While at Filipino restaurant Pistahan in the East Village, my friend and I split an order of lechon kawali, pork belly that's boiled then deep fried, but we couldn't finish it. I blamed it partly on just having devoured an order of halo-halo (eating dessert before the main course is acceptable in my world), and partly on the lechon kawali being composed of 99% pork fat.
As Brooklyn bands played in the backyard of East Williamsburg's 3rd Ward on Sunday, the real rock star was making music by taking a big, serrated knife to a 200 pound roast pig. Butcher Tom Mylan of Diner, Bonita, and Marlow & Sons fathered the pig roasting part of the 1st Annual Pig Roast & Dance Party, and all eyes were on him. Watching Mylan is like watching an indie rock band on the cusp of stardom. He'll be big soon enough, but for now, it's mostly just hip Brooklynites fawning over him—the Ray-Ban-protected ones willing to trek out to Morgan Street yesterday for his meat. Whether you're stalking him at the Un-Fancy Food Show (he was one of the organizers), watching him spread pate at the Taste of Brooklyn, or attending one of his many butchering demos at The Brooklyn Kitchen, here are some tidbits of info from yesterday's event that every card-carrying-fan-club-member will want to know:
Warning: Giant roasted pig after the jump.
Skin from El Quinto Pino; Feet from Hakata Tonton
Printed in the latest issue of Time Out New York is a list of the best pork dishes in New York City, with each one using a different part of the pig. There are 15 in all, and among the recommendations are two places our own Ed Levine has raved about, Salumeria Biellese (for fatback) and Bar Boulud (for head cheese), coupled with two of my personal favorites (shown in the photo above)—the pork skin from El Quinto Pino, and the pig's feet with salt from Hakata Tonton. For us pork lovers, the list will make a great checklist, although I hate starting with some already checked off, so let's add the pork belly from Eleven Madison Park and the deviled egg with crisp pork toast from Resto (both highly recommended by Ed.)
Bar Boulud: Charcuterie Magnifique (Are We Ready for It?)
The Serious Eats Pig Heaven Honor Roll
I must tell you, after having another superb pork roast from Ceriello's at the Grand Central Market, that it may sell the best pork in New York at a reasonable price this side of the Union Square Greenmarket, where Flying Pig Farms sells their pig.
Being the ultimate glutton for punishment when it comes to fat and cholesterol-laden foods, Steingarten, his lovely wife Karen, my friend and New Orleans Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie, and I headed to Resto, the Belgian meat and fat festival of a restaurant Mr. Bruni recently reviewed in the Times. Bruni of course told me everything I needed to know in his hilarious opening:
"IT’S time for a quiz. A diagnostic test, really. This one is best taken on an empty stomach, with a napkin and a defibrillator at hand.
1. If the lamb ribs you’re served are striped with garishly thick bands of fat, you ...
a) use your knife as if it were a scalpel, surgically isolating the meat.
b) quiver with joy.
2. If a tower of French fries is skirted by a deep well of mayonnaise, you ...
a) gasp, and ask for ketchup instead.
b) say a prayer of thanks.
3. If a deviled egg wobbles on a pedestal of breaded, deep-fried pork jowl, you ...
a) send it back.
b) wonder how much better the egg might taste on a double-decker pedestal of breaded, deep-fried pork jowl.
If you answered (a) to all or most of the above, stop reading now. What follows may sicken you, ruining your breakfast of low-fat cottage cheese and jeopardizing your attendance at Bikram yoga class.
If you answered (b), perk up. A terrific new restaurant named Resto serves lamb ribs just like the ones I described. Its deviled eggs really do piggyback on pork."
Here's the good news. Much of the food at Resto is crunchy, original, and utterly delicious. We had half a dozen dishes there I'd never seen anywhere else:
Deviled eggs on rafts of deep-fried pork jowl.
A phenomenal cheeseburger burger made with hangar steak, beef cheeks, fatback, and Gruyere cheese that is beefier and juicier than any hamburger I have ever had in my life.
Double cooked pork with a Belgian endive vinaigrette.
A special that night of an incredibly good pork jowl sandwich on toast.
Bitter Ballen, fried pork and veal meatballs served with a mustard aioli.
An incredibly crispy lobster tempura with green sauce and bitter almond.
I have only one question. If these dishes are part of the prototypical Belgian diet, does any Belgian live to be thirty? Forty, maybe? Fifty, possibly?
Which leads me to the bad news about Resto. As we know, I love fat, pork, and beef more than life itself (no pun intended). That could be seen as a death wish if my cholesterol levels weren't so shockingly low. But even I found the food at Resto exceptionally and excessively fat-laden (and we're not talking about Mediterranean diet olive oil fat here). Deliciously but aggressively fat-laden.
So Resto will be an occasional, maybe a semi-annual excursion for me, unless they start putting bottles of Lipator on each table as both a preventive and remedial measure. Otherwise you might find yourself having to get a signed note from your cardiologist to get in.
Resto
111 E. 29th Street (bet. Park and Lex)
New York, NY
Ph: 212-685-5585
Yesterday was the Il Buco Pig Roast.
Not only was the pig sensational (served four ways), but the event itself was an incredibly laid back and thoroughly enjoyable experience.
As a friend of mine said, "It feels like we're not even in NYC any more." In fact, it felt like we were upstate on a weekend, a nice feeling to have in the middle of a work day in Gotham.
As good as the pig was, the sheep's milk ricotta and apple fritters were even better. Cloud-like, perfectly fried fritters with a hint of tart (the apples) and tang (the ricotta) drizzled with pomegranate molasses. Delicious!
The four pig dishes served yesterday aren't on the regular menu at Il Buco, but there is a porchetta sandwich that is out of this world that I wrote about in Details Magazine in the September issue.
I asked Il Buco owner Donna Lennard if the celestial fritters were on the restaurant's dessert menu, and she said they had just taken them off.
This comes pretty close to my definition of a dessert tragedy. Please call or e-mail the restaurant (ilbuco@ilbuco.com or 212-533-1932) and ask them nicely to put the fritters back on the menu.
BRING BACK THE IL BUCO RICOTTA AND APPLE FRITTERS!
Adam Platt weighs in this week on Trestle on Tenth, the new Germanesque restaurant at 242 Tenth Ave. (24th St.), 212-645-5659.
He went on a pork binge, which is what I do almost every day. And he concludes that the chef, Ralk Kuettel does heavy better than light, long deep flavor cooking. Here are the menu highlights the way I interpret Adam's review: Pork crepinette (pulled pork shoulder, savoy cabbage and spices), a pork sandwich (served with horseradish mayo, sauerkraut and melted gruyere), thick bone-in roasted pork loin served with caramelized carrots. It's a veritable pork festival.
When I brought my great white apricots to my friends on the east end of Long Island I also brought out some sensational cheeses, a wonderful, crusty loaf of bread, and some lomo, cured Spanish pork loin that is so satiny and flavorful it could give prosciutto de parma a run for its money.
In the middle of our third meal assembled from what I brought, my friend Tom said, "Man, we have eaten so well, and the great thing is we haven't done much cooking. All we did is assemble what Ed brought."
I guess that's my thing. I can cook all right, but I can assemble and forage better than just about anyone else I can think of.
Assembling in the summer in New York is easy. Our local fruits and vegetables are ready to be harvested, we get great West Coast stonefruit that if you look hard enough you can find tree-ripened juicy cherries, peaches, nectarines, and plums, there are so many first-rate cheese stores and departments around; and there is good bread to be had in virtually any big city in this country.
So here's what I've been using to assemble impromptu and delicious dinners:
1) lomo: That great Spanish pork loin that we served last weekend with quartered fresh figs. Fantastic!
2) Rare-Breed Smoked Ham: It's a slightly salty smoked ham that could go with a fresh melon or on a Balthazar baguette with a little French sweet butter.
3) French Feta: French Feta Cheese is flavorful, creamy, and much less salty than its Bulgarian or Greek counterparts. And there's no different brands to choose from. All French Feta is made by one company. Serve it with some vine-ripened tomatoes from the greenmarket. The tomatoes have been delicious this year.
I have now walked past my wife's scrumptious lemon-glazed pound cake ten times in the last eight hours, and so far I have been able to resist its siren call.
The cake was left over from our dinner party last night, which severely tested my diet discipline. I made two recipes from Mario Batali's excellent new book, Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes to Cook at Home
The main course was a braised (in red wine and tomato sauce) pork butt that had been browned in a paste of garlic, pancetta and Italian parsley. The 7 1/2 hunk of pork cooked on the stove for four hours, so by the time we served it, it was as tender and flavorful as the best barbecue.
In fact, I decided it WAS Italian barbecue.
The pork was accompanied by a celery root puree my wife made from a Bass Serena cookbook, Serena, Food & Stories: Feeding Friends Every Hour of the Day
I tried to watch my caloric intake by not having seconds and eating very little of the cheese and bread we served beforehand. I also made sure to eat a couple of pears and an apple in the course of the day, which was mostly spent shopping and cooking. I also had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and two pieces of whole-grain bread and a piece of American cheese (Deluxe, not the cheese food crap) for lunch, so I wouldn't be starving when our guests showed up around seven.
I had lost five pounds going into the dinner, and I will get on the scale Wednesday to see if I can maintain my weight loss momentum. Oh, yeah I broke down and had a couple of bites of the lemon pound cake tonight.
