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.

Mesa menu

I often buy cookbooks, look at them, and, at most, cook one or two recipes from them. That's not to say that they are useless. They do, after all, provide a lot of great ideas, but still, it would be nice to use them a bit more. So, when I got my latest cookbook, the Mesa Grill cookbook, I figured a dinner party would be a nice way to knock out a lot of recipes at once. I was able to make an appetizer (corn pancakes with mango serrano crema), a soup (pumpkin soup with chipotle), an entree (spice rubbed pork tenderloin with bourbon ancho sauce and a smoky red pepper sauce), and a dessert (molten chocolate cake with dulce de leche). I also added a couple things of my own: an apple and manchego salad, cheddar and jalapeno polenta, and spicy garlic kale. Here are some pictures of the food.






A dinner party would not be complete without great company, and Eliana, Sebastian, Jon, Katrina (first picture below), Suzanna, William, Melissa, and Dino (second picture below), ably filled that role (they also all did a great job of bring some great wine to the table).

Brined pork

Abby left for Guatemala at the beginning of May, but before she took off, we had a couple of friends over for a little send off dinner party. The menu was a brined rack of pork with apple chutney and a bourbon reduction, a puree of sweet and russet potatoes, and braised brussels sprouts with pancetta. I the rack came from Savenor's so I knew that, if I prepared it well, it would taste great. The recipe for the pork, chutney, and sauce was from a Bobby Flay show, and since I like the kind of food he makes, I knew that if I didn't mess things up, it would probably taste pretty good. Brussles sprouts are something I've been making a lot lately and the potatoes are a dish that I've been experimenting with lately.

There were a lot of components to this dish, so everyone pitched in on the preparation. Here's Kathleen, Sharlene, and Gustavo trying to make sense of the food blog. Gustavo, by the way, has an amazing food blog that is really one of the major inspirations for this blog. I highly recommend it. I'm very impressed by his pictures, the range of dishes that he creates, his great use of seasonal ingredients, and his eye for economy in cooking, a must for any grad student/cooking enthusiast. His cooking is something to aspire to.
Here, Abby and Kathleen work on the chutney. I think that I might be secretly related to Kathleen. She really looks a lot like a Kina. Any relatives reading this might want to look into that and let me know if you find anything.
Here are the ingredients for the potatoes, simmering away.
The potatoes that I made were a half and half mix of sweet and regular potatoes. Sweet potatoes alone, I think, would be overpowering, hence the mixture. I'm essentially thinning out, or diluting, the sweet potato with the regular russets. The sweet potatoes are a lot denser, so I start boiling those a few minutes before adding the other potatoes. On the right is a mixture of cream and butter with thyme and dried sage. Heating it over low heat infuses the flavor of the herbs into the cream, but I probably needed to add more herbs and steeped it for a longer to get the effect I was going for. Once the potatoes are boiled, I pass them through a ricer, fold in the creme mixture and a couple cloves of roasted garlic, and season with salt and pepper. If you have a ricer, I would advise always using it to make mashed potatoes. If you have a potato masher, throw it out and get a ricer. Potatoes are, of course, a starch, and working it too much makes them heavy and sticky, like paste. I think its more or less the same reaction that you get when you knead dough. By using a ricer and gently folding in the ingredients, the mixture stays light and fluffy.

The most fun part was preparing the bourbon reduction. I've always liked playing with fire.
And, here is the final product all finished and plated before heading out to the dining room. The brussels sprouts were braised a little too long, so the color isn't as vivid as I would like, but it tasted good, and other than that, I have no complaints.
Here's Gustavo, Gary, and Abby. Notice how Abby has three glasses of wine in front of her.
She really loves her wine.