Montreal: Au Pied de Cochon

 Our last meal in Montreal was at Au Pied de Cochon.  This was restaurant was really the main reason for our trip to Montreal.  Au Pied de Cochon, or PDC, is a temple of excess.  Any single dish on the menu probably has more fat and cholesterol in it than a normal person would eat in a month.  This place is not healthy.  It is, however, damn tasty, and it is a really fun environment.  Its the sort of restaurants where you walk in and everyone is absolutely excited to be there.  Eating at this restaurant is an event, but it isn't an event like, say, eating at Alinea, where the atmosphere is formal and subdued and the food is precise and refined.  PDC is loud; it is sloppy; and it is decadent.

PDC is located on a street where there are a number of pretty bad, touristy restaurants.  Before PDC took over the space, the restaurant was a pizza place, and PDC puts the pizze oven, above, to good use.  I'm not sure if you can see it without zooming in on this picture, but a whole pig head is sitting in the mouth of the oven.  This roasted pig head dish is served on a big platter, with a knife sticking out of the top of the head, and a whole lobster coming out of the mouth of the pig.  It's a pretty crazy presentation.  If you google "PDC pig's head" you should be able to see a ton of images of this dish.

One of the drawbacks of this restaurant is that, because everything is so rich you can't order as many dishes as you would at a "normal" restaurant.  With three of us at the table, I picked out a few appetizers and main courses, just like I would at any other restaurant, but as I was ordering, our waitress stopped me and warned that we were ordering way more than we could handle.  We went ahead and ordered all of the dishes we had in mind anyways, and made a pretty good dent in everything.

The first dish that we go was called "Plogue a Champlain."  This was a really nice dish.  It consisted of something like a pancake, topped with ham, aged cheddar, a big slice of foie gras, and a maple syrup sauce.  It's a strange combination, but it all worked really well together.

At Francis' recommendation, we also ordered something light.  The tomato salad that they were serving as a special that night was excellent, but I wished that we had asked to have it served latter in the meal.  It would have been nice to have a nice, light salad at the end of a very heavy meal.

 We also ordered the stuffed pied de cochon with foie gras.  I mean, when you're at au pied de cochon, you should order the pied de cochon, right?  For this dish, they debone the pig trotter, braise it, remove the meat and chop it up and than stuff it back into the trotter with mushrooms and foie gras.  The whole thing is the breaded and roasted and served on top of mashed potatoes that are just loaded with cream and cheese curds.  It isn't the most photogenic dish, but it's an impressive presentation and it is really tasty.

We also order the "Canard en Conserve," or duck in a can.  This one is a really fun presentation.  The server brings you a plate with a dollop of mashed potatoes on the bottom,

then she opens the can and dumps out the contents 

which include a duck breast, a pig lobe of foie gras, braised cabbage, and a balsamic sauce.  Everything is cooked together in the can, letting all of the flavors meld together. 

Our last dish was a cured foie gras tart.  The has a really light, flakey crust, topped with slices of blood sausage and torchon of foie gras.  The blood sausage was the highlight of this dish.  Previously, I had only had blood sausage as part of "english breakfasts" at places that you go to for the soccer viewing instead of the food.  It was never really that great.  This stuff, though, was amazing.

After all of these dishes, we were all totally defeated.

Next time, I'll have to bring more people so I can try more dishes.

Montreal: Liverpool House

 

 Abby, Francis, and I went to Liverpool House on our second night in Montreal.  Liverpool House is owned and operated by the chefs that run Joe Beef, one of Montreal's more well known restaurants.  Since I couldn't get a reservation at Joe Beef, Liverpool House was the next best thing.  The setup at the two restaurants are very similar.  The only menu is written on a big blackboard in the dining room, and a lot of the menu items are the same at both restaurants.

 Like a lot of good restaurants these days, Liverpool House and Joe Beef serve dishes that are seasonal, locally sourced, and simply prepared.  I thought that the meal had some hits and misses, but was pretty solid overall.

This dish below, their bone marrow presentation, was the highlight of the meal and this dish alone makes this restaurant a place you have to visit as long as it is on the menu.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is one of the best things I have ever eaten.

The marrow bone is split lengthwise, roasted, topped with big chunks of raw albacore tuna in a caviar sauce.  Bone marrow alone is pretty decadent.  Topping it off with tuna and caviar is just totally over the top in a very, very good way.

In addition to the bone marrow, we tried a fried anchovy starter

and another appetizer of cavateli and pork belly.  Both were good, but not spectacular.

For the main courses, we tried a "Pintade" or guinea hen that was served in two preparations.  The legs were braised and served with pasta,

and the breast and wing were pan roasted and served over whipped potatoes with a pan jus.

This was a really nice, homey dish, and I like the idea of breaking a bird up into two preparations like this.  I might have to do something like this for a dinner party in the future.  This dish also came with a really nice salad.  I have been to a couple of restaurants recently that served salads that, while simple, were among the better dishes on the menu.  This was one of them.

 The second main course that we ordered was the lobster spaghetti, which is a mainstay on both the Liverpool House and Joe Beef menus.  Read any review of either of these restaurants and this dish is mentioned.  I don't get it.  It's good, but not great, and certainly not worth the $50 price tag.  If I went back, I would try something else, as this dish is something that you could make at home with similar results.

By the time our meal ended, we were the last people left in the restaurant, but, rather than rush us out so they could close up shop, our waitress brought out a couple of complementary desserts (which we forgot to take pictures of).

All in all, this was a really good meal, and as long as that marrow dish is on the menu, I would highly recommend it.

Mesa Grill

Bobby Flay might just be my favorite TV celebrity chef. Years ago, I bought one of his grilling cookbooks, and it remains one of my favorites. Not having a grill - or a yard, for that matter - I haven't used it much since I moved to Boston, but back when I lived in DC I would make something directly from this cookbook or directly inspired by something in the cookbook on a fairly regular basis. All of the recipes have been consistently good. Naturally, I couldn't spend a summer eating in New York and not try one of Flay's restaurants.

I can't really compare this place to many of the other restaurants I have been to recently for a couple of reasons. First, we sat at the bar, and, second, we weren't that hungry, so we just ordered a bunch of appetizers.

We started out with a flight of three different ceviches: sea scallop with tomatillo and orange, shrimp with pickled hot and sweet peppers, and lobster and octopus with yellow pepper and smoke paprika. I thought that these were all really good, but I liked the lobster and octopus ceviche the most. (As an aside, the best ceviche I have ever had was at this sushi place that Abby and I went to when she was living in Santiago, Chile. I can't remember the name, but it was in Plaza Nunoa. If you are ever in that city, check it out.)

After the ceviche, we tried the dishes pictured below.

Barbecued country ribs with mango habanero glaze and green onion peanut relish. These were really tender and the peanuts created a nice textural contrast. The sauce was awesome. That's something I could say about all of his dishes. I think bold, interesting sauces are sort of a Flay signature. Tequila cured salmon and cripy squash blossom salad with roasted lime vinaigrette. This was my least favorite dish, but it was still pretty good.
Shrimp and roasted garlic corn tamale with fresh corn and cilantro sauce. I didn't actually try this one, but it got rave reviews at our table. It looks great.
Barbecued pork and Oaxaca cheesee quesadilla with hot and sweet cabbage relish. This one was sort of mundane, but it was still tasty. I just wouldn't have paid $13 for it.
Blue corn pancake with barbecued duck and habanero chile-star anise sauce. This was my favorite appetizer. It is one of the restaurants most popular appetizers with good reason.
Vanilla, Sevilla orange and creme fraiche flan with blueberry salad and orange sage caramel. I thought this was a really good flan. It had the perfect level of citrus accent, which made the flavor really bright, for lack of a better word. The blueberries mixed with the orange sauce and some candied orange zest were great.
Chocolate and dulce de leche layer cake. I only had a bite of this one. It was very rich, but very good. If you like chocolate, this is your kind of dessert.
In total, I thought that this was pretty good food, but I thought you were definitely paying for some combination of the location (right near Union Square) and the celebrity brand. Most of the appetizers were around $15 and most of the entrees were over $30. At those prices, I would expect something much more formal than the dining experience offered at the Mesa Grill. So, it was good food, but overpriced.

The Spotted Pig

I forgot my camera, so I don't have any pictures for this review, which is too bad. We ate lunch here, and we probably could have snapped some decent photos since we actually had some honest to goodness sunlight - not the dim lighting of your typically evening dinning room. Anyway, on with the review.

I had heard a lot about the Pig. The head chef, April Bloomfield recently had a strong showing on Iron Chef and made a cameo on Top Chef last season; Anthony Bourdain listed this as one of his favorite places on a recent episode of No Reservations; and this Greenwich Village gastro-pub has received glowing reviews from just about every critic that walked through the door. It has one Michelin star and is a "Top Pick" of the New York Times. Friends I talked to said that they tried to eat there twice, and both times were rebuffed by the three hour wait times (reservations not accepted at this place). In short, this place is scorching hot right now. It may be one of the trendiest restaurants to be seen at this season. Given all the hype, I expected to love the place. It was good. I love food and would be hard pressed to find a meal that I don't like, so "good" is a bit of a lukewarm review. I'll include the caveat that I ate lunch here, so the menu was limited, but the full dinner menu didn't include a ton of additional options. On the website, I saw pictures of servers maneuvering through crowds with plates bearing half of a pigs head or pieces of roasted marrow. That's the sort of food I was hoping for, and was disappointed to not find it on the menu.

When we walked in, we didn't have to wait too long to get a seat at the bar, where I quickly ordered a Bloody Mary - they are supposed to be amazing. It was nice and thick with a decent amount of horseradish and garnished with a pickled green bean. It was...here's that word again...good.

It only took about 15 minutes to get seated at a nice table upstairs. The upstairs dining room has an additional bar and is significantly more spacious than the first floor. Like the first floor, every inch of the walls are covered with some sort of kitschy decoration. Most of the decorations have a pig theme, but there are several illustrations of vegetables and other bucolic subjects. A couple of large mirrors with menus and beer-lists scrawled across their surfaces adorn two of the walls upstairs and help open the space up a bit. I loved the decor. Very cool.

Once seated, we ordered the deviled eggs and chicken liver toast. Both of these were good, simple dishes. The egg tasted like it had a bit of vinegar in it, giving it a bit more of a kick than your typical deviled egg. I'm not sure why I keep ordering chicken liver dishes. I don't really like chicken liver, but I feel like I should, as a non-vegetarian foodie. Anyway, I actually thought this was pretty good for a chicken liver dish. The liver was seasoned and blended into a fairly loose spread and served on grilled toasts. Charred bits of bread really complemented the liver flavor well.

For our main courses, Abby and I orderd the gnudi (a ricotta dumpling served with brown butter and crispy sage) and the ricotta and prosciutto tart with marjoram. The gnudi were good, but they seemed a little out of place on an the menu for an English gastro pub. I guess they are a popular dish, though. So, give the customers what they want, right? The tart seemed like a more fitting menu option, and the crispy pastry shell, the saltiness of the prosciutto, and the sour taste of the ricotta all went together quite well. These were good dishes, but would I wait three hours for them? Not a chance.

The atmosphere alone probably makes this place worth going to, but I don't think its worth a long wait (I MIGHT wait for an hour to eat here). You also have to pay quite a bit for what you get. One diner sitting next to me looked shocked when he was served the bib lettuce salad ($14). It was a plate of lettuce, lightly dressed with a light vinaigrette (probably oil and lemon) and a light sprinkling of herbs. I think a problem was in the presentation. It looked like a naked plate of lettuce. Hardly the kind of thing you want to pay more than a couple bucks for, even if it is some damn good lettuce.

My recommendation would be to go here during lunch when the wait is more reasonable or wait a few months and see if the hype dies down and the crowds get more manageable. Even though I wasn't totally impressed by my first trip, I would definitely go back. There are several other menu options that I would like to try out before going against the conventional wisdom and saying that this place is overrated. Again, I really want to love this place and hope that future visits will change my mind.

Late night dinner at Babbo

Last night we ate at Babbo. People I've talked to who have eaten here usually say things like "best meal I have ever had," "best restaurant ever," or some other superlative when describing their experience at Babbo. While I won't go out and proclaim that it's the single best meal I've ever had, I'm having a hard time coming up with places that were, across the board, better than Babbo. I think that the best dishes I had at Del Posto were better than the best dishes that I had at Babbo, but I thought that Babbo was stronger across the board. This could just be a function of what we ordered. I would be more likely to go back to Babbo because its not as expensive as Del Posto. On the other hand, it's pretty tough to get a reservation at Babbo. The only table we could get was at 11pm. It was well worth the wait, though.
I really liked the layout of the restaurant. You walk into a crowded bar. Behind the bar is a lower level dining room with a large table in the center that has a big center piece along with bottles of wine, olive oil, and vinegar. Some dishes, such as the branzino, are platted here after the waiter shows you the whole fish (or whatever dish you are ordering). Del Posto also has these serving stations. I think it's a really nice touch. A large staircase in lands in the center of the room, and leads up to a more spacious second floor dining room that has a large skylight and another large serving table in the center of the room. The sound track accompanying diners includes bands such as Led Zepplin, Guns and Roses, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The soundtrack would seem bit at odds with the food and the setting, but, surprisingly, it works.

As far as the service goes, I thought that the bartender was a bit brusque, but the rest of the staff was fantastic. I didn't get our waiter's name, but he was awesome, and gave us a number of great recommendations. Here's what we had.

Grilled octopus with "Barlotti Marinati" and spicy lemoncello vinaigrette.
Testa (pig's head) with pickled pearl onions and thyme vinaigrette.
Warm tripe "alla Parmagiana"
Mint love letters with spicy lamb sausage.
Black spaghetti with rock shrimp, spicy salami calabrese, and green chiles.
Goose liver ravioli with balsamic vinegar and brown butter.
Whole grilled branzino with cardoons and lemon oregano jam.
Grilled pork chop with cherry peppers, cipolline and aceto manodori.

Future Food @ WD-50

Every season on Top Chef, there's at least one contestant that is really in to molecular gastronomy, Wylie Dufresne is always a guest judge, and the producers always show a clip of said contestant gushing about how great Dufresne is and how he is one of the pioneers of this type of cooking. Having seen it executed on TV many times but never tried it, Abby and I jumped at the chance to grab lunch there.

The verdict? It was good. I don't think this type of cooking really adds much in terms of taste, but all the dishes were really creative, sometimes surprising, and everything looked great. If this were an Iron Chef battle, the dishes would have been maxed out on the plating and creativity scores, and average on the taste scores.

Here's what we had:

They started us out with some 'sesame paper' instead of the typical bread basket.
The first dish in the lunch tasting menu was poached New Zealand Snapper with green mango, parsley root, and cumin.
Dish two was "Knot foie," a strip of foie gras terrine tied in a know with puffed rice. The puffed rice added a nice textural contrast, but it was also all I could taste. I think it would have been better if they had used about half the amount of the puffed rice.
The third - and perhaps most creative dish -was their version of eggs benedict. The yellow stuff is poached egg yolk with a pinch of volcanic salt. Its topped with a Canadian bacon chip. On the side, they serve a hollandaise cube dusted with English muffin crumbs. You read correctly...that's a cube of sauce. Very cool. When you break open the cube, the hollandaise sauce spills out, and you can mix all the ingredients together. It tastes just like a very good eggs benedict.
Course four on the menu was a seared 'crab tail' covered with and edamame noodle in a cinnamon dashi broth. I thought the cinnamon was a bit off-putting at first but was really in to it by the time I finished the dish. It added a really nice aroma.
The fifth dish on the menu was chicken liver spaetzle with radish, cocoa nibs, and pine needle oil sauce. I liked how the sauce looked like mint chip ice cream and the radishes add nice texture. I'm not crazy about chicken livers done this way though.
The last savory dish was beef tongue with king oyster mushrooms, crispy quinoa, palm seeds infused with bitters, and a cherry-miso sauce. Beef tongue has a pretty distinct flavor, so this is probably something that you love or hate. The palm seeds were a nice complement to the dish.
The first dessert dish was called "Waldorf Salad." It has walnut crumble, walnut tuile, goldn raisins, celery, celery mayonnaise, apple, and apple ice cream. I thought that this was a really clean tasting, well done dish....very creative.
Dessert number two was toasted coconut cake, carob, smoked cashews, brown butter sorbet, and coconut foam. Another winner.
The last dessert course was Yuzu ice cream with a marcona almond coating.

Del Posto

Abby moved down to New York last week to start here summer job at a law firm, so I went down to visit her this weekend. After being stuck in the Fung Wah bus in bumper to bumper traffic for several hours, I finally made it to NYC with about an hour to spare before Abby and I needed to meet Alex and Jane at Del Posto, where they were somehow able to get last minute reservations. Let me just begin by saying that this meal was absolutely phenomenal. From the service, to the setting, to the food, everything was on point.

When our cab pulled up to the curb, I opened up my door and started to stick my umbrella out to open it and shield Abby from the rain - it had been pretty dismal all day - and when I looked up I saw that the doorman has already beat me there. With his large umbrella in hand, he escorted us to the door (and later helped us get a cab).

Once we were seated, the waiter graciously answered our many many questions about the menu, and a somolier gave us some excellent recommendations so we didn't have to contend with the 60+ page wine list. We ended up choosing the tasting menu, so between the four of us, we were able to try out a fairly nice variety of items. Abby and Jane both ordered an appetizer called vitello tonnato crudo which consisted of three cubes each of raw veal and tuna as the centerpiece. Alex had an abalone salad, which may have been the best appetizer at the table, and I ordered the frutti di mare, which was a mix of raxor clams, scallops, and calamari. I thought it was excellent, but the abalone might be a more novel dish.

For the tasting menu, the whole table chooses two different pasta dishes to share for the first course, and we went with rabbit panzotti with pencil asparagus and black truffle butter and del posto agnolotti del plin with parmagiano-reggiano butter. The agnolotti was good. The panzotti was absolutely amazing.
The past skin was incredibly thin and delicate, providing the perfect casing for the smooth rabbit filling inside. The taste of the asparagus and black truffles was perfect balanced. I wish I could have eaten a whole plate full of this stuff.

For the second course, Jane and I both ordered grilled squab that was served with shaved white asparagus, cherries, and fava beans. I'de never had squab before, and I never thought that the lowly pigeon could taste so good. On the side, they serve a little cup with the squab's liver at the bottom and topped with a forcemeat made from the legs.
Abby ordered cacciucco, a fishermens stew, sort of like a ciopino, that was flavored with some type of bread sauce with salt cod. This dish had a great presentation. The waiter first brings the soup out to the table in a warm silver bowl and then goes and plates it at a serving table in the center of the dining room. The bread sauce is presented on the side in a silver pitcher so you get to add it an mix it together yourself. The sauce thickens the soup a little and completely transforms the flavor.
Alex ordered roasted pork loin that was served with a side dish that has sausages, garbanzo beans, carrot, and a pearl onion in some sort of broth.

For dessert, we ordered an assortment of different things pictures below. They were all very good, but, not having much of a sweet tooth, it was harder for me to get excited about these dishes.