Category: Restaurants

West Village Rambles: Food for Body & Mind

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Since our arrival in Manhattan a week ago, we have spent considerable time with our delightful granddaughter, but we’ve also been walking and exploring, making a bit of the West Village our own. And walk we do—one day we did two long walks for a grand total of 25,000 steps. A new record!

For us, much of life revolves around food and, consequently, we are sampling cheese and deli items from Murray’s Cheese and Gourmet Garage, braving the bustle that is Eataly, and dining at restaurants new to us.

Some recent standouts of cuisine are the following:

Via Carota. This casual Italian place draws from all regions of Italy, has a comfortable vibe and at night is very lively. We had lunch here our first day—a yummy lemon risotto and a  plate of gnocchi with a piquant gorgonzola sauce—and liked it so much we returned that night for dinner. This meal, we shared some grilled artichokes (slightly and appropriately charred) and also grilled chicken with a lemon vinaigrette. All with some good white wine by the glass. Just perfect!

www.thenewpotato.com
Via Carota (www.thenewpotato.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gloo. This is a new French bistro, only  open a month or so, on Carmine Street and hasn’t really been discovered. We were its first Open Table reservation. The owner is from France and has several restaurants there, but this is his first U.S. venture. The space is small with a quiet ambiance.  I loved the upside down tomato tart to start (very pretty, looking somewhat like stacked red grapefruit sections) followed by a very satisfying boneless chicken breast in a cream sauce with small mushrooms served alongside mashed potatoes. Hard not to savor this comfort food!

Casa. A Brazilian eatery on Bedford Street, Casa has a small bar, about a dozen tables, and a mullioned window wall. Our entrees were excellent—fish fillet with lemon caper sauce and a slightly spicy, herby tomato stew of chicken and shrimp —both served with rice. My only advice, if you’re over fifty, go early! There are only hard surfaces and the noise level after 7:30 made conversation hopeless.

Casa (www.pinterest.com)
Casa (www.pinterest.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Culture Notes

On Thursday, we were at one of the first performances of Therese Raquin, a play based on Emile Zola’s novel of the same name ,and starring Keira Knightley. (The preview the night before had been cancelled due to Knightley having suffered a minor injury.) The set was minimal and the staging stark, but very effective given the themes of passion and guilt. Knightley as Therese was excellent as the seemingly meek and docile wife who later exhibits extreme passion and emotion. The supporting cast was also very good, especially Matt Ryan as her lover, Laurent, and Judith Light as her mother-in-law.

I really enjoyed Lily Tomlin in “Grace and Frankie” and today seeing her in Grandma, I thought she was fabulous. Playing Elle, a grieving, unemployed academic who is angry at most everyone and everything and demonstrates it, Tomlin takes on the challenge of helping her pregnant granddaughter Sage (played by the radiant Julia Garner) when she unexpectedly shows up. The film is an odyssey of visits to Elle’s past lives—old friends and acquaintances and old loves—that culminates in some touchingly funny and poignant scenes between grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter. (I loved seeing the career-driven daughter on her treadmill desk.) Each of these women is strong in her own way. Not a perfect film, but one with sharpness, wit, and heart. Rated R, partly for the strong language.

 

Cover image: www.everettpotter.com

 

Tidy Tidbits: Food Fare

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Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer, and for many, it’s a chance for one last barbecue or picnic before work and school take center stage.  We don’t have any special holiday plans, but it does seem an appropriate time to focus on food.  So this week’s blog is mostly local, as they say.

Cooking with the Chief Penguin

Over the course of our marriage, I’ve been the primary cook and my spouse, aka Chief Penguin, the baker extraordinaire.  He’s a foodie too and now that he’s retired he’s the one who spends time studying cooking web sites, poring over cookbooks, and collecting recipes we should try.  We go to the supermarket armed with a sheaf of papers and usually I decide which recipe I’d be happy to prepare.  Don’t get me wrong, he’s a capable cook in his own right and sometimes takes a turn as entrée chef.

Our recent culinary adventure was the result of his finding a Gordon Ramsay YouTube video on how to prepare short ribs.  You might say, short ribs in this heat?  And you’d be right, but he was captivated and then so was I.  Something about Ramsay’s exuberant energetic style and how easy he made it all look.  We printed the recipe, shopped (a word about where later), and I got into motion.

The recipe is really fairly straightforward and involved browning the short ribs on top of the stove, then adding and reducing a bottle of red wine before adding beef stock, and then putting the pan in a supposedly slow oven for 3-4 hours.  Ramsay’s low slow oven was 338 degrees F. or 170 C.  Although the pan was covered, our ribs were more than done in 2 hours—a bit blackened in fact.  And the stock and reduced wine were very thin and didn’t ever become thick.  But, before serving, the ribs are topped with a marvelous mixture of crispy sautéed pancetta and crimini mushrooms which adds salt and spice and texture.  Would I make this dish again?  Possibly, but with some adjustment in oven temperature and the amount of stock, for sure, and perhaps an herb or two.

A footnote:  some years ago we enjoyed a superb Thanksgiving dinner with friends at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London.  It was so wonderful we were at table for four hours.  Still sated from the meal, we continued to relax.  Then the wait staff pleasantly, but firmly, requested we move to the lounge.  There we sat until the noise of a vacuum cleaner around our feet suggested it really was time to depart.  A most memorable meal!

Eating Out

Although we like to cook, we also dine out frequently.  Last night we tried a new restaurant on Anna Maria Island that was recommended by several friends.  Called Eat Here, it’s informal and slightly funky with a very appealing menu.  It also happens to be the sister restaurant to the much fancier, more expensive, and excellent Beach Bistro nearby.

Here we succumbed to temptation (multiple ones, I’d say) and ordered the homemade potato chips with blue cheese dip to start—sinfully addictive and easy to transport any extras home since they are served in a small tan takeout box!  We also sampled the flounder with a lime butter caper sauce, shrimp served over roasted Brussels sprouts, the house French fries (scrumptious skinny ones!) and their key lime cheesecake.  It was a very tasty meal and we will definitely go back again…and again.

Provisions

There is a Whole Foods market in downtown Sarasota, but closer to home are two very good options for fresh produce and meats.  Fresh Market on Manatee Ave. in Bradenton is a branch of a North Carolina-based chain and very good for organic fruits and vegetables, meats and fish, with a carefully curated selection of dry goods, everything from nuts and grains to jarred sauces and pasta.  We are fans of their roasted chicken salad (light on the mayonnaise) in the deli case and their ultimate crab cakes (a thicker cake with virtually no filler).  This is an upscale store and our regular go-to market.

For the aforementioned ribs, however, we paid a visit to the Chop Shop, also on Manatee.  It’s a low undistinguished building, doesn’t look like much from the outside, and you might hesitate to go in.  But do!  It’s a high quality butcher shop and much more with a wide selection and helpful staff.  The deli case contains delicious made-on-the-premises ham salad and very good vinegar-based coleslaw.  And if you need any unusual jellies, jams, pickles, or sauces, there is shelf after shelf, an eclectic and international array that will surely tempt you (it always does me!) to try something new.

Photo credit:  Skinny-fries, www.foodfood.com

Maine Musings: Restaurants & Reading

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LAZY DAYS

Being in Maine promotes being lazy—watching the lobster boats circling to check their traps, observing the patterns of sun and shadow on the garden lilies, letting the hours slink by without any pressure. It’s also getting together with friends, shopping at the weekly farmers’ market, and exploring new venues.

This week we returned to Portland for lunch at the Blue Spoon with new Florida friends. The café is small and serves good food that is more interesting than the usual sandwiches and burgers. It’s located on Munjoy Hill in a section of the city we hadn’t previously discovered. After lunch we walked down the hill to the waterfront and strolled along the Eastern Promenade. Stately old frame houses with widows’ walks and porches line the opposite side of the promenade, several with condo for sale signs. A tempting prospect.

We also had dinner at the Newagen Inn, the place we came to stay twenty-five years ago for the first of our annual visits. The inn has changed over the years and become more elegant—the latest addition an impressive portico and re-worked entrance drive. What hasn’t changed, however, is its lovely location on the point of land known as Cape Newagen. The casual restaurant has a cozy bar area and a porch-like section with big windows perfect for admiring the view to the sea. You can also sit outdoors on a wrap around porch with umbrella tables. We all enjoyed the excellent halibut on a bed of risotto studded with sundried tomatoes and greens. The chef, a tall young woman in a ball cap, came out to chat and enthusiastically shared her plans for future menus.

BEACH READS

With the relaxed pace of these weeks comes the desire to indulge in good stories, novels that are absorbing with convincing characters and a strong narrative arc. Here are two I read this week, one definitely better than the other.

Haven Lake by Holly Robinson. This novelist is also a ghost writer and she was new to me. Set in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, this is a novel of complicated family dynamics—an estranged mother and daughter (both adults and the mother a sheep farmer), an unhappy teenager, and a surgeon fiancé who seems obsessed with his work. Add to this a mystery about two deaths that occurred twenty years ago and you have an intriguing slew of emotions. I thought the portrait of 15 year old Dylan was especially well drawn.

Silver Bay by Jojo Moyes. I like Moyes’ work and thought Me Before You was an exceptional novel due to its subject matter. I also enjoyed The Last Letter from Your Lover. This novel is one of her earliest and it shows. It isn’t as tightly constructed and, to my lights, could have used more focus and more editing. That said, it’s set in Australia at a hotel that attracts tourists who come to see the whales and the dolphins on Silver Bay. When a developer has plans to build a new hotel and retail complex, there is immediate conflict between the outside firm and the local whalesavers and environmentalists.

Tidy Tidbits: Spies, Tribes & Trills

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AT THE MOVIES

“Madcap,” ” hilarious” and “fun” are all terms I’d use to describe just released espionage comedy, Spy.  The women are at the top of their game—mostly—and there is plenty of foreign intrigue and too many bodies getting shot to count.  The wonderful cast is led by Melissa McCarthy as Susan Cooper, a basement CIA analyst who inveigles her way into the field, supported by a tough deputy CIA director, Alison Janney (think CJ on West Wing,) and colleague and agent, Miranda Hart, better known to many viewers as Chummie in Call the Midwife.  Rose Byrne plays the prime target while the distaff side is represented by Jude Law and Jason Statham.  It’s perfect summer fare.

NOVEL DELIGHT

Heaps of laudatory adjectives, “enthralling, exhilarating, arresting, fiercely intelligent, steamy, compelling” have been applied to Lily King’s novel, Euphoria, and perhaps that’s why I had avoided reading it until now.  But read it I did and found it pretty much lived up to the praise.  And what a vivid cover and enticing title!  Using Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson’s time in the field in New Guinea in 1932 as a jumping off point, King has created a novel that celebrates anthropology (the title refers to a certain pleasure in the work), raises questions about the methods and motives used to study the primitive tribes there, and sharply delineates the amalgam of professional competition and jealousy, sexual tension, and friendship that unites and divides this talented trio.

The Mead character, Nell Stone, is married to Schuyler Fenwick, known as Fen, but is strongly attracted to Blankson, the younger anthropologist modeled on Bateson, and he to her.  The point of view shifts from the narrative third person to Blankson recalling events retrospectively to passages from Nell’s field notebooks.  It is worth remembering that these are characters and the story here is not real life.  Euphoria was selected as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year, 2014.  Definitely recommend it!

As for Lily King, I was not familiar with her work, but have since learned she lives in Yarmouth, Maine and has written four novels, each of which has been cited for some award or other.  Here’s an interview with her from the Boston Globe.  Now I need to go back and find her earlier books.

SAVORING SARASOTA

The snow birds have gone home, the spring vacationers have departed the beach and traffic is down to a trickle.  But, for those of us still here, June abounds with delights both culinary and musical.  For two weeks, many Sarasota restaurants participate in Savor Sarasota Restaurant Week and offer three-course lunch and dinner menus at $15 and $29 respectively. These are seriously good deals!

We enjoyed lunch at Louie’s Modern (trendy cuisine such as kale salad with grilled salmon) and dinners at Bjou Café (scrumptious shrimp and crab bisque to start!) and Miguel’s (traditional fare with a French accent including plump snails in a gruyere cream sauce).  I’ve been impressed each meal with both the menu choices and the portion sizes—no stinting on quality or quantity.

Also in June, young musicians from conservatories across the country (who’ve competed for one of the coveted 60 slots) come to Sarasota.  They take part in master classes with noted musicians and performers and together present a series of public concerts of chamber and symphonic works.  All under the aegis of the Sarasota Orchestra.  We have been to one chamber concert already and are gearing up for two more.  Especially memorable was flutist Carol Wincenc’s performance last Friday evening.