A Finger in Every Pie

ADOURation Society: Revelry Continued

 
Is there ever really such a thing as *enough* when it comes to celebrating your birthday?  I think not.  And apparently our dear friends B & B, who have often figured in these pages, agree with this dictum.  Months ago, darling B asked what we were going to do for my birthday.  "Oh, G will take me out to dinner."  And he did.  "And maybe I'll have a party this year," I said, and I did. 

"But let's do something else too, just the four of us," said dearest B.  "I think the new Ducasse restaurant would fit the occasion."  Who am I to argue with such suasion?

That's how we came to be at Adour last night.  Alain Ducasse's latest project is a stunner indeed.  Ruth Reichl has described the room far better than I, and I really hope she and the rest of the staff at Gourmet will forgive me for *borrowing* the images above from their website (does attribution make a difference?)  I'm still phobic about photographing food in posh restaurants.  I know this makes me a bad blogger, but it just really interrupts my dining experience.  I have this preference for allowing myself to be overtaken by the lush environment and the lovely dinner, rather than documenting it.   

The word that best described our experience at Adour is "balance," I think.  Perhaps harmony, but I'll start with balance.  Everything was beautifully balanced, from the perfect touch of sea salt in the olive butter that accompanied the very, very good breads, to the service -- which was comfortable, with just the right touch of put-us-at-our-ease familiarity.  There was a light lacing of humor, but nary a moment's sense of intrusion.  Everyone who came to our table was smoothly delighted to serve our any and every whim -- and not for a moment obsequious.  It was as if we were all, served and servers, just having a very, very good time.  Which we were.  Well.  At least we the served were, since I can't really speak for the servers.  But it's fair to say that if they weren't, they put on a very good show.

Personally, there wasn't a mouthful I met at Adour that I didn't like -- and in most cases, love.  From my bouche's amusement at a tiny vol-au-vent filled with molten truffled cheese (quite perfect with a flute of Dom Perignon) to the petits fours pictured below, it was an evening of simple bliss. 

The stand-out was my starter.  Imagine tiny round ravioli in a herbacious, truffle-laden broth.  As you bite into each one, the rich filling of foie gras melts and fills you with happiness and well-being -- as do the slices of black truffle shaved generously over the top of the dish.  G's starter of tiny buttery clouds of ricotta gnocchi were clearly at the very pinnacle of their game -- whatever gnocchi's game is.  The normally laconic fellow that is my husband was moved to exclaim their deliciousness, especially with their partnering greens and crisped prosciutto. These were the only starters we tasted, since we're not food critics and therefore not obliged to all order different dishes.  The breakdown was that the women ordered the foie gras ravioli, and the men had the gnocchi.  I don't know what this says about gender, and I don't really need to know, since the one true thing was that it was all quite transcendent. 

Next up, staying gender-true, B and I both had Adour's luxurious version of Lobster Thermidor -- beautifully tender small lobster tails and claw meat in a classic sauce, flavored with cognac and tarragon.  The dish was accompanied by swiss chard, geometric domino slices of delicious albeit indeciferable vegetables, and a gorgeously crusted patty of lobster and mushrooms, baked in a little shell.  The men were meat-eaters -- B had a rack of lamb with piquillo peppers and apricots, and a quinoa risotto, while G had venison accompanied by jewel-like carved blocks of root vegetables.  With the agile help of the sommelier, G found us an excellent red that paired well with everyone's food.

Again, everything was in balance.  There was precisely the right amount of sauce in everyone's dish, never overshadowing the main ingredients, but simply enhancing them.  And everything was luxurious, but nothing was overly rich.

Except maybe dessert, which was a glittering event in its own right. First we had a little intermediary cheese course chosen by our most helpful and gentlemanly server, with accompaniments of red pepper jelly, acacia honeyed raisins, date paste and walnut-raisin paste.  Then the stars came out, in the form of huge desserts.  My chocolate sorbet, under a crust of unbelievably good dark chocolate, was graced with a large feuille of gold-leaf, drenched in a dark chocolate sauce and peppered with espresso flavored brioche buttons.  It was one of the deepest, darkest, most delicious chocolate experiences I've ever had -- and I've had a few.  G's apple soufflé was both gloriously pouffy and seriously apple-y -- and accompanied by a vanilla ice-cream with such an addictive vanilla perfume that the table began referring to it as vanilla crack.  B's pear clafoutis (which was actually more of a pear napoleon) was everything pear -- pear pastry with balls of pear, pear ice cream, and julienne salad of pear. 

I'm always a little sad when the petits fours appear.  I just never have the capacity for them, and I do love sweets so very much.  Which is why the servers kindly packed up a whole box of lovely macarons (filled with concentrated raspberry gelée and dark gianduja, respectively) and some chocolates for me to take home, so that I could photograph them for you on my much less lovely petits four dishes in the comfort of Chez AFIEP.   

So ends another installment of the feast of love that has been my latest birthday.  And according to some forecasts, even though February has waned, the celebrations have not, yet.  Imagine. 

Our Dinner at Telepan

"Where would you like to go for your birthday?" asked my best beloved.  I wasn't sure it mattered too much; I just wanted to be with him.  We had some pretty fancy meals coming up anyway -- a soirée this weekend; a dinner invitation next month to a rather special venue.  But I gave his question some thought. 

A friend of a friend made a superhuman effort and got us a reservation at Babbo.  The best she could do was six days *before* my birthday. Apparently all the days around Valentine's Day (my birthday is three days after) were booked up at Babbo; consolation prizes for the sweeties who couldn't get in on the lovers' day itself, I suppose.  I decided that we'd put the Babbo plans on hold, and see if we couldn't call this marker in for another occasion.  We go out pretty rarely, and I thought I'd rather have a rest from kitchen duty on the actual birthday, as it were.  So I settled on having the celebratory meal at Telepan.

I've wanted to try this restaurant for a while, but a couple of factors were the deciding ones.  First, it wasn't so over the top that we were going to a) break the bank or b) have to dress up, which I don't mind but which G equates with various sorts of torture.   Secondly, it has a tasting menu -- but one you put together yourself from their various courses.  Now me, I'm an intrepid eater that loves a tasting menu -- lots of new treats to savor.  G, on the other hand, is the sort of eater who, when faced with various arty constructions on his plate, is wont to say things like, "Are there mushrooms in this?" It's hard to let the chef cook for you when you're with dining companions who have a lot of uh-ohs on their list of acceptable food substances.  So a four-course tasting menu where you choose all your courses satisfies us both. 

We went to an early showing of Persepolis (a bit disappointing, but I won't spoil it for you).  Then we walked up Columbus in a misty, romantic rain.  Telepan is a pretty space, with friendly service.  Despite a bit of crowding at the entrance, we were seated promptly for our reservation.  Shortly thereafter a server offered us a choice of warm breads (we both chose the semolina raisin fennel). Then another server showed up with a pretty wooden trencher of amuses bouches for each of us.  Lined up in a row was a little gougère, a porcelain spoon of salad, and the obligatory demitasse cup of soup (although I did bring my camera to this meal, we were in a very low-lit part of the room, and not a single one is unblurred -- which is sad, since the food was very pretty.  The composition of souvenirs above was, of course, taken after the fact). 

The cheese puff was a surprise -- it was filled with a sharp, molten hot cheese sauce.  The salad was finely shredded brussels sprouts in a citrus vinaigrette with ricotta salata cheese, which turned out to be a very fine combination.  The soup was parsnip with pineapple -- again, nothing I'd ever think of throwing together, necessarily, but quite lovely as it turned out.  These preliminary tastes boded well for the meal to come, I thought.   

I loved my first course -- tiny grilled quail on a salad of fresh greens, roast duck meat, oranges and chunks of toasted almond.  Tasting menu portions are smaller than ala carte, of course, but the little half quail was sufficient for me, since I always have to pace myself with a multi-course meal.  G was not as happy with his starter.  He had chosen a salad with a dry jack cheese dressing, which turned out to be composed of very tall reddish salad leaves.  I tasted it, and could see why he was unimpressed.  The salad dressing was not balanced -- it was very vinegar-forward, to the point of concealing the flavor of the cheese -- the very thing designed to tick off my cheese-loving husband.

Both of our mid-courses, however, were exceptional.  We both had pastas -- I the lobster bolognese, and he the veal ravioli.  The bolognese was a gorgeous big chunk of lobster tail in the shell, balanced atop a tangle of spaghetti in a very light, herbal tomato broth with more lobster chunkettes.  I wanted to lick my plate, but refrained.  G's was light, pillowy ravioli filled with shredded roast veal, and sauced with a pure veal jus reduction.  Very simple -- and very, very good.

Things fell down a little during entrée time.  G's hangar steak was tender and delicious, but he looked askance at the two little slices on his plate.  This is where the tasting menu concept doesn't work for him -- he waits through the meal for the thing he likes best, and then it's a little dollhouse portion.

The roast loin of veal, my choice, was only one slice, which was actually plenty for me.  Unfortunately, it was on the very rare side of medium rare, which is a nice thing when it's steak, but not so much when it's veal, in my opinion.  Veal is one of those meats which, when it's too rare, becomes (in the words of the immortal Laurie Colwin) a tough matting of wet red fibers.  I didn't send it back, however, because that always creates problems in a multi-course meal.  I soldiered through several bites of it, and very much enjoyed the accompanying geometrically perfect block of crunchy exteriored/creamy interiored potato slices, and the little clump of pungent black kale. 

A few tables down from us, a silver-haired dowager did indeed send back her veal, and then the not-so-much-fun started.  Of course her three other dining companions finished their tiny entrées in a trice.  By the time the server came by to assure her that her veal would be right out, she was in a full-blown snit.  "Never mind," she said haughtily. "Can I get you something else?"  "Can we have it packed for you?"  "NO," said she.  "I said, NEVER MIND."  By this time, the server had gotten the sous manager, and the sous manager had gotten the manager-manager...but it was no use.  The queen mother would not be mollified.

The server came back.  "The manager wants you to know that he would like to treat the table to dessert."  "I thought the dessert came with the meal anyway," replied the woman, razoring right through the waiter's gesture.  The poor fellow had just about reached wits' end, but made a superhuman effort to respond without throttling her.  "Yes, of course, but the bill will be adjusted to reflect complimentary desserts," he said, just the tiniest hint of exasperation filtering through, perhaps only noticeable to me. 

Ah, the theatre of dining out.  I tend to forget about other people, since we mostly dine á deux.  We were busy with our own not-complimentary but still very nice (full-size!) desserts when I began to pick up conversation from the other side.  At the four-top to our right was a pregnant couple and an engaged couple.  There was talk of bachelor parties and baby showers.  G appeared not to notice, engrossed as he was in forking up warm ginger cake, pear fritter, crème fraîche ice cream, poached pear and cranberries.  The daddy-to-be at our neighbors' table excused himself and left for a bit.  The engaged couple honed in on the mommy-to-be.  "How are you feeling?"  they asked.  "Mmmm, I'm not ready," she said.  "Not ready for this at all."  "Ummm," said the engaged guy.  "Then, ummm, why are you doing it?"  Soon-to-be-mommy smiled and shrugged.  "Well, you know," she said.  "It's what people do."  I took my spoon from my crumbly, fudgy, chocolate pecan tart, and dipped it, first into the quenelle of caramel crumble ice-cream on the side of the plate, then into the long stripe of dark fudge, then into the little pool of rich warm caramel.  The daddy-to-be came back to the table, and their conversation shifted.

I looked up from my luscious plate of sweets, and caught G's eye.  He had indeed been listening.  "I'm so glad I married you, and only you," I said, as the waiter brought the check with some tiny citrus-scented coconut macaroons in little wrappers.   "And I you, my love," said G.  "And I you." 

The Kiev: Makes Me Wanna Challah

I really did try to find the right kind of restaurant to go to so that I could participate in this month’s Dine and Dish, a new food-blogging event now in its second installment.  Dine and Dish is the brainchild of the lovely and talented Sarah at The Delicious Life.  Sadly I missed the first month’s theme, which was aptly named Barfly.  I know just what bar I would have eaten at, too. 

This month the theme is Queen of Cuisine, and the task is to dine at and write about a restaurant with a woman chef.  I’m a little behind on the NYC restaurant scene to be quite honest, since we don’t eat out with any real frequency.  That may be why I just don’t know of a wide number of restaurants in NYC that have women chefs.  There are some pricey ones.  Then again, when does anyone actually know the chefs’ names, gender or anything else about them except when the restaurants are high-end?  I could have done some research and called some of my fave middle-brow places to find out if the kitchens were headed by females, but time was lacking.    I do know of Gabrielle Hamilton who owns and heads the kitchen at Prune.  And I’ve actually been dying to try it.  But it simply wasn’t in the cards this month.

So instead I’ve chosen to write about a place that still exists, but has been scarily reconfigured.  I’m going to tell the tale of its former glory.  Good, filling, inexpensive food that cannot be duplicated was once served there, on Second Avenue at East 7th Street, at the Kiev.  Once upon a time, New Yorkers knew that at any hour of the day or night, you could get buttery potato or cheese pierogi topped with perfect caramel-bronze fried onions and a little dish of sour cream.  You could order foot-long cylindrical blintzes: delicate crepes fried to a crisply hot exterior, oozing creamy, vanilla-scented pot cheese from within.  There was sour cream with those too, or applesauce.  Or both.  Or you could have both with crunchy potato pancakes instead.  Then again, you might (if you had been so lucky as to go to the old Kiev) have requested one of the combination platters that included two or more of the “Kiev specialties”.  If you didn’t want those, you could always have soup – chicken soup or wonderful daily specials, borscht and pea soup and white bean with leeks and dill – each one a meal in itself, especially since the brimming bowl of soup arrived with two thick slices of homemade, eggy, golden challah bread  and little cups of butter and jam.   Almost all dishes at the Kiev came with that challah – and consider this in light of the fact that most of the dishes I’ve named and will name in this post were under five dollars, and all of them were well under ten.  You could buy a huge, triple-humpbacked loaf of that challah to take home with you too, for just a few dollars.  I can’t even enumerate all the wonderful things at the old Kiev – the huge dish of nutty buckwheat kasha with meltingly tender beef chunks and mushroom gravy, the best babka I’ve ever eaten, or maybe eggs and kielbasa served with kasha instead of home-fries, if you so desired.   If for some reason  you or perhaps your companion didn’t want Russian food, you could have anything you might have ordered in any coffee shop in America – a burger, a grilled cheese, an omelette; iced tea or a big thick milkshake.  But I went there, at least once a week for several years, for the Eastern European specialties. 

They called her Mama.  Who even knows what her real name was?  Occasionally you could catch a glimpse of her through the window that connected the front counter and cash register with the kitchen.   She was a stocky Eastern European lady with rosy cheeks from spending her days over the big stove – and usually she was a blur of motion.  “Mama!”  the waitresses, blond and dark pony-tailed, sneakered girls from the Ukraine and Georgia and Belarus sang out.  “One order potato pierogi boiled, a pierogi-blintz combo and a bowl borscht, quick quick!”  “Mama!  Where’s my takeout for the front?” Sergei the counterman would cry.  All the countermen seemed to be named Sergei.  Sometimes they called out the order in Russian, and I couldn’t catch the words – but the cry of “Mama!” was always the same.   

Maybe the names were coded.  Maybe all the countermen were Sergei; maybe the waitresses had rotating sobriquets of Masha and Natalya and Tanya.  There had to have been several cooks, since the restaurant never closed; it seems they were all simply known as “Mama”, perhaps an honorific much like “chef” in other restaurants.  I don’t know, and I can’t ask, because (as Pastor Niedermeier would say) there’s no-one left to ask.  The old Kiev is no longer.  And whither Mama?  Until fairly recently, women were "cooks" and men were "chefs";  how many talented women have cooked us all wonderful restaurant meals, unnoticed and unsung?

Slowly the Kiev changed.  Many of us didn’t like it when they remodeled, and took out the middle room and the old back room, where you walked up a short flight of stairs to a long narrow space with more tables.  But at least the food stayed the same, more or less.  Then one day, when I hadn’t been there for many months, I walked in and the counter was gone.  In its place was a bar.  How strange, I thought.  I was comforted, however, by the sight of a man eating a double order of pierogi at a nearby table.  Time passed again, and I had long ago stopped visiting the Kiev with any regularity.  One night, out late in the East Village, I thought I might stop and get some of my old favorites to take home.  I could pick up a loaf of challah for my father, perhaps. 

That’s the only thing that remained the same.  You can still buy the challah, and I like to think that there is a “Mama” out there somewhere who makes it.  The restaurant has a new name.  It’s called “Kiev East”.  It’s not open 24 hours.  The banged up old wooden tables and chairs are gone, and in their place is a dark blue lighting scheme that tries for romantic or mysterious or something that escapes me altogether, and a décor that simply tries too hard.  Worst of all, the big old menu is gone.  In its place is someone’s fantasy of a Eurotrashed Eastern European/Asian fusion menu.  They now have seafood pierogis, and vegetable “potato” pancakes, made with parsnips and red peppers, served with gingered sour cream.  They might be very good.  I don’t know.  But I don’t want them.  Nor do I want  a “Beijing”catfish sandwich.  “Ukraisian Wings”? Nyet.   

That last time I went, they had just a few of the old specialties on the menu.  For old times’ sake, I ordered my favorite boiled potato pierogi to go.  I received an order half the size for twice the price – no sweet browned onions, no sour cream.  And they were simply terrible.  Mama didn’t make these.  Nobody’s mama made these.  These came out of a freezer compartment somewhere, filled with barely reconstituted mashed potatoes.   As I threw the aluminum plate of sad dumplings in the trash, I could have cried for my own hunger.  It was not so much physical, although I was hungry.   There was nothing else I could make or eat at that moment, because my hunger was for the pierogi from the old Kiev. 

While I was writing this, I looked at the Kiev East's online menu, and at voluntary customer reviews from several online venues.  All the reviews have a suspicious similarity of tone.  They all seem to be touting the idea that Kiev East is just like or even better than the old Kiev, because now it’s swank and you can take your date there.  Arrgh.  They do, however, seem to have recently restored a number of the old menu items.  There are blintzes (although in noxious flavors just like the pierogi), and there’s kasha.  Perhaps, one day when I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll pick up some of that good challah.  Maybe I’ll even try an order of blintzes for takeout, on the off chance that someone is actually cooking somewhere in back.   

In the meantime, if anyone knows where *Mama* is plying her vast culinary talents, please call, write, or send a telegram.  If I can locate her, I’m there.