Eat What We Say!

February 7^th was French Bistro Day. At least it was for me.

A friend was in town, and suddenly had time, so we went to a little corner joint near my office, La Luncheonette that week. And on Thursday, my brother in law had free time for lunch, so again: La Luncheonette. On the corner of 18^th and 10^th, you can tell that this was an out of the way place five years ago, but much less so with Chelsea Piers, Chelsea Market, Equinox, the Gehry building and the new condos going up. I wonder, though, if they’ll survive the rent increases that drove my beloved Little Pie Company out of Chelsea.

The restaurant was low-key – not empty, but very quiet. It seems like a good place for a clandestine lunchtime rendezvous, but my friend and I talked shop and kids. I’ve had several things at La Luncheonette and enjoyed them all – as a Francophile, I love the Parisian bistro scene. I’m sorry, I dig Mongolian Hot Pot and Bibimbop and other allegedly ‘up and coming exotic foods’ but there’s something so spiritually and physically satisfying about a ’simple’ bistro meal. (I live in NYC, and am shocked that Bibimbop is considered exotic, though to be fair, I was sad to give up egg creams for crispy rice stone hotpot magic at The Mill near my alma mater. Columbia.) In fact, on our last trip in 2006, the Euro made the bistro scene basically all we could afford. We spent something like US$30/person (not including B, Jr. who hadn’t yet grown into his love of roast chicken), but Parisian bistros bear little resemblance to places like French Roast. I can say that there’s a degree of casual authenticity about La Luncheonette that, while it doesn’t architecturally resemble the archetypal Parisian Bistro (this is relevant because my dinner reservation was at Balthazar), it feels authentic. (And there were plenty of Parisian bistros that didn’t look like they were called out of central casting, either.)

Bistro food’s heavy, and I had a real date with Ms. B later in the evening, so I shied away from my usual favorites like the Steak au Poivre, and concentrated on the salad. There was the roast half chicken salad and the duck confit salad. I used to call chicken the compromise meat – it’s what you order when you think beef’s too rich, and fish too delicate. So you compromise and choose chicken. Granted this was before a close friend brought us into his family’s Sunday night roast chicken ritual, a/k/a ‘Poultistadt’, and before Ms. B mastered a lemon roast chicken recipe that involves brining. (Fried chicken is automatically exempt from any discussion of compromise meat, of course.)

I’ve had the roast chicken salad at LL before – it’s good, but you know what I really wanted to order from the salad family then: the duck confit.

Confit is a French word that means “crispy and delicious by cooking for a long time.” OK, I made that up, but it seems to be a reasonable translation. It’s a sort of cross between frying and stewing – the meat falls off the bone, yet the skin is just short of burned, crispy like a potato chip. I don’t know what’s happened to the layer of fat underneath the duck skin – I suppose that it has melted off, but somehow I fear (know) that much of it has been absorbed into the meat, thereby preserving its juicyness.

Oh, Christ, I had to look. Oh, the French are so pragmatic – it’s designed to preserve (as they said their heavy sauces were designed to cover up less than fresh beef), and look – so delicious! The Chinese bury eggs, the French soak duck in fat. French +1.

I ordered the Portobello mushroom appetizer – the mushrooms were rich and garlicky, but I was puzzled over the little bit of lettuce and radicchio that came alongside. They weren’t dressed (not even with a little oil and vinegar, that I could discern); were they meant to cleanse the palate after the mushrooms? I would have preferred a little dressing.

That wasn’t the problem with the duck confit salad, which came well dressed in a vinaigrette, covering the beets, (French) string beans. Atop the vegetative matter was the anti-vegetarian statement: the leg of duck, confit-atized. Crispy, moist, flavorful. Everything they’ve served there is competent French bistro fare – hearty, flavorful, on the rich side, simple. The dish came a bit heavy on the dressing side; I like it that way but you may not. I know LL can get smoky (stinky candles) and loud at night, but it’s the perfect quiet lunch place. The corner table in the back gets just enough daylight to combat winter gloom, and the room feels like it could be on some random sidestreet, as once made up far-west Chelsea.

Thursday night was a theme continuation.

Balthazar looks like the typical bistro; more upscale than Dôme, more like La Coupole, as I (vaguely) recall. It’s certainly way more polished than La Luncheonette – the bread’s better (they do have that little bakery next door), the butter’s soft, the service very professional. La Luncheonette’s service has always been casual – often friendly, sometimes indifferent, but still very ‘neighborhood-y’ and personal/intimate. I’m not griping – it was a semi-special evening for Ms. B and me, we were celebrating one of the anniversaries of our long courtship, which didn’t really happen on that date. We just wanted to celebrate it, having missed a few recently and seeing how Valentine’s Day was next week. So we told Balthazar that we were celebrating our anniversary (long story, and true – as Obi Wan would say – from a certain point of view. Actually, it’s way more true than telling Luke that ‘his father was killed by Darth Vader.’) The only tables open were at 6 and 9:30, and 9:30 just isn’t a childcare-friendly time (turns out having a child also limits your general restaurant-going and therefore, food blogging). 6 it was, but Ms. B was delayed by a long subway ride. We didn’t get seated till 6:40pm, and the staff took care of us – they gave us a lovely corner table, and treated us with (I imagine) a little extra solicitousness as befit the occasion.

Balthazar looks authentic, meticulously so, and watching the grande plateaus of seafood spiraling up from other tables certainly reminded me of the first time I ate at Coupole. But Coupole’s hardly just a Parisian bistro, is it? And Balthazar – packed, still a scene, noisy, with walk-in tables behind a nearly 2 hour queue – hardly just another bistro-simulacrum.

Ms. B wasn’t a fan of the entire selection of the giant seafood plateau (the clams, ferinstance), so we went for 3 orders of the oyster sampler and a shrimp cocktail. We haven’t had oysters since the Wellfleets on the Cape over the summer, and crikey, they were good. Fresh, slightly briny, nice texture. We have a strong disagreement on how to eat oysters; I like a little mignonette, maybe a dab of cocktail sauce – a tine of a fork’s trail of a streak – and slurp them up. Ms. B prefers only a squeeze of lemon, if at all, claiming my way masks the taste. We both love the liquid, though. We both are happy to eat them naked (the oysters, not us, since I don’t want to go near a shucking knife while naked, nor do I think most respectable oyster bars in the city would let us in undressed as La Luncheonette’s Portobello appetizer). We’re not good at identifying them – there were definitely the larger Wellfleets. No Kumomotos as we could see.

Ms. B had the cod – horrible food blogger that I am, I didn’t even want to try. See, e.g., analysis of ‘compromise meat’. I had the meat, why would I bother with the fish? Ms.B assured me that it was good, however. I had the special that evening, braised beef cheeks in a wine reduction. Turns out the beef cheeks had a fall of the bone (cheek) quality, like a good stew, but retained an intense beef-y flavor. Ms. B didn’t want to eat anything cheek-related in origin, so she stayed off my plate. The sauce was strong, a bit overpowering, but I associate that bistro cuisine. Desert was excellent – the carmelized banana tart was a winning selection. Ms. B had something else, I don’t remember, which was competent; she was helpfully steered away from the Upside-down Pineapple Cake, which, apparently, doesn’t benefit from the canned pineapples.

Balthazar works as a place where you’re as actively focused on your guests as well as the surroundings and food; if you’re there to reminisce or relax, its grand simulation of authenticity and volume prevent that. The food doesn’t demand the attention, and is competing with other sensory assaults. A festive group, a hearty meal, outbursts of laughter and wild gesticulation: check. A tired, married couple, looking to celebrate an important and very personal memory while trying to grab some needed mental break time – not so great.

Ms. B would likely say, however, “but the oysters were delicious!”

My friend, J, was in town for a rare visit, and the last time we had lunch was quite memorable - Balthazar, and we saw Bobby Valentine. Kenny Rogers had walked in the winning run.

Craftsteak doesn’t serve lunch, which deflated us for a moment. We decided to go to Spice Market, also near my office. We walked east on 13th street, ignoring the smell, and were the first people seated at 12:15pm. The interior was lovely, airy, open, very southeast Asia by way of Meatpacking district (clean, architected), of course. (Not that I know, I’m mostly a China/Korea/Japan kind of traveler.)

Indecision must have been obvious since our server hurried over, and were sold on the tasting menu, $58/pp. “It’s a sampling of our the best dishes,” she said. It occurred to me that we might look like tourists.

We had a shaved tuna sashimi dish, the lobster summer roll, shrimp with pineapple, avocado salad, samosas, pork satay, cod, corn and broccoli, fried rice (with a fried egg, yolk still runny), chicken, and two desserts - a chocolate brownie with carmelized banana, and a coconut fruit thing.

Family style, the server said, it’s meant to be shared and comes out as it’s done. I had no problem with this, as it’s the way I ate growing up. Which was sort of the problem, in the end.

What did I love?

The black pepper shrimp and sun-dried pineapple. It might be a bit sweet, but I liked the shrimp (which seemed to use a hoisin sauce). The chilled, tapioca dessert with the mango. Man, I wish I wasn’t so full at the end of the meal. The fried rice with egg yolk reminded me of something my grandma made, a fried egg, soy sauce over fried or white rice. The pork satay was tender, and the avocado salad had a Chinese mustard sauce, I think, that was delicious.

What would I skip? The chicken, while tasty, was kinda dry. The broccoli and baby corn (which I thought was not corn at all, but apparently it is) was a throwaway - why not use pea pod shoots? Something a little less ‘La Choy makes Chinese food’.

So I’ve eaten around Asia and Chinatown, and I found Spice Market pretty good - though I actually preferred the Chinatown Brasserie reimagination of the cuisine. And I left with that familiar aftertaste in my mouth, which was both familiar and disconcerting - never thought I’d have that leaving a JGV restaurant. Ultimately, it may be the disconnect of Asian stall/street food in a high end MePa eatery - if my expectations weren’t as high, given Spice Market’s parentage, I would have been happier. When food’s elevated to event/cultural/celebrity status, it has to bear the weight of sometimes unreasonable, or uneducated expectations.

Lunch was especially great time to eat there - the space really shines with some daylight, and I presume way easier to get a reservation than some dinner seatings.

Went to Singapore last year, mileage run and business trip combined. Chowhounders pointed me to No Signboard for the chili crab, though one advisor told me to skip to the pepper crab instead. I ignored the advice, and ate the chili crab. So here’s the test post including a picture.