flatiron | Notes on Food

Misc. Eats

June 19, 2016 § Leave a comment

Remembering when I still had it easy at work and weekends were free…just need to make it through June 30. Here – a lazy Sunday lunch at the Via Carota bar, starting with fried green olives with pork sausage and a superb negroni

A huge, hands-only kamayan feast featuring banana ketchup ribs, longanisa sausage, whole head-on shrimp, braised lamb, etc. at Filipino gastropub, Jeepney, in East Village with Cahill friends. Total gut bomb.

The Macho Man sandwich from a new favorite, Court Street Grocers – heritage pork shoulder, cabot cheddar, coleslaw, pickled jalapenos and duck sauce on garlic bread. Between this, the Delight and the Cubano, I can order from here about 4 times a week. So dangerous.

Dinner with Artemis at Mario Batali’s new restaurant, La Sirena, in the Meatpacking District. Bucatini with braised octopus in spicy pomodoro sauce and then ravioli all’amatriciana with spring onion butter…quite tasty but wasn’t crazy about the atmosphere, the service or the scene

Lunch at Legend near Washington Square Park with the family. We ordered our usual dishes – spicy lamb with cumin, spicy beef tendon with chili vinaigrette and a seriously delicious whole braised fish with spicy bean sauce – and went for a really long walk afterwards to recover

Sunday night shellfish bake at North End Grill – half a Maine lobster, head-on prawns, clams, new potatoes and corn in an addictive garlic butter and then sweet gem lettuce and blue cheese dressing on the side. Not pictured: duck fat fries and a lot of white wine.

The famous, substantial duck carnitas at Cosme…’nuff said.

Late night eats at Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken…my ultimate weakness.

ABC Kitchen

May 8, 2016 § Leave a comment

Sometimes on lazy Sundays, I really love walking up through Union Square and wandering through ABC Carpet & Home, which has kitchen supplies, decor, carpets, furniture, everything you’d need to decorate your dream home if you had no budget. Yes, the goods can get insanely expensive but the presentations always looks so goddamn gorgeous that I can’t help fantasizing about buying up all of their ceramics, objets d’art and wall decor. The store is also wonderful because of the well-known farm-to-table restaurant next door by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, which is beautifully appointed with ABC Carpet & Home wares and offers a lot of vegetable-heavy dishes. It’s usually difficult to get reservations on short notice, but one night, Alice and I managed to get a table and dig into some of the lighter fare they had to offer.

Crab toast with lemon aioli with blood orange negroni and clementine mojito. A nice start that was a surprisingly large portion.

One of my favorite dishes from last time: roast carrot and avocado salad with seeds, sour cream and citrus. It may look like a mess of greens but it’s incredibly flavorful and full of different textures – crunchy seeds and croutons, smooth and creamy avocado, toothsome carrots spiced with cumin. Good for you but delicious too! I’ve tried to replicate this dish at home but there’s always something missing in my version.

Another favorite from my last visit: the insane mushroom pizza with parmesan, oregano and a farm egg – completely meatless but very satisfying and perfectly presented, with a runny bright yellow yolk and crispy, charred crust. We also ordered the roasted hake with crispy potatoes, broccoli and red chile garlic sauce, which was super delicate and fell apart with a fork and had a nice kick thanks to the sauce. All in all, a really lovely and light low-key meal in a beautiful venue.

Miscellaneous eats

January 26, 2016 § Leave a comment

Girls’ night at John Dory Oyster Bar, where we loaded up on the lobster with tomalley vinaigrette, Parker House rolls and tons of raw oysters

A stop at Rouge et Blanc for a low-key dinner at the bar. Below are the Vietnamese beef cheeks with green papaya, rice cakes and roasted enoki mushrooms, an old favorite.

Charlie Bird for a late Saturday lunch

Cahill dinner at Polo Bar. Definitely don’t think you’d be missing out by not going, the high prices reflect the ambiance and pretentiousness more than the quality of the food or wine. If you’re looking to do a large format steak dinner (with much better service), I’d recommend Minetta Tavern or Bowery Meat Company instead, both of which are still pricey but not as ridiculous as here and so much better generally.

Eats around town

January 13, 2016 § Leave a comment

A delicious brunch with Bohee at Claudette, right by Washington Square Park, consisting of their chicken liver mousse with soft, squishy pain Tunisien and a super juicy lamb burger

Another solo visit to Via Carota in the middle of a day of errands. The bartender highly recommended the lemon grilled chicken and though it didn’t sound particularly thrilling on the menu, I was impressed (and it’s so cute!)

Craftbar with co-workers – delicious burrata, kale (meh) and winter squash salad, duck hearts and dumplings and of course, the oozy pecorino fonduta, my favorite item on the menu

Lunch at old reliable, Charlie Bird – diver scallops with brown butter and Sicilian lemon and mezze paccherie with suckling pig and saffron ragu (and their addictive house-made chili oil). I should probably start trying more new places but am a huge creature of habit.

The Clocktower

November 12, 2015 § Leave a comment

Sometime in August, Cindy and I had a date at newly opened restaurant, The Clocktower, by Stephen Starr. It’s located in EDITION Hotel right by Madison Square Park and helmed by Michelin-starred chef Jason Atherton, who leans toward seasonally-inspired (though it seems like no one intentionally does out-of-season cooking these days anyway) contemporary food with British influences. You enter the dimly lit hotel lobby and then go up a flight of stairs, leading to three different dining rooms, a billiards room and a room with a bar, all sumptuously decorated with works of art covering almost every inch of the walls. This is definitely a great place to bring a date – it looks super fancy and might seem a bit stuffy at first, but the service is warm and very helpful when you ask them for recommendations (food or wine).

We started with some bread, right out of the oven, and cultured butter, a hand chopped steak tartare au poivre with roasted bone marrow, sourdough, pickled artichokes and mustard leaves (nicely balanced with fattiness from the marrow and zing from the pickles) and finally, uni risotto with peekytoe carb and bottarga. The dishes were all well executed and I fell in love with the uni risotto – comforting and luxurious but not too heavy for a starter. I could have maybe used a different textural element (some crunch on top?) and slightly more seasoning but that’s mainly me just being a little nitpicky.

For her main, Cindy ordered the beef wellington with carrots and potatoes gratin, which looked absolutely amazing and a nice medium-rare, and I got the classic Long Island duck with sauce l’ orange, fennel, endive and salt baked turnips. These were pretty substantial portions and I liked that the sauce in my dish was not overly sweet, which can often happen with orange sauce, and the breast pieces were perfectly cooked for my taste. All of this washed down with a round of cocktails and then a bottle of smoky red wine, and Cindy and I were happy campers, ready to walk all the back to the Village from Madison Square Park.

Eats around town

November 9, 2015 § Leave a comment

Phi and Vikki visited a while back during the summer (don’t think I’d seen them in 3 or 4 years, maybe even longer) and one of the stops on our eating tour was Eataly, where we got the mixed salumi and cheese platter. So good to see them, even though I ended up totally stuffed when we finally called it a day.

A favorite in the Financial District: Harry’s Italian square pies – 1/2 pepperoni and eggplant, 1/2 sausage and broccoli rabe (gotta get some veg), half of which usually gets eaten by Bert.

The beautiful charred lamb breast with giant roti at Rouge et Blanc

Another solid restaurant from Andrew Carmellini in The Dutch. This wagyu steak tartare had sunflower seeds and pickled ramps.

Mini high school reunion featuring Momofuku’s fried chicken dinner at Noodle Bar. Amazing.

Months later, we had another reunion at Pig and Khao and got this crazy sizzling sisig with pork head, chili and fried egg

Finally, a weekend trip to Charlottesville for another high school friend’s wedding yielded some super tasty tagliatelle with braised lamb, eggplant and feta and an enormous pork belly gyro

Cosme

December 13, 2014 § Leave a comment

A late Friday night dinner at Cosme – Enrique Olvera’s new Mexican restaurant in the Flatiron and one of the most-hyped openings this year since it’s his first restaurant in the States. It was still pretty busy by the time we arrived for our 9:30 reservation and it’s definitely a very hip setting but service was friendly and the vibe was casual. We were actually seated at a communal table with plenty of room and started off with some single-origin, just-fried corn tortillas and two salsas (the red one was super spicy even for me) and house cocktails, including a refreshing Paloma with homemade grapefruit syrup and ginger-packed El Ninja (mezcal, gin, vermouth, shiso shrub, lime, ginger and dehydrated pineapple).

Tortillas and salsa

Paloma and El Ninja

Cold appetizers were thinly-sliced raw scallops and poached jicama in a wasabi-cucumber-lime vinaigrette as well as a ripe avocado half piled high with raw seafood and horseradish to add a little bit of zing. Though I’m usually a sucker for anything avocado (see below), the scallops were my favorite of the two due to the clear, bright flavors of the sea and citrus.

Scallops and stuffed avocado with seafood

Our hot appetizers were actually two vegetarian choices: enfrijoladas with ricotta, hoja santa, creme fraiche and onion as well as the mushroom and squash barbacoa, chilpachole and hoja santa. The enfrijoladas had a lot of familiar Mexican flavors but the mushroom and squash dish was definitely an example of Mexican cuisine that none of us had really eaten before.

Enfrijoladas

Mushroom and squash barbacoa

Standouts of the night, however, were our entrees. I ordered the black garlic rubbed NY strip with shishito peppers (one of my favorite things) and avocado-tarragon puree (see?). Super flavorful, tender beef balanced with raw onions and crunchy, sweet peppers and then mellowed with a creamy, smooth avocado sauce.

The duck carnitas to be shared was the favorite dish by far – it came out in its own cast iron skillet, enormous and amazing-smelling, perfectly cooked (crispy skin with just the right amount of fat and meat) with spicy radishes and a punchy salsa verde. I’d definitely go back to Cosme with a friend and sit at the bar (which just started serving the full menu) with a glass of wine and order just that dish. The red snapper with thai curry, plantains and scallions and the half lobster pibil, chorizo, black bean and avocado leaf puree also got glowing reviews.

Black garlic rubbed NY strip for tacos, fried shishitos, avocado-tarragon purée

Half lobster pibil, chorizo, black bean and avocado leaf purée

Duck carnitas, white onions, radishes, salsa verde

Broiled red snapper, thai hoja santa curry, plantains, scallions

Somehow, even after drinks, appetizers and entrees (and we’d actually come from a coworker’s going away party chock full of bar food), we still had enough room for four desserts (definitely took a looooong walk after this meal). Having read early reviews of the restaurant, we all agreed that we’d get the popular and somewhat strange looking husk meringue with corn mousse dessert, which proved to be a good choice. Definitely a unique dish with strong corn flavor without being too sweet. I also really loved the carrot cake riff with cream cheese ice cream and the lemon cake with quince sorbet.

Nixtamalized carrot, cinnamon cake, cream cheese ice cream

Chocolate ganache, mezcal, blood orange, beet sorbet

Husk meringue, corn mousse

Lemon cake, grapefruit, quince sorbet

Word is that reservations for Cosme at prime dinner time are currently hard to come by, but if you can get even a late seating around 9:30 or 10:00 PM or a place at the bar and you have the time to indulge in a long leisurely meal, I’d definitely recommend getting the scallops appetizer, the duck carnitas to share (though honestly, I could probably finish this dish on my own because it was so frikkin’ delicious and I eat like a baby dinosaur) and then a husk meringue to finish.

Two posts within a week! Trying to be better about keeping up with this blog…

ABC Kitchen

December 31, 2012 § 1 Comment

Horribly late with this post, a birthday dinner in July for Laura and Jackie at ABC Kitchen in Flatiron, a beautifully-designed restaurant inside/adjacent to ABC Carpet and Home. Possibly the best pizza I’ve ever had in my entire life (whole wheat with mushrooms, parmesan, oregano, and a fresh farm egg), a roast carrot and avocado appetizer that made me view “salads” in a whole new light, and some really gorgeous and tasty seafood – fried, steamed, roasted, you name it. This is a great restaurant for special occasions – friendly service that doesn’t hover, gorgeous interiors and wares, excellent, fresh food that doesn’t leave you feeling grossly stuffed.