Sneakeater

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=88408?

I'm sure everybody cares that the Pegu Club's Intro to Aperol is my favorite new cocktail. Just delicious.

This is exactly my experience, BTW.

Babbo is far from a bad restaurant. But isn't it clear that it gets so much play because of the chef's celebrity, for reasons that have little to do with cooking? (I HATE FOOD TV. IT MAY MAKE THINGS BETTER ELSEWHERE, BUT I HATE EVERY EFFECT IT'S HAD ON RESTAURANTS IN NEW YORK.)

You can get them from Dalmatia, right?

Is Alchemist a bartender at Freeman's? I've almost certainly met him, then.

Little Giant takes reservations again. This is just the kind of place I like, so the fact I didn't like it more than I did may be significant. It's not bad -- it's good, actually -- but it isn't in any way special. Maybe the food is most comparable to Ici in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Emphasis on local produce, seasonal ingredients, etc. Fairly free-form cuisine (although Ici seems to me to be roughly French-based and Little Giant seems roughly American-based). I started with one of the house cocktails. It's a real improvement to life as we know it that so many restaurants now feature cocktail lists. The problem is, of course, that some are really great, and some are good, and some are just OK. The cocktail I had here -- the Spiced Mojito, made with house-spiced rum and ginger along with the usual ingredients -- was good. But maybe it's that we cocktail aficonados are spoiled now, but it wasn't exciting the way the house cocktails at, say, Cafe Gray -- or, to be more egalitarian, Franny's on Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn (one of the great unsung cocktail sources, if you ask me) -- still are, at least to me. I started with braised artichokes with an herbed ricotta dip. The ricotta was a little blander than I'd have hoped (which would become a theme for the night). Not bad, but not better than that. I then had the cavatelli with pickled ramps and ramp emulsion. It's highly unusual for me to order something like that when the menu also features an enticing short rib dish and the famous "swine of the week." But it had been an 85-degree day (and I had ended the afternoon with a four-scoop sampler at Il Laboratorio del Gelato). And I figured that this would probably be my last shot at ramps for the season. Again, though, the dish was good enough, but to my unsubtle palate too bland. Dessert was something they called a "Thin Mint Sundae" -- mint ice cream atop a very good brownie. I have nothing bad to say about this. Our waiter was snotty. If I could walk to Little Giant, the way I can walk to Ici, I'm sure I'd appreciate it more. As it is, it's not worth avoiding, but it's hardly worth a trip.

Clandestino was very pleasant. You could tell that mixed drinks would be nothing special, and I just had glasses of riesling. I thought the music was very good (if too loud for my purposes). It's not the kind of place that wows you. But it's a fine place to hang out.

Dinner at Degustation. The dishes are all fairly complicated, with many ingredients and such, and my friends and I were drinking pretty steadily, and I ordered the tasting menu, so I didn't choose my dishes. Accordingly, I'm not able to do a detailed descriptive plate-by-plate analysis. I'll just give some impressions. As is already known, Jack and Grace Lamb's new venture Degustation (right next door to Jewel Bako) is a "small plates" place. You can't call these dishes tapas: they're too worked-out and complicated for that. Nevertheless -- and although the chef appears to be anglo -- the orientation here is definitely Spanish. But it's contemporary Spanish. Meaning that people who've eaten a lot in Spain will recognize it as Spanish, whereas people whose experience is mainly Casa Espana will be wondering what's so Spanish about it. Too, it's modern, and it has modern influences, but you couldn't call the food "molecular" (whatever that means): it's just contemporary, in the way, say, David Bouley's food is contemporary without being avant-garde. In fact, although I haven't yet eaten at Urena and so can't compare the food at the two places, the general descriptions we've seen here of the kind of food served at Urena could also apply to Degustation. I found the food to be good, even very good, but not fantastic. I didn't walk out of the restaurant not quite believing how good it was, the way I did at my first visit to Momofuku. On the other hand, I liked everything I ate. And the level of thought and of execution was impressive. Moreover, the five-dish tasting menu (all stuff on the regular menu, only they choose instead of you) is a great bargain at $50 (these are not merely $10 dishes). It's certainly worth going to Degustation for that.

I have a friend -- a woman beyond a certain age, who lives (as it happens) in Chicago -- who thinks that Le Veau d'0r is still one of the best restaurants in New York. Of course, up till he died, she thought Saul Bellow was still a liberal, too.

I, for one, tried to make a reservation for Saturday night and was told I couldn't until next week. (Of course, I can't reservations for two at Yakitori Totto, either.)

See also: http://www.epicureantable.com/recipes/O/onionconfit.htm http://www.globalgourmet.com/food/special/...urn/confit.html http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/re...6_11045,00.html So, my prior (inaccurate) post notwithstanding, these are sort of like what we'd recognize as confits, except they aren't cooked or jarred "in their own fat" (not having any).

There is no doubt in my mind that, the week before last, my skate schnitzel (a member of the ray family) was accompanied by something the menu called a "meyer lemon confit" at Cafe Gray.

Noodling around on the internet, I get the feeling they mean "slow roasted," or at least "slow cooked."

Over the past year, I've had several tomato confits and at leas a few lemon or onion confits. That said, I have no idea what they mean.

Although this is probably a better answer.

To me, taking my own special bitters to a bar would be like taking my own special butter or salt to a restaurant. I just wouldn't do it. I just expect different levels of quality -- or really not quality, but rather elaborateness -- when I go to a place like Pegu Club (I'm in New York), which has orange bitters and whatever else you could want in a cocktail, and more modest places, which I wouldn't expect to.

I hope it won't sound unduly provincial if I say that this is one of the most bizarre things I've ever heard. Now I have to go.

Yorkville is a section of the Upper East Side that used to have a large German population, with a lot of German restaurants and food stores. Very little of that remains. (As has been noted elsewhere, even the sainted Elk confectionary, NYC's premiere source of marzipan, just closed, leaving many of us scrambling around looking for someplace to buy little marzipan mice and pigs. It's surprising what you find to be hard to live without.)

I would be grateful even to be told of a restaurant or bar in New York City (sorry to be provincial) that serves sangrita with its tequila shots. I mean, that's the way you're supposed to drink tequila. If I remember right, the little serving device in which they serve tequila at La Esquina, for example, contains a place where a glass of sangrita would go, but, if I remember right (which owing to the tequila I might not), no sangrita.

This has to be the Line Of The Day.

Maybe this is just a similarly named place? Because there isn't anything Cincinnati about it. ← Yeah I know. But it's even in Tribeca, just like she said.

Here's a link to a page that links their menu: http://www.menupages.com/restaurantdetails...=0&cuisineid=72 Not sure I can discern anything distinctly Cincinnatian on it. But maybe I'm just ignorant.

Maybe they could keep them in tanks by the door, and each diner could get to select their chips to be pulled out of the water and served to them.

Thanks. But not enough of a bar for my purposes. (And in the wrong semi-neighborhood.)