vengroff
-
Posts
1,832 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by vengroff
-
-
I went to Curacao a few years ago and for some reason ended up coming back with six different colors of the stuff. Probably because I sampled them all at the end of the distillery tour and was then easily seperated from my money.
Still have most of it.
-
Thanks for the current report Vengroff--I haven't been in a long while. But the bar, oysters and lunch would not be judged on the "dinner" scale would it, which is where reputations would be made and on which laurels a restaurant might be resting?
I agree. However, I expect a place that is tops for dinner to be able to put together a good lunch.
Can you assess it with some context of price--power lunch pricing or something more value-oriented?Power lunch. There seemed to be a decent crowd of regulars willing to spend. For example, there was a group of mid to upper level diplomats from the Mexican embassy on the next block.
Lunch entrees started around $13 for light salady choices and went up to around $20. The halibut was $18. My guess would be that at dinner they are probably in the mid to upper 20's.
I think it's tough and possibly unfair to ask someone to extrapolate from lunch to dinner--so you'll have to go for dinner as well!I'm just not sure I want to put up with the need to book so far in advance for prime times. There are plenty of other places in this town (Cashions, Poste, Zola,...) that I would like to try first.
Also, I'm intrigued by your "Is the food bold, forward-thinking, surprising, challenging or avant-garde" versus "well executed and genuinely tasty"--because to me there is a middle ground of well executed tasty food which also happens to be "interesting" or "creative" but that is not what I believe you mean when you say "bold, forward-thinking, surprising, challenging and avant-garde." Agree? If so, then push yourself to classify the Kinkead lunch as you observed it--was it leaning more toward the "well-executed but not that interesting"--on the safe, perfunctory or boring side or "well executed, simple yet interesting?"I would say that the fish was definitely in the interesting and well executed camp, but not particularly creative. You could get more or less the same dish, though almost certainly not as perfectly executed, at an upper level chain like Legal or McCormick and Shmicks.
Was the food itself--apart from service issues--in terms of conception, quality of ingredients, execution and price-point--worthy of a place alongside whichever chefs and restaurateurs would make your "highest level" list?No, not in this day and age. I doubt anything will change, since the place gets rave reviews and is filled every night. From my limited experience, it's just a place that really knows how cook a piece of fish. I think their target audience is people who like pretty standard American seafood dishes, and are willing to pay a little extra to have them done as expertly as they can be done. I'd never compare it to Le Bernardin or Oceana; they are seafood places, but they are looking to do something quite different and more creative than Kinkead's is.
Ah, now I know what it is. It's the all-seafood version of City Hall. I don't mean that in a bad way, because I like City Hall a lot for what it does.
I suppose at this point someone with a better background in recent American culinary history may claim that Bob Kinkead invented all this stuff, and Henry Meer and some corporate schlocks from Boston and Portland just ripped it off.
-
Would you say the same thing about excluding insects and worms from your diet? Objectively, the same holds true in those cases, right? So are most of us gastronomically impoverished because of our refusal to eat such protein sources?
If we refuse, under any circumstances, we may well be impoverished. That's the point that Shaw has been making, and I tried to reiterate.
In some cultures the idea of eating an egg, or rotten moldy milk (aka cheese) is disgusting. If a food writer refused to eat them, we wouldn't take their writing seriously.
For all I know, every time we saute some diced onions in oil we should be tossing in a handful of grubs too. It chould be that there is a compelling flavor there that we are missing out on. Or, it could be the culinary equivalent of a pukey green color with orange spots. Actually, now that I think about it, fiddleheads have probably already claimed that role.
-
I mean, there are tons of vegetable dishes in chinese (and thai, and indian, and well, lots of cuisines) cooking that are prepared without meat for the express purpose of showcasing the vegetables, not because of some inherent aversion to meat or any other kind of animal protein. They just -are-.
These are like the paintings that have no blue paint, but belong in the museum anyway.
-
I think at best a religious or cultural restriction on gastronomy will be harmless (the humoral system sounds this way), and most likely it will be limiting (as in the Jewish or Islamic dietary laws). To say that it's possible to cook delicious food under those systems seems beside the point.
Sometimes I cook vegetarian dishes for vegetarian or kosher guests. The way I always think about it is that cooking without meat is like painting without using the color blue. It doesn't mean you can't make a good painting, but it limits your subject matter a lot.
If you go through the Met, you will run across some interesting paintings that happen to not use any blue. In some cases the subject matter may not have required any blue. In others, the artist may have meant to say something specific via the lack of blue. In still others, blue pigment may have been particularly unobtainable or unaffordable at the time and place the painting was made, forcing the artist to come up with a creative way of getting his message across without it. In all of these cases, the curators decided that the paintings in question were still interesting and worthy of display. If, however, the curators had decided to refuse to show any paintings with blue in them, the museum would be a curiousity, rather than the home of one of the world's great collections.
My point is that you can cook valid and interesting meals without meat, or without pork, or shellfish, or whatever else you might wish to exclude from your diet, but you can't argue that you are not missing out on the full range of culinary experience.
-
Kinkead's comes up from time to time in this forum. Some people love it, others find it decidedly overrated. I've now been, and I can see both arguments. Indeed, if I were predisposed to do so, I think I could easily write either a very favorable or relatively unfavorable review. I would have ample ammunition for either.
Kinkead's wasn't actually in my original plans, but Kaz Sushi Bistro's doors were already locked at 2:10pm. What to do? A quick dash around the corner to dine at the bar at Kinkead's, obviously.
The lunch menu has a lot of classic American fish dishes--things like chowders, crab cakes, lobster rolls, fish and chips, and oysters on the half shell. Is the food bold, forward-thinking, surprising, challenging or avant-garde? No, not at all. Is it well executed and genuinely tasty? Yes, with some minor exceptions on the execution end.
My lunch consisted of a selection of oysters on the half shell followed by seared halibut with dijon sauce, fingerling potatoes, and spinach. The oysters were fresh, smooth, briney, and well-shucked. They came with a classic mignonette, lemon, and cocktail sauce. The mignonette stood out, not so much for it's flavor as for its presentation. The shallots were chopped into all sorts of irregularly sized triangular shapes. No careful brunoise dice here. It was either done mechanically or by someone who failed knife skills 101. I know it's a small nit to pick, but this is the kind of lack of attention to detail that one should not find at this level of dining. It's only a matter of time until this lack of focus spreads to other aspects of the cuisine, where it can do more damage.
The halibut that followed was exceptional in every way. There was a hint of golden brown on the surface, and the center was tender, moist, and just flaking. It was exactly how this fish was meant to be cooked. The same could be said of the potatoes. The combination of spinach and mustard, one of my favorites, and admittedly a big part of why I ordered this dish, was fully up to my expectations. Nothing about the plate was complicated or fussy, everything was simply cooked to the exact standards required to get the most out of the ingredients. This is clearly the kind of cooking that Bob Kinkead made his name on.
The meal ended with an espresso, which was disappointingly luke warm. It had good strength, texture, and crema; it just wasn't hot. I suspect it was brewed properly but served in a cup that was previously cool.
So how can I summarize a meal like this? It didn't try to push any limits; instead it just took a simple plan and tried to execute it as flawlessly as possible. Had I only sampled the main dish, I would have said it had absolutely succeeded. However, there was sufficient lack of attention to detail elsewhere to live up to the billing of one of the absolute top tables in the area. I wouldn't say the flaws ruined the meal by any means. However, they were certainly not things that I would tolerate as a chef de cuisine or general manager of an establishment trying to compete at the highest level.
-
Recipes from this thread are now in the eGullet Recipe Archive. Using the new Ingredient Wizard feature, it took just a few minutes per recipe to put them in.
Here's a link to the Cornbread Recipes in the eGRA.
To try it out, and enter your own recipes from other threads, simply click the Add A Recipe link from any eGRA page, and then click the "Ingredient Wizard..." button to bring up a window where you can paste your ingredients. The window has directions explaining the units it recognizes, and how it determines what lines are headers.
-
-
But that has nothing to do with being confronted with a Yassa for the first time.... Because when it comes down to it, it's just a lamb and lemon dish. How can it be bad?
I thought yassa was usually made with chicken and lemon.
-
I recently tried damn hard to repress my preexisting framework of evaluation when eating some African cuisine, and I failed. I couldn't get past the "this just sucks" reaction.
What part of Africa was the food you had from? Surely there is significant diversity across the continent. I have had some decent Senegalese food in New York, but I was in the company of Senegalese who knew what and how to order.
-
I'll second the gnocchi. I think it's easier to make than most homemade pasta. What about a wild boar roast for a secondi?
-
Thanks, Vengroff. I will head there Friday. Can't wait.
Note, I was just asking if that is the place. I have never been there and have no idea what they carry. I just found that address with google.
-
Springfield Butcher has pheasant, duck, foie gras, quail, and maybe some other things.
Saycheese,
Where IS the Springfield Butcher? PLEASE share.
Is this the place?
Springfield Butcher
6816 Bland Street
Springfield, VA 22150
Phone: (703) 451-3033
-
I consider them along the lines of edible flowers; they're edible. Cant really say they taste good. "Taste like the forest" Yeah, I'll give them that. They pretty much taste like any random hunk of forest you'd choose to take a bite of...
I'm with =Mark on this one. Pass them right on by, and go for asparagus instead.
-
Venison Stew with Gnocchi
Serves 4 as Main Dish.
I think of this dish as an Italian take on meat and potatoes. It is loosely based on a gnocchi dish that Mario Batali serves at Babbo, which appears in his Babbo Cookbook. However, I'm sure St. Mario would advocate a lower ratio of ragu to gnocchi.
For the stew
- 2 T olive oil
- 130 g panchetta, in 1/4
- 100 g carrot, diced
- 75 g minced shallot
- 100 g diced onion
- 4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
- 500 g venison stew meat, cut into 1" cubes
- 500 ml dry red wine
- 28 oz canned crushed San Marzano tomatoes
- 3 bay leaves
- 1 T chopped fresh rosemary
- salt and pepper
For the gnocchi
- 500 g Russet potato
- 120 g all purpose flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 large egg
- additional flour for dusting
- water and salt for boiling
Begin the stew first, and then prepare the gnocchi while it simmers. The whole process will take two to two-and-a-half hours, but most of it is unattended.
Start the stew in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. When the pan is hot, add olive oil, and then fry the panchetta in it until it is crisp and brown and has given up its fat and flavor. Remove the panchetta, but leave the oil behind.
Pat the meat dry and coat generously with ground black pepper and a little salt. Add to the pan and cook until all sides are well seared and brown. Remove the meat.
Add a bit more olive oil to the pan if necessary, then add the carrots. Saute until they just begin to soften, about 3-5 minutes. Add the onions and shallots, saute until they just begin to color.
Stir in 1/4 of the tomatoes, and turn the heat to high. Cook until the moisture has left the tomatoes and the whole thick mass of vegetables begins to carmelize. Stir to carmelize all over, not just on the bottom.
Add the wine, and reduce by about 1/4 to remove the alchohol. Add the venison, panchetta, remaining tomatoes, bay leaves and rosemary and return to a simmer.
Reduce the heat and leave the pot to simmer uncovered. Over the course of the next two hours, the flavors will meld, the meat will soften, and the sauce will reduce and thicken. After an hour, you may wish to skim any excess fat from the surface.
While the stew simmers, prepare the gnocchi. Preheat the oven (or a toaster oven, if you have a decent one and don't want to overheat the kitchen) to 425 F. Poke a few holes in the potato to release moisture, and bake it for 45-50 minutes until the skin is crisp and the center is tender. I prefer baking rather than boiling the potato, because boiling retains too much moisture and can make the gnocchi soggy and dense instead of light and fluffy.
Cut the potato into chunks and remove the skin. The skin should easily seperate from the potato. Put the potato through a potato ricer (ideal) or mash with a fork. Spread the potato out in a thin layer so that it will not get soggy, and allow to cool to room temperature.
Mix the flour and salt with the cooled potato, and make a well in the center. Add the egg to the well and work it into the flour and potato to form a dough that holds together in a ball but is not sticky.
Divide the dough into quarters, and put on a floured work surface. With floured hands, roll each piece of dough into a long rope about 3/4" in diameter. With a sharp knife, cut the rope into bite-sized portions. I like to pinch the rope between my fingers as I cut, so that each gnoccho has a dimple to hold sauce on each side. If you prefer ridged gnocchi, you can roll them on the tines of a fork or a gnocchi roller.
If the ragu is not ready yet, lay the floured gnocchi in a single layer on a baking sheet and refrigerate. When the ragu is thick and the meat is tender, add salt and pepper to taste.
To cook the gnocchi, bring 8 quarts of water to a rolling boil over high heat. Add salt to taste (a couple of tablespoons) and then add the gnocchi. When the gnocchi rise to the surface, they are ready. Remove the floating gnocchi with a spider and add to the stew pot. Once all the gnocchi are ready and have been transferred, gently fold them into the stew. Turn the mixture out into a serving bowl, and bring it to the table to the delight of your guests.
Serve with a bold Italian red.
Keywords: Game, Potatoes, Pasta, Intermediate, Main Dish, Italian
( RG224 )
-
Ever since he did the food festival series, I can't watch this guy. He never even attended the festivals, he just did voice overs after the fact. For this, I think of him as more of an anti-Bourdain than Emeril could ever be.
-
Is there a retail outlet in the DC area that carries a good selection of game? I've seen a bit of venison and quail here and there, but that's about it. Any recommendations? Wild boar, in particular, is a favorite of mine.
-
Another restaurant that comes to mind is Elysium in Alexandria - I've not dined there, but other eGulleters have gone together and had a wonderful time. That seems like it could qualify as a sufficiently romantic spot and the cuisine is superior by all accounts (Chef Mazzi was recently at the Beard House in NYC).
Note that Chef Mazzi's departure was just announced within the past couple of weeks. So, it's not clear what you will get if you go there.
-
I didn't mean to imply that I agreed with Tom Sietsema, just that he must not have sampled some of Steve's desserts.
He most certainly has. He has mentioned them more than once in his reviews and chats. It seems he views them as exceptions to the rule.
-
So what about Dylan Prime's various toppings? The only one I've tried is the wild mushroom. OK, but not really needed when the steak is good.
From the Dylan Prime Web Site:
We recommend the following accents - it's up to you.CHAPEAUX - $3
MEAT
MAYTAG BLUE & CHIVE or PARMESAN REGGIANO
FISH
CALIFORNIA SPINACH or BASIL PESTO
FOR MEAT OR FISH
WILD MUSHROOM & TRUFFLE or
CHIMICHURRI or
HUDSON VALLEY FOIE GRAS ($12. SUPPLEMENT )
SAUCES - $2
MAKERS MARK BOURBON
HERB BEARNAISE
DIJON MUSTARD ROASTED SHALLOT
AU POIVRE BEURRE ROUGE
BLACK TRUFFLE BEURRE BLANC
BORDELAISE
-
Throw in Fabio Trabocchi from Maestro--who picked up the Beard "Rising Star" nod--assuming he stays here and isn't the chef Tom Sietsema referred to in his last online chat as moving up and out of the area.
In today's Weekly Dish, Tom's only mention of a move is
CHANGING SPACES: The Oval Room at Lafayette Square (800 Connecticut Ave. NW; 202-463-8700) is losing its chef to Zola (800 F St. NW; 202-654-0999) in white-hot Penn Quarter. "I want a broader audience, to have a bit more fun" with cooking, says Frank Morales, who is leaving the modern American restaurant near the White House after 18 months in the kitchen there. The 36-year-old chef is stepping into shoes originally filled by Phillip Carroll, who returned to Chicago in January.This doesn't seem as big as what he intimated was going to happen last week. Is it?
-
Last call for baseball tickets. PM me by 5pm eastern time today if you want them.
-
Here is a recipe for Crispy Buttermilk Waffles.
-
Yesterday we spent some time getting the yard ready for spring. In one corner, we found a sage plant and a rosemary plant, both of which seem to have survived winter just fine. In fact, both are now large woody balls between two and three feet in diameter. If I trim them back, will they develop new tender branches and leaves more appropriate for kitchen use?
Rating restaurants only on DINNER
in Restaurant Life
Posted
Despite being the author of the lunch report that inspired this thread, I'm with the Steves. If a reviewer can only have a single meal, it should be dinner. Obviously, three or four visits, including at least one lunch, is going to give the reviewer a broader collection of data to work with.
I think the question of dinner-only reviews becomes more interesting if you turn it on its head. What if a reviewer went the opposite direction, and built him or herself a niche reviewing lunches only? It's not unreasonable to believe that there is a place for this in a large city. There are a lot of people who dine out more at midday than they do in the evenings. The audience is probably mostly office workers and businesspeople, but also includes city visitors, bargain hunters, and those who enjoy dining in the city but have family obligations that force them to retreat to the suburbs most evenings. Think of how many times the lunch at Bouley is recommended on the New York forum. Clearly there is interest in lunch.
Maybe one of eGullet's own aspiring food writers could give the lunch beat a shot in their city?