Easter Eggs in Salzburg, Austria

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IN THIS ISSUE
  Dining Out with Confidence
By John Mariani

NEW YORK CORNER
What All the Hipster Food Media Are Missing 
By John Mariani

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
CHÂTEAU CLIMENS
By John Mariani


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AN ANNOUNCEMENT: On April 13 at 7 PM at the Westchester Italian Cultural Center in Tuckahoe, NY, John Mariani will give a convivial talk on "The Enduring Presence of Mamma in the Italian Kitchen." A light reception is offered prior to the beginning of the presentation from 6:30-7 PM. Members: $25, non-members $25. For details click here: www.wiccny.org

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Dining Out with Confidence
By John Mariani

    The above photo of Cary Grant shows him in full, confident stride—as he always looked—a man for whom the world is his oyster, a gentleman in excelsis, brightening every room he enters.
    There’s a story of a couple who had been at a dinner party where Grant showed up, and later, when they got home, the woman asked her husband, “Did you see how beautifully Cary Grant was dressed?”
    Her husband responded, “No, what was he wearing?”
   The woman answered, “Oh, I don’t know what he was wearing.”
    One last Grant anecdote, from Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”: In the opening scene we see Grant exiting a taxi, walking up the steps of the Plaza Hotel in New York, striding along the hallway to the Oak Room Bar, where he calls the maître d’ by name and where everyone knows him as a regular, which one can imagine he is all over town, the epitome of savoir-faire, pre-Mad Men’s Don Draper (below).
    I won’t go on about Grant’s signature kind of cool, which was acquired along the way after he left Bristol, England, and his birth name, Archibald Leach, behind. Hollywood groomed him to become a fellow named Cary Grant so successfully that the actor once said, “Even I’d like to be Cary Grant,” suggesting no one could quite rise to his persona’s level of gregarious sophistication.
    Nevertheless, in Grant’s hey-day—let’s say 1940-1960—men of my father’s generation seemed to have a lot more confidence in themselves and in their favorite place, a confidence based on manners taught and manners mastered, with the attendant gallantries of holding a door for a woman, getting up from a table when she entered a room and taking her arm while walking out.  None of these niceties were felt to be any big deal; a man just knew them and did them, the same way he addressed a maître d’ or bartender or coat check girl at a restaurant, with respect and a genteel familiarity that never, ever meant throwing one’s weight around.  In return, a reciprocal respect was given, favorite tables and cocktails remembered, discretion applied at all times.  
       Special treatment might be doled out to VIPs, but a gentleman who had confidence in himself was always treated as he wished to be. Certainly James “007” Bond knew that and even used it to his advantage with both women and villains, who were often the same.  In “Dr. No” (below) Bond even told his demented captor—in a slyly gracious way—that the choice of No’s Champagne vintage at dinner was not to Bond’s liking.
    I bring all this up because, while it is generally acknowledged that a lot of young men, whether they be Gen-X or Millennials, lack manners and push their way around to get noticed, it has also become more or less the rule that such men are genuinely so insecure about how to handle themselves in a fine restaurant that they stay clear of them.  Or worse, they try to force their own idiosyncrasies and taste upon the restaurant owners and staff.  As a result, the current food media insist that “people”—read, “men”—don’t like “fussy dining rooms” where they “have to dress up.” That is true for many, but largely because they are incapable of handling themselves in such restaurants with even one-tenth of one percent of the confidence their fathers possessed.
    Their fathers never made a big deal about putting on a jacket and tie to dine out, nor did they have to pay a maître d’ to get a decent table.  Their fathers would not wait on a two-hour line to eat at a hole-in-the-wall serving Asian noodles or banh mi sandwiches.  But the current generation of men bristle at the thought of being “requested” to wear “appropriate dress”—largely because they haven’t a clue what that means.  The most delusional are those who flaunt their $300 designer jeans and $1,000 leather jackets, while others less expensively attired repeat the idiotic mantra, “Clothes don’t make the food taste any better.” 
    That last assertion is debatable, in the same way that romantic lighting, flowers, soft music, starched linens, thin stemware and heavy silverware don’t literally make the food taste better but can definitely enhance the dining experience by stimulating all the other senses in the loveliest possible way. 
    I once had a young editor at Esquire magazine who was very smart, very well-educated and up on everything to do with pop culture.  But he still felt himself a total nebbish when it came to fine dining.  “I just wouldn’t feel comfortable going to one of those ...  kinds of restaurants,” he told me, as if not knowing menu French or whom to ask for a napkin would be an embarrassment.  He held on to an archaic myth that fine dining restaurant staffs and their guests are in an adversarial position, with the former ready to laugh behind closed doors at the latter’s cheap shirt or the way he holds his knife and fork.  A long time ago, there was indeed a loathsome snobbery at old line French restaurants among service staff in frayed tuxedos who themselves had barely graduated from lycée and who left the hair growing out of their ears untrimmed.
    But that kind of pretension is a thing of the past, and today’s service staffs are better educated, more knowledgeable about food and wine, and really go out of their way to help their guests enjoy the evening.  And they actually get a certain joy out of seeing a well-dressed gentleman enter the dining room, hold a chair for a woman, address the staff courteously, perhaps ask the captain his name if he doesn’t already know it, not make a big deal over the wine tasting and order without fussing over every detail.
    Acting in such a way, with glowing confidence, should be effortless on both sides of the dining table.  It just takes a little practice.  And any man of this younger generation who feels he cannot possibly achieve such poise just wasn’t paying attention to his father. Or never saw Cary Grant in action.

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What All the Hipster Food Media Have Missed
  By John Mariani

    It is tempting to call the hipster food media that now occupy desks at the NY Times, New York Magazine, Bon Appetit, and Eater.com pathetic when they go ga-ga over what they proclaim to be unique restaurants of a kind that NYC has never before seen.

    Of course, so many of those media are at a number of severe disadvantages: 1. Their experience usually averages less than five years of dining out around NYC. 2. They have little idea of and have read nothing about NYC restaurant history. (May I suggest my book America Eats Out: An Illustrated History of Restaurants, Taverns, Coffee Shops, Speakeasies, and Other Establishments that Have Fed us for 350 Years?). 3. Those employed by most newspapers, magazines or on-line food sites are rarely given expense accounts to allow them to dine out above a certain level of eatery. 4 They have an adolescent view that whatever is refined and elegant is therefore to be avoided. 5. They ignore any restaurants not frequented by their imagined demographic. 

    The hipster media might be shocked to find out that Ferdinand’s Focacceria opened in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, in 1904; that back in 1939, according to Dining Out in New York by G. Selmer Fougner, NYC had a slew of Scandinavian—now referred to as “Nordic”—restaurants that included Gripsolm on East 37th Street, Kungsolm on East 55th and Stockholm on West 51st.      Those in high praise of new places like Ed’s Lobster Bar and The John Dory Oyster Bar may know about the Grand Central Oyster Bar (above), opened 1912, but not about Billy the Oysterman (right; East 20th) or Libby’s Oyster House (Fulton St.) of the same period.  In 1939 there were plenty of German restaurants, especially in Yorkville, and down in Greenwich Village a Basque place called Jai-Ali  served bacalao à la Vizcaina.  There were a dozen Austrian restaurants like Huber’s (East 82nd) and Sacher’s (Madison Ave.) and Hungarian places like Zimmerman’s (West 6th Street).  Teresa’s (1st Ave.) was where you’d go for Polish cooking.

    Ten years later Knife and Fork in New York by Lawton Mackall (1949) listed Lottie’s Dogwood Room (East 58th) and Francis Bell (West 55th) for made-to-order fried chicken and other Southern fare.  For Indian there was the East India Curry Shop (East 55th); for Czech, Sokol (East 71st) and many others; for Mexican, Xochitl (West 46th); for Brazilian, Semon’s (East 58th); several Armenian places like Izmir (Lexington Ave.), and Asian, like Singapore (on Broadway).

    When I first began compiling restaurant guides in the mid-1980s, I could recommend Wong Kee  and Noodletown for Chinese noodles in Chinatown; Texarcana (West 10th) for Gulf Coast cooking; Smokey’s Pit Barbecue (9th Ave.) and Austrian cuisine at Vienna 79 (East 79th).

    The food hipsters rarely venture north of 14th Street in Manhattan,  preferring to discover tamale shops and sushi bars on the Lower East Side, tacquerias in the East Village, and ramen storefronts in Brooklyn.  But had they been around as of 1990, they might have discovered some of the most innovative restaurants in NYC were in fact downtown.  The Odeon (West Bway), which opened up TriBeCa as a restaurant destination; Le Pescadou (King St.), Jour et Nuit (West Bway), Felix (West Bway), Jean-Claude (Sullivan St.), and Provence (MacDougal St.) for authentic French bistro fare, as well as Chanterelle (Spring Street) and Montrachet (West Bway), which brought contemporary French to NYC; Soho Charcuterie (Spring St.), Alison on Dominick (Dominick St.) and Union Square Café (East 16th) established  templates for modern American cuisine and service;  Can (West Bway) and Indochine (Lafayette St.) for Vietnamese; Po (Cornelia St.) was Mario Batali’s first trattoria venture; and Benny’s Burritos (Greenwich Avenue) is still as popular as ever.

    In the 1990s Soho Kitchen and Bar (Green St.) was serving more than 100 wines by the glass--the Cruvinet wine dispenser and preserver appeared in 1978--along with thin-crusted pizzas and house-made pastas, while Da Silvano (6th Ave.) clued New Yorkers into what Tuscan food was.  Florent (Gansevoort St.)—one of the hipster  eateries of its day—kick-started the food scene in the Meat Packing District as of 1985; the area has now become a street of fashion boutiques and frequently changing restaurants.

    So forgive me if I take the pronouncements of the hipster food media as ill-informed when they suggest that all the culinary excitement is now south of Union Square and that places in Brooklyn like Gran Eléctrica, serving “California-style Mexican” food, or the Michelin one-star La Vara (where “hip urbanites get down to business around the sleek marble bar”) are the first of their kind.

    I will admit that, given the quality of ingredients now available to chefs and the evolution of cooking over the last half century in NYC and elsewhere, food everywhere is better than ever.  But the concocted phrase “farm-to-table” used by hipster restaurants and their p.r. machines would mystify a cook in any other country in the world, where such a claim would be meaningless.

    Once, when asked his opinion of old-timer Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington (who was actually older than Satchmo by two years) paid him the highest compliment, saying, “No he, no me.”  It’s a humble homage the hipster media should learn before they extol the next big thing out there. 

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    Beloved but so often neglected, Sauternes are among the world’s most respected wines that few people drink with any degree of frequency.  Best known as the accompaniment with foie gras (a match I think is overrated), Sauternes, owing to their sweetness, are otherwise relegated to the dessert part of the meal, sometimes sipped all on their own.  Still, there are interesting match-ups with savory dishes where Sauternes show remarkably well.
    This notion was in full play at a lovely spring day luncheon at Blue Hills at Stone Barns restaurant in Pocantico Hills, NY, hosted by Bérénice Lurton (below), owner of the esteemed Château Climens, classified in 1855 as a First Growth.  The Lurtons are the fourth family to own the estate, whose name means “unfertile, poor land,” dating back to 1547, with the château itself built by the Roborel family in the 17th century.  Three centuries later, Lucien Lurton, already owner of several fine Bordeaux estates, acquired the 75-acre Climens in 1971, and since 1992 his daughter, Bérénice, working alongside wine maker and viticulturist Frédéric Nivelle since 1998, has been in charge of bringing to bear all modern viticultural techniques, including biodynamic farming since 2010, to improve the health of the vines and the signature style of Climens wines of freshness, medium body and delectable sweetness.
    To this day that infertile, poor red clay soil, though rich in iron and limestone, is stingy in producing Sémillon grapes. Climens is the only winery in Barsac to make its Sauternes with 100% of the varietal, which must be attacked by the botrytis fungus (below)—known as “the Noble Rot”—in order to shrivel the grapes and develops the number of actual aromatic molecules, and concentrate the sugars,  most of which turn into alcohol while maintaining delicate sweetness that must be bolstered by good acid to achieve balance and refinement.                                                 

    At the luncheon, Lurton said that, unlike most dry white and red wines, Sauternes is difficult to make. “One vine will only produce a single glass of wine, and it is not easy to extract great vines from the terroir’s soil.  Grape yields are low and irregular from year to year. If summer is too dry, botrytis will not appear; too wet and it turns to horrid gray rot. If things go well, we still never know until a few days before when we can pick the grapes, and we have to be very selective in picking the grapes that will work to make a quality Sauternes.” Speaking in the language of biodynamics, she explained, “It is the sandiness that guarantees Climens’s brightness and taut tension, and the limestone adds structure and depth.”
     Thus, the climate and the vines interact to become either beauty or beast in the fall harvest, and under the rules of biodynamic winemaking, all chemical sprays have been banned, vines are now knitted instead of trimmed, even the phases of the moon are taken into consideration.  Just as acupuncture operates on the body without drugs to produce a balance of elements, so, too, the biodynamic method avoids as much as possible unnatural systemic interference in the vineyards.
    Once the grapes are pressed, fermentation using natural yeasts is achieved in small, separate barrels.  Only in the rigorous final blend is it determined if Climens will even release a vintage, as they did not in 1984, 1987, 1992 and 1993, because the quality was not good. The attempt by the kitchen at Stone Barns to pair a four-course lunch with various Climens wines was convincing, largely because a wine like the estate’s second label, Cyprès de Climens 2013 ($25), made from grapes left after the primary selection is done, has such a delightfully light floral nose and structure. Served with an amuse of pork liver terrine sandwiched in bitter chocolate wafers, Cyprès was easy to drink as an aperitif, especially now that spring is here.
          The 2012 ($70) and 2011 ($114) vintages were sipped with a winter squash salad whose golden raisins evoked the moderate sweetness of the wines, while a yogurt dressing’s acidity counterbalanced it. An Indian summer provided the 2011 vintage with an excellent degree of Noble Rot along with good quantity—at 43,000 bottles nearly three times the size of 2012’s, whose  harvest was a tough one but resulted in producing a stunningly elegant Sauternes, feminine and vibrant with youthfulness.
    The saltiness of a slice of succulent pork (from pigs raised on the farm there), served with rutabaga, sweet dates and spinach, was able to contend well with the rich sweetness of the 2005 ($124) and 2009 ($135) vintages. 
    Lurton called 2005 the “big one,” an abundant crop ideal for its concentration in tandem with good acids.  I enjoyed its faint whiff of the farmland itself in the bouquet.  Pure apple and pear flavors were shot through the somewhat lighter 2009, whose citrus notes were refreshing and bright.

    Dessert was a honey parfait with beeswax ice cream, a far more traditional kind of match-up for Sauternes like the 2002 ($81), made from a difficult harvest that produced a small crop; it had great depth but not enough acid to cut through its sweetness, resulting in flavors more like maple syrup but not cloying like caramel.
    Our reward for cleaning our plates that afternoon was a taste of a 1976 ($228), made only five years into the Lurtons’ ownership of the estate.  It was remarkably bright for its age—although many Sauternes can age well for decades—a tour de force, really, with that characteristic lightness that  identifies Climens’ style.
    Lurton and Stone Barns proved that such sweet wines can happily be paired with savory dishes, though as such it seemed more of a rewarding novelty than a great idea for increasing Sauternes consumption. 
     In the end, Climens and other great Sauternes are to be enjoyed largely for themselves and with foods that are amenable to their lush sweetness.  But there’s no question that these unusual wines, literally plucked from the edge of disastrous rot, are fit to be more than an occasional indulgence.

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