Category: Restaurants

Spain–He Is Risen!

Now that I’m Greek Orthodox, I’m not supposed to say this, but today is Easter. And you’d think that would be a day of rest in Spain, right? I mean, teams of 40 men have been carrying immensely heavy statues through the streets nearly all day, every day for a week. There was a special 100th-anniversary-of-something procession yesterday with all of the statues. Today everyone kicks back and eats, right?

Yeah, no. Three more groups are parading today, starting at noon. Como se dice ‘overkill’?

But to be fair, even last night I was still stunned by a procession. We caught one coming up a hill, without much of a crowd around. There’s this great super-slow Doppler effect with the band, which follows behind the statue. So the music’s getting louder and louder, but if you’re around a bend you can’t really see anything. And then the music is bouncing off the walls of the buildings super-loud just as the statue, surrounded by candles, emerges from the side street.

And then, as the statue goes by, and you’re boggling at how heavy it is, the band finally emerges and it is even LOUDER. And the bass drums go by last.

I saw this effect for the first time a few nights ago, with a statue of Christ hauling the cross, surrounded by centurions with huge feathers in their helmets. When the statue emerged from the side street, with the band blaring, all we saw first was the feathers. By the time the whole statue was visible, I expected Jesus and the soldiers to be doing a big kick line routine.

On the research front, things have gotten a little easier. We’ve figured out the route to break out of our little procession island, and know better to avoid bars right on the routes, because they’re mobbed and are basically pulling tapas out of their asses. “Beer coasters? Toss ’em in the fryer! Forty more people just showed up!”

Yesterday was a good day for research–I checked a fair amount of stuff of my list, and it even felt a little easy and like I was ahead of the game.

Then I looked at my watch, and I realized I’d been walking, with Beverly tagging along behind, for ten hours straight.

We started out after our churros and chocolate–the logical thing to eat when it’s 44 degrees out. But apparently the rest of the city thought so too. I have never seen bars so frenzied, even at night. The place where we did finally get our ch-and-ch fix–an excellent rec from AV–looked like a war zone inside, with empty chocolate cups four deep and two high stacked all along the bar. So we sat outside, which was for the best, since we were wearing every layer of clothing we packed (six each), and it would’ve been too difficult to adjust to a heated room.

The chocolate was thick as pudding, and the churros actually had a little ridgy texture, which I have seen only up in northern Spain–down south here, they’re usually they’re just smooth round tubes. And they were so perfectly fried and light they were almost empty inside. We shared a table with an older Spanish couple, the only people we saw all day who were as bundled up as we were.

Later, I admit, we did stop for a fairly nice lunch. Lovely baby beans with ham, and some nice fancy mushrooms. A real live green salad. And some too-creative-sounding veal with cardamom that turned out to be good. Finished with a little dab of orange wine that the waiter, who looked like Peter Dinklage, gave me for free, because apparently it was available only by the bottle. Crazy.

And later we took a 15-minute break in a bar that went from funky-neighborhoody to totally skeevy in the time it took for the foam to settle on our beers. While I was looking in the kitchen and noticing that when the sign said “food cooked with love,” they really meant “food cooked with cigarette butts and dirty wads of paper towels,” the older regulars at the bar were replaced by strung-out hippies, one of whom was doing the junkie lean into his beer. The review I was writing in my head was quickly discarded, and I pushed my octopus tapa around, feeling bad that it had died in vain. We fled up the street and took solace in a church with a very strange collection of artifacts, none labeled.

Which reminds me–earlier in the day, we saw an honest-to-God shrunken head in another museum! Why that museum is not listed in the guidebook I cannot for the life of me imagine. I can’t wait to rectify that oversight, and type the words “shrunken head” in the manuscript! First I will have to figure out what the whole point of the museum is, though–the guided tour was in Spanish, and while I thought I understood what the guy was saying most of the time, when I strung it all together at the end for Beverly, I realized it made no sense at all.

I’m sure a million other funny things have happened, but they’ve all been beaten out of my head by those bass drums. Monday is going to be quiet, right?

Spain: F***ed by Grandma

My mom has this joke involving a guy who sees a sign for Grandma’s Whorehouse. He gets all excited, and follows the sign all over the place, then after a long time through streets and down hallways, he winds up in a back alley facing another sign that reads “You’ve just been fucked by Grandma!”

We’ve said that twice now, after meals, which is not a good track record.

See, I have this ethic that if a restaurant is expensive and/or far away, that’s the restaurant that I should definitely eat at (as opposed to cruise by and ogle the food and the people, which, it’s true, is the case for some restaurants in guidebooks). Because if it sucks, it’s going to suck extra hard, and the bad vibes from the angry traveler will rain down on me.

Now, after two nearly back-to-back meals that were both expensive and far away, I’m thinking…maybe expensive and far away is just a guarantee of terrible? I can certainly think of a few examples from places I’ve lived–there’s that special-occasion/Sunday-drive factor that puts people in the frame of mind to enjoy whatever crap is put in front of them. But if I lived by this new judgment, and just ignored all restaurants in this category, there’d be no room for El Bulli. (Which is not my territory for this book, but you get the idea.)

The first act of Grandma was a couple of days ago, in the beach town of Almunecar. Following the recommendation of another guidebook (I know, bad form–but it happens!), I drove out to this place that allegedly merged Belgian and Spanish. It was the tail end of lunch (see, already I’m getting late for things), so when I saw some of the initial warning signs of badness, I didn’t feel like I had other options. These warning signs were: painted wicker furniture, a menu in a terrible curlicue font and many tables full of families.

The waiter glided up and told me it was a “menu gastronomico,” which I thought might be a polite way of saying “It’s a little fancier than you’re used to, honey,” but was in fact referring to the set eight-course menu that they were serving that day.

As we sat down, I noticed some food on other tables. I saw red-leaf lettuce as a garnish. I saw something that looked suspiciously like fish fingers. I saw that the waiters’ vests fit them all poorly, and that one of the waiters had a palsy. And yet, I still did not run.

We settled into our slightly-too-low wicker chairs (as those damn wicker chairs always are). The first course was unobjectionable–avocado, goat cheese and pimientos in a twee little column.

But it went so downhill from there. I’ve blotted the traumatic details from my mind, but suffice to say, I now know how to say “fish fingers” in French. (Goulettes, I think it is.) And I’m saying that even though there was foie gras and prunes soaked in Armagnac. Somehow, in the world of high-end dining, even that has become a horrible, horrible cliche.

So…that was interesting. And cost about $100. (Can I just complain at this point that I get paid in dollars, and the euro has of course gained value since I did all the math for my expenses and signed my contract? Argh.)

It was also illuminating because this other guidebook that recommended the place sounds very authoritative on the food front. But if that gets a fancy best-of-the-best star, then I think I can safely chuck that book, and no longer feel a twinge of guilt every time I think about poaching from it.

Grandma’s Round 2 came last night, in Granada. We drove up a million mountain roads (it’s true–the Moor’s Last Sigh is just a highway pullout now), toured the Alhambra and finally found our hotel. We’re on the edge of town, because we have the car at this juncture, and I noticed we’re actually very close to Granada’s expensive, out-of-town-but-allegedly-worth-the-drive place. It’s listed in all the guidebooks I have as being stupendous.

It’s a Monday, but I call to make reservations. Actually, I ask, “Do we need reservations for tonight?” and the guy says, “Why, yes, indeed!” So I get a reservation for half an hour hence, using my new alias, Sara. (Turns out Zora means ‘whore’ in Spain Spanish–no wonder people look at me funny. Also, when I ask waiters what ‘cogollos’ means–I just did a Google image search, and all I got were pictures of pot plants.)

We get ourselves looking moderately fancy–as fancy as possible, considering it’s freezing outside and I didn’t pack for a nice restaurant and cold weather. Suffice to say I’m wearing my fancy shoes with socks.

We trundle down there, and even from our hotel it seems like a long haul. We stride in through the door–nobody. We walk up the grand alabaster stairs–re-nobody. Just the toilets, marked with cheesy brass flamenco dancers and bullfighters. (Did I mention? The place in Almunecar had those terrible pissing-children plaques. Another terrible sign.)

Finally, I try one of the many unmarked inner doors–ah, there’s the party. Or at least a couple of members of the waitstaff. I give my alias, they consult the list seriously, and then…we’re whisked into an empty dining room. In the next room over, we can hear a few people–but we’d foolishly chosen non-smoking when given the choice. I thought back to college, when smart people I knew said they were smokers on their housing forms, so they’d get cooler roommates.

So, we sit alone in this giant tchotchke-filled dining room, every table set with every piece of silver and possible glass. The walls are so crammed, it’s like a Spanish version of TGIFriday’s.

Our waiter, however, doesn’t have much flair. In fact, he’s a little skinny and anxious. He gives us English menus, but I have to ask for the Spanish because the English is so strange and unappetizing.

After we finally order, the waiters arrive with a plate of toasted bread with olive oil–appealing, not stupid-fancy–and our amuse-bouche. Which is hideous. It’s this poor denuded, hollowed-out tomato that’s hiding a wad of inferior tuna, set on a bed of pimiento. There’s some gratuitous eight-inch-long spiky cracker thing sticking out of the top. The tomato is horrible, all sickly and wan (when over in Almeria province, there are special tomatoes in season–argh!), and the whole thing reminds me only of what I had for breakfast the day before.

Worst of all, it’s cloaked in this horrendously bitter olive oil. And our toasted bread is soaking in the same vile bitterness.

It all goes downhill from there: the first artichokes in my life that I’ve not been able to eat, some off-tasting shrimp and this blood-pudding lasagna, which is actually the best of the bunch, but the sweet tomato-carrot sauce on it is cloying.

By the time our main dish, a baby leg of lamb, turned up, we were very dispirited. Which was sad, because the lamb was pretty good. Not trying to be anything but lamb, with a little rosemary, and nice crispy skin. But it was so wee (it was billed as suckling lamb), it was depressing. There’s no reason to eat suckling lamb–it doesn’t taste any better than regular lamb. Let the little guys frolic a while! Eat some grass… I’ll check back later, when it doesn’t seem quite so pointless to kill it and serve it in some random restaurant by the side of the road on a Monday night.

Anyhoo, we at least had a little room for dessert. But the dessert list looked lame, except for one thing. Which they were out of.

We high-tailed it out of there. The diners in the other room had just left, and we were the only people in the place. We went upstairs to the bathrooms, we peered at the weird decor… Why was a reel-to-reel tape player sitting next to an old Singer sewing machine in a tableau of Olde Thinges? And why did that giant oil painting depict a naked boy with a very prominently shaded penis, and a creepy-looking man with his arm around his shoulder?

And why, oh why, did that basket of decorative apples still have their little produce stickers on? If I’d noticed that when I walked in the door, maybe I would’ve actually run out. But maybe not. After all, I’d driven all this way…

Remember, kids, I eat at the bad places, so you don’t have to. I get fucked by Grandma, so you don’t have to.

The New Illiteracy, Brought to You by Chili’s

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve got this little strip of suburban plastic at the southern end of Astoria. One of the bigger tenants is an Applebee’s.

And that Applebee’s has a big ol’ freakin’ apple on top of it.

applebees

When I saw this, I immediately thought of Campeche, Mexico. Like many Spanish colonial towns, Campeche didn’t have street signs at first. People referred to corners instead, and named them for objects or animals, which were marked with a drawing or a figure. In Campeche, the corner known as “el rincon del venado” is still marked by a somewhat battered statue of a deer (which I can’t find a photo of, unfortunately) atop one of the buildings.

This isn’t unique to Campeche. Most of medieval Europe used this same navigation, and it was handy in colonial towns where new streets were built and named quickly (and unmemorably–the Spanish just used numbers).

So the Applebee’s sign makes sense here in Queens–the streets here are also unmemorably numbered, and there is certainly a polyglot population.

But the bad aspect of medieval signage is that it was really adopted because no one could read.

Is that what’s happening now? It sure seems like it.

Especially because it’s not just Applebee’s.

chilis_bldg

Chili’s is probably even more thorough in this than Applebee’s is–most restaurants have the gigundo chili on it. And with its logo, Chili’s has gone so far as to take all but one of the letters out of its name:

logo_chilis

When I was in Chicago in January, we passed the Weber Grill restaurant. This has perhaps the most medieval look of all, the way it’s sticking off the building:

weber-grill

I can practically hear someone saying, “I’ll meet you at el rincon del Weber…”

I was on the Upper West Side last week, and saw that Dunkin’ Donuts is following the trend too, by affixing a giant coffee cup to its awning. I didn’t get a picture of that, but here’s another version, out in Brooklyn:

dunkin-cup-in-bklyn

What’s funny about this one is that there’s still lettering on the cup. Dunkin’ Donuts is basically admitting that it doesn’t “own” the takeaway coffee market–but it’s hoping that if it just makes its own logo big enough, it will suffice. (And can I add that it’s just plain sad that the more obvious symbol–duh, a doughnut!–is not even an option, due to health concerns.)

I knew standards in the U.S. were slipping–we’re more like a third-world country than anyone wants to admit. But if we’re going back to the illiterate Middle Ages on top of it all, it’s worse than I thought.

Any signs of diner illiteracy near you?

Shoney’s or Bust

In a roundabout way, I just really amused myself and got a little trip down memory lane. Randomly, at the end of a post, Cook Eat Fret sent me to the following link:

Shoney‘s

Yeah, that Shoney’s. Now click the link. And once you’ve laughed, close the window. Otherwise the terrible music starts–complete with yokel-y whistling–and the pictures of the food start–and lord knows, you don’t want to scorch that onto your little eyeballs.

I’d laugh even harder, except: I kinda like Shoney’s. Or I used to, the last time I at there, which was probably at least half my lifetime ago (that’s 18 years, people–18 years! holy crapola).

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Rules for Restaurant Reviewing

A little while back, I mentioned the blog New York Knife & Fork.

My suspicions about its overall uselessness were confirmed when she reviewed the joint right around the corner from my house, a Bosnian restaurant called Pasha.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that a restaurant reviewer (especially a self-proclaimed one) should adhere to a certain code of ethics. Specifically, when confronted with a cuisine you know fuck-all about, you have a few options:

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Astoria Restaurant Reviews

I recently came across (OK, no, Peter forwarded me the links) two blogs doing reviews of Astoria restaurants.

Every Restaurant in Astoria seems like the more promising, if only because its authors recognize the sheer foolishness of their endeavor: “like Sisyphus, but with gyros,” as they put it. I like their moxie, and their attitude comes through loud and clear in their review of Sparrow, which pretty accurately gets at the hipster/no-hipster dilemma of Astoria.

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Meanwhile, Back on the Road…

Since yesterday, I have been embroiled in and fascinated with Kohnstamm Kontroversy… Fortunately it landed on a couple of days when my research schedule has been relatively light. My main challenge in Taos has been catching up on all the new restaurants (ha–I typed ‘restrooms’ first by mistake…perhaps also true). I carefully charted out which ones were open for brek, which for lunch, which dinner–and on what days. Seeing how Sunday and Monday are major closing days, it wound up being a little like an LSAT puzzle to hit them all. I mostly had it worked out, but then I was so busy blogging this morning that I missed breakfast, and now everything’s messed up again.

But last night I ate dinner at an old standby: Joseph’s Table. Joseph Wrede made a huge splash here when he opened his restaurant. He was one of the first chefs in the state to really push for local, organic ingredients; he was a Food & Wine hot new chef in 2000, all that jazz. Midway through dinner last night, I remembered that years ago, during a period in which I was looking for A Big Change, I had actually briefly fantasized about chucking my NYC life and moving back here to work at his restaurant.

I went last night not because of this ages-old restaurant crush (like I said, I’d forgotten I’d even had it) but because I’d heard lots of mutterings that the place had gone downhill. Wrede is notoriously flaky–or something, I don’t know, but a lot of deals just don’t work out for him…he was supposed to run the restaurant at El Monte Sagrado, he opened a bakery cafe a couple of years ago, and now I find it’s already shut. So I could believe he’s not really steering the ship away from the rocks at Joseph’s Table.

But, dude, I am here to say: the place is just fine! Oh man. And it was especially heartwarming after my Coyote Cafe experience.

True to form, I drank a couple of glasses of Lillet (first thing on the wine list–how can I not love the place?) and wrote a lot of shit in my notebook while I ate.

It all boils down to: When I eat at a restaurant, I want to be nourished, not dazzled (or, more likely, dulled, as that’s what happens when dazzlement goes awry with too much butter/foie gras/melted cheese/squiggly sauces).

It’s the same standard I set for eating at home, or for cooking for other people in my home.

So why do I go to restaurants at all, then, if I’m so not impressed by your culinary ass-slapping? Well, I go to learn about new flavors. I go to sit in a beautiful room (can the person who painted Joseph’s Table please come do the same gorgeous flowers all over my dining room? And while they’re at it, dust the pussy-willow chandeliers that I want to install, but know are impractical?). I go to enjoy composing a dinner–which appetizer goes best with which main and which dessert? Menu planning is often just as satisfying as the cooking–without actually having to follow through and cook it.

And I go to eavesdrop on other people. Last night was Dining with the Almost-Stars. I did a double-take when I saw Fabio at the next table. Then I saw he had bangs, and I just knew the real Fabio would never compromise his locks in such a way. At the table on the other side, a couple of Afflecks from Massachusetts were complaining to their companions about how people so often misspell their name Asslick–once for a funeral, no less! I have a little more sympathy for Ben now, knowing what he must’ve gone through in school.

I perused the menu. And I did something so genius I can’t imagine why I’ve never thought of it before: I asked for the dessert menu right up front! There’s nothing I hate more than being presented with a half-assed, uninspired dessert menu and realizing I could’ve eaten more savory dishes. Or–let’s be honest here, as it’s more often this way–getting a drop-dead gorgeous list of sweets and realizing I never should’ve ordered an app and a giant main.

So I sat there with my various pieces of paper. It was pretty easy to pull together. Desserts looked good, so I just went for two apps: warm kale sauteed with shallots and a tomato dressing, and a plate of pork liver (from a local farm) in a lemon-caper sauce.

I got the kale because it’s still damn cold here, but I need vegetables. I got the liver because Peter hates it so I never cook it at home. When I ordered it, the waiter practically did a little dance. The best way to endear yourself to the restaurant staff is to order the weird thing on the menu. You can bet they don’t give a shit when you get the roasted token, I mean chicken. And slabs of meat–you already know what a steak tastes like, and there’s nothing a chef can do to make a good steak taste better than just grilling it mid-rare and sprinkling some salt on top. I can do that at home. But something like liver (or the sweetbreads I ordered the other night, at a steak, seafood or steak-and-seafood kind of place), you know the chef has put a lot of thought into how to make that tasty.

And I ordered a glass of Lillet. Drinking my Lillet with my plate of lovely crispy, curly kale, with my wedge of sourdough Frenchy bread and butter on the side, I felt like I could be at home. After a week on the road, that in itself was a treat.

Then my liver came. “If you’re a liver lover, you’re just going to adore this!” said my waiter, with a flourish. I told him I hadn’t eaten liver in a long time, actually, so it was a really special treat.

When I said that, I wasn’t even thinking of the last exact time I’d had liver. But as soon as I had a bite, I remembered. Actually, no–it was the second bite, which I combined with a little spinach leaf from my mixed-green garnish.

The last time I ate liver was in those weeks right after my heart surgery, when Karine and Tamara came to California and dedicated themselves to raising my red-blood-cell count through home cooking. I’m practically crying just thinking about it now. Fucking fantastic friends. They made me chicken-liver-and-spinach salads up the ying-yang. Lillet would’ve gone great with that too, but I couldn’t drink with all my pain meds. Within a week of applying the special leafy-greens-and-liver diet, my blood was back to normal, and I was sleeping a few hours less out of the day. I went outside and walked around the block. The sun glimmered down and the birds sang in the trees.

I am a liver lover because I was raised on it. It was one of those genius fancy-on-food-stamps meals my dad would cook, in the same vein as on-sale steak with homemade french fries and nothing else. “Never let it get overdone!” he’d always proclaim as he seared the liver quickly in the skillet. (And he’d go–and still goes–“Aaaaaagh!” in his signature way when he encountered it overdone in restaurants–or even recalled such an undignified encounter.) A little salt, and that was it. No onions, or I don’t remember any. It was rich, and cheap.

My pork liver would’ve made him proud. I think it must’ve been chilled right up till it hit the super-hot pan, because the outside, the thin edges, were wonderfully chewy, but the inside was almost jelly-like it was so rare. Offal-eating can be such a quien-es-mas-macho sort of thing, but I’m not trying to pull that here, I swear. It was just delicious.

Also, it was doused in a lemon-caper sauce. Now why have I never thought of that? This is what I mean when I talk about learning something new by eating at a restaurant. The lemon brightened it up in the most lovely way, and the capers must’ve been the nice wee salt-cured ones because they looked like they’d exploded when they hit the hot fat in the pan. After I cleaned my plate, I actually ate one of the stragglers right off the tablecloth, where it had landed during my initial omigod-this-is-so-amazing eating frenzy.

I cleaned my plate, and I felt great. I felt nourished–not just from the iron coursing through my bloodstream, but from the fact that someone had concocted this lovely dish for my express delight. For me, the liver lover. I could feel the spirit of home cooking in every bite.

In a swoon, I looked at the dessert menu again. But I’d already decided–the Guinness ginger cake. And another glass of Lillet. It arrived looking like a cupcake, topped with fluffy whipped cream. It was delicious. I ate every bit, and actually did not feel painfully stuffed.

I even felt a twinge of regret at not ordering more. I reconsidered my restaurant schedule for the next day–it would only be a small loss to the greater research plan if I came back the next night to try the risotto cake and the trout with trout roe, and that bay-leaf creme brulee… (Note that I was not thinking thoughts remotely like this at the Coyote Cafe. I was thinking, “Haul this tired, butter-coated ass to bed.”)

On my walk home, I mean to my hotel, I realized my dessert choice hadn’t been random either. During the Great Red Blood Cell Boost of 2006, I finished all my meals with a big slab of gingerbread made with iron-rich blackstrap molasses.

Amazing, in retrospect, that I didn’t get sick of any of these things–greens, liver, gingerbread–or associate them with trauma and never eat them again. Now that’s the power of food cooked with love.

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PS: I completely forgot to mention: this all came in at LESS THAN HALF THE PRICE of my Coyote Cafe dinner. I put that in caps not because I’m a bargain-hound, but because usually I don’t even notice what things cost–and this really struck me. (This probably makes me a bad restaurant critic, but I think of my occasional restaurant outings as an extension of the genius Grocery Store Diet & Budget articulated by some lovely houseguests last year: scrimp on everything else, but let yourself get whatever you want at the grocery store, and you’ll be just fine. Plus, it’s all in the name of research, and making me less cranky about my job at the end of the day.)

PPS: I’ve spent so long typing this post that I’ve now missed dinner hours at the place I’d meant to go tonight. Hm. Joseph’s Table is still open. Tempting. But I don’t want to go and have an only semi-wonderful meal this time, and leave on a lower note, know what I mean?