It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Although I firmly believe that Christmas music season started a month ago, when the Jewish holidays ended, the world and I are now in sync and the Christmas season is indeed upon us. For Katherine C. and I this means a trip to the annual Christmas Fair hosted by the Danish Seamen's Church in Brooklyn. This year we went only for the food, but there is also a fun market of holiday-themed crafts and various cute gifts.

Food options included open faced sandwiches (some alarmingly heavy on the mayo but delicious nonetheless), meatballs, potato salad, and pastries. Naturally we tried a little bit of everything. Also available--Danish beer! A lovely way to kick off the holiday season. Check it out next year!

Socarrat has Delicious Socarrat

Socarrat is a paella restaurant that opened in Chelsea a few years ago that I've been wanting to try, since I love any dish featuring carbs as the star. After a weekend visiting family in Florida (hi Aunt P., your potato leek soup was the best! [sorry Mom]) I finally got the chance to give Socarrat a try, in their new-ish NoLiTa location, with the wonderful Katie C., foodie companion extraordinaire.





The fixture of the menu is of course the paella, which comes in a number of varieties, in 2-person per order portions. We went traditional, with seafood, chicken, and beef. While waiting for the paella (which takes about half an hour to prepare) we feasted on tapas, the highlight of which was grilled octopus sliced extremely thin with scrumptious garlic and olive oil. I would have been perfectly happy eating just the octopus. The grilled asparagus with goat cheese, and the fried artichokes, were both delicious but nothing especially exciting.

The paella was pretty fantastic. The seafood was all perfectly cooked (though the chicken and beef were ever so slightly overcooked) and it was all seasoned very well. The best part was the socarrat--the crispy rice formed at the bottom and sides of the pan as the paella roasts. The rice takes on this nutty, caramelized flavor that is scrumptious. I especially liked that part of the service involves the waiter coming and scraping all the socarrat off the pan, because they are much better at it than I was.

Although I liked the food, I was a little disappointed in the service. It wasn't bad; on the contrary they were very attentive, perhaps too attentive. It seemed like they were trying too hard to please and ended up just being a little annoying--ordering took a long time because the wine selection had to be handled first, and that was a multi-step process, and then picked tapas was a big ordeal too. Plus there was a lot of pressure to finish all the paella, which I thought was a little odd. Still, nothing so offensive that I would refuse to go back, especially since the food was so yummy.

Iceland--volcanoes, glaciers, and puffin

Because school has started again and I find myself with lots of time on my hands, and because loyal reader Laura L. made a special request, let's rewind a month to my recent trip to Iceland.

To celebrate the end of our summer, Maxine S. and I took a trip to Iceland. Despite my tonsils' best efforts to derail the vacation, I made it to Reykjavik for a long weekend and met Maxine, who was at the end of her own Scandinavian travel adventure. I was excited to see a land of fire and ice--check out volcanoes, glaciers, continental rifts and many hours of sunlight--and of course to see what the food was like. I was interested to see if everything I love about Scandinavian food (read: smoked salmon) had migrated halfway across the Atlantic with the Vikings.

Well, let's just say there's a reason Iceland isn't known for its food. Travel articles focus mostly on the exotic elements of Icelandic cuisine--whale, puffin, putrefied shark--and with good reason. There's not much more to speak of. Even so, I'm turning it into a blog post, so read on!

Scallops and potatoes below, whale above

Mark Bittman told us we had to go to Sægreifiin for as-local-as-it-gets seafood, so that was our first stop. We both had the lobster soup, which was similar to a lobster bisque, though a little thinner and with much less cream. It was quite tasty, with a generous amount of lumps of tender lobster meat in the soup, though a bit salty. Maxine was brave enough to taste the whale (minke whale, allegedly not endangered and therefore legal to eat) which she said tasted more like steak than fish, was a bit tough and was unpretentious in both taste and presentation. She wanted to like it more than she did (which mirrors my feelings on some of the other food we ate--read on!) I wasn't as willing to adventure, so I stuck with the grilled scallops, which were delicious.

Mmmm, fish and ice cream

For brunch on our day spent in Reykjavik itself (when you go to Iceland, and you should because it's the most breathtakingly beautiful place I've ever seen, plan to spend not even a full day in the capital and spend the entire time you're there out in the country soaking up the amazing views) we headed to Cafe Loki, recommended by several guidebooks as a good place for traditional and well-prepared food. We each got one of the specialty platters, which had an open-faced sandwich of herring and egg, one of mashed fish and potato, and the restaurant's speciality, rye bread ice cream. We decided against the platter featuring lambshead jelly (headcheese) and putrified shark. The ice cream was definitely the highlight--it was similar in look to cookies and cream but the bits of bread retained a little more texture than the normal crumbled cookies, making me think the trick is to use day-old rye bread. The lack of extra sweetness in the flavoring was more than compensated for by the extra butter and milkfat in the ice cream, making it creamy and rich.

Guillemot

Finally we moved on to the game birds of Icelandic cuisine. We headed to Þrir Frakkar, a more upscale restaurant in the city center for our farewell to Iceland dinner. Having seen hundreds of puffins the day before, and realizing they were more like birds than cute helpless penguins, we decided to go for it and order the smoked puffin. We also shared a few entrees, including the guillemot (a seabird similar to, and potentially the same as, pigeon). To be honest, I was underwhelmed. I expected great things from Jamie Oliver's favorite restaurant in Reykjavik (though I guess it's all relative), but what we ate was not extraordinary. The puffin tasted of nothing but smoke and had no texture to speak of, while the guillemot, though well-cooked, was presented with a strident and overpowering sauce. Still, it wasn't bad, and the tasting adventure was a great way to end a vacation full of geological and geothermal adventures. Go to Iceland, be a curious taster, and come home having had the same fantastic time I did!

The best pesto I've ever eaten

After 10 days in Southern California, eating delicious Mexican food at least once a day (more on that coming in a future blog post) I am back in New York, enjoying the heat and humidity. While in LA I decided I needed to get to some Top Chef restaurants, so made reservations at all-star Fabio's Firenze Osteria. After so much raving from the judges on both seasons of Top Chef, I was indescribably excited to experience his rustic Italian cooking, especially the gnocchi. I was also a little nervous, because my experience with Top Chef restaurants has been a mixed bag--Harold's Perilla and Kin Shop are some of the best meals I've had, while Dave's Crave on 42nd (now closed) was an overpriced Olive Garden. So off I went to North Hollywood, with Miriam F. and Rachel G.

Well, dear readers, Fabio does not disappoint. We were greeted with a delicious black olive spread and some bread. The spread was essentially a tapenade, but it was mixed with some finely chopped tomatoes, which helped to cut through some of the strident saltiness that sometimes comes along with a tapenade. With that, we were off to the races.

We next shared an appetizer of spinach and ricotta dumplings, over melted butter with sage. The sage butter was really the selling point on this, and it was delicious, although between the extra cheese grated on top and the butter on the bottom, the dish was a skosh too salty to eat a lot of.

Although we tried to avoid being THAT table ordering the same thing, we all ordered gnocchi. In our defense, we all ordered different gnocchi preparations. Miriam went with the marinara and fresh ricotta, which she adored. 

 I was all set to steer clear of the gnocchi and order the sausage and mushroom risotto, but then decided that I had to experience what the judges on Top Chef called perfect gnocchi. I went with the gnocchi dish no one else was going to order--in a truffled 4-cheese sauce with sausage. It was delicious--everything was perfectly balanced, the sausage was very finely crumpled so that it mixed in with the sauce, and the gnocchi were heavenly light pillows. The only negative was that this was a fairly heavy dish to order for lunch on a warm day, but the especially intense food coma I went through was totally worth it.



Rachel's order blew everyone else's out of the water. She ordered the pesto gnocchi, and this pesto was DIVINE. I truly have never tasted anything like it. The toasted pine nuts scattered above the gnocchi were just the tip of the iceberg. The pesto was creamy and perfectly balanced--there's nothing else to say about it except that it was perfect.



  Seriously, people, go here. It's delicious. And thanks to Rachel G. for the pictures, since my camera died as soon as we sat down to eat.

If food was my religion, this would be my church

Friends, it finally happened. I made it to Eleven Madison Park. It was a dining experience unlike any other I've ever had. I'd heard from friends who'd been there of the incredible attention the waitstaff gives to each customer, of the perfect execution of the food, and the way in which the restaurant is able to produce a meal that lasts for 3 hours and never feels slow, rushed, or anything other than divine. They were all correct. I'm completely overwhelmed by all of the wonderful things I have to say about my meal and can't possibly do it justice in a blog, so let me be clear. GO TO ELEVEN MADISON PARK. GO. Go for lunch, go for dinner, both will be incredible (although I hear there are even more perks to going for dinner) (the only difference might be that some of the special bonuses--like the infamous "have as much of this bottle of cognas as you want"--only come with dinner). The reviews are entirely earned and it is entirely worth any amount of cost-cutting to save up the money to afford it. Seriously, go, you can eat a plate of food as pretty as this one (crab salad between pickled daikon)


Some highlights--

--The Leisure Suit--a cocktail of gin, vermouth, and maraschino liquer. To be honest I have no idea what maraschino liquer is or tastes like, but I like things that resemble a martini and this was definitely that, with the added benefit of not being quite so strident as the run of the mill martini you order at a bar.
--A 135-page wine list. As we know I don't know anything about wine (except that I like to drink it), but 135 pages are bound to contain many goodies, and the sommelier definitely steered us in a delicious, if pricey, direction.
--The bonuses. By bonuses I mean everything that wasn't part of the 3-course meal: the bread (with two butters, one made of cow's milk the other goat's milk), the chilled pea soup with buttermilk "snow" (hi liquid nitrogen!), the egg cream at the end of the meal (with a twist, of course), and my personal favorite, the smoked sturgeon sabayon with chive oil, served in an egg shell. Holy sweet mother, it was amazing.

 

Moving on to the star of the meal, the menu. The menu at Eleven Madison Park is unlike any other menu I've ever seen. For each course you get one word--asparagus, pork, crab, snapper, egg to name a few--and you choose one per course. You then tell them if there's any ingredient you don't like (I asked them to leave out portabello mushrooms) and away they go to perfectly cook your food. I went with asparagus, which came out as a composed salad with hard-boiled egg, bulgur wheat (surprised, Miriam and Hilary?) and some sort of cured ham.

 

I also got the lobster (all I remember about it was that it was butter poached) and the pork (there was a pea puree, clearly my ability to retain information about each dish decreased along with the amount of wine left in the bottle). Everything was perfectly cooked, tasted deliciously, exquisitely seasoned, and the tableside presentation was a nice extra flourish. At the end of the post we're right back where we started--I can't say enough great things about this meal, and what I can say I can't say well. Just go and see for yourself

Some sweets to make the finals pass

It occurred to me recently that a self-professed expert in cupcakes, such as myself, should probably be doing a lot more sampling of and blogging about cupcakes and a lot less about Italian food. I can think of no better time to go for cupcakes than after a tragically hard final. So, after a brutal Securities Regulations final Kat and I walked over to Sweet Revenge for some tasty rewards slash consolation-in-dessert-form. I was first introduced to these cupcakes last year by a wonderful professor. While there's not a lot of variety, which can be a problem when you're in the mood for something specific, what I love about Sweet Revenge (aside from its proximity to school) is the fun way they serve the cupcakes--they're in cups!

 This is the Sweet Revenge Cupcake, a peanut butter cupcake with ganache filling and a peanut butter frosting. It sounds like a LOT of peanut butter so I was a little wary that it would be overwhelming and way too rich, especially when combined with the ganache in the middle. I worried for nothing. It's a delicious cupcake, made even more delicious by the fact that this cupcake manages to somehow be moist without being dense. It's a little crumby, but that's ok because it's in a cup! I also find the cupcake to frosting ratio to be ideal. Sweet Revenge is a great cupcake when you're looking for some variety from the usual suspects and their cookie-cutter vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting.

Stay tuned for a very exciting upcoming post, after Katie and I enjoy the best meal of our lives at Eleven Madison Park.

More Italian food--maybe this blog's name doesn't match my food interests...

Friends, it's happened. I was afraid this day was going to come, I was hoping against hope that it never would, but it's come. It's time for a negative blog post. Here's what went down.

To celebrate the end of Passover, Maxine and I decided on a quick dinner of pasta before going back to the 7th circle of hell known as outlining. Because the goal was something quick I didn't suggest the Friendly Neighborhood Italian Place, since it's a bit far from school and not the quickest restaurant. Instead Maxine suggested Olio, a place she enjoyed last time she was there. So we went. And sat. 30 minutes after ordering a basket containing 2 slices of what I'm 90% certain was WonderBread appeared on the table, with some admittedly very high quality olive oil. 10 minutes later we asked about our food and were told it was 5 minutes away. 10 minutes after that our food arrived, lukewarm and slightly bland.

So, that was a less than ideal return to chametz, minus the part where I got to spend an hour and a half with the wonderful Maxine. Loyal readers, I'd avoid Olio, and stick with the Friendly Neighborhood Italian Place.