New York City: The Middleweights

The silvered pig at Batali & Bastianich's Eataly. About the only thing you can't buy there. 

The flight into New York's LaGuardia airport on a clear night is one of the prettiest airborne sights imaginable, After the initial approach, the plane banks northwest and scurries past the East side of Manhattan Island. Immediately a diorama of buildings comes into focus, all aglow with shimmering lights. This view of Manhattan is an intoxicating aperitif.

After tossing our bags into the hotel room, we hailed a cab to make the trip from Midtown to what has become an institution: David Chang's Momofuku Ssam Bar. At about 10:30 at night, Ssam was just hitting its second gear with a growing ambiance fueled by loud music, pork, and beer. The dark paneled room and low lights create the sensation of eating in a humidor. Two seats at the bar opened quickly and the feast commenced.

The famed steamed buns of course - pillow soft and filled with succulent slabs of pork belly. A quick glaze with a fiery red sauce helped finish the last of the first round of beers. While those steamed were delicious, they paled in comparison to the kimchi rubbed apples with face bacon. Let's break this dish down John Madden style shall we? First you have the apple, which has just a touch of sweetness and a heavy dose of tart while adding a base layer of crunchy to the dish. Then this guy takes those apple slices and smears kimchi all over them to give it something spicy. Then over here, you got the face bacon lead blocking and bringing that salty, crispiness that makes bacon America's favorite food group.

Perhaps even more impressive was the way Chang and Co. turned chewy tripe into a sublime Asian noodle dish. Tender, shreds of tripe were tossed into a ginger scallion sauce and served at room temperature. Out chop sticks engaged as sword play as we fought for the last morsels. Finally, a clunky dish of rice cakes and Chinese pork sausage. While advertised as spicy, the dish needed acid to round everything out, and on the whole the dish was dry. But then again anything would have paled in comparison to the tripe and apples.

Dessert at the Momofuku Milk Bar. A Crack Pie, peanut butter cookie, and soft serve ceral milk ice cream rounded out the meal. That soft serve ice cream quickly became Lindsay's white whale. Wherever we were in New York for the next few days, she would say, "Look on your Twitter thing and find out if there is a Milk Bar nearby."

Meatballs with potato puree, Fontina cheese, and red wine demi glace at Gramercy Tavern

If there is a Mohammad of Dining in the 21st Century, his name would have to be Danny Meyer. The list of dining "things" he helped pioneer are too long to list, but include such things as quality hamburgers and unpretentious, intelligent service. The room at Gramercy Tavern is warm decorated with arrangements to evoke the season. In late winter, think large birch branches and  jars of preserves. Everyone has a friend whose home they love to visit - it is comfortable but not stuffy, there are fantastic things to drink but nothing fussy, and the food is delicious without being obsessive. That is eating at Gramercy Tavern in a nutshell.

Meatballs, more like meatpucks, have a crisp crust gilded in melted Fontina cheese. Both the cheese and crust struggle to contain the soft textured interior of the meatball. Red wine demi glace and potatoes as smooth as glass round out a well-composed plate. But then you look across at the chicken soup, which is loaded with juicy chicken, vibrant kale, and tender dumplings and wish just for once you had not been such a fat kid when ordering.

Dessert was a symphony of composure. Chocolate pudding, salted caramel, and brioche croutons worked harmoniously to produce the greatest pudding possible. The rhythmic clacking of spoons looking for pudding but finding only ceramic became the crescendo of this movement.

There was of course a stop at Eataly with its miles of Italian food products. It is overwhelming and enrapturing. Aisles of pasta, counters full of meats and seafood, barrels of olive oils and vinegars, jugs of wines and beers,  a vegetable butcher, marble carving classes,prosciutto carved fresh, mozzarella pulled while you wait, and Vespa rentals (only made up two of those). We sat in the pizza and pasta kitchen and devoured a plate of pork and chicken liver agnolotti and a Neapolitan pizza laced with anchovies.

We got out of there in a hurry before the bank called and closed our account.

Winner, Winner Boudin Dinner

Wow. You folks sure know how to turn a Boudin Haiku Contest into a Boudin Haiku Contest. While we enjoyed all of the entries, like cream some rose to the top. Just a reminder tickets are still available for Boudin and Beer presented By Abita Beer. In addition to pork and beer, there will also be wine from Presqu'ile Winery. We just hope there is enough boudin, beer, and wine for you after we get done with our raid. See you there. PS In case we don't see you time to point out Robert Peyton, look for the creepy guy, wearing a turtleneck, and a million watt scowl.

Honorable Mention

Greg
Carnivorous treat
Delectable temptation
How much shall I eat?

Third Runner Up

John
Boudin, Beer, Boudin
I want to stuff my face with
Boudin, Beer, Boudin

Second Runner Up

Blair (who gets all e.e. cummings up in this piece)
out of gas and cash
boudin or fuel at station?
need pork, walking home

Runner Up

Joshua
Here piggy, piggy
You taste like heaven to me
Boudin afterlife

Winner Winner Boudin Dinner

Crack (Perhaps channeling William Blake's The Tyger)
Transcendant food bite
Your rice and liver shine bright
Beer will pair just right

Congrats Crack, please contact us at your earliest convenience. Thanks to all who competed.

Boudin and Beer Giveaway

As we mentioned last week, Emeril Lagasse brings his traveling trope of toques into town this weekend for his Carnivale du Vin charity event. While the main event - a black tie Gala, Dinner, and Wine Auction - is out of our price range, there is a more accessible and casual event Friday night called Boudin & Beer. We are fairly certain you can figure out what the event entails. The other day, Alon Shaya refused to reveal what sort of goodies he had in store for Boudin & Beer. You should take this to mean, Boudin & Beer will be one of the best grazing events of the eating season. Plus, all the Abita you can drink.

In honor of someone else figuring out the unbeatable combination of pork, beer, and music is one hell of a good way to raise money, we are giving away two (2) tickets to the event. Also, if you go to Boudin & Beer we will gladly point out Robert Peyton to you, so you know who to avoid. We bantered about a few contest ideas. First, we thought, "Why not do boudin trivia?" But the only trivia questions we could come up with all had the same answers: pork liver, rice, beer. Then we thought about doing one of those cute Twitter hashtag things like adding "with boudin" to the end of a movie title. We nixed that idea after we figured out the best answer was going to be "Riding in Cars With Boys With Boudin."

So we decided to challenge your tenth grade English self. In order to win the two tickets to Boudin & Beer, we want your best Boudin Haiku. You remember those, right? 3 lines of poetry; the first and third with 5 syllables and the second with 7. You can leave your haikus in the comments, tweet them to us, or send them by email. The best one wins. Enjoy.

Delicious photos courtesy of renee b. aka Peanut.

Cooking With Wine

The term Indian Summer is thrown around a lot right now. Near as I can tell it is the last few days of September when the days feel like summer and the nights fall. Well here in New Orleans, it is still just hot, but there are rumors of fall in the air. Sunday afternoon was one of those perfect Indian Summer days and it was time to grill. But this time in lieu of beef, pork, or chicken, we opted to grill shrimp.

Mad Max had provided the perfect wine for grilled shrimp. As the man himself says,"The 2008 Pinot Blanc from cult winemaker, Robert Foley, is vinified with total focus on the fruit characteristics of the Pinot Blanc grape - effusive peach and gardenia blossom notes in the bouquet, a broad and fresh mouth feel with a lingering fruity finish. The wine was vinified entirely in stainless steel to preserve the freshness of fruit, no oak barrels, no malolactic fermentation." You can find it at Carte des Vins, Rib Room, Stella!, Herbsaint, NOLA, and Coquette. This wine retails for around $25 and is best drank out of a mason jar to complete the summertime ensemble.

Good enough for good times I say. The recipe we used came out of Mario Batali's excellent Italian Grill cookbook. It is really more of a technique than a recipe as he uses it throughout the book to add a crunchy, charred crust to proteins. As you will see below, a bread crumb sort of pesto kicks ass on the grill. Batali also calls for a piastra- a  flat metal sheet over a roaring fire- in this recipe. Not having one and channeling inner MacGyver, I just flipped over a cast iron skillet and used its flat underside.

Shrimp Spiedini alla Romagnola

First combine 1 bunch of Italian parsley, 1 bunch basil, 2 cups fresh bread crumbs, a hefty pinch of salt, black pepper, and 1/4 cup of olive oil. I added a little bit of lemon zest because yellow and green look good together. You blend all of that into a paste in a food processor, blender, or mortar and pestle, if you aren't into that whole brevity thing. Toss two pounds of peeled and deveined shrimp into this paste and coat well.

Now thread the shrimp onto some rosemary sprigs that you have removed the leaves from and soaked in water. Or you could use bamboo skewers. Or if you are afraid of pokey things, just place them directly on grill. After skewering all the shrimp, leave in the fridge for about 30 minutes while you get your fire cranking.

 Take a cast iron pan (or piastra if you fancy), flip it over and place it over the hottest part of the grill. Let it get hot, brush on some olive oil, and then place the skewers on the makeshift piastra. Cook 2 minutes per side. Serve with a salad- here I did a grilled Caesar. The shrimp come out the perfect love child between grilled shrimp and fried shrimp, with little clumps of charred bread and a zip of "pesto". It is the perfect dish for an Indian Summer's Eve....Wait, that didn't come out right.

Stoltzfus

Michael Stoltzfus came to New Orleans from Maryland to work at John Besh's August. Not long after,  he and then girlfriend now fiancee, Lillian Hubbard opened Coquette on the corner of Washington and Magazine in December of 2008. Within a few months they had Four Beans from the Times Pic and the restaurant was well on its way to joining the roster of restaurants one has to eat at in New Orleans. In December, Stoltzfus will open his second eatery, Sweet Olive in The Saint Hotel. Let's put twentyish questions on the clock and get to know Michael Stoltzfus.

I was about to go to college and my mom opened a bakery. She said, "why don't you work here for a few weeks before school starts?" I never left for college. Started cooking breakfast and lunch in the back of the bakery. Got an Alain Ducasse book and just taught myself from there.

While I was working at my mom's in the morning, I was spending nights working at a fine dining restaurant in Chestertown, Maryland. Then I went to work at Julia's, probably the best restaurant at that time in Maryland. At Julia's I worked every position in restaurant- waiter, cook, manager- save bartender. After that, I went to work at August. Stayed there for a year and a half before this opportunity fell in our laps.

Losing all my money (laughs). Actually the thing I was most afraid of was not being able to cook. When you work for someone else, there is always a way to do things. Their vision, their recipe are what you use. I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to cook food that was any good. When we opened, we had no idea what was going on with national economy. Luckily, Louisiana was pretty recession proof at that time. We were steady for the first five months, and then Brett Anderson reviewed us, and we took off from there. We had no idea he had been in, no idea we were on anyone's radar, and then the Times Picayune called to do a photo shoot for a review. We were shocked.

My approach to food has changed a lot. When we first opened, I was trying to emulate the cooking of the people I had learned from and so there was a heavy Besh presence to my food. In a way this was detrimental to my growth as a chef. A few years ago, something switched and my cooks and I started focusing our menu on what we would like to eat. How would we like to eat this ingredient. My cooks create more than I do now and in the last year we really started to focus on local products and purveyors. I'd say right now we get 80% of our produce locally and hopefully with Sweet Olive we will get that number to 100%.

I've become much more laid back recently. My biggest kitchen pet peeve is probably watching a cook turn a burner on high and try to cook something. The only time a burner should ever be on high in a kitchen is when you are trying to boil water. One of the most important aspects to cooking is controlling your heat and you can't do that on high. Also, I need a really clean kitchen. But all chefs are like that.

I love making bread. Making bread everyday for the restaurant can be monotonous, but there is nothing more rewarding than baking bread. What is funny is that at my mom's bakery, I never baked anything. Now I bake 60-70 loaves a day. Pulling a loaf of bread out of the oven is super rewarding. It is just flour, water, and yeast, but what comes out is so much more.

Hardest part of opening the restaurant was that neither Lillian nor I had any business background whatsoever. We had no idea of what we were getting ourselves into. I learned I was halfway decent at business things.

The French Laundry Cookbook- It is sort of the template of most cooks for the last 10 years or so, but I really love that book. Bread Baker's Apprentice. The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's. And I really like the NOMA cookbook, because it is so different and revolutionary. His emphasis on foraging and cooking ingredients I've never heard of is so different, it is really cool.

These days my favorite kitchen tool is my Sharpie. But always the knife. I use an 8 inch Misono chef's knife for just about everything.

Had a cook on maybe his third day. Right before service on a busy Friday night there was a huge stock pot on a table by the dishwasher's station. The leg of the table gave out and the cook rushed over to save the stock. 15 gallons of near boiling hot stock went everywhere including all over him. That was a pretty gruesome thing to see.

The food at Sweet Olive is going to be updated versions of New Orleans and Southern food classics. We are going to take a similar approach there that we do at Coquette and have a good time with the food. I've been obsessed with collard greens lately. One idea has us cooking whole leaf collards sous vide, then treating it like a grape leaf and wrapping it around boudin. We are also going to do bar food for the bar, a really great Continental breakfast, and maybe a tiki bar themed rooftop bar. We've got 3-4 months to put together the menu; when we opened Coquette we did not have that luxury.

I get really nervous cooking for people, especially chefs. Cooks all have different approaches to foods, so I am always nervous when I serve a chef he is thinking, "This is not what I would have done." I'd probably just want to cook for friends and family mostly. I love when people come in and I can cook on the fly, just make new things with the ingredients we have in our kitchen. If I spend weeks on a new menu, it is invariably crap. But if I just throw something together it is always great. Desperation plays a critical role in this kitchen.

When not in my restaurant, I like to eat. I eat out a lot. When we first opened, we ate out whenever we could, in order to scope out the competition. But now we do it because we love to eat.

Most memorable meal was at Babbo. We had gone to New York to eat. One night we ate at Corton, Paul Liebrandt's restaurant. While the food was good, it was nothing special. You could tell that a lot of time had been put into each dish, but it was just lacking. Plus it was a very expensive meal. The next night we went to Babbo and did the pasta tasting for like $60. Everything was so simple, but so well done. The sommelier waited on us and halfway through switched pairings to grappa, there was rock music in the background, just a great meal.

Mike Gulotta of August, probably. He taught me how to make food taste good and how to run a kitchen.

Truffle oil, but thankfully that is going away anyway. I can't stand the stuff and will never use it here. That is disgusting stuff. And of course, I wish restaurants would get away from commodity meats and the like. I am not preachy about it, don't plaster farms all over the menu, but that is really important to me. As cooks we have a duty to our customers to give them healthy food- not just for their bodies but for the environment also.

Right now, I am really being influenced by Spanish and Vietnamese flavors and cooking. One of my cook's is from Miami and so he has a huge love of Spanish cooking. Another one of my cooks is absolutely obsessed with all things Vietnamese. Eventually I'd like to have a really casual spot that just serves awesome food without worrying about plating or dining rooms. I cook to make people happy and casual food does that better than anything else.

Usually the last thing I want to do when I get home is cook. Lillian is an excellent cook, so usually she has something ready. If not, I like to grill. The other day picked up some boudin stuffed quail from Butcher and threw those on the grill. If nothing to grill, Lillian hasn't cooked anything, and nothing in fridge, I just eat almonds.

La Boca is my favorite restaurant in the city. There is absolutely no pretension there. I love that they can serve me an appetizer that is just a piece of sausage and an entree that is just a piece of meat. Lillian is an occasional vegan, but even she loves La Boca. Adolfo thinks I am stalking him because I go to a lot of his restaurants and he is always there. Nine Roses, we go here pretty much every Sunday night in the winter. Horinoya is the only good sushi I've found in the city and their service is incredible. And Butcher, that place is an anomaly. Every time I go in there, it gets better and better. I love Butcher.

On a deserted island, I would need sparkling water. I go through 3 liters of the stuff a day. Something to dip ranch into, along with ranch dressing. Marconna almonds and crispy pig ear. We fry it up to order at the restaurant, and there is always a few bits for me to snack on. I figure I eat pig ear all night. Probably not healthy but hey it is good.