Dinan

    When speaking of Brittany it is wise to remember that the Breton language is Celtic, not French. Even though Brittany has been battled over and changed sides dozens of times since the Middle Ages, Bretons retain an indelible link to their ethnic heritage. Bagpipes are still played to their folk songs, and their most beloved hero is the cartoon character Asterix (right), a kin to Hagar the Horrible.
    Brittany has never had much political clout, even within France. Its destiny is tied to the sea, its coastline rippled and dimpled with inlets and harbors that have made its ports ever the envy of competing powers.
    Of course, its cuisine is based on what is drawn from the sea. The favorite drink is not wine but cider. Buckwheat crêpes are preferred to loaves of bread. Their desserts are butter cakes and galettes.  And if you find a pizzeria in a Breton town, the pizza will be inedible.
    The two cities of distinction to visit along Brittany’s shoreline are Saint-Malo and, less than an hour away, Dinan. The former dates back to the 1st century B.C. under Roman control, taking its name from a 6th century abbey, and the inhabitants even considered themselves “Malouines,” rather than Bretons.  Jacques Cartier, who explored Canada under the French flag, is probably the only Malouine to have name recognition.
    The city’s privateers—pirates to the British—wreaked havoc on shipping in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in 1944 the Allies all but bombed the walled city into rubble. The result was that Saint-Malo has been re-built in bits and pieces, with some reconstructed timbered structures alongside faux-Neoclassic and modern architecture. Still, a walk around the walls of the compact city and a visit to the 12th century Cathedral of St. Vincent (whose 15th century steeple was destroyed in the bombing and took three decades to restore) will give you a very true idea of its heritage.  
    My wife and I stayed at the very modest, and very reasonable, hotel Armoricaine (€90 per night), on the Rue de Boyer, but spent all our time  walking through the city’s old center, which is lined with cafés, restaurants and crêperies. The center is especially lovely at night, when colored lights are artfully arrayed against the buildings. The Musée de la Ville will give you a good overview of the city’s history.
    On our first evening we dined at a beautiful restaurant set right on the seashore, La Brasserie du Sillon (3 Chaussée du Sillon), whose marine décor put me in mind of fine seafood houses in New England, with its polished wood and brick columns, roomy tables and soft overhead lighting. Quiet jazz music plays in the background.
    There’s a first-rate wine list with fair-minded pricing, as is the food. I enjoyed an excellent first course of foie gras terrine with preserves (€19.50) and a glistening carpaccio of raw scallops (right) with lemon and oil (€18). Hearty oxtail parmentier was a French form of shepherd’s pie with a gratinéed topping of both white and sweet potatoes (€17.50). Sweetbreads with just-picked morels (€28) was a wonderful autumn dish, and best of all was roasted leg of lamb braised for seven hours till it melted from the bone, accompanied by fried potatoes and chestnuts  (€21.50).  For dessert we enjoyed some of the best profiteroles (€7) of our trip (left).
    Stéphane Brébel is one of the most creative chefs in the city at his restaurant L’Absinthe (1 Rue de L’Orme), cooking in a modern style by using spices rarely tasted in Breton cuisine.  The three-story restaurant is located in a rehabbed 17th-century building. Downstairs is prim, with rustic stone walls, while the mezzanine and the slightly more intimate upstairs feature walls and rafters of bright vermillion, hung with modern portraits and gold-framed, tilted mirrors (below).
    The fixed-price menu is a remarkable bargain at €38, with wine €22 more. There’s another at €29 and a locavore menu at €47, as well as one à la carte.  We began our meal with a tapanade amuse on buttery wafers, then a fine vegetable broth with small ravioli. Tuna and smoked  swordfish carpaccio were next, served with a tangy orange sherbet (below).  There was also a sashimi of spiced dorade with seaweed, yogurt and crystallized ginger and cider vinegar.          
       Stuffed quail and a confit of its legs came in a wine-laced butter sauce, and scallops were poached in cider. We opted for both a selection of local cheeses and two desserts—a poached pear and a sponge cake with pistachio—neither wonderful.
    Dinan is a much better preserved medieval town than Saint-Malo, set on the meandering River Rance and largely undamaged by the Allies, so many extant buildings actually date back 700 years. It is ideal for long strolls along the ramparts and through narrow streets of somewhat tilted timbered buildings, around the Place des Merciers, with its corbel extensions of the buildings second floors held up with wooden pillars. This and several good-sized plazas enjoy outdoor cafés into November. If you have the time, The Old Quarter clock tower can be reached up a 158-step trudge. And if you’re a railroad aficionado, the Rail Museum has an extensive collection of model trains.
    For hundreds of years Thursday has been when the outdoor market opens at the busy Place Du-Guesclin, named after military hero Bertrand Du Guesclin, who still sits atop his steed as a bronze commemorative; the buildings date from the 18th and 19th centuries. One can only marvel at the panoply of local products (left), from seafood to mushrooms, from cheeses to fruit., with stalls for children’s clothes and toys. The tourist office for the town is just down the street.
    Because of Dinan’s quaint beauty, it has become a popular tourist destination for the French, British and Spanish, who can easily reach it in a day, and it matters little if the fog rolls into the town, topping the battlements, or the snow falls, but in spring and fall Dinan shows its darling best.
     For finely wrought and presented but unfussy cuisine, try Le Cantorbery (6 Rue Sainte-Claire) in a 17th century building, where you can eat well for a modest €30. For lunch any of the myriad crêperies in Dinan will do.

                                                                                            Photo by Emily Andrews
    Whew!

    For a while there I hesitated going to Manhatta because little I’d heard or read about made it sound particularly appealing, save the fact that it’s on the 60th floor of a Financial District tower with a 360° panorama of daunting beauty.
    In particular, Pete Wells, in a NY Times review entitled “At Danny Meyer’s Manhatta, Only the View Tries to Dazzle,” wrote, “You can’t blame Mr. Meyer for not wanting to open a mediocre splashy restaurant, but Manhatta flirts dangerously with being a mediocre unsplashy restaurant.” Ouch!
        If anyone is considered restaurant royalty in New York, it is Danny Meyer (left), whose Union Square Hospitality Group more than two decades ago set a standard for casual but cordial hospitality at Union Square Cafe that has had enormous influence on American restaurants everywhere. He followed up with a series of first-rate concepts that included The Modern, Gramercy Tavern, Maialino and Eleven Madison Park (now owned by others). He also changed the image of American hamburger stands with Shake Shack, whose branches are now spread from here to California and on to China, Russia and throughout the Arab Middle East.
    For all that time, I’ve known Meyer as a professional friend and, I believe, we enjoy mutual respect. (One of my sons was long ago a cook at The Modern.)  So I’ve always been candid with him about his restaurants, many of which made it onto my annual lists of best new restaurants in America.  I wasn’t crazy about North End Grill (soon to close due to “a combination of declining profitability and rising costs”), was never a big fan of Blue Smoke barbecue, and found it difficult to overcome the noise factor at Marta to ever want to go back.
    So I approached Manhatta  anticipating another grand Danny Meyer concept, an evocative aerie like The Rainbow Room and the sadly missed Windows on the World. (By the way, the restaurant's odd spelling that sort of refers to the island’s Native American name, Manahatta, as well as to its standard borough name, but without the final n, actually references a 1921 documentary film by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.) But aside from the Times review, I was put off by the posted website menu (still up as of this writing), which included several dishes Wells dissed along with less-than-enticing items like chilled cucumber soup; heirloom tomato and burrata; baby lettuces with tahini and mimolette cheese; chicken paillard with cassoulet; and scallop amandine. Oddly, no beef, no lamb, no pork, no veal. The menu reads like something from an abstemious corporate dining room somewhere else in the building.
    Yet, keeping an open mind and a faith in Meyer’s and Chef Jason Pfeifer’s experience at Per Se, Gramercy Tavern and Maialino, I made my way through the maze of streets in the Financial District into a mundane ground-floor lobby to be shown to an elevator that soars to the 60th floor, where we were flanked by a lounge on one side and a very busy bar on the other.  Beyond that was a main dining room centered by a brightly lit open kitchen and counter (right), all of it surrounded by a view no other city in the world can match for its variety, its sweep, its carousel-like bridges and its grandeur.  You can’t help but gasp at what looks like a moving, teeming, beautiful garden of light.
    So the large dining room itself need not—cannot—try to compete, and it doesn’t. There’s not much color or décor to discern in the low-lighted room—some navy blue leather and dark wood—and the decibel level is high, particularly because Manhatta draws  a booming, boastful downtown crowd. One woman at a nearby table spoke with such stridency that, upon leaving, I was tempted to tell her, “I enjoyed your conversation all night.”
    Without tablecloths to help, attempts have been made to tamp down the din: Slide your hand under the wooden tables and you’ll feel sound-absorbing plastic sponge. Believe me, no one who's had success snaring a table at Manhatta in the coming weeks would balk upon arriving to find a nice, soft tablecloth.
    With slight trepidation I opened the remarkably moderate $78 fixed prixe menu (which, as in all Meyer's restaurants, includes the service charge, so there is no need to tip) to find that next to nothing of the posted website menu remains.  I asked a waiter about this and he said it changes all the time, depending on what Pfeifer finds in the market, so the menu might be printed daily. Nevertheless, chefs never change menus on a whim—cooks have to be taught how to make a dish—so I suspect the lackluster Times review pushed Pfeifer to make a radical change. Gone are the chilled cucumber soup, the tomato and burrata, and the baby lettuces. Added now are wagyu beef and duck, foie gras and lobster quenelles. I became very hopeful.
    Beverage Director Matt Whitney stocks what is already one of the finest wine lists in New York, especially commendable for the scores of excellent, often singular, labels priced under $100.  Thank heavens our sommelier did not go in for dithyrambic descriptions of the wines, and he was cordial enough to ask if we wished the chilled white wine to be left on the table or in an iced bucket. Cocktails were well rendered.
    You receive a paper bag of terrific little baguettes, though for our table of four, a ramekin of butter about the size of a silver dollar was hardly enough. You may receive an amuse or two: We got a delicious sunny side up quail's egg with ham on toast (left) to pop in the mouth, along with various vegetable crudités.
    From the first taste of the first appetizer I was won over. Instead of using bland, sometimes fishy pike as the base of a quenelle, Pfeifer uses chunks of lobster bound with egg whites and poached, then napped with a rich Nantua-like sauce dotted with scallions, onions and mushrooms that set me back against my chair.  It’s a magnificent dish.
    Meyer has always put emphasis on eggs as a dinner dish, and Manhatta’s fluffy scrambled eggs with crispy sweetbreads and chives (right) proves why it’s such a great idea.  Very fine foie gras as a starter comes as a slender block glazed with Concord grapes, gelée, a dash of sesame and a small brioche (below).
    Sea scallops were sweet and just cooked through, complemented by the acid sweetness of apple and buoyed by crème fraiche and radish.
    Turbot is a fish that rarely makes it across the Atlantic in good shape, but obviously Pfeifer has obtained a pristine example of velvety texture, dressed with a very creamy brown butter, grapes and the crunch of almonds. Chicken is done in a welcome Cordon Blue style with oozing cheese and ham and pickled peppers for pop.
    That continental canard, duck à l’orange, can be a wonderful dish in the classic tradition, but Pfeifer’s version tastes little of the citrus fruit except for a few orange segments on the plate. It needed heft and a balance of sweetness and tartness to make a claim for a comeback. Still, the duck itself and its confit were finely cooked.
    The bavette is a bistro-favored cut of steak with a commendable chewiness, so making a dish with wagyu bavette does little to improve the idea. At least you’re not paying extra for that wagyu. It comes with a butter-rich potato puree, Brussels sprouts and mushrooms.
    Jennifer Bretania and Vanesa Beltran are co-patîssiers. And I heartily advise you to order the vanilla soufflé with butterscotch sauce (right) in advance (it only takes twelve minutes). It’s exactly the texture and lightness a soufflé should be.  Also recommended is a chocolate crèmeux crumble on a brittle pâte au choux with caramel-miso ice cream.  Warm date cake is lavished with crème fraȋche ice cream and an almost Christmas-y whiskey sauce.  Strawberry sorbet doesn’t really gain anything from an olive oil sable, basil and a creamy sabayon.
    I need hardly mention how genuinely friendly and knowledgeable the entire staff is at Manhatta, even pretending to chuckle when I asked if they could open a window.  They are young and they all seem very committed to the Meyer Doctrine that if the customer is not always right, everything will be done to make him happy.
    Manhatta is at the moment booming and reservations are made a month in advance. Its sky high location easily explains its allure as a bar and lounge, but now, as the kitchen hits its stride and its menu reflects a needed corrective, this may yet become the Windows on the World for our time.

Open for lunch Mon.-Fri., for dinner nightly.

The German website the Local reports that bodybuilder and Ironman triathlete Jaroslav Bobrowski paid just 15.90 euros ($18.49) for the "Bottomless Meal" at Running Sushi in the city of Landshut. The owner  said Bobrowski ate five people’s worth of food — “not normal.” Bobrowski apparently follows a strict diet where he fasts for 20 hours per day, then eats his entire allotment of calories within the remaining four hours.