sundownyellowmoon

Does anyone have any recent feedback on Gramercy Tavern? I'm planning to have dinner there on Sunday with a friend from out of town. I've been to GT a few times but not while Mike Anthony has been the chef. Thanks! Jon

Hi Gavin, We ate at Michel Bras about 8 years ago. The meal was spectacular--perhaps things have changed since then. There is a vegetable dish that is called "gargouillou", which means, as best I can tell, "fanciful mixture of vegetables". There must have been 20 local (many wild, I'm sure) vegetables in the mix. I've spoken with other friends who have been there, and this dish seems to change with the wind. We were travelling with another couple and between our two families we had 5 children, ranging in age from 4 to 11. We elected to not bring any of our kids--even though our son, 11 at the time, still wishes he could have joined us. To accommodate the kids, we asked the hostess when we made reservations what we might do with our kids. Madame Bras called us back and made arrangements for us: she hired a babysitter for the kids, (her niece, if memory serves me well) and they just had a simple meal in the room. (Note that none of our kids were French-speakers, and the babysitter spoke very little English. Still, it was a fun night for all.) I hope this helps. Jon

Just trust the beans to develop their own crust. You've waited this long....what's a bit more time? Jon

Thanks so much for the terrific NY dining tales! It makes me want to go back to JG on my next trip to NYC--which is this week, thankfully. When we ate at JG, we had a foie gras dish, too. My son described it as the best PB&J he'd ever tasted. What do you think? Jon

Hi, Great review on the Shola experience at Blackfish. I had dinner at Blackfish on Tuesday night, too. I thought the price was too high, all things considered. The ambience is hardly opulent. I don't know if what was lacking was the level of service, or the level and attention to detail in the presentation. The first course even arrived without an underliner! Since the food, and all of the flavors, are so clearly thought out, one would think that this level of sophistication would be carried through. The pork belly dish was exceptional. I thought it looked like a dessert--millefeuilles, set upon what looked like a poached apple. Lemon curd....That dish is a gem: the perfectly cooked pork belly, the turnip (right?) cooked in red wine with some vinegar, the yuzu curd, and the elegant apple, fennel and daikon slaw that looked like zucchini matchsticks! The flavor combinations were stunning. The rest of the meal was less gratifying, and only the suzuki with the cumin foam approached the pork. I salute both Shola and Blackfish, though, for putting it out there. I'll go back to the restaurant and will seek out Shola for other dinners.

Hi, We spent a little over a week in the Portland area--5 days/nights in Portland, 3 days/nights in Cannon Beach. In Portland, we stayed both at The Heathman and at the Ace. The Heathman was predictable, maybe even a little boring. We found the service in the hotel to be a bit cocky, and less knowledgeable than they would represent. The dinner, though at the restaurant there was pretty good, and, the sommelier was particularly knowledgeable. We drank a delicious bottle of Alsatian wine from Marcel Deiss that he recommended. The accommodations at the Ace were decidedly different--low on the services, but high on the vibe and the energy. For example, the businees "center" was a long (16') wooden table with a few white macbooks waiting there for anyone to use. There were jars of pink rubber erasers, pencils, nearby. On the wall the complete lyrics to "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen were painted/written. If you wanted to (and I saw one young man doing this) you could don a pair of headphones and just sit at the macbook for hours and browse, e-mail, blog, whatever on-line. The rooms were large and really comfortable. They even had turntables in them with a random selection of vinyl that you could conveniently broadcast through the clock radio speakers in the room. (our selection included "Harvest Moon" from Neil Young, "Songs from a Room" from L. Cohen, and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" from Elton John) The restaurant in the hotel is called "Clyde Common" and it's outstanding. (In fact, in last week's NYT they featured Portland Restaurants and even had a photo of the chef from Clyde...The wine list is reasonably priced, and pretty interesting. We had a gruner veltliner by the glass that was crisp and delicious, and a great bottle of Bandol red from Bunan. But the chicken was amazing! They buy it from a local farm where it lives the good life outside. You get a half chicken. When you place the order, the chefs cook it. (Not cooked at all in advance). They cook it "a la plancha", and under a brick or some sort of weight. It takes about a half hour, but what was the rush? They serve it with summer succotash. For only the second time in my life when on vacation I went back to the same restaurant two nights in a row and ordered the same dish. It was that good. We also had a dish with beef tongue and diver scallop and a piquant sauce that was really tasty. Go there when/if you are back in Portland. They change the menu every couple of days. The kitchen is open. The bar is very hip and fun. There is a mezzanine (where we sat one night) and the walls there are "papered" with pages from one of the early Fanny Farmer Cookbooks. These folks love food! We ate another night at Le Pigeon which is in a neighborhood a bit off the beaten path. We went there because the chef had been included in Food + Wine's "best 10 new chefs" issue from the summer. The meal, however, was disappointing. Maybe they were having a bad night--the food was all too heavily seasoned--salt mostly--but the ideas were inspired. I just wished that the technique had been better. (The chef here and the restaurant also made it to the same NYT article--it's just not a place I'm going to revisit when next in Portland. (I did like the wine list...and we drank a delicious half bottle of beaujolais from Morgon (1998), produced by a biodynamic producer named Marcel Lapierre. 9 years old and still going strong! On the coast we had a terrific meal at a little country spot called "Inn at Nehalem River". The food was elegant and refined (whereas the food at CC and Le Pigeon in Portland had been more gutsy and rustic), and quite good. While we didn't stay at the Inn, it seemed like a good place to frequent. In Cannon Beach, we found nothing in the restaurants worth mentioning--but the walks on the beaches certainly made up for any lack in gustatory adventure.

For staff lunch one day when cooking in Paris I had what I thought were the best fried potatoes I'd ever had. When I found out who'd made lunch I asked the commis why the potatoes were so good. He wasn't sure. I asked him what he'd done to make them. "I just fried them in veal kidney fat." A few weeks later I told a friend of mine, who was the chef/owner of a small relais in Normandy about this. He said that the best fried potatoes he'd ever had were ones cooked in veal kidney fat that had been rendered from a whole veal kidney that had been cooked on a spit over an open fire. He then made this for me and....no surprise--I agreed.

f: Love Potion Number Nine

server sombody -seager ← Nope. It's not "Seager".

""give my stomach to Milwaukee if they run out of beer" This must be John Prine. How about these: "Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk, Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk, You might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread, You may be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-sized bed" "somebody steal the peanut butter I've got a can of sardines runnin' up and down the aisles of the mini mart stuffin' food in our jeans" "When I first met you baby you fed me on chicken and wine It was steak and potatoes and lobster and babe I sure felt fine But now all you ever give me is seaweed and alfalfa sprouts And sunflower seeds and Igot my doubts...."

Hi, If you are going to NYC when Danny Meyer's "Shake Shack" is open in Madison Park, I'd go there. We took our kids (17 and 10) there, and had a rendezvous with their cousins (15 and 11). We all sat outside. The kids loved the burgers. You can get decent wine for yourself, too, if so inclined. At MOMA with kids, I'd eat at one of the restaurants in the museum--but not at The Modern--too fussy at least for my 10-year old. The food is not like Eleven Madison Park or Jean-Georges or Becco, but you've got 4 kids! Best wishes,