House of Chow: Domicile of Delish

I have long considered myself to be a Connoisseur of chinese takeout. It is one of the many small gifts one acquires after living in NYC, the way that people from LA claim to have a sixth sense about mexican food, or perhaps the way Cincinnatians might be able to nose out a good three-way from a strip mall away. Some of the skills involved are simple. Recon: Is there anyone in the restaurant? Has there ever been? If not, perhaps you should move on. What's around the restaurant? Do you like those places? Details: When you enter, is it the sort of place you would like to stay for those long, hungry minutes before your food is ready? Have they put any effort into making your time in the restaurant, however brief, enjoyable? Intangibles: There's something about the names of restaurants. My least favorite chinese restaurants have been: Jade Garden, Ming Garden, Main Garden and Dragon Garden. I would love to say that there is some reason for a correlation between bad food and the naming of restaurants, but I'm content to say, if the name sounds a little off-putting, perhaps you should avoid.

And then there's the House of Chao on Whalley Ave. I felt ambivalent about the place from the get-go. Was this a good name or an awful one? It is next the best brunch place in New Haven, but you can't really see inside....I entered in the middle of the day and there was just one other person there perusing a menu. The place looked more like a bistro than a take-out Chinese place, which again gave me pause. This really was like no other Chinese place I had ever been. What got me to enter the place was a recommendation made in passing. What intrigued me was the person waiting for the waiter, who was perusing a novel that seemed large and out of place in a restaurant. Apparently, the customer's intense time with the menu was mostly a show; she only wanted one thing: dumplings. "Has the chef prepared the dumplings for the day?"

"No, he's still working on them." "Fine, I'll come back in an hour or so."

Chef...prepared?

I would come to appreciate all of this in time. As I do whenever I am testing out a restaurant, I got something I truly love: General Tso's chicken. For the record, I have tasted the highs and the lows of this dish. It is surprisingly easy to make at home, and to pack it with enough tang to wrench your jaw out of place. It is also possible to but General Tso's chicken and find it packed with greyish meat, which you can't stomach. It is also possible to return to said purveyor, when a little inebriated and purchase that same dish and get half-way to sobriety before feeling the shame of what you have done, but I digress.

This was the best General Tso's Chicken I have ever had. The same with every dish I had there. Not a trace of grease, made with fresh ingredients, balanced so that the spices did not overpower the dish, and the side items were not simple present to be brushed off. Just the memory of the food makes concentrating on writing a little difficult.

The downsides: it is a little difficult to get to without a car. I bike like I have a death wish, but I'm not foolish enough to tango with the traffic patterns on Whalley. It's as though a group of people have developed the technique of driving by faith, so they don't bother to use turn signals, or look when they want to make a U-turn across three lanes of traffic. Also, the service is slow, man reading Dickens novels instead of taking your order-slow. But the food is so worth it that, that last criticism barely deserves notice. Go in, chow down!

Next time: Recollections of Rudy's.

Montreal, I'm yours

I know it has been a long time, and I know that this going to be a post about something that has nothing do do with New Haven, but I have decided that since the city of Montreal, today's topic, is a meager hour plane ride or 5 hour car ride away, this counts as a New Haven activity. I have recently returned from a trip to Montreal, which according to Wikipedia, which quotes the Lonely Planet guide for the city was nicknamed "Sin City". (A brief digression, apparently Montreal has shaken itself of the name, but not of the vice. There were more establishments dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh than coffee shops, bookstores and churches combined. It's a serious issue there, although it seems to be taken with due deliberation. Check out the sex worker resource center and advocacy group, Stella, for more information.)

I like cities with attitude and this one had it in spades. From the slightly scary punks on lower Rue St. Denis (more on this street in a moment) to the general air of hip exuded by the young and oldsters. The streets were dirty and the people were rude. The subway was fast and real people (not the super rich) lived in the city proper. This is all to say that city was cosmopolitan; it had all the things one would want from a proper city. In the spirit of this universal cosmopolitanism, I sought out Montreal's versions of some of my favorite things. Here is a quick list of what I found:

Fries-

Poutine! I arrived hungry and irritable. All the places I was told to go to were packed with cool teens and early 20-somethings. After stomping around St. Laurent for two hours, I decided my life would be infinitely better if I was somewhere warm, eating greasy food and drinking beer. As I began to wend my way to downtown Montreal, I saw a small place called Patati Patata. When I say small, I mean miniscule, Rudy's stage small. There were 2 tables, a central bar and a window bar, meaning that any number of people constituted a crowd. Through the window I glimpsed, my future perfect evening: two cooks hard at work churning out plates of poutine anda double barreled tap of Montreal.

Poutine has an odd texture. Nothing in the mixture seems to be truly solid or liquid. The cheese melts into the gravy, the gravy absorbed into the fries and the fries decompose rapidly. Balanced with a pilsner, this was manna from heaven. The atmosphere of standing cheek to jowl with other people from Montreal also helped make this a singular eating experience.

Bagels-

As a man from New York, I am of course a bagel snob. I strongly believe that the further you get from New York City, the worse the bagels are. (The only place this does not hold for is Long Island, which seems to exist in the New York Bagel slip stream.) I was told that Montreal could field a good bagel, so I tried the Fairmount Bagel, known for its hand rolled, wood fired bagels. To be fair, I ordered half a dozen, each a different type including the New York salted bagel. Now, the simplest description I can give of a New York Bagel is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The Montreal bagel did not have the bite nor the crumb, yet they were bagels...good bagels...warm, soft, sweet, almost honey-sweet, bagels. They had a more uniform consistency than those in New York and I cream cheese didn't spring to mind while biting into one, but they were serious baked goods.

Beer-

Beer is important to me. The way that politics can be important to people. I feel like I failed myself on the beer front. The convenience stores all proudly sold Unibroue beer. And I had generic Montreal beer with my poutine. But I really wanted something distinct, and perhaps unavailable in the United States. Despite some digging I was unable to discover a truly beer centered bar in Montreal, the sort of place that makes drawing together an assortment of beer its priority. I did go to a microbrewery called L'Amere A Boire, which had 20 beers on tap, of which I had Fin de Siecle which, I believe was a red ale. It was pleasant, rich and not overpowering. While it did not have an expansive beer list, it had a brochure style of presenting them which made choosing difficult (did I mention that it was also in French?). Nonetheless, it was good place. There was no poutine, but they had great locally-grown Bison burgers and juicy rabbit burgers.

I suppose the mark of a good trip is a bit of regret.

P.S. This is hardly worth it's own entry, but Montreal has these Farmer's Market-esque markets. I believe there are 4 of them. I went to Marche Maisonneuve. The bakers there changed my notion of what a croissant could be. More precisely, they changed my notion of how much butter could be pressed into a pastry. I try to be resistant to saying "they make x better there" (except in the case of NY), so let's just say, it's not better, it's butter.

Clam Creep

In the second week of November I think the weather has finally turned. The landscape beyond my window has turned to a comforting November wet and dreary. Recent writing about the coming apocalypse in 2012 and its cinematic foretelling, writers diagnose this anxiety as U.S. wars and the president and food shortages. Poor global warming doesn't have a chance. Placed against solar flare fueled tidal waves and the squaredness of Viggo Mortensen's chin, Al Gore's powerpoint doesn't have a chance. As unscientific as this might be, I worry that I shouldn't be able to walk around without a jacket in the middle of November (it was 50 degrees in the Have 2 days ago).

In another, more blog-pertinent way, winter had arrived months ago. I am, of course, referring to Christmas Creep (a term I borrow from Gregg Easterbrook's excellent sports and other stuff column). Christmas, the attendant fake snow and ominous soundtrack, is back with us, muscling its way past Halloween (which I always thought should occupy larger commercial space than it does) and pushing Thanksgiving's nose into the dust (the last Thanksgiving decoration I can remember was one I colored in 5th grade art class, little did I know that poor purple and brown bird would become a memento of a lost age).

Not to be outdone, this is the summer creep edition of NextHaven. I will be reviewing two outdoor seafood restaurants that won't be serving you again until May, or according to the revised creep calendar, next Christmas Eve.

The first is the Lobster Shack in Branford. If you have never been to Branford, imagine it as the clean cut little sibling of New Haven, complete with its own green and original site of Yale University. It is tucked away just a few blocks from the green, although you would not be able to tell this as it is on a branch of the Branford Harbor, a body of water not visible from center Branford. Instead of theme appropriate decor, (say, a painting of a lobster) there are actual fishing boats in the harbor and steaming pots feet away from the seating. The downside of this exposure to feeling close to the food you consume (I don't know if the docked boats actually hauled the lobsters that went into my lobster rolls) is total exposure to the elements. All the seating is outdoors, which meant trying to huddle around my steamed clams for warmth. (I imagine being seated outdoors is pleasurable to some people, at some time, although I get cranky when I sit outdoors. The sun is either feeble or tyrranical, the breeze, blinding or sullen.

(Reading digression- As for reading recommendations, I suggest that before you consume your next buttery lobster roll, you read David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster". It was initially published in the now defunct Gourmet magazine, but you can read it in his essay collection Consider the Lobster. While Wallace won't tell you what to do w/r/t eating lobster, he does make a convincing case that boiling a creature that is sensible to changes in temperature of several degrees, must be an extreme form of torture that no amount of buttery goodness can mask. I had not eaten lobster for about a decade, but thought that I could not forgo such a distinctly New England dish. Wallace makes a point of noting how easy it is to shrug off moral qualms for the sake of good food. In a later article I would like to write about the possibility of eating well and without shrugs in New Haven. Stay tuned.)

The second fish food place I visited is also outdoors. It is called, appropriately enough, The Place. ( I think that giving fish shacks more sophisticated names would betray something essential to the fabric of the restaurant's genre.) Although both provide excellent food and are staffed by some of the friendliest people I've ever met in this state (The owners of the Place hang out at the restaurant and man the grill and will relate the history of the restaurant to you; the Lobster Shack seems to be more of a family operation, but the members of the family operate more felicitously in their two trailers filled with boiling pots and surrounded by customers than most families can manage over Thanksgiving), The Place has several advantages over The Lobster Shack. Although they are both outdoors, the former is surrounded by trees and has a canopy, which pacifies even a weather infant like myself. The menu is slightly larger, with about a dozen offering as opposed to about 5, so if you don't feel like lobster (which The Place doesn't have anyway) you could have grilled catfish, or a grilled steak, or grilled corn. Also, there is a lot of grilling going on with several attendants including the owner grappling with what seem to be perilous flames, which makes for a striking background to your meal. The rules are extremely lax in The Place: 1. Throw your clam shells on the ground.
2. Bring food that they do not sell but you think might go well with your grilled blackfish.
3. Bring your own alcohol. (I always feel cultured unwrapping a chilled bottle of wine at a restaurant.)
These rules are the perfect recipe for extended hanging out and feeling some control over the experience you have.

As for the actual food, I feel like it would be a disservice to actually work through describing the food here. You will have to trust me that it is all sufficiently delicious. These places are conscious of being fine, but not elaborate.

The Burger Continues

It's an indescribable feeling. Warmth in your mouth, moist without saturation, salty without excess. The burgers at Rudy's are perfect. I used to think that the Rainbow Cafe, the spot in New Haven where the burgers were as monstrously large as the color scheme was monstrous, was the only place for meat in a bun in New Haven. Sure there are other places. There is the Temple Grill if you are unfortunate enough not to like flavor, or the Prime 16, which tries to disguise its burgers under layers of toppings, or the burgers flavored by malice in Louie's Lunch, where they hope the aura of being the oldest burger place on the eastern seaboard will transform the slices of white bread they give you into something like a bun.

All these other burgers have swagger, but little substance. Strangely, Rudy's is the only place with no signs proclaiming their burger dominance, no law suits about how long they have been there, nor meal cards, if you get ten burgers you get the 11th free. In fact, the only indication that they know they have the best burger in town is that it is the most costly. Investment in ten burgers would run you the downpayment on a small home. (This is the most timely my blog will ever be. The NYTimes has just written an article about the best burger in New York City. Curiously , despite the ambiance of spilled beer and Rudy's prices are able to keep up with such chi-chi burger purveyors as the Genesis Bar and Restaurant in NYC.)

The times article and my most recent experience at Rudy's has inspired me to try to construct my own burger. In the past I have experimented with onions, chili powder, garlic, sage, egg, sausage meat and handmade breadcrumbs in my burgers, all of which made the burger distinctly unburgerlike. This time, following a suggestion made in the Washington Post, I trusted my meat: nothing but oil, meat, salt and pepper; mustard on the bun; caramelize onion and bacon as the toppings. Before you read the following, here is a disclaimer: while I can be an ambitious baker, I am, occasionally, known to cut corners when cooking, under the guise of experimentation. In this case the corner I cut was grilling. The idea was a good one. "Why do Rudy's burgers taste so good?" "Because they're so juicy." "How did they get so juicy?" Perhaps, I thought, because they pan fried them...in bacon fat. Do not do this. The result was a rubbery, wobbly mess. Everything else came together in perfect burger unison, meaning that it was just the burger itself at fault. Until I come up with a new theory for the burger, I will save my pennies until they amount to a mountain high enough to buy a Rudy's burger and a beer.

Zinc and Tonic

Four years ago, getting a cocktail in New Haven was a perilous affair. There were around 2 acknowledged venues for a good mixed drink: Hot Tomatoes and Cafe Bottega. If you could get past the rancid carpet on your arrival and the lusty after-work crowd at the bar and the music that prevented your order from being heard, you then wondered why gin had been banned in martinis and how champagne could be put to such evil uses. Cafe Bottega was a spirited venue, I miss their mojitos, but one venue did not make a drink scene.

Fast forward to the time of Prime 16, 116 Crown and Firehouse 12, places where the staff has opinions about the type of vodka you drink, or the shape of a glass and where you realize that the combination of something simple like vodka, Galliano and orange juice can be divine if done well.

This seems to be the motto of Zinc. In my experience I have had: Nachos, roasted chicken, salad, berries with whipped cream, and a chocolate cake. This should be the sort of stuff you get at a pub, but the simple rules of each dish give life to subtlety. The nachos are sprinkled with duck meat. The salad was dressed with restraint: a little vinegar and a little oil and a little goat cheese. The berries were topped with champagne infused whipped cream, which gave the cream a little more gravity and brought forward the freshness of the berries. It's much mor edifficult to describe why the chicken was such a success without describing...well...really good chicken. But that was executed with crispy, juicy, large proportioned ease as well.

Nothing was too assertive about the meal, everything was perfect. Except for the wine list. Stick to the cocktails. As of this posting they have added a brand new drinks menu, making it one of the better places to drink as well.

Night 1-The Art of Ravioli

In an article about the restaurant Babbo, in Lower Manhattan, NY Times reporter Sam Sifton writes about the ravioli. (For many years, Chef Boyardee, was synonymous with ravioli for me. If this seems unusual to you, check out the parent company of Chef Boyardee, and discover just how much muscle lies at the ready underneath that smiling chef's visage.) Sifton's article hones its contemplation of ravioli to something like the the crux of a zen koan: "The best ravioli is made in stages and eaten leisurely." He also notes that this ravioli comes at a hefty price.

One can debate the merits of going to certain restaurants during restaurant week. If you went to certain restaurants on a normal day, would you spend more than 30 dollars? Ibiza is one of those restaurants where the answer will never be no. In this way Ibiza is the rarest of treats in New Haven, available only when one feels flush with cash and in need of some of the familiar warmth a cozy restaurant can provide. Ibiza can fabricate such intimacy with its sensitivity to the line between the formality one secretly desires from a place where you are going to spend your discretionary budget and the pleasantness of people who seem to want you to enjoy your time at the restaurant. This comes from the simple gestures of welcome at the door, or the pleasant chit-chat from the wait staff.

They also have excellent ravioli. I recommend the baby back ribs, which are cooked to the point of butter-knife tenderness. They are also glazed with a sauce that has slightly caramelized, giving texture to each bite. Ibiza also makes its own ice cream. They often have a honey and lavender ice cream, delivered on a spoon accompanying an apple and lavender tart. The flavor is delicate, with the lavender providing a twist to the flavor. Their Sangria is perhaps their only disappointing menu item, because it lacks the extra layer of surprise that much of their food provides.

-DT

Restaurant Week

I am writing this in anticipation of restaurant week in New Haven. Restaurant Week begins today, seemingly as part of New Haven's pitch to become a more attractive city to people looking to relocate to New Haven. Whenever I pass the State 360 project, I sincerely hope that it's working. Restaurant week in the winter seemed to pass me right by, despite the giant billboard by Ikea, the fliers in handed out by Downtown Ambassadors (those people who look like they are on Safari), and various e-mails, and newspaper articles, I still grumbled that the town just didn't try hard enough to inform me about this upcoming event. I heard about it through a friend on the Wednesday of Restaurant Week. This led to some frantic phoning. Everyone was very polite in saying, "No." My favorite "no" came from Ibiza. When you hear most things said with a slightly Spanish accent, you cannot help but feeling thrilled. After getting used to hearing the response it was easier to phone all the restaurants on the list, the final one being Thali. I didn't want to go to Thali (through no fault of the restaurant, I just was not eager for Indian.) Of course they said they had 2 seats left...5 minutes of haggling with the hostess later, during which I tried to extract myself from the situation by claiming that I wanted a table at what I thought would be a peak time, then asking for more seats, then just plain trying to back out of the arrangement. Once again the people were very patient and accommodating, despite my increasingly frantic demands.

This time around, New Haven went above and beyond by postering the New Haven train station, which I frequent. While I never noticed the poster until the same friend from the winter informed me that Restaurant Week was approaching, the poster was then a nice reminder. I will be going to at least 3 restaurants this week: Zinc, Ibiza and L'Orcio. I will try to fit some others into my lunch schedule. I tried to get reservations to Bespoke a week in advance, but apparently so did hundreds of other people. I also tried to reserve a table at Kudeta, but either they are shunning the 20th century by letting their web-site go defunct and disconnecting their phone, or they are going through some issues with being open. Most of the restaurants use the OpenTable system, which takes some of the thrill out of reservation making, but is a lot faster and less awkward. I will be writing up my impressions of these restaurants after I go, as a mental keepsake for myself, and a guide to restaurants for anyone who might be interested in that sort of thing. I will also provide some thoughts on how the OpenTable system works out. So far, I have been called by one restaurant to confirm my reservation, which is reassuring. Part of me fears that my reservations will never be read and I will hike up to these restaurants just to be turned away at the door. Until soon.
-DT