Fat and Happy Food Slut

Like a heather flecked three season Harris tweed, Daniel Boulud’s Bowery menu makes fatty meat look good nearly all year round, a rare feat for the beer and sausage trade, which is at best usually a one season affair.  Below are a few highlights of recent visits.

1. Boudin blanc: As elegant as intestine wrapped innards can possibly be. Artful swirls of potato purée and and pair of braised apples turned a single link into a singular dish. Some well traveled microgreens added the obligatory color complement.

2. Foie gras in the boudin blanc: Foie gras taste and texture are distinct and complementary to the rest of the sausage. In some ways a better combination than the db Bistro Moderne foie and short rib burger. Fat flavor spectrum never goes greasy or gross.

3. Niçoise salad: Light tasting and beautifully glistening little sardines. A lively olive oil and good poached tuna. Throw in a scattering of olives and a few grape tomatoes, and it’s easy to forget the season or the street on which you’re eating this little number.

4. Good bread and great butter: Hearty bread perfect for sopping and a sea salt sprinkled butter that would fit in at Eleven Madison Park. A great high low combo. Freebies this good are a clear trickle down benefit of eating on the outposts of an empire.

5. Alevras in the House: When top chefs like Colin Alevras run a restaurant’s beverage program, good things happen. Places like Blind Tiger Ale House do a nice job of matching food to beer, but DBDG does a better job matching beer to food. I’d rather drink like a chef than eat like a bartender. In any case, DBGB’s wonderful beer list is affordable, never upsold and always worth exploring. They nail the little details of bar service as well: Lovely but not overdelicate glassware, nice crushed ice in the water glasses, and a deft hand with the refills.

6. Madcap mint sundae: A delicious dessert with a willfully unnatural looking gross out green color scheme. This ice cream confection makes sweet mockery of the loco locavore seasonality at all costs crowd. On the other hand, it is also far more natural than it appears. Hershey’s Kiss shaped meringue bites are Dayglo bright but made of local egg whites; whipped cream was Redi-Whip shaped but made from some hefty and tasty high fat high test cowjuice.

7. Impeccable Service: All the runners, floor managers and wine folks were fast and friendly. Better than any individual server was the coordination of the team. No Steve Hanson style scripted robotics and no Eric Ripert staffing overload.  In sum, warm well orchestrated front of house takes the chill off DBGB’s neo-Brutalist concrete jungle interior.

1. Drip coffee: Potent as espresso with none of the bite on the backwash.  Worth the wait.  Pulled coffee is superb, but I prefer the less violent touch of the slow filtered brew.

2. Sweet side: Olive oil is more of a mystery ingredient here than an overwhelming front note.  This type of cake is now ubiquitous in the city, but this is still the best I’ve encountered.  Compares favorably to the greasy number at Café Pedlar.  NB: Orange blossom pound cake is also a worthy option.

3. Service: Jamie is a one man cult of personality backed up by hard skill competence.  He’s also one of the least condescending and most hospitable people in the coffee business.  Easy for just about anyone to feel welcome here.

4. Music: Brazilian tunes hummed and sung along to in NoCal inflected Portuguese.  It’s hard to argue with the double mellow whammy of Samba and San Fran.

5. Savory: Sandwiches and soups are always a surprise and nearly always delicious.  Like the baked goods, they also hold up well throughout the course of the day.  A nice contrast to the typical day old by midafternoon sandwiches you find in many coffee shops.

Conclusion: The combination of stellar baker, savory chef and barista gives Rush a run for their money in the power trio business.  I hope and fear this place will open more branches beyond its 7th st./btw 1st and 2nd Aves original.

1. Coffee Milk: A nice nod to the Rhode Island tradition that somehow surpasses the original in intensity without losing balance of flavor.  Captures the smell of coffee in taste form.  A rare feat that  Chef Tosi somehow pulls off.  This is everything a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee–with its beady, come hither photos–promises and fails to deliver.

2. Tuesday Focaccia: Selections vary from week to week. Best of all was a candied kale number soaked in bacon fat and drizzled with honey.  Sriracha cuts through the sweet and brings out the savory. Sounded like overkill, turned out to be a neo-Baroque delight.  But six dollars for a slice of focaccia?  Even the Vinegar Factory and Jim Lahey’s bakery offer better prices for their versions.

3. Day old cookies: Blueberry cream and chocolate chocolate chip hold up well on day two and ring in at half price.  Under a buck makes them worth it.   Tosi hasn’t entered the straight chocolate chip cookie wars yet, and for good reason.  These are fun little numbers, but they’re nowhere near Levain Bakery’s or Jacques Torres’ league.

4. Le Cirque prices: The ingredients all come with stories, but provenance doesn’t explain the customer hating prices, especially when combined with tattooed hipper than thou service.  In Chang’s world, enlightened hospitality meets its evil counterpart, unenlightened hostility.

5. Soft serve: Flavors are best enjoyed in sample sizes.  Cucumber and horchata are two bite pleasures, so no need to order more.  Cereal milk is the one glorious exception to the “more interesting than delicious” rule.  Taken in milkshake form, it’s one for the ages. NB: Avoid stuffing ice cream at all costs.  Utterly repulsive.

As a kid, I used to frequent the St. Louis operation that inspired  the dairy side of the Shake Shack empire, so I thought it would be fun to compare the two operations over the course of a weekend.

1. Custard Base: Shake Shack wins hands down for the custard base. It’s sweet and luscious without appearing to work at it. Like good foie gras or a hundred other death dealing treats, it doesn’t taste of fat or sugar, just flavor. No one needs to know the details. Ted Drewes custard, on the other hand, tastes not just sweet but sweetened, a bit like Ben & Jerry’s. You can perceive the effort to candify in the hints of honey: Honey Nut Cheerios style honey. Conclusion: Meyer found the spirit of the Shake Shack in St. Louis but not the recipe for the custard.

2.Custard Mix-Ins: Ted Drewes by a landslide. Their chocolate chips are ground to a sharded consistency that never goes waxy but still tastes like real chocolate. Great paired with blueberrry or cherry. Shake Shack has some delicious flavored custards on its calendar, but its house designed concretes are as over the top as a Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby or Phish Food pint, but not as creative.  Sometimes too much is too much.

3. Service: Ted Drewes by a thin margin. The servers have all the Danny Meyer friendliness plus a surprising age range that means you can get three generations’ opinion on the ideal size t-shirt for a toddler plus. Further, Ted Drewes has also been handling hour plus lines for more than half a century, which gives it a slight edge in smiling its way through that crackle of irritation we all bring to the counter when finally called up to order. This is enlightened hospitality taken to a buddhistic extreme. Saint Louis style service is simply best done by Saint Louisans.

4. Splendor in the Parking Lot: In the summer months, South County (St. Louis) has its charms, from Astroturfed front porches with friendly folks sipping Budweiser and talking baseball, to inexpensive houses and relatively low crime rates. First and foremost, though, it has the city’s best tailgate in Ted Drewes’ parking lot. The big crowds give it a festive air at night, and the heat off the asphalt and from neighboring cars makes it pleasant even into the fall. Then again, it’s a pile of concrete covered in idling cars.

5. Splendor in the Grass: Park beats parking lot. Madison Square Park is a year round glory.  Ted Drewes and its terrain are a seasonal delight.  Enough said.

Fat and Happy Food Slut is on a brief hiatus to recharge bank account and catch up on work.  Look for a slew of reports after Christmas.

After reading a recent editorial by the famed Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos on the twilight of the Spanish Culinary Vanguard, I decided to browse his restaurant guide, Lo mejor de la gastronomía, to see who still makes the cut.

Like most readers of lists, I sought out the parts most pertinent to me, namely the few and far between American selections.   Therein I found Thomas Keller—Per Se, not the French Laundry—was up pretty high, a step above Pierre Gagnaire in fact, with an 8.5 on a 10 point scale.  Wylie Dufresne’s WD~50 also had a solid finish finish at 8.0.

Most notable however was Grant Achatz’s Alinea at number 2, with a stunning 9.5. He was, in fact, but one spot behind Ferrán Adrià’s El Bulli.  The answer to the question of what Adrià will come up with next may come not from his devotees in Spain but those working abroad.

If some argue that Argentina is a European country located by a quirk of God in South America, then Achatz is making a convincing case that Chicago is a small Northern Spanish town located by a quirk of God in Illinois.