Serious Eats New York - newyork.seriouseats.com

Dessert Club ChikaLicious, From All Pudding to All Yummy

Posted by Ed Levine, October 7, 2008 at 11:00 PM

Photographs by Robyn Lee

When ChikaLicious' Chika and Don Tillman opened the Dessert Club directly across the street from their Dessert Bar, their plan was to sell only three kinds of delicious pudding made with care from great ingredients. It was to be the only pudding bar in the country, and maybe the whole world for that matter. What an elegant, simple, even-more-minimalist-than-Dessert Bar concept.

It was a beautiful thing. There was only one problem. It bombed. People wanted more than high-priced, high-quality pudding at a sweets emporium.

So with necessity being the mother of invention, especially when it comes to small food businesses, Chika and Don remade Dessert Club into an equally idiosyncratic, still small, not quite full scale bakery—albeit one with a limited menu. Not just any small bakery, either. Dessert Club has become one of the best bakeries or sweet shops in not just the East Village, but all of New York. You might say it's mighty fine.

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13 Comments | Tags: cupcakes, Dessert Club Chikalicious, East Village, Manhattan, pudding, reviews, Sugar Rush

At Porchetta, the Namesake Dish Is Just About the Whole Deal

Posted by Ed Levine, September 30, 2008 at 11:00 PM

If you love pig in all its forms the way I do, a serious chef opening a restaurant dedicated to porchetta is cause for celebration. That's of course assuming that said chef can deliver a fabulous rendition of porchetta, which in central Italy is a crazy delicious whole boned and roasted pig seasoned with lots of salt, pepper, garlic, and wild fennel.

Sara Jenkins, co-author of Figs and Oranges and Porchetta's owner, is an extremely accomplished Italian chef who actually grew up spending summers in Italy. Clearly she knows her way around porchetta.

Her version is made from whole Hampshire pork loins that she cooks for four to five hours in a special combination steam and dry heat oven at two different temperatures (350°F to brown the outside and 220°F to slowly cook the interior). At any one time in the tiny shop you can see two of these beautiful golden brown puppies, with their crunchy exterior skin giving way to streaks of fat and tender, well-seasoned pig flesh.

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10 Comments | Tags: East Village, Italian, Manhattan, Porchetta, pork, reviews, sandwiches, Sara Jenkins

Lunch Whistle Review: Morimoto

Posted by Ed Levine, September 23, 2008 at 11:00 PM

Editor's note: Periodically we're going to review lunch at serious restaurants all over New York. Lunch at these restaurants tends to be overlooked, is generally much cheaper, and in many cases doesn't require 30 days of precise military-style action to secure a reservation. So today's Lunch Whistle tweets about Morimoto.

Photographs by Robyn Lee

By night Morimoto is a jumble of stylized images. When the dinner bell rings at six, impossibly thin and gorgeous men and women dressed in all black Armani convene to eat sushi, drink sake, and flaunt their stylish hipness at every opportunity. The place practically begs to be a location for Gossip Girl (and for all I know it already has been).

But at lunchtime, Morimoto becomes a relaxed, comfortable contemporary Japanese restaurant serving big plates of reasonably priced food made with top quality ingredients. It's a brisk fifteen minute walk from Serious Eats World HQ, so it has served as one of my go-to business lunch spots. Best of all, you can walk right in without a reservation—even if you're not wearing black designer duds.

It helps to have some guidance when ordering lunch at Morimoto, because if you let your eyes wander to the more expensive items on the lunch menu, you can spend a fortune without even thinking about it.

So how should a serious eater attack the lunch menu at Morimoto?

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8 Comments | Tags: bento boxes, Chelsea, Japanese, lunch, Manhattan, Morimoto, reviews, sushi

Square Meal, A Neighborhood Comfort Food Clubhouse

Posted by Ed Levine, September 16, 2008 at 8:30 PM

You know that silly t-shirt, "Life is short, eat dessert first?" Well, last week I went to a restaurant, Square Meal, where the desserts were so good, I could have eaten them first, last, and in between, with no main course necessary. Square Meals' owner Yura Mohr has run a Manhattan catering business and take-out storefront for almost 20 years (before that she owned a luncheonette in Brooklyn Heights and cooked at the Heights Casino athletic club) in various locations around her stomping grounds, Manhattan's upper east side. Denizens of that tony 'hood know that as a comfort food-style baker Yura has very few peers in this country.

So it's no surprise that desserts at the recently opened Square Meal, a long and narrow, simply painted and furnished room catty corner to her take-out storefront, are stellar in that Yuraesque, if-your-grandmother-was-a-phenomenal-baker-who-shopped-at-the-greenmarket way. Go soon or you risk not finding the wild Maine blueberry pie ($8.00) on the menu. Imagine a pie loosely packed with tiny, still intact wild Maine blueberries splashed with lemon juice, with almost no blue goop whatsoever, surrounded by a flakey, buttery crust so fine you think you've been taken to a farm cafe in Iowa.

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4 Comments | Tags: desserts, Manhattan, reviews, Square Meal, Upper East Side

Piece of Chicken, a Dollar Restaurant in Hell's Kitchen

Posted by Ed Levine, September 2, 2008 at 11:00 PM

Photographs by Robyn Lee

What in the way of substantial food can you get for a buck or two in Gotham these days? Not much. Chinatowns all over New York are full of inexpensive delicious treats: Dumplings, greens sandwiches, dollar hot dogs were all included in Serious Eater Gordon Mark's deliciously comprehensive guide to cheap eats in Chinatown. And then there's the dollar menu at McDonalds, which budget-minded students of all ages and ethnicities avail themselves of frequently. Finally, there have been a couple of pizza-slice-for-a-buck emporia starting to pop up all over town, but those slices will only do when any form of melted cheese on warm bread fix will suffice. Of those mentioned above, only the Chinatown offerings strike me as anything I would look forward to eating on a regular basis.

That's why I was so excited when Serious Eats: New York editor Zach Brooks told me about Piece of Chicken, a soul food take-out joint (really a kiosk fronting a kitchen) where most things on the menu are a buck or two.

Piece of Chicken operates out of a chunk of what was the kitchen of the old, elegant soul food restaurant Jezebel. Most of Jezebel's kitchen and the rest of its space are now 5 Napkin Burger, where the burgers and fries are good but cost way more than a dollar.

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8 Comments | Tags: chicken, fried chicken, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, Piece of Chicken, reviews, Southern

Fiore: Seriously Delicious Budget Italian

Posted by Ed Levine, June 24, 2008 at 11:00 PM

Remember back in the day, when going out to eat an Italian meal in New York was not an extravagance or much of a financial commitment? Those were the days of red sauce; chicken, veal, and eggplant parm; lasagna and baked ziti; baked clams and fried zucchini; of an Italian meal that cost less than $25 a head.

Then real authentic fancy-pants northern Italian food appeared in New York when Lidia and Felix Bastianich opened Felidia in 1981. Ten years ago Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich opened Babbo, and now the city is awash with first-rate expensive Italian restaurants. Don't get me wrong. I love the food at Del Posto, Scarpetta, Alto, Fiamma, and the like, but, oh how I long for the first-rate, authentically Italian, seriously delicious Italian repast that doesn't dent the wallet quite so heavily.

Enter Giancarlo Quadalti. Quadalti, the chef-partner at the fine, unheralded Teodora on East 57th Street, is a well-seasoned, incredibly talented Italian chef (from Emilia Romagna) who wants all of us serious eaters to eat terrific Italian food and not pay through the nose for it. He has done that at Celeste on the Upper West Side, Bianca in the East Village, and now he has even raised his game with Fiore in Williamsburg, which he opened with the equally talented chef-partner Roberto Aita (Roc) in a building that Quadalti lives in, above the restaurant. Fiore might be the best Italian food bargain in town.

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8 Comments | Tags: Brooklyn, Fiore, Italian, northern Italian, NYC, reviews, Williamsburg

Blue Hill at Stone Barns: The Most Important Restaurant in America

Posted by Ed Levine, June 17, 2008 at 10:45 PM

Clockwise from top: Stone Barns farm, face bacon, Dan Barber. Photographs by Robyn Lee

Reviewers and food writers like me often throw around words like gutsy, important, and groundbreaking with impunity, and the result is that these words have lost their impact. So at the risk of doing just that, I am hereby proclaiming that Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the combination working farm and restaurant presided over by chef and partner Dan Barber, might be, just might be, the most important and gutsiest restaurant in America right now.

Barber has taken the ideas of locavorism, nose-to-tail cooking, and farm-to-table to groundbreaking places, and in so doing he is laying the foundation for a truly different kind of restaurant-going experience with far-reaching implications. He's taken the Alice Waters–Michael Pollan ethos to a place no other chef has ever done, including Waters herself. And Barber has done so while elevating his food to an extraordinarily delicious plane. Barber has also elevated his game at Blue Hill in New York City, as SE:NY editor Zach Brooks pointed out recently, but if you want to get the full-on farm-to-table experience complete with squealing pigs and bleating sheep, you have to go to Stone Barns.

I say this after having eaten three meals at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the last month, each one more exciting than the last. You know you're not in your garden-variety bastion of haute cuisine when you drive up to the restaurant and pass sheep, pigs, beehives, and fields of green on the Stone Barns property on your way to the valet parking. It's only later that you realize you had been looking at the sources of your meal.

Your expectations are further confounded by the menu. Don't look for conventional groupings of starters, main courses, and dessert. They're nowhere to be found on the Blue Hill at Stone Barns menu. Instead you are confronted by this:

List of ingredients on the menu.

On the left side is just a list of all the ingredients Barber and his cohorts have at their disposal in the kitchen that day. The right side has a list of prices that depend on how many courses you have. Your server will ask you if there are any ingredients you don't want the kitchen to use in your meal, and after that you are in the kitchen's hands. Eating this way adds elements of surprise and a even a little drama to your restaurant experience.

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30 Comments | Tags: Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber, New York, Pocantico Hills, reviews

Roberta's: The DIY Pizzeria

Posted by Ed Levine, June 10, 2008 at 10:55 PM

Photographs by Robyn Lee

There are three kinds of people in the pizza-making universe. There are the to-the-oven-born, old-school types like Lawrence Ciminieri of Totonno's, whose great uncle Anthony Pero (nicknamed "Totonno") introduced pizza to the family gene pool almost a hundred years ago. Then there are the obsessive, perfectionist, chef/bread baker types, like Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana, Andrew Feinberg of Franny's, and Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix. Then there is the third school, what I call the "We're good cooks who love pizza, so let's open a pizzeria" contingent, where a can-do attitude, enthusiasm, some cooking chops, and economic necessity are the forces driving the people involved.

Wall of logs and the pizza oven.

The partners at the very fine Bushwick, Brooklyn, pizzeria Roberta's definitely fall into the latter camp. Musician and bar-owner Chris Parachini and his partners Brandon Hoy, Carlo Mirarchi, and Mauro Soggio decided to open a pizzeria because they love pizza. They found a practically unfinished space with high beams and poured-concrete floors in a hard-core commercial section adjoining an auto-repair shop in Bushwick, went to Italy to apprentice with an Italian pizzaiolo, found a fire-engine-red wood-burning pizza oven in a bankrupt Italian pizzeria (yes, pizzerias do go bankrupt in Italy), and came back to Brooklyn, put in the pizza oven in the front and waited for the city to install the gas line in the kitchen in the back. They waited and waited until they were about to run out of money, so they were forced to open Roberta's with the aforementioned pizza oven and three pans and three propane burners in lieu of a kitchen.

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9 Comments | Tags: Brooklyn, Bushwick, calzones, pizza, reviews, Roberta's Pizza

Scarpetta's Scott Conant a Veteran on a New Playing Field

Posted by Ed Levine, June 3, 2008 at 11:00 PM

Dining room and bar of Scarpetta. Photographs by Robyn Lee

If you follow the bouncing chefs in New York these days, you know that Scott Conant left Alto and L'Impero a year ago to pursue other interests. I've been following Conant's career for ten years now, ever since he cooked at Chianti, where what he calls his modern take on rustic Italian food was first fully realized. After that Conant cooked at City Eatery in 2000, L'Impero in 2002, Bar Tonno in 2004, and Alto in 2005. Got all that? Quiz to follow at the end of the review.

Now Conant has, for the first time, become a chef-restaurateur with the Meatpacking District's Scarpetta, which turns out to be a warm, inviting space with a a modern baseball stadium touch—a retractable roof. The food at Scarpetta is not a radical departure for Conant. In fact, you can call it Conant's Greatest Hits, with a few new tracks thrown in for good measure. Conant's food has always been honest, soulful, and mercifully devoid of gimmickry, and I wanted to see if it could withstand a retractable roof.

The space, formerly Gin Lane, consists of a front bar room with a few tables, and an airy, expansive, back room, where, if you go in good weather, you might see the retractable roof in action.

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11 Comments | Tags: Italian, Manhattan, Meatpacking District, reviews, Scarpetta, Scott Conant

Casellula: A Down-to-Earth, Cheese-Driven Spot Whose (Unfortunate) Name Says It All

Posted by Ed Levine, May 27, 2008 at 11:00 PM

Wine bars with cheese programs are cropping up everywhere, but even more exciting to a cheese freak like me are the places that put the proverbial cart before the horse, or, in this case, the cheese plate before the wine bottle. The year-old Casellula (a bad, impossible-to-spell pretentious name that has something to do with the Latin roots of house and cheese), actually calls itself a cheese and wine bar, so you know what its owner, Brian Keyser, considers most important. Amen, Brian.

The kitchen that turns out the extremely tasty and carefully thought-out cheese-based food here is actually located behind the bar, and in fact it's not really a kitchen at all. It's a carefully laid-out mise en place with a sandwich press and a small convection oven. What they understand here is that cheese is so powerful a flavoring agent that this set-up produces plenty of delicious, complex, elemental flavors and dishes that could satisfy anyone, especially anyone who likes cheese and is willing to construct an entire meal around it.

You can get your cheese fix many different ways here. Six dollars gets you one cheese from the constantly rotating list of 40, served with really good bread from Tom Cat Bakery and a seemingly endless variety of house-constructed condiments. Tia Keenan, who oversees the cheese program, is uncommonly gifted when it comes to cheese and condiment pairings.

When I ordered the Domestic Darlings flight ($18), the Green Hill from Sweet Grass Dairy was served with candied pecans, the 5 Spoke Creamery Tumbleweed was served with a tomato relish, and Faribault Dairy's St. Pete's Select Blue was served with a surprisingly felicitous chocolate wafer. All thoughtful, wonderfully realized pairings.

Spanish chistorra sausages wrapped in tortillas and stuffed Peppadew.

Four dollars gets you four little Spanish chistorra sausages wrapped in tortillas, in a pool of Mexican crema (sour cream), arranged like Lincoln logs. Even better are the stuffed Peppadew (cherry peppers; $7) wrapped with speck (smoked prosciutto) and stuffed with buffalo mozzarella. These are so good that you will be disinclined to share them once you've had your first.

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11 Comments | Tags: Casellula, cheese bars, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, reviews, SE reviews, wine bars

Salumeria Biellese: The BYOB Hero Review

Posted by Ed Levine, May 20, 2008 at 11:30 PM

(Photographs by Robyn Lee)

In my capacity as the official reviewer for Serious Eats New York, I feel it's perfectly within my rights to invent a new category of Italian sandwich emporium: the BYOB deli. The B in this case stands for "bread," not "bottle." That's right, I'm advocating—in fact I'm telling you flat out—that if you would like to eat the finest mixed Italian cold-cut hero to be found in New York, you need to bring your own bread to Salumeria Biellese, which from the outside looks like the most nondescript, generic steam-table Italian deli you can imagine. It's even a little nondescript on the inside, too.

Get over how ordinary the place looks and bring your bread, which, if you can swing it is a stirato from the Sullivan Street Bakery or its offshoot Grandaisy. The stirato is, simply put, the most heroic hero bread in the land. It is just chewy and crusty enough to generate a slight noise when you bite into it, but its interior has lovely hole structure and tenderness. For the purposes of this review I bought my stirato at the Whole Foods on Seventh Avenue and 24th Street, a mere five blocks from Salumeria Biellese.

When it is your turn to order, tell one of the countermen you would like a mixed Italian cold-cut hero with the housemade Genoa salami, soppressata (your choice of hot or sweet), capicola, and provolone, made on the bread you are giving him.

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11 Comments | Tags: Chelsea, Italian cold cuts, Italian heroes, Manhattan, meatball heroes, reviews, Salumeria Biellese, sandwiches

Wildwood: Good but Inconsistent Barbecue

Posted by Ed Levine, May 13, 2008 at 11:00 PM

The gentleman exiting the building is not Ed Levine. (Photographs: Robyn Lee)

With barbecue joints seemingly sprouting up on every corner these days in New York, it's easy to forget what a barbecue wilderness Gotham was for so many years.

When I arrived in New York in 1973, there was precious little real barbecue, slow-smoked meat cooked with indirect heat. Even by the late '80s our barbecue options here were limited to Smokey's on Ninth Avenue (for North Carolina barbecue), Stick to Your Ribs in Queens, and Tennessee Mountain Home in SoHo.

The barbecue game-changers in our town were Virgil's in Times Square and Blue Smoke in the Flatiron District, both opened by respected restaurateurs (the late Artie Cutler, and Danny Meyer, respectively). Following those in short order were Daisy May's, the first chef-driven barbecue joint in New York (Daniel and Le Cirque veteran Adam Perry Lang), R.U.B. (Paul Kirk), with its Kansas City–influenced style; and Hill Country, which harkened to Smokey's with its dedication to a single regional barbecue style (in its case, central Texas's German butcher–derived 'cue). Hill Country (Robbie Richter and Big Lou Elrose) and Daisy May's were also the first barbecue joints manned by competition pit masters who honed their barbecue skills on the national 'cue competition circuit.

Now comes Wildwood BBQ, which brings together the talents of an interesting trio: megasuccessful, commercially oriented restaurateur Steve Hanson, the aforementioned pit master Elrose, and uber restaurant designer David Rockwell. Hanson has made it clear that he hopes to roll out Wildwood nationally in the next year, bringing his pan-regional, urbane-but-not-fancy-pants barbecue concept to a city near you. But barbecue is tricky business, serious eaters, and does not easily translate to multiple locations, so I was curious as to what I would find at Wildwood.

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13 Comments | Tags: barbecue, Flatiron District, Gramercy, Manhattan, NYC, reviews, Wildwood BBQ

Terroir

Posted by Ed Levine, May 6, 2008 at 10:00 PM

Editor's note: Starting this week I am going to post a restaurant review every Tuesday night. Why? Because it's fun to do and because I think serious eaters could use a little guidance when they're searching for something delicious to eat in New York City (I know I certainly appreciate any reliable food advice I get). That's what my reviews are going to focus on: the search for deliciousness. When it comes to what I'll be reviewing, I'm certainly not going to limit myself to fancy-pants restaurants or even dinner. In the coming weeks I'm going to review breakfast joints, lunch spots, and even places that serve only snacks. Serious eaters just want something delicious when they're hungry, and hopefully we're going to help you find exactly that. —Ed Levine

Terroir

From left: Veal and ricotta meatballs, beet risotto balls with gorgonzola cheese.

I drink so little wine I would not even call myself a casual drinker, so wine bars in and of themselves hold little interest for me. But when a serious chef and his passionately unsnobby wine expert and restaurateur partner open a wine bar, well, that gets my attention.

Marco Canora, whose long, deep-flavored food I've been eating for ten years, and his business partner, Paul Greico, have opened Terroir, a casually spiffy wine bar just down the street from their first restaurant, Hearth (they also own a terrific Midtown Italian restaurant, Insieme).

Though the food at Hearth and Insieme is clearly the work of a very serious cook using the best ingredients, Canora has always had a fondness for hearty populist foods like sandwiches, soups, and sausage. He was the original opening chef at Craft Bar when those kinds of items were on the menu there, and the food at Terroir is a continuation of his love affair with those kinds of foods.

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11 Comments | Tags: A-, East Village, ELE reviews, Manhattan, reviews, Terroir, wine bars

In Search of the Perfect Food Review Rating System

Posted by Ed Levine, May 6, 2008 at 9:00 PM

Every time I've reviewed restaurants in print, on television or radio, or, now, online, I've always wrestled with the question of what rating system to use. There are so many ratings systems already in use it's hard to make sense of them all. The New York Times uses a four-star rating system for its upscale restaurant review, which makes some sense, but I've often found that the stars don't match the prose. Plus, where does that leave the places that appear in the "$25 and Under" column? Nowhere in fact, as those are done with no rating system at all. New York magazine has adopted a five-star system to allow more latitude, and it differentiates between fancy and nonfancy restaurants by using hollow stars for the cheaper restaurant rating. The red Michelin Guide uses a three-star system, but I don't find the Michelin guides to be all that relevant anymore.

I've been searching for a rating system that is easily recognizable that will enable serious eaters to know what to expect when they go to any kind of eatery, from a hot dog stand like Gray's Papaya to a fancy-pants restaurant extravaganza like Daniel or Per Se.

I would like our rating system to place each experience and each food in context. So yesterday someone here at the Serious Eats office suggested a report card–like rating system, A to F, with every plus and minus gradation included.

I thought about it and decided I really liked the idea. Doesn't a perfect natural-casing all-beef hot dog served on a toasted bun deserve an A just as much as a ten-course tasting menu at Daniel or Per Se? I think it does, though maybe not if there's no place to sit to eat that hot dog.

So that's what we're going to try starting tonight in about an hour or so. Thoughts, serious eaters?

8 Comments | Tags: ratings systems, reviews

Momofuku Ko: Does the Service Matter?

Posted by Ed Levine, May 6, 2008 at 7:15 PM

Or, 'Hi, My Name Is David and I'll Be Your Waiter Tonight'

When a Wall Street Journal reporter detailed her experience at Momofuku Ko and questioned her overall experience there, I thought it was an exercise in needless complaining. But then, on the eve of Frank Bruni's review, I started thinking about the service at Momofuku Ko and about what it says about where serious dining is going, and I decided that maybe she had a point—that, for a minimum of a hundred dollars a head, Ko should deliver on the promise of a welcoming, service-intensive experience where the diner feels well taken care of. Is that even possible when the cooks are doing the serving?

When you talk to Ko chef-owner David Chang and read about what he says about Ko, it's clear he wants the restaurant to be first and foremost about the food and the talented cooks who prepare and serve said food.

"Look," he told me, "we're trying to do something different here. When I was thinking about Ko, I didn't think much about the service. We want to have good service, we want people to have a good time, but not at the expense of our core values, which are all about the food. I think good service and hospitality are mutually exclusive. We are not going to be about customers having a bad day and taking it out on the chefs who work at Ko. If people have a problem with that, they should come talk to me about it—and if they don't like it, they don't have to come eat at Ko."

Where does that leave us, the serious eaters who want to eat well and feel well taken care of?

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6 Comments | Tags: David Chang, fine dining, Momofuku Ko, reviews

Alan Richman Speaks the Truth About Il Mulino

Posted by Ed Levine, September 27, 2007 at 11:00 AM

I'm sure Alan Richman is still mad at me about what I wrote about his New Orleans food piece, but that doesn't mean I can't blog about his writing. His review last week of Il Mulino is so spot on it's like the man has some magical truth serum in his computer keyboard.

At the risk of violating copyright laws, here are the first 11 (short) paragraphs of his review:

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Post a Comment | Tags: Alan Richman, food critics, Il Mulino, reviews

The Pasta Chronicles

Posted by Ed Levine, January 19, 2007 at 12:01 PM

Some people count sheep when they can't sleep. I count pasta dishes. There's something about a plate of pasta that's incredibly soothing and satisfying at the same time, and soothing and satisfying thoughts are surefire paths to sleep. The other night I couldn't sleep, and I tried to come up with a list of my most satisfying pastas of the last year. I had a good time putting my little list together, so I thought other people would, too. I asked Adam Platt, restaurant critic at New York magazine, Serious Eats community member Sandro, and Johanne Killeen, co-owner of Al Forno in Providence, Rhode Island, and the coauthor (along with her husband and business partner, George Gerrmon) of the new book, On Top of Spaghetti. Johanne was kind enough to let us post one of the pasta recipes from the book. After the jump, the responses (and the recipe).

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2 Comments | Tags: Adam Platt, Italian, Johanne Killeen, New York, New York City, NYC, pasta, recipe, restaurants, reviews