Andrew Fenton
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Posts posted by Andrew Fenton
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We went to Vintage last week and had a disappointing experience. Since it was happy hour, and since we are basically cheapskates, we took advantage of their happy hour special: $4 glasses of the house wines. Unfortunately, the house wines aren’t really worth drinking. The cabernet sauvignon was thin and unremarkable (sorry, I didn’t note any of the wines’ names). One of my dining partners called the pinot grigio “undrinkable” and ordered a glass of the vinho verde, which wasn’t bad. It also wasn’t one of the house wines, which I guess goes to show what’s worth ordering at Vintage.
Honestly, I don’t know if it was fair to be disappointed by the house wines. 4 bones is really cheap, and I wasn’t expecting greatness. But I’d hope that a wine bar would be able to find good, cheap wines for basic drinking.
The food was good, or at least had the potential to be good. I ordered the house burger medium rare, and was impressed to see that it was actually served that way: most places will try to slip you a medium. Smoked bacon and roasted peppers were a nice touch. But it was also cold, as if it had been sitting around for twenty minutes.
Which in fact it probably had: it took a good forty minutes for our food to arrive. And that was just the tip of the giant jutting iceberg of bad service. It took a long time for the waitress to take even our drink orders. Twice, after we ordered a glass of wine, the waitress forgot to bring it, and we had to order again. I’ll grant that she seemed frazzled, but she lost any sympathy she might have gotten from me by carrying a pad and not writing any of our orders down. That’s fine if you can keep it all together, but if you can’t, honey, please honor the memory of your hominid ancestors and remember that you are a tool user. That apron isn't there as a fashion statement!
I figure I’ll try them again in six months or so; at that point they’ll either have worked out their staffing issues or they’ll be out of business. (God, that sounds cold-hearted. Oh well.)
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So I made some coffee granita the other day. It worked great; easy to make and very satisfying. But then I made the mistake of serving it (con panna, natch) for dessert last night. The caffeine kept me up until 3 AM...
But at least it gives me the excuse to eat granita for breakfast!
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anchovy (ok, so this ingredient is not in Marcella's version, but my 3-year-old insisted...)
You have trained the nippa well! When I was three, I only insisted on malt liquor...
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"The Best House Pizzeria"? Obviously, The Wurst House in U-City has changed hands. I'd always wondered what a pizza joint was doing with a name that suggested you were going to find German fare inside anyway.
I used to live around the corner from the Wurst House, and I can confirm that you'd have to be high to consider the pizza anywhere near the best of anything. Unless the new owners have really improved the product, it's totally typical greasy Greek-style pizza.
Ditto Lickety Split (so that's what it's called; it's in my current neighborhood and I'd never noticed a name). It's completely forgettable.
It's easy to imagine that the Grey Lodge has good pizza; on our Northeast pizza trip we skipped the food and went straight for the beer there. (When was that trip? 2005? 2004?)
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Also in Chinatown, Nan Zhou's hand-pulled noodle soups are just great. The broths are good, if not spectacular, but the fresh noodles transcend anything, I'd probably eat them in a bowl of hot water.
I finally made it to NZ (because when it's ninety degrees out, who WOULDN'T want a bowl of hot soup?) and those noodles are indeed transcendent. I weep for all the years I've spent not eating it. (And needless to say, it's cheap! 5 bones for a nice bowl of roasted duck noodle soup.)
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OK I finally decided on the menu for tomorrow night. I dropped the cauliflower fritters in favour of chickpea fritters b/c there's only 2 ingredients in the chickpea fritter recipe (chickpea flour, parsley, and seasoning and water) and we're trying to pull off a longer menu...
All I can say is, that menu looks tremendous. You have some lucky guests!
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Lasrt night we had another recipe from C. Wright's "Cucina Paradiso", Baked Rice. He has two recipes in there. A festive one with a very long list of ingredients and a simpler one that contains some veal, proscuitto, cheese and a few other things. So I made the second one. The rice is arborio, cooked till tender and mixed with chopped boiled egg, pecorino (Locatelli), and some of the meat cooking sauce. The filling was supposed to be veal but I used chopped up turkey thigh meat instead.
Elie, this looks terrific. It looks like a variation of the baked macaroni that I'm still planning to make, one of these days... Can you pass along the recipe? Next week, I have friends coming over for dinner; I'd promised them a Sicilian dinner, only to learn that one of them won't eat fish. (Grr.) This could be perfect.
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Here is a critical difference, the Greeks...came as colonizers...
Regarding your question about Sardegna and Sicily, comparing the cuisines of the two islands, I suspect you answer your question about differences & "influences" in the first sentence I have quoted here. Most invaders come with the intentions of colonizing, but not all develop major settlements. While Andrew the Syracusophile should jump in to speak about the ancient world, Sicily is associated with figures such as Aeschylus, Archimedes and Plato.
As much as I love the Greeks, I don't know that we should privilege them too much as colonists over invaders. Greek Sicily was the wealthiest part of the Mediterranean (at least during the fifth century BCE) and the Greek influence on the island was profound and long-lasting. But they can be described as invaders as much as the Romans or Normans or Muslims can; it's just harder to write history from a Siceliot or Elymian point of view.
And most of the peoples who invaded Sicily (at least before the 19th and 20th centuries) stuck around and left their marks. There's a scene in the movie Patton where George C. Scott is in Palermo and describes the city as the most invaded patch of real estate in the world. He lists all the people who've invaded the island, from the Phoenicians to the Americans... it's quite a list.
As to the Sardinia vs. Sicily question, my guess is that it has to do with Sicily's greater importance in the economy of the Mediterranean. Thanks to its size, agricultural importance and location! location! location!, Sicily was very rich for a very long time; Sardinia, as far as I know, has always been kind of a backwater. The real question is, why did Sicily go from being so wealthy (as it was at least up through the Normans) to being so poor? I have my theories, but that's another topic...
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Thank you Thank you Thank you MAF and Andrew Fenton!
Didn't see this until just now... you're welcome! Glad you had a good trip, and kudos for getting so far off the beaten path.
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Okay, last night's dinner featured a Syracusan-style fish soup. This isn't as elaborate or rich as some other versions (I have a recipe for a Catanese soup that includes olives and tomato paste- and Campanian fish soups are a whole other story as well). It's built on a fish broth (heads, shells, white wine) and three kinds of fish: branzino, red snapper and shrimp. And that's close to it: some onion and a little garlic, some tomato and celery, all resting on a slice of toasted bread:
(The recipe comes from Gosetti, but Clifford Wright has a very similar recipe as well.) It's a good summer soup, refreshing and satisfying. The soup cooks at a relatively low temperature (40 minutes at 350 degrees in the oven) so the fish is cooked, but the vegetables still have some texture to them.
The only recommendation I'd make about this soup is to avoid leftovers. You know how lots of Ideally,soups are better the next day? This is not one of them.
For dessert, we had cannoli. I confess, I didn't make these: but one of the perks of living in Philadelphia is ready access to cannoli that are as good as anything I ate in Sicily. And I don't have to deep fry them. That's a good thing; for me, deep frying always results in clouds of black smoke, terrified cats, terrified me, alarms going off, and it all ends in tears...
Here's the photo:
(For best results, please put on your 3-D glasses).
To drink was a bottle of 2005 Colosi bianco from Messina. Not a great wine, but it was fine, and geographically appropriate...
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I noticed last week that yet another Mexican bodega had opened on 9th Street, this one in the semi-dead zone between Washington Avenue and Cheesesteak Corner, where the (Chinese-run) Great Wall Seafood Market lasted all of about four months the previous year.
I managed to miss that seafood market. Maybe it's just as well: it strikes me that "Great Wall Seafood Market" is a little bit like "Arizona Seafood Market" or "Rocky Mountain Seafood Market". (Well, maybe not so much that one: at least they have oysters in the Rockies...)
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What is the traditional arancini filling? The ones I got from the corner trattoria in Florence seemed to be filled with leftover risotto from the night before.
Leftover risotto is the medium. They're usually filled with ragu, peas, prosciutto: that kinda thing...
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What a fantastic goal. I suppose it is true of much of Italy, but when you get into the country and the small comuni of Sicily, you can really experience the reality of living in an agricultural community that holds fast to tradition. The meals are prepared with what is in season and much of the conversation is of the weather and its effect on the crops. These are not large farms. Each family has an "orto", a kitchen garden that grows most of the produce for their own table. It is amazing to me how they produce so abundantly in hillsides steeply terraced in rocky limestone. I receive emails talking about the crops...their recent extreme heat (as high as 110 C) is causing the little olives to dry and drop to the ground so the local harvest will be small this year, reducing the amount of oil each family will produce from their family groves. Here is a picture of an orto in Ferla, near my cousin's house.
Hey, I know that area! Not Ferla exactly, but that limestone plateau above Syracuse. This spring I wasn't far away, in Pantalica (the rockingest town of all Sicily, being the namesake of both Pantera and Metallica). It's a gorgeous area, and your photo is very evocative of the really dramatic landscape of that part of Sicily. I can't imagine trying to do agricultural work on those hills, but people have been doing it for a long, long time, since at least the Bronze Age.
(I've been meaning to write up something about Pantalica for a long time now, and you've inspired me to go ahead and do it. Thanks!)
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this week i made green beans in sort of a caponata-esque preparation, with the sultanas and pine nuts and vinegar and sugar and herbs and oil and cinnamon and whatnot. i could have sworn i read this as a recipe somewhere in one of my books or on the web, but i can't find it anywhere. maybe i'm crazy. but i was thinking of you guys.
Maybe you just sorta absorbed the caponata mood; those are pretty standard ingredients for a sweet and sour caponata, a la the Batali's. (I prefer the more acidic, olivey kind, but that's me.)
Mind you, I'm not saying you aren't crazy...
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Welcome, Alfonso! Great blog. (I've had that Rapitala syrah, by the way. It's great.)
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The first time I had fresh sardines, I was a university student gone to Madrid to study and the next summer visited the Marseille home of a classmate. We took a boat out to an island near Chateau d'If for a day of swimming, first stopping by a fishing boat to buy a bagful of freshly caught sardines. When noon came, we gathered sticks and bult a fire. We rubbed the sardines' scales off in the water then speared them on sticks, otherwise uncleaned, and held them over the fire to roast. Bliss!!
I have a picture of some of thse lovely fresh sardines from Golden's but am unable to figure out how to insert it in this msg.
Those are beautiful sardines, Dorine. (I've attached them to the end of this post: the key thing is to use the IMG tag, and paste the image URL into it.) As Bob knows, I've been looking for fresh sardines or anchovies: a couple of recent trips to RTM and the Italian Market have come up with nothing.
HOWEVER, I learned today that DiBruno's has alici sott'olio, one of my favorite things. They're not quite as good as what I had in Campania, but they're still pretty good. (And they must be getting the anchovies from somewhere, right? Lisa, are you reading this? Can you help me out?)
sardines below:
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My cousins live in a little mountain comune, Ferla, in the province of Siracusa. Every April they head out to gather the wild asparagi. They are slender stalks, with a stronger flavor and a bit more chewy than what we are used to. Yes, they saute it in olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. Wonderful flavor.
Wild asparagus is the best EVER. Back in April (when they were in season in Lazio) I gorged myself on it. I'm glad to know that it's native to Sicily, too. All the more reason for me to move to Syracuse. Seriously, I'm going to do it.
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Actually, it was caciocavallo that I had in mind when asked. (I use RS all the time.) It seems like the kind of thing you'd find hanging up in some of the older Italian-American stores.
Pontormo, if you're having trouble getting caciocavallo in DC, just come up to Philly. This morning DiBruno's was offering a special on two kinds of it: regular and smoked. w00t!
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Wow. I've been away for a couple of days, and y'all have been very, very busy: bravi!
On arancini and suppli: they're pretty close. But arancini are larger, saffron-yellow and fried to a light golden color (instead of a darker brown), and are shaped like oranges or pears (as opposed to a sort of egg shape). Peas are very, very good in arancini (often with prosciutto: even better!) I've never seen a mushroom ragu in arancini or suppli (and I've eaten a lot of suppli), but for vegetarians it'd be a good substitution. I don't think cheese is typical for arancini (as opposed to suppli, for which they are par for the course).
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I don't remember for sure; it's been a year or two. But I think it's on or near Lancaster Ave. The last time I walked by, the berries had stained the sidewalk.
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There's a tree on the sidewalk over in Powelton Village, not far from Zocalo. Probably not what you're looking for... but the price is right!
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I'm wondering if the menus in Sicily are in Italian or Sicilian?
Pretty much everywhere in Italian. My guess is that a restaurant with a menu in dialect would be doing it as an affectation. Outside of old people in really hick towns, I don't think there are many Sicilians who only speak Sicilian.
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The other day while I was walking down Passyunk, a restaurant billing itself as Abruzzese caught my eye. Unfortunately, they were closed, and didn't have a menu posted, so I don't know whether it lives up to its billing.
I suspect that is Le Virtu, which has not yet open. This old Inky link says last spring, but "best laid plans..."
They served that tasty duck breast at the Passyunk tent last spring with the Book & Cook.
Just went by it again tonight. It's Mamma Maria's, at 1637 S. Passyunk. Again, I don't know anything about the food. But it was packed.
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All riiiiiight! I'd been thinking that you know, I haven't had sushi since December (fish carpaccio is good, but it ain't the same)... then looking over this thread forced me, zombie-like, to march over to the phone and make a reservation for tonight.
... and we went, and it was really good. I admit that we stuck to a pretty unadventurous menu (no flan this time), but everything was well-prepared. Good sushi and soba soup, with really terrific shrimp tempura.
The service was efficient, maybe too efficient; we were in and out in about half an hour. Not much time to digest. I suppose that if we'd ordered off the main plates menu, that'd have slowed things down a little bit. Next time, I suppose...
Best Mexican in Philly
in Pennsylvania: Dining
Posted
This morning a group of eGulleteers converged on Restaurant Acapulco (1144 S. Ninth St.) to try their Sunday barbacoa special. The restaurant is well within the Washington Avenue Good Eating Zone, just a block or so away from La Lupe. It's easy to recognize thanks to their sign, which also gives a subtle hint about the especialidad de la casa:
Why only on Sunday? Well, you couldn't eat this little fellow on just any day:
(But remember, you're eating goat, not a goat, especially a cute little goat! I'm pretty sure that this goat had a nasty disposition.)
Anyway, goat is sort of a standout on the menu; the other specialty of the house seems to be seafood. After we'd ordered, a beautiful whole fried snapper came by. It was gorgeous. Still, we came for goat, and we were gonna get our goat. One way or another.
But first, chips, pico de gallo, salsa verde and a dish of beans:
Could there have been more chips? Why yes, there could have been. If there had been, would I have eaten them all like some sort of half-man/half-pig creature from the island of Dr. Moreau? Why yes, I would have; and probably not have had room for the rest of the meal.
Oddly, not everybody was psyched about dipping their toe into the shadowy pools of goativorousness. Appropriately for brunch, then, here's an omelette made with spicy sausage:
The goat special came with a bowl of broth. Goat broth? Probably, though it wasn't overwhelmingly goaty:
It was spicy, with a sheen of oil floating on top as a heat-accelerator. But no time to admire the soup because up next was the piece de resistance (hard to resist, actually):
That's some barbacoa there, bub. Some bones, not too much fat, good flavor, nicely browned. And yes, that is in fact a side dish of spaghetti. Why spaghetti? A nod to the Italian Market location? A chef trying his hand at fusion cuisine? Or a culinary remnant of the Calabrese invasion during the Mexican-Italian War? This is a mystery. But the combination of spaghetti, tomato sauce, Parmesan and queso fresco was oddly tasty.