Archive for the 'Restaurants and Food' Category

This Monday, June 6th, marks the launch of the Sud de France Festival in New York. The month-long festival, now in its third year, encourages attendees to experience the spirit of the Mediterranean lifestyle, complete with fine wine, foods and entertainment from the Languedoc-Roussillon region. It allows people the opportunity to learn more about the culture and specialties of the region through a convivial approach of tastings and experimentation, all at exciting venues with welcoming ambiance and alongside local winemakers and artists.

For a region with so much to offer, the concept behind the annual festival couldn’t be more appropriate.

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I’ve sat by (mostly) quietly this week while listening to people complain about Valentine’s Day. It’s standard fare for the holiday: people either go gaga for it or completely despise the thought of it. When I was younger, it seemed clear that most of the people who didn’t share the joy were simply jealous because they were alone, and vice-versa those who treated it like the most important day on Earth were usually madly in love. Now, as I converse with friends, coworkers and colleagues alike, I find that those lines are, and probably always were, blurred.

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Always a popular summer destination, the Hamptons promise a beautiful warm weather getaway for city dwellers and tri-state residents alike looking to get away from the grind without the necessity of hopping on a plane. Located on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, there are gorgeous beaches to choose from, fabulous shopping opportunities and a bevy of food and drink options to cater to every crowd of any preference. While there are a plethora of wineries located on the North Fork, and some situated on the South Fork (like Wölffer, Channing Daughters and Duckwalk), my most recent trip out to the Island focused on trying new restaurants across the Hamptons to recommend. Here’s what I came up with:

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Here’s a cure for your Monday blues… today marks the beginning of the annual American Craft Beer Week, taking place across the country from May 17th to 23rd. Organized by the Brewers Association, the week-long festivities were designed to celebrate small and independent craft brewers from across the nation, promoting the spirit and value of America’s craft beer scene. The week became the largest national effort focusing on domestic craft brewers in 2006, and remains so even to this very day.

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A pizza revolution has taken over New York and is quickly moving to the West coast and surely, everywhere in between. As the second-best-known pizza town (the boot across the pond being the first), New York has its share of historic pie stations, but there are new kids in town throwing the establishment off kilter.

With impeccably thin crusts, blistery surfaces and carefully-sourced toppings, artisanal pizza demands wine beyond basic, fruity reds. Pair this perfect pizza with a wine you want to shine, rather than a simple quaffer. Extra thought can take your bite from “Just OK” to the next level, like the pairing nirvana I recently experienced at artisanal pizza pioneer: Franny’s in Brooklyn.

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If you dine out with any regularity, it’s likely you have an opinion on how restaurant service should be. Whether you feel service is of prime importance or not, we all have our gripes. Recently, I had a particularly poor experience at a 2-Michelin-Star restaurant in NY. Since posting my recap this morning, I’ve been amazed at the number of people corralling to support me. And it makes sense! When you pay top dollar for a meal, people should treat you nicely. Oddly enough, I think too many people take service etiquette for granted. Not wanting to be curmudgeonly they keep opinions to themselves, making these rules unspoken.

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One of the hottest (and my most favorite) trends in the restaurant industry right now is the pairing dinner. You know, those dinners that you pay a little extra up front with the prix-fixe so you can enjoy perfectly matched beverages (usually wine) with the various courses of the meal. Now this in itself might not be a new occurrence, but what has been recently updated to make this craze popular again is the format that these dinners are now taking on… battle.

That’s right… they are now a fight to the death for the two worlds of alcoholic beverage choices (sorry, spirits): beer and wine.

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One year it’s pork belly, the next it’s kobe beef, the following it’s heirloom tomatoes. There will always be trends that emerge on restaurant menus. Now that we’re sliding into 2010, I declare 2009, the year of raw fish.

I know what you’re thinking. Sushi has been around for a long time! What’s new about that? Get with it! But this trend goes far beyond sushi. There is a version of raw fish enveloped into most cuisines, be it a classic French tuna tartare with waffled chips or a Peruvian scallop ceviche with lime and green pepper. Once palaces of pizza and pasta, “crudo” bars are even sliding into Italian restaurants (think Italian, thin-sliced sushi with olive oil, salt and acid). These dishes may not be new, but people are embracing them like never before.

Italian newcomer Marea opened in May in New York, dedicating an entire section of the menu to crudi like fluke with lemon thyme and olive oil or bigeye tuna with oyster crema and crispy artichokes.

Another Italian favorite in NY, known for their sublime spaghetti with tomato and basil, Scarpetta announced that they’ve added a late-night crudo menu with offerings like raw yellowtail with oil and flaked sea salt.

There is even a restaurant called  “Crudo” which opened last month and I can think of others that serve ceviche exclusively.

It seems one cannot open a restaurant these days without serving a dish from the raw fish category. But I’m not complaining.

It takes special fortitude to create these unadulterated cross-sections of flavor with little help from the oven, and these dishes are a paradise for the grazer. One minute you’re getting heat from jalapeno, the next some umami in a slice of truffle, then a crunch of marcona almond followed by some silky fish cloaked in oil. I feel refreshed and buoyant from raw fish preparations, rather than weighed down. I’m a crudo convert.

There seems to be no limit to the craving for raw fish of every flavor. I wonder if we are begging for more food in the raw? Maybe we are somehow setting the stage for the raw food movement with our carpaccios, crudos and tartares.

I’ve had one completely raw food dining experience at a vegan restaurant called Pure Food and Wine. Their theory is that raw food preserves its natural enzymes which catalyze digestion. So eating raw food is healthier. All of the food is prepared in dehydrators, if cooked at all.  The meal was a pretty amazing journey, through  dishes like marinated shiitake and avocado sushi rolls served with freshly sliced, pungent ginger and tamales filled with a white corn mash studded with marinated mushrooms with a raw cacao and tomatillo-cilantro salsa.  There was no actual cheese or meat on the menu and nothing was heated above 118°F. As the restaurant’s name would suggest, it was a lot of pure flavors, and I felt great afterward, even without hot food. As sushi paved the way for crudo, perhaps crudo will pave the way for raw food.

Have you noticed the raw fish trend emerging in your neighborhood?
Could 2010 be the year of  raw cuisine? I can almost hear your laughter from my desk! But with sushi bars as common in grocery stores as hamburger meat, anything is possible…

Each year, Wine Enthusiast Magazine awards three tiers of awards (Award of Ultimate Distinction, Award of Unique Distinction, and Award of Distinction) to submitting restaurants with notable wine lists. In reviewing this year’s applicants, I started to think about how wine consumers approach wine selections when they walk into a restaurant, and what most restaurants are honestly doing right (or screwing up) in their presentation of wines.

First, based on the applicant wine lists and my own dining in Manhattan, where I live, I’d say presentation and organization tends to be schizophrenic. Some restaurants organize by wine variety, some by region, and some by style. Others get cute and clever and organize choices by criteria that are more personal and subjective (i.e. “Wines for Romantics;” “Wines for Celebrating;” or “Rebel Wines”). Some include elements of all of the above. I’m not sure anyone is really sure of what diners want, or how they actually read wine lists.

We talked about the different approaches among the judging panel, and just as restaurants varied widely in approach, we all varied widely in what we preferred. Several of us liked the “wine styles” approach—this is great for wine drinkers who know what they like as far as style or flavor profiles go (i.e. “Dry, Crisp Whites” or “Big, Fruity Reds”) but may be lacking in the more advanced wine knowledge (which probably describes 90% of the American wine drinking public). It seems to go one step further in making wine and food pairings choices easier, too. This was in keeping with our own approach to organizing wines in the Wine Enthusiast Wine & Food Pairings Cookbook; we received a lot of positive feedback from readers who connected with this way of presenting wines.

Others in the group found this approach annoying and liked the traditional approach of cataloging wines by region or variety—it seemed to be associated with more “serious” lists and higher-tiered eateries, which, it could be assumed, attract a more serious and knowledgeable wine drinker. I felt this kind of list was less user-friendly and that if you happened to be a food lover who maybe was still learning about wine (again, probably like most Americans), then you might get lost in the endless columns of wines that may not be familiar to you. One hopes these types of restaurants would employ a friendly sommelier who could help diners navigate the list, but in some cases it wasn’t true, and often, people hesitate to ask for help for fear of “looking dumb.” How many of these diners stare numbly at the list, then panic and choose something based on price alone?

Finally, the more eclectic approach of grouping wines under “clever” headings (usually handpicked and chosen by the sommelier or wine director)was deemed among our group to be charming and add a human, personal touch (like having your wine expert best friend handpick wines for you), but only in addition to a list that offered more help, like one of the approaches above.

List organization style was just one of many things we considered in judging our own awards–depth of list, creativity, food-pairing elements–all figured heavily as well, as did staff education, storage and events. There was no one “right” approach to wine lists organization necessarily, but it was an interesting topic of discussion.

What type of restaurant wine list do you prefer? Old school, practical, zany? Are restaurants doing a good job in exposing you to new wines and organizing lists in ways that are helpful, logical and stress-free?

This past weekend was Labor Day, one of my favorite holidays to take some time off and enjoy life a bit. Actually, I pretty much use any national holiday as an excuse to celebrate, but this one truly is special. Yes, most of us get the day off work, and yes, it traditionally signifies the end of the summer, so there are two solid reasons to celebrate and get your kicks in while you still can. But Labor Day weekend is also the time of year that my boyfriend and I hold our annual Smokefest… a day of smoking food and drinking with friends.

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