I think there are exactly two Jewish people living in Ohio), this is great.)
Domaine Tempier, Bandol, Provence, France 2011
The famous bread course, served in a coarse sack with cow and goat butter. One of my food friends has chided me after both of my EMP visits for not asking for a second round of bread, so I made sure to this time, and our server never brought it to us! He also refused my request for a souffle for dessert. If the kitchen couldn’t make one for me, he should have made it himself, AM I RIGHT?
couscous smoked with tomato, yogurt, olives
Strong tomato and herb flavors with a funky little ball of goat cheese and an olive crumble. Fresh and Mediterranean.
Le Roc des Anges, Les Vielles Vignes, Montner, France 2009
Weingut Leitz, Rudesheimer Magdalenenkreuz, Spatlese, Rheingau, Germany 2010
Cold and hot foie courses:
marinated with nepitella and blackberry
In my notes, I call this a “foie beet salad”. I would love to know what that means. I would’ve never thought of foie gras and the mint flavor of the nepitella going together but love being surprised, and then there was the crunch of the blackberry seeds. I liked the flavor of the slab of foie in the hot dish more than this torchon, but I sure did love the composition of this.
The hot preparation included thin, crisp slices of kohlrabi, a super sear on the foie hidden beneath the kohlrabi cover, a bite of ginger in the scallion broth, and very bacony caramelized onion.
Aztec Summer: tequila, lime, cocchi americano, mezcal, agave, cucumber
fluke poached with lemongrass, cucumber, coconut
A lemongrass-tinged fluke in olive oil with a dollop of coconut(!) cream and crunchy coconut flesh, topped with a tasting of cucumber that ranged from vegetal to pickled.
Maison Deux Montille, Sur Gamay, Premier Cru, St. Aubin, Burgundy, France 2008
lobster poached with zucchini, avocado, amaranth
I love a lobster, but the sauce on this was clearly made using the shells and roe, and it was overall just a little too shellfishy for me. My boyfriend appreciated the effort, though. I appreciated that the other elements of the dish toned down the shellfish flavor, especially the green yuzu sauce and the nutty toasted amaranth, which was my favourite part of the dish.
Jean Grivot, Roncieres, 1er Cru, Nuits-St.-Georges, Burgundy, France 2006
poussin roasted with lettuce, spring onion, quinoa
The foie-gras-fortified jus on this made for such a sweet, sticky sauce. The skin of the chicken was crisp, and so was the quinoa. The oniony ramps were a real addition to the the plate.
Il Colle, Brunello di Montalcino, Tuscany, Italy 2005
veal roasted and corned with summer beans, violet mustard, savory
A thick, lip-smacking veal bordelaise sauce accompanied this slab of veal and its melt-in-your-mouth slice of lunchmeat-like corned veal. I loved the effort of the tiny slices of green bean and the tomato confit that was surprisingly sweet and had none of the bitter notes that make me hate tomatoes.
Girardin, Black Label, Brussels, Belgium
meridian chevre
We were shown whole rounds of fresh and aged chevre before our cheese course was served. I’m 100% convinced that they sliced a tiny sliver from each of these for our dishes and then threw out the rest of the round. I expect nothing less than that for $195 per person.
So much garlic! And it went so well with the berries.
meridian chevre with strawberries, pistachio, garlic
The making of the New York egg cream:
egg cream, orange, cocoa nib, seltzer
With its orange oil and cocoa nib, this was like one of those Terry’s Chocolate Oranges you see at Christmastime.
cheesecake, goat cheese, chamomile, raspberry
Goat cheese powder sprinkled atop a layer of creamy cheesecake with a gelatinous raspberry topping.
Chateau Lafaurie-Peyraguey, Sauternes, Bordeaux, France 1998
chocolate ganache with caramel, apricot, cocoa nibs
I kind of wrecked this dish before I took a picture of it. These are my very poignant notes on it:
White stuff is chocolate.
Brown stuff is caramel.
This is what a $6 iced coffee looks like.
Sweet black and white cookies to reference the savory ones we were first served. These were more lemony that most I’ve had in NYC, and more lemon is always good.
caramel corn
In a word–salty.
The traditional liquid nitrogen cocktail as part of the kitchen tour. This time, we were given a copy of the Eleven Madison Park cookbook to sign. I’m sure I wrote something SO witty. Like, “Thanks for the free meal that made the entire Internet hate me.” I can’t remember for sure, because I had just DROPPED MY CAMERA ON THE FLOOR while standing up from our table and was still hyperventilating.
We had one good meal and one amazing meal at Eleven Madison Park, but I have a feeling that this was the meal that people are having there day-to-day. It was excellent. There’s really nothing to complain about. The service is top-notch, and the atmosphere is the kind of luxury preferred by gentlemen making business deals. But it’s not Per Se. New Yorkers love calling EMP the best restaurant in NYC these days–most notably New York magazine critic Adam Platt in 2011–but I swear it’s just because we’re tired of talking about how Per Se is perfection. While individual dishes at EMP are at times worth gushing over, the dish I don’t gush over at Per Se is the exception. EMP’s food doesn’t bubble and burst the way Per Se’s does. It’s not so buttery, so creamy, so inexplicably better than the sum of its parts. There’s a little bit of magic, for lack of a better word, that’s missing for me at EMP. I’m glad for the meals I’ve had here, and I’d certainly love to continue to visit, but the best part of this visit was finding out for sure that if I’m recommending one restaurant in NYC for the meal of someone’s life, this isn’t first on my list.
Ben & Jerry’s Cannoli Ice Cream
When it comes to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, it’s all about two flavors for me: Americone Dream and What a Cluster. I’ll dabble in Phish Food and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and I was into Magic Brownies (despite the Dave Matthews Band association) because it tasted like my hometown favourite, Graeter’s Black Raspberry Chip. But my local Ben & Jerry’s spot was running low on the good stuff and running high on Late Night Snack and the Greek yogurt flavors the other night, so my boyfriend convinced me to try the limited edition Cannoli.
This picture is about as exciting as the ice cream itself was. The mascarpone base was a cross between vanilla bean and cake batter ice cream flavors that I actually wouldn’t mind tasting in more vanilla-based pints, especially with its end notes of butterscotch. The pastry hunks were very crunchy, and the chocolate they were dipped in had an alcoholic taste with a hint of cherry. Not bad, if a bit overpowering.
The disappointment was in the mascarpone swirl, which was only evident by a fleeting hint of graininess; we couldn’t detect a flavor difference between the base and the swirl. Either the swirl needed to be more Amazonian so the texture could make up for the lack of flavor excitement, or it could have been the traditional ricotta of a cannoli, or even better would have been something completely different, like the chocolate chips you see on a lot of Brooklyn cannolis.
I liked the overall effect of a slightly cheesy, elevated cake batter. I’ll just know to bring my own Nutella and M&Ms to the ice cream party next time.
Momofuku Noodle Bar Fried Chicken Dinner
Momofuku Ko is probably my favourite restaurant in NYC, so it was no surprise when my group of dining friends loved the whole rotisserie duck at Momofuku Ssam Bar and wanted to follow it immediately with the fried chicken dinner at Momofuku Noodle Bar.
It was approximately an entire year ago that we did this, so my review will consist solely of photos and drool sounds spelled phonetically. Get ready.
pork buns
With hoisin, scallions, and cucumber. Because you’re not going to Ssam Bar or Noodle Bar and not getting the buns. In fact, you might go to Noodle Bar after Ko just to get the buns.
the chicken: Southern style and Korean style
Saucy!
Spice-ful!
So much sweet white meat! I can’t actually choose a favourite between the lip-smacking saucy Korean wings and the crunchy Southern wings with their spiced batter. The mu shu pancakes are simple enough, but somehow that oily fried bread ends up being the part of the meal I most look forward to when it comes to the large-format Momofuku meals. I barely touched the lettuce but plowed through the fresh herbs and hoisin sauce and filled up on just a few pieces of plump chicken; even with eight of us, there was no shortage of birdmeat to be had. The rest of the restaurant, on the other hand, looked on droolily as they stood reservationless, waiting in the perpetual Noodle Bar line for not even fried chicken but ramen. Ramen, people. Make your reservation, and get your fried chicken.
New York, NY 10003 (map)
Truffle Feast at David Santos’s Louro
I’ve been pretty terrible about blogging them, but suffice it to say that our first trip to Chef David Santos’s underground supper club was the first of many. Dave’s food is this hard-to-find combination of incredibly comforting and refined, and his passion for what he does makes it taste even better. And now the chef finally has a proper home, Louro in the West Village.
The night before the official opening, we were lucky enough to get a couple of seats at his first Monday night Nossa Mesa supper club dinner, part of a weekly series of themed meals. This was the Black and White dinner, featuring loads and loads of truffles.
This dinner was BYOB, but the bar was fully stocked, and we of course had a glass of Riesling. The space, formerly housing the restaurant Lowcountry, has been redesigned with whites and granites, gorgeous branch-like lighting fixtures with exposed bulbs, and a “library” of photos of books lining the walls. Classy.
Chef Santos’s famous/infamous Portuguese “butter”
Actually lard. With lots and lots of black pepper.
Chef Santos’s equally famous/infamous “flatbread”
Actually the fluffiest bread. Not at all flat.
amuse: uni, grapefruit
One of the better preparations of uni I’ve had. The tart grapefruit didn’t highlight the bitterness of the uni, as I would expect, but they balanced one another. A very clean, refreshing start.
hamachi tartare, quail egg, grilled scallions, white truffle aioli
I never thought I’d ever call scallions the highlight of a dish, but these were so flavorful and had such a great chewy texture. Between the over-easy quail egg and the aioli, this became a creamy mess within seconds, and all of us were practically licking our plates to get every last bit of scallion-y oil-slicked hamachi.
celery root soup, black truffle pudding, celery in textures
I have a friend who hates celery, and never was I sadder for her than when eating this belly-warming bowl of celery-flavored cream. Slivers of celery lined the bottom of the bowl, but the textures weren’t even necessary for me when the base was so incredibly rich with celery.
risotto, lardo, parmigiano foam, white truffles
Refusing to let up for a second, the chef followed with another creamy dish: the most cheesy, fatty risotto. You think you’re going to get tired of eating a whole bowl of the same flavor and texture, and then you take a single truffle-laden bite and wish the bowl was bigger.
Senat Farms chicken two ways:
first way: black truffle, corn bread, wild mushrooms
Tender chicken with a crispy skin and cubes of granular cornbread, mushrooms, and onions marinated in truffle oil. So many deep, dark, umami flavors in one dish. I needed about ten times more cornbread and ten times fewer mushrooms, but I understand that normal people love mushrooms.
second way: polenta, confit ragu, wild mushrooms
Very reminiscent of the buttery potato mousseline served on the side of the whole duck at Eleven Madison Park, this was so smooth it was hard for me to equate it with the grainy fried polenta I’m used to. The tender chicken almost disintegrated into the creamy polenta. I hope this shows up on the regular menu so I can eat it again in the dead of winter and be comforted.
foie gras beignets, truffle sugar and glaze
Donuts4dinner! Only sadly, I didn’t care for them. For me, they weren’t nearly sweet enough to be dessert because of the truffle, but they were also too sweet to be savory because of the sugar, and they were also a little funky thanks to the foie gras. On the bright side, they were just the right fluffy-but-filling consistency, and one of my friends thought they were entirely successful, so.
New York, NY 10014 (map)
In the name of self-congratulations, I’d also like to mention that some of my photos were used by New York magazine’s Grub Street blog yesterday in the announcement of Louro’s opening this week: What to Eat at Louro, Now Serving Fry Bread and Rabbit Rillettes in the West Village. (Click on the picture to see more.)
I couldn’t have been more pleased at the opportunity to shoot Chef Santos’s food and to have my work shown in one of my favourite blogs. Here’s one of the outtakes from the shoot to get you ready for Louro’s regular menu: