MARIANI’S
Virtual Gourmet
HOME | BOOKS | CONTACT
"The Great
Gatsby" (2013)
HAPPY NEW YEAR! ❖❖❖ IN THIS ISSUE DINING OUT IN ATLANTA By John Mariani NEW YORK CORNER BURKE & WILLS By John Mariani ❖❖❖ OUT AND ABOUT IN ATLANTA By John Mariani
As the South's major
hub city, Atlanta’s restaurateurs are in fierce
competition among restaurateurs seeking to attract
locals, tourists, and both national and
international business. So for more than two
decades, the city has been home to every kind of
ethnic eatery, plenty of steakhouses, and a
ballast of places that are part of Southern
culinary tradition.
Here are some of the new ones I like. St.
Cecilia 3455 Peachtree Road NE 404-554-0005
Chef-restaurateur Ford Fry may
have developed into Atlanta’s golden boy, having
opened the bellwether seafood restaurant The
Optimist, then the meat-centric King & Duke—he
was also Justin Bieber’s personal chef for three
months this year--and now an Italian seafood
restaurant named, for no particular reason after
Saint Cecilia, patroness of musicians. All this in
the last three years. That’s a lot of activity for a
corporate chef (he also owns the Southern-style
JCT.Kitchen and a place in nearby Decatur and is
about to open a Mexican restaurant, too), so I
wonder if all his enterprises have maintained their
original quality.
When I visited St. Cecilia, it was pretty
new, and the kitchen and service staff were clearly
stretched and stressed. This used to be another
wonderful seafood place named Bluepointe, and the
bones of the soaring building are still there, with
vast amounts of glass, hanging lamps, subway tiles,
and wood, but nothing at all to tamp down the
achingly loud noise level. The
room is huge and so is the menu—far too large to
allow the kitchen to serve hundreds of guests beyond
a “get-‘er-done” efficiency. Odd, then, the menu
reports that it “changes daily,” meaning little or
no time to perfect a dish. No surprise, then, that
the crudo (right)
seafood dishes ($11-$18) are the
best way to go at the beginning because they need
only slicing and seasoning rather than long, careful
cooking time . So, too, the excellent salumi
offerings ($14-$19) of meats and terrines.
Oversaucing and elaborating
most of the eight pasta selections work against
them. With the exception of a delicious agnolotti
filled with braised short ribs and dusted with
Parmigiano ($12), the rest I tried fell flat,
including caramelle
with smoked eggplant, tomato sauce, salsa verde and
ricotta
salata ($12) and corn-filled ravioli with
polenta, lobster and mascarpone ($14). Only a
chef unfamiliar with Italian pasta-making would
marry polenta on a plate with ravioli, which in the
South would be like putting grits on top of
mac-and-cheese.
Risotto ($15) with clams, always difficult to
get to the right texture, was overcooked that
evening.
As at The Optimist, the main seafood courses
ring truest: a wonderful porgy with grilled lettuce,
cucumber and capers ($47) and a whole loup de
mer with Marcona almonds and acidic citrus
($29) were impeccably cooked. Swordfish was
well rendered, simply combined with olives, tomato
and garlic.
Clearly roast chicken dish and a strip steak
are on the menu solely to please non-seafood eaters,
and they taste that way. The chicken ($18) was not
juicy but watery, perhaps from over-brining.
Desserts (all $8) need tweaking: I liked dark
chocolate mousse ($8) and a crème brûlée tart, but
raspberry crèmeux, chocolate budino
and coconut milk
panna cotta were bland, as if prepared in
large batches to serve so many people.
It might be time for Fry and his group to slow down,
collect their thoughts, make everything work
smoothly, and focus in on their strength, which is
clearly fine seafood. And think about some sound
control.
Ink and Elm 1577 N
Decatur Road 678-244-7050
Located in the Emory University area
of Druid Hills, Ink
and Elm was opened by Nick
Chaivarlis, Hunter Jefferson, and Keith Osborne a bit over a
year ago and named to
honor the neighborhood’s designer Frederick
Law Olmsted. Ink & Elm: According
to the restaurant website, “`Ink’ is an allusion to
Olmsted's renderings, while `Elm’ refers to his
“favorite type of tree. . . used to adorn the
streets of Druid Hills in the 1890s.”
Inside there are three ways to dine in the cavernous
7,300 square foot space--in the Tavern, Dining Room,
or Lounge. The
first serves cocktails and sandwiches, the last
oysters and charcuterie plates. The
dining room is large, the tables commodious, and the
chandelier lighting and colors throughout make the
room darker than it looks in the photo to the right.
This includes dark wooden tables without tablecloths
that would reflect light and dampen sound, which is
absorbed only by tweed banquettes and a curtain of
sheer fabric. There’s
a truly lovely window on the kitchen overlaid with a
photograph of elm
trees in the local Lullwater Preserve.
Executive Chef Stephen Sharp has a fine flair for
modern American fare, putting emphasis on Southern
ingredients and seasonality. And he
keeps prices in reasonable line, perhaps so that
those Emory profs can dine here occasionally. The
food has heft, it’s hearty, and it’s often deeply
flavorful, dependent on the high quality of
ingredients. Still, the dishes can be overloaded and
messy. Heirloom
tomato with pickled okra, Vidalia onion, cucumbers,
lady peas, herbs and soft boiled egg and dilly
vinaigrette ($14)
was all about summer. Veal sweetbreads ($14) came
with a sweet date puree and spinach adds a foil,
with pine nut pistou,
feta cheese, Port
pear and naan
Indian bread—way too much to allow the delicate
flavor of the sweetbreads to shine through. The
best dish I tried was a generous appetizer plate of
luscious, succulent Georgia shrimp (below) with
toasted butter, smoked ham broth, pickled peppers
and charred bread ($14), which I would gladly gobble
up as a main course. Pole beans and burrata
came with peaches, spiced pecans, sunburst tomato,
zucchini puree and shallot vinaigrette ($13); again,
the cream-centered cheese got lost in the rest of
the ingredients.
Entrees
include a beautifully cooked and well presented
trout with rock shrimp, carrot salsa verde, baby
carrots and a fennel confit ($35), which just
skirted being too many flavors on one plate. Carolina
pork with smoked belly, ham steak, garlic sausage,
field pea succotash, pole beans, leeks and a pork
demi-glace ($27) is more than enough food for two
people and speaks mightily of how good Southern
cooking can be.
So, too,
does the grouper with eggplant, okra, squash,
preserved tomato, purple peppers, corn and celery
($28), though few traditional Southern chefs would
ever pile so much on a fish. Another
big-hearted dish is the duo of lamb ($34)—braised
shank, crȇpinette,
smoked peach, harissa
for bite, bulgur, pickled cucumber, fava beans, and
almond gremolata.
Obviously, with these kinds of main items you
don’t need any side dishes.
You may also be too stuffed for desserts, and they
are not lightweights. But they’re terrific, not
least the sticky cinnamon bun with pecans, sorghum,
bourbon glaze and welcome white cheddar ($9) and the
butterscotch pot de crème with pumpkin butter,
chocolate gingersnap and whipped cream ($9). My eyes are now a
bit blurry and fingers sore just from typing out
those myriad ingredients dispersed with too much
unbridled enthusiasm
and little discrimination as to whether they
all go together.
Simplifying the menus and clashing flavors
would make Ink and Elm a much better restaurant than
it already is. Open
Tues.-Sun. for dinner. Sunday for brunch.
Gio’s Chicken Amalfitano
and Antico Pizza
Across the way is his Pizza Antico Napoletana
(below)—a
madhouse of first-come-first serve, sit anywhere
communal tables, and it’s B.Y.O/B. (Bummer.) There’s a
list of ten pizzas—no slices!-- from $18-$22, only
produced “until the dough runs out.” At meal’s
end you an get cannoli or sfogliatelle
pastry. The place has had a lot of celebrity
sightings, including Chris Rock and Owen Wilson. Di
Palma himself, who contends he was once so poor he
slept in his Dodge Challenger, now drives to work in
an Aston Martin. Other buildings
on the expanding property include a Bottega and a
Gelateria.
You can’t fault Di Palma’s exuberance and
good cheer, though local media seem to delight in
reporting on how he seems always to be getting in
and out of hot water in various dealings. They
include a contentiously embattled failed IT Company,
a messy public divorce, numerous lawsuits, and, a
few weeks ago, an investigation by the Federal
Department of Labor. Gio’s Chicken
Amalfitana is open for dinner Tues.-Sun; Pizza
Antico Mon.-Sat. The Polaris Restaurant 404-460-6425
Back in the late 1960s the revolving
restaurant at the top of the Hyatt Regency was all
the rage, though more for the view than for the
food. It
lasted as a tourist attraction for decades but
finally shut down.
Now, having undergone a total renovation by
Johnson Studios, it is called the Polaris
Restaurant, re-opened this past June.
It features small plates at a variety of perches on
the 45-minute rotating platform that gives you a
360-degree view of Atlanta’s skyline, which only
recently has acquired any architecture that’s
interesting to look at. Most of downtown looks like it
was built by the Veteran’s Administration.
The dining "zone" at Polaris features a custom
walnut communal table; the library and living room
have lounge seating and sectional sofas and screens;
the bar is where a good deal of the nightly action
takes place, especially at sundown. Throughout
there is a lot of bold modern artwork and sculpture,
and the ceiling is finished with a remarkable,
unnoticeable polished material that sucks up noise.
More
restaurateurs should find out about this.
I hadn’t the time to dine at The Polaris, but I
found the place a pleasant diversion in the
otherwise dreary downtown. And after
all these years, it’s still fun to zoom up the
atrium in those original John Portman elevators. ❖❖❖ NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani BURKE &WILLS 226 West 79th Street 646-823-9251
The
cuisine of Australia has not exactly captivated
the rest of the world, but then, it’s not an
easy cuisine to pin down. According
to Alan Davidson’s Oxford
Companion to Food, Australia is rich in
flora, with 25,000 plant species, more than
Europe, though it has only two percent of the
world’s freshwater fish species.
Its aboriginal people’s diet was very
basic, so, with colonization by the British, the
continent’s gastronomy developed along British
culinary traditions—shepherd’s pie, steamed
puddings and the like. But, over the past twenty
years Australia’s urban chefs have shown as much
imagination and culinary talent as any on Earth. Most
revel in their indigenous provender, while readily
absorbing the cuisines of the Pacific Rim into
their kitchens.
Australian cuisine, not unlike American, is
then an amalgam immigrant cuisine, and, while New
York has had a few restaurants open under the
Australian banner, the year-old Burke & Wills
on the Upper West Side makes a fine showing.
Named for pioneering adventurers who made
an expedition across Australia in 1860, Burke
& Wills is Tim Harris and Matilda Boland’s
homage to the land Down Under. Harris grew up in
the restaurant business in Australia, and
previously worked at another Aussie restaurant
(now closed) named Bondi Road. Now, with Executive Chef Rodrigo Nogueira
(previously at Montmartre and the Monkey Bar), he has
created a menu that offers a savory introduction
to the kind of modern cuisine being served in
Sydney, Melbourne and other cities, with an
emphasis on the rotisserie. Harris
is also your ebullient guide through a wine list
heavily stocked with some of the best Aussie and
New Zealand bottlings available in NYC.
Up front is a long, polished bar offering
raw shellfish and a small plates menu of items
like beef tartare with smoked egg and capers, and
a crispy crab beignet with Japanese mayo and
bonito flakes.
The very cozy dining room to the rear, with
an angled skylight ceiling, is done in handsome
shades of slate gray
banquettes, white tablecloths and distressed
stained wood, with antique Australian photos and
maps on the walls. Our amiable waitress was
herself appropriately an Aussie and was very
helpful in explaining the menu and anything else
I asked her about the cooking and Australia in
general. The
menu is of a sensible size (the kitchen is
cramped), with eight first courses, six mains, one
or two specials, and five desserts. Our
table began with fine tuna sashimi with a lush
lemon
custard and contrasting smoked hon shimeji
mushrooms ($16).
Foie gras torchon
($17) was made less predictable with the addition
of a sea scallop, a confit of apple, a drizzle of
honey and brioche bread. Sweet bay scallops were a
special that evening, gently sautéed and subtly
seasoned, tender and juicy, in a ginger broth.
Best of all the starters was a highly flavorful,
very juicy crêpinette of lamb with roasted
cauliflower, capers and a lamb jus
($15).
B&W’s “large plates” live up to their
boast: portions are very generous, and prices are,
too, $17-$29.
Even if unexpected in an Aussie bistro,
potato gnocchi with roasted mushrooms, pecorino
and grilled scallions were very welcome at our
table, as was roasted chicken with roasted baby
patty pan squash and a rich brown butter sauce.
The fish that night was barramundi, which was pan
seared and quite succulent, and the accompanying
fennel barigoule
and pickled fennel gave it tart spiking. (For the
ichthyologists out there, this barramundi is an
Asian sea bass, farmed in the U.S., not the
barramundi cod that swims in Australian waters.)
Of
course, what’s an Australian menu without
kangaroo? At
B&W the marsupial shows up as an appetizer of
loin with onion soubise,
roasted mushrooms and fingerling potatoes, and as
a “’roo burger,” which is big and hearty, on a
good roll, with tomato jam, shaved onions and fat,
triple-fried potatoes (which they call “chips”). It’s a
good dish, not very fatty, though more a curiosity
when compared to a more flavorful beef burger. Oddly,
the dish lacked a fried egg, traditional to
Australian burgers. Best of the
main courses was a spiced duck breast, meaty, well
fatted and served with farrotto, roasted
turnips, and honey turnip puree.
You shouldn’t skip dessert here (all $8).
At least share the warm chocolate cake with orange
syrup, and amaretto crunch gelato,
or the Pavlova--the one Australian dish many people
will recognize—named after Russian ballet dancer
Anna Pavlova, who did several tours of Australia
and New Zealand. It is a meringue torte with
passion fruit curd, berries and kiwi fruit and
then lavished with whipped cream. Upstairs at
B&W is a wood-paneled cocktail lounge—they
call it a “private speakeasy open to the
public”—named The Manhattan Cricket Club, arrayed
with Australian cricket paraphernalia and
photographs of turn-of-the-century players. In
the end, you may not exit B&W with a thorough
understanding of Aussie cuisine, but you will have
eaten well in a casual but sophisticated ambiance
you won’t easily find downtown. Anyone
who lives on the Upper West Side may well make it
their own personal club to frequent. Burke & Wills is located at 226 W 79th
Street, 646-823-9251,
www.burkeandwillsny.com and is open seven days a
week for cocktails, bar snacks, dinner, late
night and weekend brunch. ❖❖❖ DEPT. OF BAD TASTE IN THE MOUTH
GEE! WE NEVER WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF ANY OF THESE ALL ON OUR OWN!!!
El Celler de Can Roca,
Girona : "Even if you encounter the same bleak
e-fate we did, you can also try calling or e-mailing the
restaurant to get yourself on the wait list." Tickets, Barcelona:
"Stop by when you’re in town and check with the emcee to
see if any last-minute cancellations have freed up a
table." Sukiyabashi, Tokyo:
"To get a seat at the ten-person bar, you'll need to
know a Tokyo native (or have other Japanese host who can
vouch for you) and that's with the help of a hotel
concierge to boot." Schwa,
Chicago: "Patience, grasshopper—that and
flexibility."
❖❖❖
I'm proud and happy to announce that my new book, The Hound in Heaven (21st Century Lion Books), has just been published through Amazon and Kindle. It is a Christmas novella, and for anyone who loves dogs, Christmas, romance, inspiration, even the supernatural, I hope you'll find this to be a treasured favorite. The story concerns how, after a New England teacher, his wife and their two daughters adopt a stray puppy found in their barn in northern Maine, their lives seem full of promise. But when tragedy strikes, their wonderful dog Lazarus and the spirit of Christmas are the only things that may bring back his master back from the edge of despair. WATCH
THE VIDEO Any of John Mariani's
books below may be ordered from amazon.com.
❖❖❖
FEATURED
LINKS: I am happy to report
that the Virtual
Gourmet is linked to four excellent
travel sites: Everett Potter's
Travel Report:
I consider this the best and savviest blog of its kind on the web. Potter is a columnist for USA Weekend, Diversion, Laptop and Luxury Spa Finder, a contributing editor for Ski and a frequent contributor to National Geographic Traveler, ForbesTraveler.com and Elle Decor. "I’ve designed this site is for people who take their travel seriously," says Potter. "For travelers who want to learn about special places but don’t necessarily want to pay through the nose for the privilege of staying there. Because at the end of the day, it’s not so much about five-star places as five-star experiences." Eating Las Vegas is the new on-line site for Virtual Gourmet contributor John A. Curtas., who since 1995 has been commenting on the Las Vegas food scene and reviewing restaurants for Nevada Public Radio. He is also the restaurant critic for KLAS TV, Channel 8 in Las Vegas, and his past reviews can be accessed at KNPR.org. Click on the logo below to go directly to his site.
MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET
NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Editor/Publisher: John
Mariani.
Editor: Walter Bagley. Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani,
Robert Mariani, Misha
Mariani,
John A. Curtas, Edward Brivio, Mort Hochstein,
Andrew Chalk, Dotty Griffith and Brian Freedman. Contributing
Photographers: Galina Dargery, Bobby
Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.
To un-subscribe from this newsletter,click here.
© copyright John Mariani 2014 |