Weekend five, 6/22/14.

Here’s all my ESPN content from the last week:

* Updated Sunday afternoon: My report on Dylan Bundy and Marcos Molina from Saturday night’s Aberdeen-Brooklyn game.
* A very quick note on Cuban defector Yasmani Tomás.
* Scouting notes from the California-Carolina Leagues All-Star Game, held in my backyard this year in Wilmington.
* Notes on Yankees/Orioles AA prospects, including lefties Manny Banuelos and Eddie Rodriguez.
* More notes, this time on the Ike Davis trade, some Lakewood/Hickory prospects, and Daniel Carbonell.
* This week’s Klawchat.

And now, the links…

Nashville eats, 2012 edition.

I ate really, really well in Nashville this week, which is what happens when you get the hell out of the Opryland Hotel, itself a testament to what happens when capitalism’s DNA mutates and reproduces out of control. Over the last five years it seems that Nashville has had a culinary boom, and I had more places I wanted to visit than I could have gotten to in a week.

Our first big group dinner was Monday night at City House, one of the most-recommended restaurants in Nashville by those of you who live there, and one of the most enjoyable meals I have ever had when you combine the food and the company at the table. Because of the size of our party, we were served family-style, which had the benefit of allowing us to all try more items. I thought two items really stood out above everything else: the belly ham pizza and the bread gnocchi. We tried all four pizzas on the menu, with the anchovy pizza the only disappointment, but the belly ham pizza with fresh mozzarella, oregano, and a pretty healthy dose of red chili flakes was incredible, from the light, almost cracker-like crust to the bacon-like pork to the bright, creamy cheese. The gnocchi, without potato as traditional gnocchi would have, were the best I’ve ever eaten (caveat: potato gnocchi don’t thrill me) and are served with a scant tomato sauce, braised pork butt, and grana padano (essentially Parmiggiano-Reggiano from cows near but not in that specific region). That’s the dish everyone was talking about the next morning. The octopus starter everyone’s joked about was just fair, cooked correctly (that is, not till it was a spare tire) but still not that pleasant a texture and without the powerful flavors to stand up to the fish. I loved the rigatoni with rabbit sugo and fennel, kind of like a duck ragout with big flavors from the aromatics and tomato. That night’s special dessert was a chocolate-peanut butter pie that would put Reese’s out of business.

Tuesday night’s dinner included at least 16 of us from the media side at the Pharmacy Burger Bar and Bier Garden, one of the best burger places I have ever visited. Their burgers are made with Tennessee-grown beef and served on stark white rolls that are as soft as potato bread and are custom-baked for the Pharmacy. They hand-cut their fries, including skin-on sweet potato fries served without that annoying sugar topping so many places use or any tricks to make them crispier, and they serve their own tater tots, which might have been an even bigger hit than the burgers. They also had a strong selection of regional beers, including the Nashville-brewed Yazoo Gerst Amber beer, so smooth it went down almost like soda and might be too mild for folks who are more serious about their beer than I am. As for the burgers, most of us went for their signature item, the Farm Burger, with bacon, country ham, and a fried egg on top, which is a top five burger for me at this point.

We ventured out to two new lunch places, Fido and Marché. Fido is related to the Bongo Java coffee shop and retains that coffee-shop vibe even when serving sandwiches or fish entrees like the trout special I ordered, along with a cinnamon cheesecake that Jonah Keri said was to die for and a chocolate-chocolate chip cookie that also really strong. Marche offers a duck confit sandwich about which one probably needs to say little more, because really, it’s some damn good duck confit. Molly Knight ordered a latte which was large enough to drown an orangutan. Both places were worth hitting again, especially because they gave us a chance to eat somewhat more healthful items in expectation of big dinners.

On the way to the airport I made a detour to revisit Arnold’s Country Kitchen, a meat-and-three place that seems to rate as Nashville’s best and where I had a great meal back in 2007. The meats change every day as do about half of the sides available; Thursday’s options included roast beef, while mashed potatoes and turnip greens (with ham hock) appear to always be options. One of the special sides that day was fried green tomatoes, about four-inch discs breaded with seasoned bread crumbs and quickly deep-fried. They’re not good for you – none of this is – but the salty-sour combo was surprisingly satisfying. For dessert, they offered four different kinds of pies plus a few other options. The hot pepper chocolate pie wasn’t very popular but I’d gladly eat that again – the filling had the texture of a dense mousse and the flavor of half-cooked brownies, and once you finished a bite, a warm heat took over from what I assume was cayenne pepper. A meat, three sides, bread (which I skipped), dessert, and a drink ran about $13 and I was full for the whole flight back to Arizona.

Finally, the headline meal of the trip was at The Catbird Seat, named one of the ten best new restaurants in the U.S. this year by Bon Appetit. This was the most expensive meal I have ever eaten, and one of the longest at over four hours and nine-plus courses. It’s a set tasting menu, and the food tends toward the experimental – not quite Alinea territory but along the same philosophical lines. All of the courses hit the mark save one, and I was challenged by a number of the dishes to rethink ingredients or flavors. If you’re not interested in a $150+ meal that goes on for days, feel free to stop reading here – that’s why I’m covering this last. Also, each dish comes with a wine pairing, which the sommelier introduces and explains in some depth, but as the group’s driver I skipped this part.

* The meal began with quarter-sized ‘oreos’ made of a parmiggiano cream or mousse sandwiched between two slices of porcini mushrooms, producing a gustatory dissonance as my palate kept expecting sweet. The point of this starter, other than just being playful, became evident later on.

* The first actual course was a trio of one-bite items, including a raw Island Creek oyster with kimchi and a lime foam, a “cracker jack” using shiitake mushrooms roasted until crunchy, and a rectangle of chicken skin baked until crunchy and topped with ground red pepper for a twist on Nashville hot chicken. That’s the first raw oyster I’ve ever eaten, incidentally – growing up on Long Island during a time when raw oysters were quite dangerous to eat, I had no exposure to them and had (have?) a long-standing bias against raw shellfish of any sort. The faux cracker jack was the best item here, combining the earthiness of the mushroom with the hint of sweetness and crunch you’d expect from something that looks like caramel corn.

* Second course was a diver scallop crudo, sliced thinly, served with their own dashi, smoked roe of Arctic char, crumbled chicken skin, lime juice, finely minced serrano chiles, soy sauce, and shiso leaves. As complex as that sounded, and even looked, the end result was perfectly balanced and nothing overshadowed the scallop itself. This was also one of the largest portions of the night.

* Third course was a soup of roasted sunchoke and caramelized yogurt, poured tableside over a quarter of an artichoke heart, shaved roasted fennel, black olive, black garlic, and a tiny bit of black truffle. Cooked yogurt is very much not my friend, but the texture of the soup was unreal, like double cream, and the roasted sunchokes gave it the appearance of a rich light-brown roux with hints of sweetness and a nutmeg-like spice.

* Fourth course was Arctic char with cream cheese gnudi, dill-infused oil, pureed Meyer lemon (rind and all, apparently), capers, and sorrel leaves. I love Arctic char, a fish nearly indistinguishable from salmon, but prefer it cooked a little past medium rare; this was practically swimming upstream. The gnudi, marble-sized spheres of (I presume) cream cheese with just enough flour to give them structure, had the texture of potato gnocchi and just a hint of the tang from the cheese so that they could soak up some of the dill flavor below them. (Gnudi means “nude” in Italian and refers to a filling cooked without its pasta wrapper.)

* Fifth course was probably the restaurant’s signature dish, roasted pigeon leg, served with the claw still on it, along with a celeriac ribbon, smoked butter, cured egg yolk, chestnut purée, and huckleberry reduction, with the last two items perhaps a play on peanut butter and jelly. Pigeon (usually marketed here as “squab,” for obvious reasons) was another first for me, here cooked rare with a flavor like that of a duck breast with a texture a little closer to a rare lamb rib chop. The chesnut purée stole a fair bit of the show, though, with the crisped skin of the pigeon also standing out.

* Sixth course was a large medallion of rare “Wagyu” beef ribeye with roasted Belgian endive, little spheres of Asian pear, roasted maitake mushroom, and walnut butter. This was by far the most generous portion of the night, but a little tricky to eat with all the components in one bite, in part because the beef, while tender, wasn’t quite that “like butter” consistency I’d expect from that particular cut. (There’s also a lack of labelling standards for “Wagyu” beef, but I’ll trust that the Catbird Seat is at least buying very high-quality inputs.) Getting a sphere of anything the size of a large marble on to the fork with four other elements is nearly impossible, even though the fruit’s mild sweetness was a perfect complement to the various savory elements. Great ideas here, but perhaps not fully executed.

* Seventh course was the one whiff for me, Rush Creek Reserve cheese with a curried granola, rose-water honey, and apricot jam. The cheese looks like mayonnaise and had a heavy, cheddar-y flavor that I simply don’t like. It’s supposed to be one of the best domestic cheese around, so I’m chalking this up to my specific palate and not the dish itself, although Jonah expressed his dislike of the curried granola, which I probably could eat by the bowl.

* From there we move to desserts, three plates although they’re listed on the menu as just two courses. Course 8A was a play on coffee and tea, with coffee ice cream, molasses cake, rooibos (red tea) foam, and a hazelnut and coffee crumb, just insanely good across the board, a dessert where everything was sweet but nothing was too sweet, and a great way to show off the complexity of rooibos’ flavor. (I happen to love the stuff, and especially like to drink it when I’m sick because it has no caffeine.) Course 8B was a maple-thyme flan-like custard cooked in an egg shell with a maple glaze on top and a single stick of bacon protruding from the top – an egg-and-bacon dish that implied there were pancakes on the plate that required the use of maple syrup.

* The ninth course was the most impressive dessert from an execution perspective: charred oak ice cream, vanilla cake, pineapple gelée, and bourbon balls – bourbon encapsulated in a very soft gel so they’d explode in your mouth almost on contact. The ice cream here was smoky but also had subtle flavors that reminded me of caramel, coffee, and of course whiskey, and its texture was as smooth as that of good gelato.

* Finally, another small plate of three Oreo-like items appeared, but this time, they’re sweet, with chocolate wafers and a vanilla cream. They don’t taste anything like the real thing, but speaking as a devout chocoholic, I appreciated the hit of bitter cocoa at the end of the meal.

Someone in Nashville asked me if I preferred the meal at City House or the one at the Catbird Seat but I struggled to compare them. City House is pretty straightforward upscale cuisine – recognizable dishes, done well from start to finish, using fresh, local ingredients with outstanding execution. You will also leave there stuffed. Catbird Seat is experimental and challenging; it isn’t food to be consumed so much as it’s food to be considered. Your preference would likely depend on what you prefer. Catbird Seat is doing things very few restaurants outside of New York, LA, and Chicago are doing, and that makes it the “better” restaurant, the place I’d absolutely take my wife for a special occasion or a client I wanted to blow out of the water. On the other hand, if my goal was to go have a boisterous meal with nine friends, which was what we did on Monday night, I’d take City House. You can’t lose either way.

Las Vegas and Utah eats.

I had a quick run through Vegas and Utah last week to see Kris Bryant and Marcus Littlewood and ate pretty well overall, with only one bad meal and a few gems in Utah.

First meal in Vegas was west of the Strip at Yassou Greek Grill on West Charleston, serving gyros, hummus, and other basic Greek items at very reasonable prices. Their lemon-herb chicken is heavily marinated and has a strong flavor without any compromise in the texture, and the pitas they use in their gyros are soft and thick, nothing like the dry pitas you get at the grocery store. The gyro passed my tzatziki test – when I held it perpendicular to the table, I didn’t get any glops of tzatziki, which means they sauced it properly. That gyro plus a side Greek salad and rice pilaf (just rice prepared pilaf-style, with no other ingredients) ran about $8.30 before tax and drink.

I’ve been to the original Mesa Grill location in Manhattan but haven’t had a chance to get back in nearly two years, so I dropped into the Caesar’s Palace location on this trip and decided to branch out, trying two appetizers and a dessert, for research purposes, of course. The blue corn pancake with barbecued duck was dominated by the flavor of the hoisin sauce on the duck; hoisin’s sticky-sweet flavor and texture make it the elephant on the plate, and in this case it wiped out the flavor of the duck itself. I liked the presentation and am certainly a fan of shredded meat in a crepe or pancake, but all I tasted here was hoisin. The creamy wild Mushroom Grits with poached egg, charred serrano sauce, cotija cheese, and blue corn tortilla were better, very creamy as advertised, with only the serrano sauce (which tasted largely of burn) failing to add something to the dish. For dessert, the bartender recommended the churros with chocolate dipping sauce, which were the second-best I’ve had, behind only the version at Toro in Boston.

One bad meal on the trip was at the highly-touted Hash House a Go-Go in Imperial Palace, one of two locations in Vegas. I went for breakfast and ordered the top hash on the menu, a roasted chicken hash with rosemary and asparagus. The dish was incredibly dry, especially the chicken, all white meat and often inedibly tough. Great concept – who doesn’t love a good hash? – but horrid execution.

I made a day trip to St. George, Utah, from Vegas – just under two hours each way, including a very cool drive through the Virgin River Gorge – and had an unbelievable lunch at the Painted Pony, which I would say is in “downtown St. George” except that there doesn’t seem to be much to it besides downtown. The Painted Pony is the sort of local restaurant of which Gordon Ramsay would approve, at least for lunch, with simple dishes focusing on fresh, vibrant flavors. Their torta ahogada sandwich comes on this absolutely perfect ciabatta-style roll and features roasted beef tenderloin, caramelized onions, bell peppers, and cotija cheese, with a rich red sauce on the side, so the sandwich becomes a sort of New Mexican take on French Dip. The side salad was also fresh, with walnuts and julienned apples, and none of the wilted leaves that often plague mixed greens.

I skipped their opulent desserts to hit up Croshaw’s Pies on the, um, west side of town, which was a good call. Their “very berry” pie is sweet-tart with its mix of raspberries and blackberries, and the crust was soft and butter, more tender than flaky, which is how I prefer my pie crusts anyway. It didn’t have great structure, since the filling wept slightly on to the plate, but the compensation was that it didn’t have the slightly gluey texture that comes from using too much cornstarch. Croshaw’s recently opened a second location in Mesa, Arizona, on Brown Road well east of the Cubs’ facilities.

Sarasota eats (and links).

Links first: Today’s chat transcript. My podcast with the drunks at Drunk Jays Fans. Some intriguing-looking jalapeno cornbread with a recipe, although it includes sugar, which makes it corn cake, doesn’t it? Jerry Crasnick wrote a good piece on Adenhart that gets a little more at Adenhart as a person than as a prospect. (Seriously, stop talking about his baseball future. It’s trivial.)

Speaking of Adenhart and the chat, did anyone get what I was saying here?

J.B. (Dunmore, PA): As a father, today’s news really upset me. Three lives lost and another in the driver that is pretty much over. This may sound harsh but I really hope that young man spends a good chunk of his life behind bars.

Keith Law: They should release the other driver and give him a pass to the Angels’ clubhouse for Friday’s game. And then lock the doors.

I was suggesting that the killer (let’s not mince words – that’s what he is) would be locked in the clubhouse with Adenhart’s teammates. It doesn’t read that way to me now.

On to more mundane matters: I was in Sarasota for the last three days and ate a lot of needlessly heavy food. My go-to place from years past, an Amish restaurant called Yoder’s, wasn’t quite up to my memories of it. They’re best known for their pies, and while they do have a great variety, I had three flavors in three days and didn’t love any of them. The strawberry-rhubarb pie was packed but with about 90% rhubarb; if I wanted rhubarb pie, I would have ordered it, since that’s another option. The peach pie and blackberry pie were both filled with gooey cornstarchy liquid and not enough fruit. Their pie crusts are very good, though – tender, not really flaky, very soft and buttery.

The food is mostly comfort food. Their fried chicken is above-average, pressure-fried (the Colonel’s method!) to produce a crisp crust and fully-cooked meat in a shorter time than traditional skillet-frying, which takes about 45 minutes. Unfortunately, the meat I got was lukewarm and I had to send the thigh back. (The drumstick wasn’t much warmer, but you can’t put a fried drumstick in front of me and get it back unless you use the jaws of life.) Their roast turkey is solid-average – it peels apart like it’s been smoked but doesn’t have the slightly rubbery texture that I always associate with smoked turkey – while their smoked pulled pork was moist but kind of flavorless. The stuffing was mushy, and the green beans were grayish-green from overcooking. I did have one meal at another Amish restaurant down the street, called Mom’s, with pretty similar results.

Tropical Thai in northern Sarasota was just bad. The chicken in the chicken with green curry was barely cooked and way too soft – almost like a great steak, except that that texture is great in steak and lousy in poultry – and the sauce had clearly been thickened with some kind of starch, while the vegetables in it were also undercooked.

And one more dud before I get to the two recommendations: Dutch Valley is a diner that claims to be known for its Belgian waffles (spelled “Belgium waffles” on the sign outside, which I now know was a warning). Putting pancake batter on a Belgian waffle iron does not produce a Belgian waffle – it produces a thick, dense, doughy cake-like waffle that, if cooled to room temperature, might make a suitable mattress for a hamster.

Word of Mouth was a better bet for breakfast, at least a solid 50, although I found the food to be a little hit or miss. On the plus side, their scone of the day today was pineapple-coconut (right out of the oven) and it was incredible – slightly dry, like a good scone should be; sweet but not overly so; with bits of actual coconut inside and a crumbly texture. Their home fries are nicely browned and cooked with onions, although today’s onions were more black than brown. The Tex-Mex omelet with chorizo had absolutely no salt in the egg portion, and when I ordered eggs over medium the other day I got something about five seconds past over easy. They serve Harney & Sons teas and the service is very good, but they play awful music (John Mayer on Tuesday, Hootie & the Blowfish today). There are two locations, and I went to the on Cattlemen near Bee Ridge. It’s a solid 50.

Mi Pueblo is a local mini-chain of Mexican places serving mostly the usual fare of burritos, enchiladas, and tacos. Their tacos al carbon with steak were outstanding. The steak was soft – how often have you had steak in a taco or fajita and needed a hacksaw to chew it? Mi Pueblo’s was at the other end of the spectrum. The rice was fresh and gently seasoned, not sticky with tomato paste or sauce. The one I went to, at the corner of McIntosh and Bee Ridge, is tiny and there was a wait when I arrived on a Wednesday night after 7, so the locals seem to have caught on. Based on one dish I’d hazard a grade of 55.

Chocolate-Bourbon Pecan Pie.

I’m a big fan of recipe triangulation. I see a recipe I want to try, but something doesn’t sit right – a method, an ingredient, whatever, there’s something there that I don’t believe will work, and I don’t believe in wasting time or food on poorly constructed recipes. So I find other recipes for the same dish and try to combine them, identifying similarities and isolating the differences, then either picking and choosing methods from all recipes, or just splitting the difference when we’re talking about something like a discrepancy in oven temperature. This recipe for a rather heavenly pie is the result of just such a triangulation. It’s largely adapted from Bourbon and Chocolate Pecan Pie Recipe, with an assist (the heated-filling trick) from the plain pecan pie recipe in Baking Illustrated.

(Next time out, I’m going to see how much chocolate I can stuff into the filling, but I’ve had two requests from readers for this recipe who saw my update on Twitter.)

Chocolate-Bourbon-Pecan Pie

One pie dough for a 9″ pan

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
3 large eggs
¾ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup white sugar
¾ cup dark corn syrup
½ tsp vanilla extract
3 Tbsp bourbon
¼ tsp salt
1½ cups coarsely chopped pecans

1. Blind-bake the dough at 375 degrees for 25 minutes, covered in foil and weighted down with pie weights or dry beans or whatever you have that won’t melt at 375. Remove the foil and weights and bake 6-7 minutes more until the crust just starts to brown.
2. Set a skillet with about ½” of water over a burner and bring to a simmer. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a heatproof bowl set over the simmering water. Stir to combine and set aside to cool. Do not overheat or the butter will break.
3. While the pie is baking, take a large heatproof bowl and whisk the three eggs together until frothy (meaning you can see some air bubbles and the mixture’s volume is increasing). Add both sugars and whisk until completely combined.
4. Add all remaining ingredients except the pecans and set over the simmering water (you didn’t pour it out, right?), whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches 130 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
5. As soon as the pie crust reaches that light golden brown stage, dump the pecans into the filling, then pour the whole thing into the crust. Drop the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake until the top is cracked and the center is just barely set – it should wiggle when you shake the pie dish, but should not slosh. Start checking it around 25 minutes; mine was done at 30, although my oven holds its temp well because I have a pizza stone and some unglazed quarry tiles on the oven floor.
6. Set on a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before cutting, 2½-3 hours.

Kentucky eats.

Food notes from about 24 hours on the ground in Kentucky…

Ramsey’s Diner is a local Lexington chain promising home-cooked meat and three meals, but it couldn’t have been more of a letdown. I went with the pot roast, which is the type of slow-cooked dish in which meat and three restaurants specialize, and chose pinto beans, fried okra, and mashed potatoes as sides. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was good. Everything except the small cornbread stick lacked salt. The pot roast was dry, tasteless, and grey, and they skipped the critical step of browning the meat before braising it. The mashed potatoes tasted cheap and thin. The okra missed the salt most sorely. And the cornbread stick was dry enough to use as a bat in the world’s smallest game of baseball. The only minor pleasure of the meal was dessert, as Ramsey’s serves pies from Missy’s, which is apparently a local pie-shop icon. I went with chocolate meringue over coconut, fearing the coconut might be sickly-sweet, and the chocolate was in fact quite sweet, but at least the custard brought a strong chocolate flavor (milk chocolate, but I’m trying to be positive here), and it was topped with a generous quantity of meringue.

For breakfast the next morning I wanted to see downtown Lexington, so I went to Tolly-Ho’s, allegedly a UK institution. The food sucked, which is all you need to know about Tolly-Ho’s. Fortunately, I was a few minutes’ drive from Spalding’s Bakery, established 1929, and was fortunate enough to walk in when a batch of glazed donuts had just come out of the fryer. One was enough, sixty cents’ worth of golden brown deliciousness, not too airy, with a real crust to its exterior. The selection is limited so I imagine it’s hit or miss, and it’s not a typical donut shop serving coffees and lattes, but that donut was worth the little drive. It’s across from the Jif peanut-butter plant (I was surprised not to see giant tanks of corn syrup on the property) on US-60.

I had a little time to kill before going to back to the Louisville airport, courtesy of a high school coach in Tennessee who decided at the last minute to skip his top pitcher’s start this week, so I drove to Louisville and went to Mark’s Feed Store for lunch. Mark’s is another local chain, but the food was better than the food at Ramsey’s. They specialize in barbecue; for $8, I got the small babyback ribs platter – I was still full of donut at that point, three hours after eating the thing – which was four ribs and two sides. The ribs had a thick bark on the outside and were basted in a mild barbecue sauce that was a little sweet, but not Tennessee-sweet, but I found the meat to be a little bit dry. To be fair, I was there after the lunch rush, and it’s possible that I ended up with meat that wasn’t fresh out of the smoker. The “smoky beans” were too sugary but had a good texture, and their green beans side comes with pulled pork mixed into it rather than bacon or ham hock. They serve burgoo, a Kentucky specialty stew that is traditionally made with some unusual meats, like squirrel, but I asked the server what was in it and she said pork and beef and other less interesting types of animal. Also, the meal came with one piece of grilled white bread. I have never quite understood the purpose of that, although I’ve seen it many times at southern Q joints. Is it just a side? Am I supposed to construct some sort of open-faced sandwich? Of all the starches in the world to serve, soft white bread was the choice? If I’m in the Say-uth and I’m having some sort of baked flour product, I want biscuits or cornbread. Or both, which, after all, is the #1 reason to visit a Cracker Barrel. White bread? Toasted on a flat-top grill? I just don’t understand.

Finally, I should mention two places at Logan Airport in Terminal A, which is the Delta terminal. There’s a Legal Seafood Test Kitchen which has some interesting dishes at double-digit dollar prices, but I didn’t see much that appealed to me. I did like what I ordered: a crab-meat club sandwich, with a generous portion of shredded crab meat (I can never remember which part of the crab that’s from, but it’s not lump meat), a couple of thick slices of bacon, and lettuce on brioche bread. There’s barely any mayonnaise on the sandwich – just enough to hold the crab meat together between the slices of bread – and it’s a good-sized portion. The other place, Lucky’s Lounge, is a culinary disaster, and there’s a nonzero chance I got a mild case of food poisoning from eating there. So you might want to skip that place.