Parigot (Grand St @ Lafayette) is our new "old standby" bistro in NYC

Carrie and I have been to Parigot several times now and we have never once been disappointed.

Well, one recent disappontment: when we were meeting a childhood friend and her family for a late lunch on Saturday at Parigot, they could not accommodate us, and we wound up going around the corner to a perfectly nice French/African place called L'Orange Bleue...

But we had brunch at Parigot today, and enjoyed it thoroughly, from the monster glass of fresh OJ to the last bit of garnish on the plate. :-). It's just good food cooked with love and skill, in a restaurant without a milligram of pretension.

Posted via email from Barry's posterous

A little New York City restaurant culture inside-baseball

Frank Bruni tears Graydon Carter a new one over his pretentious new restaurant, "Charles":

Charles one-ups them all. While Waverly doesn’t answer its phone, Charles doesn’t even have one, at least not one that’s published. To get a table I would send an e-mail message, and some unseen, unknown, disembodied reservations deity would write back. It was like I was in a “Bourne” movie, arranging a secret meet. I was the Joan Allen character, but with a better colorist.

I haven’t yet told you the wildest part, which is the restaurant’s windows — so Salinger, so Garbo. They’re covered in old newspapers and blue tape, as if the space is under construction or even condemned, and they’ve been that way for so long that when I paused on the sidewalk the other night to read the fine print, I learned that Sarah Palin had resuscitated the McCain candidacy.

The newspapers are at first funny, then odd, then just sort of sad, maybe because Charles doesn’t have enough else going for it. In the end I couldn’t get around that.

[...]

The lamb kebabs should be called tartare. That’s how close to raw they were. The salmon, supposedly pan-seared, was more like pan-spurned, by which I mean it was nearly raw, too. Charles is as stingy with heat as it is with light. Maybe it’s saving on utilities.

It shouldn’t have to, given what it charges for wine. On a recent list only two of about 60 reds were under $70, and I couldn’t find a white for under $60 — not that I’m scrimping! It made me wonder: aren’t the newspapers, the blue tape and the unpublished phone number velvet rope enough?

And did I really just say that? It doesn’t sound like me, but then we’re all sounding a little different since the Dow went south, Obama came east and Bernie Madoff went up the river.

Ribbing

The ribs were so good, that I was using Wildwood's ribs to teach my daughter how competition barbecue is judged. A RESTAURANT RIB. If you've never judged a barbecue contest, you don't understand how rare it is to get ribs of this quality in restaurants. The meat came off the bone only where bitten. The rib sweated lightly where the meat was removed. You could taste the meat and the seasonings and they actually complimented each other!

-- The proprietor of White Trash BBQ waxes ecstatic about Wildwood, the latest restaurant entry in New York City's barbecue joint explosion.

A mighty labor

New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, in the midst of giving a mediocre review to NYC dining institution The Four Seasons, on being "made" (identified as a critic) mid-meal:

The standouts on the menu aren’t as numerous as they should be. The signs of a restaurant that runs on two tracks — one for the anonymous, another for the anointed — are too obvious.

I get the sense that I’ve moved from the first to the second group about a third of the way into one of my dinners, with the arrival of a salad to be prepared tableside. Suddenly the romaine’s lone squire is joined by several others, who fuss and fret over the cart as if what’s under way isn’t a Caesar but a Caesarean.

Heh.

No Longer Young, But Still Turning Heads (Frank Bruni reviews The Four Seasons and gives it two stars in the New York Times, April 4, 2007)

Dinner at Danny's Place

Last night we had my delayed 40th birthday dinner (moved from its original date because I came down with the Mother Of All Colds the day before) at Eleven Madison Park, the flagship restaurant in the Danny Meyer empire.

We set out with the intention to do the "Gourmand" nine-course tasting menu, but that was just Too. Much. Food. when we actually contemplated the order, and so we went with the four-course prix fixe.

Because we are gluttons for punishment, or perhaps just gluttons, and because I'll only turn 40 once, we each ordered a course that featured shaved Alba truffles, thus incurring a "supplement" charge that essentially doubled the cost of dinner.

And worth every penny for a special occasion.

Carrie had:

• Marinated Hamachi with Butternut Squash and Pumpkin Seed Oil
• Lasagne of Butter Poached Nova Scotia Lobster with Satur Farms Spinach (with shaved truffles)
• Herb Roasted Millbrook Farms Venison with Salsify and Black Trumpet Mushrooms

...and for dessert, a chocolate-peanut torte and Moroccan mint tea.

I ate:

• Roasted Heirloom Beets with Lynnhaven "Chèvre Frais," Olio Verde and Nasturtium
• Risotto of Acquerello Carnaroli Rice with Parmigiano Reggiano (and truffles!)
• Fischer Farm Suckling Pig Confit with Cipollini Onions, Plum Chutney and Five Spice Jus

...and for dessert, black coffee and sheep's-milk yogurt cheesecake.

Every aspect of the food was gorgeous (the risotto with truffles and the cheesecake dessert were particular standouts on my side of the table; Carrie's entree, cooked a New York minute past blood-rare, was maybe the most perfect piece of venison I've ever tasted, but it was all absolutely sublime.)

There's a sixty-page wine list on offer at Eleven Madison Park, but the best option (to me) for small parties of wine drinkers seemed to be pairing wines by the glass with each course, since the menu is varied and the restaurant offers more wines by the glass than most restaurants do by the bottle.

I know a few people in New York who seem to find the "Meyer hospitality" approach (American-style service, relaxed and friendly) off-putting, and for the life of me I can't understand why. One thing I noticed immediately was how beautifully the servers seemed to mirror the moods of the tables they were handling.

Our waiter was friendly and thorough, but found us deeply engaged in conversation and kept a polite distance aside from service necessities. (Carrie and I have an abiding habit of falling into Intense Conversations at restaurants; if you eavesdrop, though, we're likely talking about something like the relative merits of different Tom Waits covers. Thank God we married each other; we're saving two families.) The pace of our meal was relaxed and pleasant.

At the table next to us, two very serious Europeans were tasting about five different champagnes before dinner, and the wine staff, recognizing wine geeks when they saw them, were reeling off information about the vintages like they were doing guest spots on the Food Channel.

Directly across from us, a smiling waitress gently led an enthusiastic but perplexed table of out-of-town businessmen through the "intricacies" of ordering without being a bit condescending (I think you could walk into Eleven Madison Park never having eaten in a fine restaurant in your life and be made to feel right at home--and I really like that, actually) and diagonally across the room, a SWAT team of waiters practiced damage control and noise containment with a huge party of garishly dressed Long Islanders who arrived drunk and might well have genuinely been as stupid as they were loud (there, in one sentence I've supplied enough condescension for a small army.)

The point is, everybody was getting the level and the kind of service that they seemed to need, as unobtrusively as possible. Despite the wonderfulness of the cooking, I notice that I wrote four paragraphs on the food and five on the service.

And I think that's the secret of Mr. Meyer's success.