KD1191

Has the economy hit the Paris dining rooms that hard? I guess I haven't been paying too much attention since I was there 6 months ago. Then, every multi-star, and most of the more casual places, I visited appeared to be fully booked. I recommended l'Atelier because it is one of the few high cuisine places that I know eschews the multi-week/month reservation game. It would certainly be hard to say any restaurant with nearly a dozen outposts worldwide is 'not-to-miss'.

In that case, I would suggest a look at the thread below: Traditional Bistros in Paris -- 2009.

Well, last minute is not usually the way to get into these types of places. You could pray for an opening at Astrance. L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon might be a good bet if you don't mind waiting, as their reservation book is limited to first seatings, I believe.

A friend who just returned from Bangkok said he'd ordered a gin sour at the bar of one of the nicer hotels and that they'd used whole egg instead of only the white. He said it was delicious.

From a conversation with Colin Field at the Hemingway Bar, I discovered one of my favorite winter warmers, the classic Hot Whisky Mac: 2 oz Famous Grouse 3 oz Stone's Ginger Wine Combine in a mug, add near-boiling water to taste. He's transformed this into a drink on the menu there called the Mach 2, which is whisky, house-made ginger spirit and green chartreuse (unfortunately, I've had little success devising the specifics/proportions of this).

Sorry to resurrect such an old post, but didn't see a better place for my question. Has anyone tried St. George's (Alameda, CA) Whiskey? If so, do you have any tasting notes/comments? I think their absinthe and vodkas are in the top of their classes, so I assume I'd like it, but I didn't want to buy a bottle completely blind. Thanks!

Can't speak for Toby, but from my own experience with both ingredients the Canton would not even come close to a replacement. Canton doesn't pack nearly the ginger whallop, and it has some artificial notes in addition to the booziness you mention. Recently, the Chicago distiler Koval has produced a ginger liqueur that is less boozy (20%) and tastes much more natural, but it still isn't nearly as spicy as ginger syrup made from fresh juice and sugar.

I haven't read the Bruni piece yet, so I don't know to what extent he's comparing disparate cuisines. I threw out a comparison to Alinea, and my comparison was based simply on price and attention to detail, things which I think can be placed more-or-less in a vacuum (obvious caveat, I understand the best fish in Chicago will cost more than many other ingredients for obvious reasons). I find the price to culinary fulfillment ratio at L2O was just far lower than so many other restaurants in Chicago. Is that a statement I can make without conflating the food with other very different places? I think so...maybe you disagree. Re: the quality of the seafood, it is certainly very fine, especially given the location. But, I don't eat sushi in Chicago for a reason. I've had better fish at hole-in-the-wall sushi places in Vancouver than what I had at L2O. L2O certainly gilded the lily (literally), but to me the meal on the whole (including my issues with service) is just not good enough for the price they are charging, and I'm pretty sure I would think that even if I'd never dined at any of Chicago's other top tables.

The Iron Cross is a pisco sour variation. There's a video of Toby making it .Hey Toby, a question I saw come up elsewhere...are TVH's eggs pasteurized?

After The Violet Hour, I think the second best cocktails in Chicago are likely to be at Sepia. They also have one of the most consistently good cheese plates I've had stateside. The front lounge is great for a drink and snack. Don't get me wrong, it's also good for dinner, but I don't feel drawn to it that often for a full meal.

Yes, TVH has The Scarlet Ibis. Hank was mixing drinks with it for my wife and I last Thursday. Very different stuff. I can't remember what was in the cocktail, but I think maybe cynar...and coffee bitters...I could be completely misremembering, though.

I've seen hibiscus syrup in two bars: At The Violet Hour in Chicago, one of my favorite drinks is the Summer Old Fashioned (a classic OF with hibiscus syrup). They also use it in a very tasty drink they call the Eyes Wide (Bulleit Bourbon, Grapefruit, Ginger Juice, Raspberry Syrup, Hibiscus Syrup). At Le Bar du Plaza Athénée in Paris, they have a section of the menu devoted to drinks made with hibiscus syrup. Here's a picture. I had the Rose de Chine...a sort of hibiscus mule. I'm not normally a vodka drinker, but the muddled fresh ginger and the addition of the delicious flowery syrup was worth it.

A friend and I dined at L2O this evening, and we both had a very underwhelming experience. I wish I would have taken the UE's review more to heart. The bottom line is that there are things about this restaurant worth experiencing, but not at anywhere near the price it ends up costing. All told, dinner topped $400 pp, making it more expensive than my last trip to Alinea, and the meal had no where near the same level of execution. My two biggest issues with the meal were the poor wine service and the excessive level of salt in many dishes. To just touch on the latter, some type of salt was specifically mentioned during the explanation of between half and three-quarters of the courses. There were several instances of specialty salts being repeated across dishes, and many dishes where the flavor profile was completely thrown off by excessive salt. On the former issue, the sommelier was simply no help at all. To start, she would point at the most expensive wine on the page, and in the face of reluctance to try the $100 half-bottle of organic Riesling, would counter with their cheapest offering. We asked if there was a pairing to go with the 12-course menu and were told that because we had added supplemental dishes (2 total) that we should just do half-bottles. I told her we weren't in the mood to make many decisions and let her take it from there. We agreed to start with a bottle of sake, and on a bottle of white that we would switch to when she believed it would be appropriate, leaving the door open for adding another half-bottle or glasses of red when the few courses that called for it were approaching. The sake was fine, but only really paired well with 2 of the 6 or 7 courses that came before we had to ask for the white to be retrieved (at least two courses too late in our estimation). When skate wing and pork belly approached, we switched to a glass of Pinot Noir, which was quite fine, but didn't require any assistance to discover on the rather limited selection of wines by the glass. The sommelier tried to sell us a half-bottle of red, under the premise that there was another fish course with which it paired (from watching their website, I know that course was previously on the tasting, but it had been removed by the time we were dining there). I had to correct her as to the composition of her own menu. Dessert wines were offered rather late, leaving us to pair with just the second of the two main desserts, as the first was already on the table by that time. Well, that's the bad. As for the good, and the strange...the truly fine dishes were the house-made tofu, crab in foie gras emulsion and the lamb tartar. 'Shanghai bouillon' was delicious, but the skate wing it was served with was ordinary. The bread service was exceptional, but the room was so uncomfortably hot that our butter was a gooey mess midway through service. A pre-dinner drink in the lounge was a gin gimlet with the marvelous addition of a touch of Aperol. I'd been wondering what I'm going to do with the unopened bottle in my cupboard, but now I know. The strangest sensation of the night may have been the smoked salmon that tasted exactly like Oscar Mayer bologna...check that, the strangest sensation was having to wait in line to use the restroom at a restaurant of this caliber. Seriously, the place is woefully equipped in that department. Or, maybe it was our waiter early in the meal (before we'd had a chance to open up or even joke with him) telling us about all the drunk people in his neighborhood this morning (St. Patrick's day celebrations, I guess). No, it was definitely the number of courses that involved gold leaf as a decoration...3. I can't believe anyone still thinks that's a good idea. I didn't have my hopes up for L2O. I try to avoid eating ocean fish in Chicago; it's just not worth it when there's so much else that is likely to be fresher, and I get to areas with amazing fresh fish often enough that I don't mind abstaining during the interim. Still, I was not impressed by the experience, and likely wouldn't return unless someone else was buying or to have a very limited menu of the few dishes that soared.

Well, you can't take it with you...and the prospects of keeping it while you're here appear to be diminishing, too. I've made a few cocktails with VEP Yellow...Last Word/Last Ward-ish things...not a bad thing at all. Is it better than drinking it straight? Probably not...but even the perfect flavor must get boring. Looking forward to the spring menu...the things Ira was doing with the infused pisco (chamomile, I think) were pretty unbelievable, and Troy's fernet drink is really good.

TVH was packed last night, despite the cold. It might have had something to do with the great Tom and Jerry's...a sublime drink on a sub-zero evening. Really loving the Winter menu. I had an Angostura Fizz last week, one of my new favorites. So, this time asked Troy to riff on it with Peychaud. He used a light cognac base, very nice. Off the new menu, we've also enjoyed the rather classic Brooklyn, the Gilded Cage - a new vodka offering with 'honey syrup' and egg white, though we switched ours up to rum - and the Velvet Fog (Wild Turkey 101, Sweet Vermouth - Punt e Mes, I think - Walnut Liqueur, salt...) Edit: Also, really like the Tax the Dandy...I believe it started as an Income Tax variant, but it's struck me like a milder negroni with apricot notes...

Sorry, should clarify that I wasn't dissing the daiquiri recipe above. I was trying to suggest that fewer drinks with lime juice on the menu wouldn't be a bad thing, as limes in Chicago in January are not the best.

Any news on the Winter Menu? I heard that it was supposed to be out yesterday. Though the daiquiri is one of my favorites, I can't say I'd be upset to see some of the lime juice disappear. Seems like it's been less than optimal the last few visits...

Finally picked up some Crème de Violette, so I've been enjoying Aviations and Hush and Wonders. This evening, I did a very minor riff on the Aviation that will (for now) be know as the Pisco Flower. 1.5 oz Pisco .75 oz Lemon Juice .5 oz (scant) Crème de Violette (Rothman & Winters) .25 oz Maraschino (Luxardo) I like the additional sweetness the Pisco brings to the party, and the fruitier floral notes blend nicely with the other side of the violette that the gin sometimes ignores.

I have you tried the Last Ward? Take the last word and sub rye for gin, lemon for lime and yellow for green chartreuse. I find the maraschino plays much nicer with lemon than lime. You don't even need to switch the gin to rye to see this difference. I prefer my Last Word with lemon/yellow to lime/green, especially during the colder months here in the north where limes can be of less than optimal quality.

Apparently my attempt at sarcasm went even further afield. In any case, while there are many bartenders at TVH that I trust, don't think for a second that you haven't been missed.

My apologies, sir, no offense was intended, though I certainly understand the negative connotations of the phrase "phoned in" and should have avoided it. I understood that you were without the proper tools to test this potentially delicious admixture and thus required the assistance of someone at the other end of some sort of telecommunications device. That was all that was intended by my poorly chosen words. I can only hope that my praise for the cocktail in question could negate the harm done by my meandering midnight missive.

There's nothing like the (relatively) barren cocktail landscape of Europe to make me appreciate returning home to the Violet Hour. We made our first trip back in over a month (we're one or twice a weekers usually) this evening and were very happy to find Troy and Michael behind the bar. It was unusually busy for a Monday night, but we still received excellent service as always. Troy made me his riff on the Improved Holland Gin Cocktail as well as a delicious Last Word. The former was prepared in the method of a sazerac, and involved a rinse of green chartreuse, which sadly was devoured by the giant nose of the Genevieve gin. Still, this could be the drink to bring the genevere style into the mainstream. It compared very favorably to the sazerac I made myself last night in complexity and mouth-feel, while the flavor was more balanced than any drink I've had with Genevieve. My drinking partner had a Sloe Gin Fizz and a yet to be named cocktail that Toby had phoned in the previous evening during a fit of revelation...it involved Sailor Jerry Rum and Tequila with Lemon and orange curacao. Absolutely delicious. It shouldn't work, but it did...certainly the most compelling drink of the night. It was smoky and sweet with just a hint of sour. I was not in a naming mood, the best I could come up with was the New Mexico Sour or Baja Sour...maybe I'm a one-hit wonder with the Secaucus Sling. Some places in NYC are more cutting edge or exclusive, and the Hemingway Bar certainly had its charm, but nothing I've seen can lead me to believe that on any given night the Violet Hour couldn't be the best cocktail bar in the world.

I do not know for sure, but I would hazard that the menu changes more frequently than that. You can compare a review from March here, from July here and then mine from November. All have similar dishes and tastes, langoustine carpaccio for example, but I don't get the impression that the menu completely changes at any given time as you describe.

I think it's an amazing place, a challenge to even get there, and then not an easy meal. It's is absolutely worth a trip, and I hope that I will be back. I think it really epitomizes what Michelin had in mind with the *** rating, requiring a commitment from the diner. It should be on every adventurous gourmet's wish-list. However, in the lead up and with the initial success of the first few courses I had built the expectations of the evening to an unattainable level, and the food could not meet that level in every course. I tried not to put anything negative in my review, because as I said I was feeling under the weather and don't want that to come through it my opinion of the place. Some of the flavors I just didn't get. The smoked eel and dai dai, for example...I was enjoying that dish until I got to that part. It wasn't that the smoked eel was bad, I just didn't understand why it was there. I had a similar experience with the 'beet root and mandarin textures'. Beets are one of my favorite ingredients, and what he did to them I have no idea because the little square of red jelly that was on the plate did nothing for me or the dish. Were these misses? I don't think I'd say so...the courses involved were still satisfying, they just weren't earth-shattering. He had a very steep hill to climb when he nearly made me cry during the amuses (the caviar). The Menu Découverte, the more expensive menu, was, I believe, 190 euro. With a bottle of wine and two of water, it pushed dinner for two to close to 450. At 25 euro, breakfast the following morning was a much better bang for the buck. Definitely try to stay at Hotel K if you go, not just for the breakfast, but because the environment is just a perfect compliment to the meal.

During a recent trip I was most pleasantly surprised by Café des Musées. It's between the Place des Vosges and the Picasso Museum. It's more of a lunch place than dinner in my opinion, but it serves some great traditional food with modern accents. I had a blood sausage terrine made with green chartreuse that was one of the best dishes I've had this year, and 3-course lunch for two with wine was 60 euro.