Tuesday, May 28, 2013.
Cannoli, Big Green Eggs, And St. Lawrence. The Coolness Of Serendipity
One of our best Round Table radio shows happened. That's what they do, happen. Planning doesn't seem to guarantee anything, except for total failure when it's no planning at all is done.
The first guest was Arthur Brocato, representing the third generation of the Angelo Brocato gelateria. He brought with him a box of cannola (plural of cannoli). That made a lot of faces smile around the radio studios, mine included.
Jeff James and Chef Caleb Cook (great name for a chef) showed up from St. Lawrence, the patron saint of chefs and accountants. This is a decidedly secular restaurant in the second block of North Peters. I have heard many glowing reports about it, but have not yet tried it. Jeff and Chef (that would make a good name for a comic strip) made sure I knew that the place has been open for a bit over a year, and can no longer be considered too new.
The menu is ambitious. It's also right with the trends in having a substantial number of vegetarian dishes among the standard ones. Also here are several sandwiches and hamburgers, some unusual--the the turduckhen burger. "Thanksgiving on French bread!" Chef called it.
At the other end of the red-bean-shaped studio desk was Fred Rittler, the boss of Bassil's Ace Hardware, and the master marketer of the Big Green Egg in these parts. In fact, he sells all kinds of grills and grill accoutrements. Fred makes at least an annual appearance. Of all the topics than come up on The Food Show, nothing surpasses outdoor grilling.
So what made this a good show? Everybody was laughing, was what. When that dynamic appears, the show becomes too entertaining to ignore. I wish it were always thus, but laughter happens.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013.
Exploring The Coolness Of Serendipity.
To dinner at Serendipity, which I hoped to be able to review for CityBusiness this week. I was happy to see that the long-promised new menu is in force. Like the old one, it's fascinating but not especially appetizing. This is because Chef Chris DeBarr's modus operandi is to combine foods and use techniques counter-intuitively.
The way the menu is written, he clearly has his tongue in his cheek. (There are no veal cheeks on the menu, however.) For example, we are informed that no pasta was hurt in the making of the beet ravioli. That's a holdover from not only from the previous menu but Chris's previous restaurant.
I began with a cold asparagus soup with an island of bread covered with melted (but now cold, intentionally) Brie cheese. This sounded iffy at best and didn't look all that great. But it was actually delicious. Typical Chris dish.
He went over the edge on the second course, an entree that I was treating as a mid-meal pasta dish. The sauce was excellent, with a mix of stock and cream with wild mushrooms and seared shrimp. The pasta part was bizarre. Made of a mix of semolina and potatoes, it was cut into blocks about the size of the potatoes in a beef stew. I tried my best, but couldn't find anything appealing about these starchy jujubes.
The entree was almost normal. Its center was a flatiron steak, a good cut we don't see often. (It comes from the bottom of the chuck roast.) Here it was seared first, then sliced into strips about half an inch wide and thick, four inches long. It came with a rectangle of potatoes au gratin, with a pile of arugula on the side. Nothing to complain about here except, once again, the temperature of the dish. I mean the dish itself, which was disconcertingly cool to the touch. But are all dishes carrying hot food themselves hot these days? They must be, because when I adjusted the position of the plate before me, its coolness registered immediately.
Despite that, this was a good plate of food.
The dessert was named for Elvis. In included all the flavors Elvis Presley was reported to have liked in a sandwich: bananas, peanut butter and bacon. This also included ice cream, between two hemispheres of baked choux pastry. A shadow of bananas Foster in the flavor. The bacon's flavor stayed out of the way, for which I was thankful. The bacon-in-desserts play is one of the silliest look-at-me food affections of the past decade, if not of all time.
Apparently Chris doesn't work on Tuesdays, but that's not why I came tonight. I wish he had been, so I could ask whether the cool temperatures served me tonight are a reference to the approaching hot months in New Orleans.That might explain everything.
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