Saturday five, 6/27/15.

My Insider pieces this week included a post on some Red Sox prospects, including Yoan Moncada; one on the Arizona/Atlanta trade involving Touki Toussaint; and a reaction to the release of the Futures Game rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the reissue of the modern classic Tigris & Euphrates, designer Reiner Knizia’s best game, now back in print with better graphics and clearer rules.

My good friend Molly Knight has a book coming out on the Dodgers, The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse, next month, and it’s so good I even gave the publisher a quote to use on the back.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • We’re getting so much closer to vaccine sanity, as California is set to end religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccinating school-age children. The science is clear and unequivocal, and making the wrong, anti-science decision can affect hundreds of others’ lives.
  • A young widow’s heartrending letter to her late husband, who committed suicide a month ago after a long battle with depression.
  • The Moringa oleifera tree may lead to an inexpensive process for purifying drinking water in developing countries.
  • On a Tokyo coffee roasting master still roasting at age 100.
  • A former president of the American Humanist Association writes in Psychology Today that anti-intellectualism is killing America. I’m not sure I agree with the premise, nor do I think such unreason as racial hatred is “anti-intellectualism” per se, but I still found it an interesting read.
  • Roxane Gay wrote in the New York Times that she can’t forgive Dylan Roof, and why should she? Forgiveness means releasing your anger. If we forget to be angry, why would anything ever change?
  • The first segment of Thursday’s episode of BBC Outlook, on Canada’s abused aboriginal children is harrowing listening, but also makes a superb case for “truth and reconciliation” commissions to address past historical wrongs.
  • Common sense from VOX.com: People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crimes. Yet we don’t hear calls for greater mental health treatment options when the former is true, only the latter.
  • A recent meta-study has found that the phenolic compounds found in olive oil may help prevent neurodegenerative diseases, although it would be nice to see empirical evidence (via clinical trials) to back this up. Still, olive oil is delicious and may be really good for you.
  • The guys behind Animal and Son of a Gun have opened a pizzeria in LA, and it sounds amazing, of course.

Nashville eats, 2015 edition.

My annual ranking of the top 25 MLB players under 25 is up for Insiders, as is another draft blog post on Vanderbilt’s Carson Fulmer and Dansby Swanson. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up. I also appeared on actor Nate Corddry’s Reading Aloud podcast, talking mostly about books and pizza with a little baseball chatter thrown in.

Nashville has more great places to eat than I could possibly hit in one scouting trip, even if I stayed five or six nights. And new ones are constantly opening, which was my aim on my two trips there in April since several of them have become so popular either with critics or locals.

The 404 Kitchen (restaurant not found error?) was the best meal I had while in Nashville; it’s a small place, seating about 40, and the menu changes daily depending on what ingredients were available that particular day. When I was there, there was a farm egg starter that was just a yolk served on a plate of al dente farro with mixed wild mushrooms and herbs, with enough of the dark cooking liquid to form a sauce when I mixed the yolk into the grains. Farro is an ancient form of wheat that has long been eaten in southern Italy the way we might eat rice or barley, but since it’s a whole grain it’s more nutritious than white rice, and I greatly prefer its flavor to that of barley. I would have preferred the farro to be a little more cooked – this was Al Dente’s cousin, Trey Dente – but the dark, earthy, lemony sauce was superb in its balance of acid and umami. I made an improvised version of the dish over the weekend using mixed dried mushrooms, reconstituting them for the cooking liquid, and using steel cut oats (a.k.a. groats) because I couldn’t get farro.

The entree was the least successful of the three dishes, a wahoo fillet served with some spring vegetables, but lacking a little punch to spruce up the mildness of the fish itself. (My first experience with wahoo was on my honeymoon in Bermuda twenty years ago, at the White Horse Tavern. They served a fried wahoo sandwich that was so frequently confused with chicken by tourists that they had a sign up saying, “No, the fried wahoo isn’t actually chicken.”) The mixture underneath the fish included some fingerling potatoes and sunchokes, easily my favorite part of the dish. The dessert was a chocolate “budino” that was thicker than most budinos or mousses, semi-sweet with bits of almond and drunken tart cherries; I like darker chocolates but this was close, and it was rich enough that it was best shared.

Two Ten Jack is Nashville’s first izakaya/ramen house, and while I am no judge of ramen or broth at all – I’ve had real ramen maybe three times in my life – I thought the tonkotsu (pork broth) ramen at Two Ten Jack was spectacular. Tonkotsu is made from pork bones, often trotters (yep, that’s pig feet), so the flavor is meatier than any other stock or broth made from chicken or beef. It’s also thicker because the preparation of the stock involves slowly poaching some pork fat and then whisking it into the liquid to form an emulsion. Two Ten Jack’s version has a little pork floating on top as well as the noodles adn aromatics you’d expect to have, but I would gladly drink this stock by the pint. The restaurant also offers sashimi, a few other raw fish preparations (including a tuna poke that I thought needed more acidity), and yakitori skewers you can order by the stick for about $3-5 each. They also serve several cocktails built around the distilled rice spirit shochu, including one that mixes it with their own house-made tonic water.

Several of you have recommended Mas Tacos Por Favor for a while, although it’s much easier now that they have a brick and mortar location right across the street from The Pharmacy, a great burger joint that also serves amazing tater tots. Mas Tacos offers five different taco options that look like they rotate or change frequently; when I was there there were options with beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, and a vegetarian one with sweet potato. The pulled (braised) pork was the easy winner over the chicken, as the pork had the flavor of carnitas without being too heavy, while I thought the chicken was too bland and I mostly got the flavors of the toppings. You can get one elote (grilled seasoned corn on the cob with paprika and cotija cheese) for $3, which I recommend, and a small plate of maduros (fried sweet plantains), which I probably wouldn’t. They also sell aguas frescas in varying flavors, but were out of the one flavor (tamarind) I would have ordered that day.

Desano’s Pizza is a mini-chain of three locations (Nashville, Charleston, LA) serving thin-crust, wood-fired pizzas to diners at long picnic tables in a dining hall in sight of the three ovens. It’s a little above-average for this style of pizza, with the crust a little too thick underneath the toppings and the sauce definitely too garlicky for me, definitely a good spot for a group outing though.

I tried to go to Barista Parlor, the over-the-top coffee emporium on the east side of Nashville, but their espresso machine was down that morning, so I’ll have to save that for another trip. I did make it back to Crema, still the best local roaster I’ve found in Nashville, not quite at the level of direct-trade spots like Intelligentsia or Counter Culture but at the high end of the next tier.

More NYC pizza and gelato.

Today’s Klawchat went well, I think. I’ll be back on BBTN tonight at 1:30 am Eastern.

I’ve gotten to two more spots from that (somewhat dubious) Food and Wine list of the nation’s best pizzerias, both in Manhattan, home to eleven of the 43 restaurants to make their cut. I still have five left in New York City, three of which (Di Fara, Paulie Gee’s, Sottocasa) are tricky because their hours are limited.

Forcella boasts three locations in the city, with the original in Brooklyn; I went to their NoHo location, on the Bowery between 2nd and 3rd (that’s Manhattan, for those of you unfamiliar with NYC neighborhoods). Their biggest claim to fame is as one of the first pizzerias, perhaps the first, to introduce the Neapolitan style of pizza known as “pizza montanara,” where the dough is quickly deep-fried to set and slightly crisp the crust, after which it’s topped and baked in a hot oven like most authentic Neapolitan pizzas are. This was my first experience with any kind of fried pizza, so I have no means of comparison, but I can say it was spectacular – the direct contact of the hot oil with the crust produces far more caramelization of the exterior starches and sugars than you’ll get from the indirect heat of a hotter oven, and there’s a hint of the flavor of a zeppole (the Italian take on fried dough, often served in a paper bag and drowned in powdered sugar). The crushed tomatoes were bright and very sweet, but I might argue for a little more cheese so you’re not just eating a plate of (delicious) fried bread. It is a steal at $9, by the way.


Pizza montanara at Forcella.

Rubirosa is a full-fledged Italian restaurant that happens to serve very good pizza. I saw it on Mulberry Street, between Prince and Spring, a fairly unassuming storefront that hides a larger seating area in the back. Rubirosa’s pizza isn’t true Neapolitan style, as it has very little exterior “lip” and is more cracker-like underneath, as opposed to the traditional wet-centered Neapolitan style. While the toppings were a little more generous than those at Forcella, the tomatoes weren’t as bright and their acidity overpowered the rest of the pizza because the crust was so thin. I enjoy these crispier crusts, like those at the Grimaldi’s chain in Arizona (I haven’t tried their NY outposts yet), but it’s a different product than true Neapolitan pizza, where you can really taste and feel the craft of the baker behind the bread. Also, at $17 for a small pizza, it’s overpriced for what you get.

Mo’ Gelato‘s coffee gelato is some of the strongest-flavored I’ve ever tasted, although that’s not saying much considering how most coffee-flavored gelatos, even those dubbed “espresso” flavor, often taste about as much like coffee as a light-and-sweet cup of swill from Dunkin’ Donuts. Mo’ Gelato’s looks darker and tastes it, so that the sweetness has real balance from the sharp note of roasted coffee. Their chocolate sorbet was a little pale in comparison, even though its color and flavor are both very dark – the lack of any kind of additional fat created a hollow flavor that, paired with the butterfat in the coffee gelato, seemed flat.

Il Buco Alimentaria is an Italian market and sandwich/small plates shop that also serves a small selection of gelato flavors, about eight when I visited, dished up by a rather fetching Sicilian woman who looked about as Italian as I do (which is to say, not much). Their chocolate gelato was superb, very smooth with a pudding-like flavor and texture, a rich semi-sweet chocolate that wasn’t extremely dark but less cloying or sweet than milk chocolate. The caramel gelato, however, was way too mild; in an era of sea salt caramel gelato and ice cream, weak caramel flavors just won’t cut it.

The next pizza stop will probably be Via Tribunali, an import to Manhattan from Seattle that is the only one of the F&W pizzerias in Manhattan that I haven’t tried and that is open for lunch.

New York City eats, 2014 edition.

The highlight meal of the trip, and the one big splurge, was a recommendation by Sother Teague at Amor y Amargo, whose establishment I’ll discuss in a moment. Sother directed me to the tasting menu at Hearth, which is only* $86 for a seven-course meal that showed incredible skill and breadth within the farm-to-table genre.

* I say “only” because this kind of meal can easily cost you north of $100, and I think the only thing Hearth’s tasting menu lacked was flash.

The meal started with an amuse-bouche, a chilled carrot soup with blackberry-balsamic drizzle on top, served in a tall narrow glass to allow you to drink the soup in one or two shots. The first proper course was also a chilled soup, this one a zucchini soup with pistachios, sun gold tomato, basil, and chunks of Parmiggiano-Reggiano. The zucchini was pureed and slightly aerated; I assume there was cream added given the soup’s tremendous body, but that much fat would have muted the flavor, and in this case there was no dampening of the taste of the squash itself at all. The nuts and small chunks of cheese are sprinkled throughout the soup, emphasizing the textural contrast – and I can’t say I ever realized what a great combination pistachios and zucchini would make until I had this soup. I was hoping I could get a gallon of this to go as a parting gift, but no such luck.

Second course was my favorite of all seven savory courses: a warm summer vegetable salad with a red wine vinegar/shallot dressing that reminded me in flavor of a buerre blanc, but in fact was made by simmering potatoes and then using some of them to thicken the dressing and coat the remaining vegetables, which included green beans, more zucchini, and cauliflower. People who think they don’t like vegetables should go eat this dish. I’ve never had a vegetable dish with this much flavor that didn’t involve cooking the vegetables to the point where they brown.

The next three courses involved proteins, and each was very good to great. The swordfish dish with eggplant, tomatoes, shelling beans, and black bean puree had two issues for me, although the fish itself was perfectly cooked – by far the most important part. I personally like swordfish served very simply: grilled, topped with sea salt, fresh black pepper, a little olive oil, and citrus juice. The way steak lovers want a fine steak is how I want my swordfish – don’t get in the way of the star ingredient. The other issue was that the eggplant was very soft, too much so, and I ended up setting it aside. The restaurant was dark enough that when the dish arrived, one strip of eggplant with a little of the skin and cap still on the end … well, I’ll just say it didn’t look very appetizing, because this isn’t Top Chef.

The lamb dish involved two different cuts, including a small piece of lamb rib meat that had been rubbed with Middle Eastern spices, smoked off the bone, and seared on both sides, giving it the look and texture of Texas BBQ but with the flavor profile of Turkish or Arabic cuisine. The remaining lamb pieces were slices of loin, served very rare, with roasted carrots and a smear of labneh (Lebanese strained yogurt) underneath. I wouldn’t have ordered this because lamb is my least favorite protein, but as it turned out the dish was fantastic and my only complaint is that I wanted more of the smoked rib (even if it meant less of the loin meat). The carrots were coated in some amaranth kernels, giving the dish a little more crunch – kind of like quinoa but without the bitterness.

Their “iconic” (that was my server’s word for it) meatball dish was very good, but I’m a tough critic on meatballs and I think I’ve had better, including Coppa in Boston … and in my own kitchen. The meatball comprises veal and ricotta, served in a traditional southern Italian tomato sauce (don’t call it “gravy,” please) with cannelloni filled with “market greens.” I prefer meatballs that have been browned more, to max out that Maillard reaction, and like a mixture of meats that isn’t so veal-heavy because veal is so lean that the proteins in it can tighten up when cooked through, as a meatball has to be, and there’s always a slightly dry mouthfeel because of that lack of fat.

The first dessert course was more like a palate cleanser, a watermelon granita with a tiny quenelle of creme fraiche and some toasted pine nuts. It looks like pink rock salt, so the fact that it’s subtle and sweet and cold is a big surprise – and, as with the pistachios and zucchinis, the pine nuts and watermelon worked shockingly well together.

The second dessert was the memorable one, as in I’ll remember eating this for the next twenty years. It was a chocolate-peanut butter sundae, without ice cream: Chocolate sorbet on soft whipped cream on a peanut-butter sauce, surrounded by a crumbled peanut butter cookie. Sure, you could make the whipped cream and cookie at home, and the sauce is probably doable (it was smooth like caramel), but that sorbet – I don’t know how you get something that dark and cocoa-intense without dairy or eggs. Grom in the west Village does a chocolate sorbet with egg yolks, but I think Hearth’s is just sorbet, based on what two staff members told me. Speaking of which, everyone I spoke to there was wonderful – I ended up chatting with a few of them up front before leaving and they’ve clearly done a good job assembling a team full of good people.

I visited two cocktail bars while in the city, one of which was the aforementioned Amor y Amargo, Sother Teague’s 240 square foot place in the East Village where he stocks no juices or other mixers. It’s all spirits and bitters – liquors, liqueurs, potable bitters (like Campari or Aperol), and the little flavoring agents you probably think of when you hear “bitters” (like Angostura or Peychaud’s). Sother’s good people, so if you go and you see him behind the bar, mention I sent you. I tried two of his drinks, one his own suggestion – a mixture of three varieties of whiskeys, finished with a habanero bitters, so the result was like standing over a grill on which you’re smoking a pork shoulder over hickory. It’s a really cool space too, and most of the bitters are out on display – I’d never heard of more than half of the brands, and Sother told me he’s got a dozen or so bottles of stuff that’s no longer made or otherwise very difficult to procure. If you’re also a fan of Amor y Amargo, you can vote for Sother in Edible Manhattan’s Cocktail Contest, which runs through August 31st. The winner gets a $5000 prize.

After recommending Hearth, Sother also recommended Pouring Ribbons, a hidden bar on Avenue B just off 14th, in Alphabet City, so well disguised it might as well be a speakeasy. (The password is to be very nice to the guy at the door.) I got one drink, because when I’d finished that I couldn’t feel the tip of my nose, generally a sign that the libation has done its job. The Trouble in Paradise cocktail starts with Appleton V/X rum, probably my favorite rum for mixing, and adds a charred pineapple-infused rum, sweet vermouth, and campari – a small upgrade on a Kingston Negroni. For a drink that was all alcohol, it was surprisingly subtle, even understated – the booze doesn’t overpower the rest of the drink. It’s rich, well-rounded, a little smoky, a little sweet (I find rum in general is a little sweet, as if it has memories of whence it came), better than any true Negroni I’ve ever had – and I do like true Negronis, which are made with gin rather than rum.

While in the neighborhood one of those nights, I stopped into the renowned Big Gay Ice Cream shop to see what the fuss was about … and I was underwhelmed. It’s decent soft serve ice cream, served with lots of crappy toppings. You can’t make premium ice cream and then coat it in stale grocery-store marshmallows – but that’s just what I ended up with when I ordered the Rocky Roadhouse cone. You can build your own cone or sundae, but the use of subpar ingredients is a big negative for me.

Whenever I’m at Citi Field and can sneak away long enough for lunch, I take the 7 train one more stop to its end in Flushing’s Chinatown, which seems to get bigger and busier every time I go there. I usually go for a dish of steamed dumplings (xiao long baozi), which is a popular item in that neighborhood and the kind of thing that can serve as a meal in itself. The serious eats blog had a few posts extolling the virtues of a small basement food stall called Tianjin Dumpling House in the Golden Mall, located down Main Street towards 41st Ave, which serves an absolute bargain of a dozen dumplings for $3-6 total. The pork, shrimp, and chive version didn’t seem to have much shrimp, but the pork and chives were well seasoned and juicy without any grease. The dough wrappers were just thick enough to retain a little tooth and didn’t tear or leak, but not so much so that they came out gummy or undercooked.

Their dumplings were much better than those at the very popular table-service restaurant Nan Xiang Dumpling House on Prince Street, which took much longer to get (even for take-out). Theirs are soup dumplings, so inside the wrapper is a tablespoon or so of broth that bursts (or slops) out when you bite into it – on to your shirt if you’re not careful. The tradeoff is you get less filling, and since their servings are only a half-dozen to an order, I added an order of vegetable dumplings, which were filled mostly with spinach. Unfortunately, I found a hair in the container of the latter – not actually in the dumplings, but still a hit to the confidence even though the place has an A rating from the board of health.

I almost never go into NYC without hitting up at least one pizzeria, and tried two from that old Food and Wine list of the country’s best pizzerias … neither of which was all that special. Don Antonio by Starita, which is partly owned by the co-owner of my favorite pizzeria in the city, Keste, is VPN certified for authenticity, but I thought the crust was too thick in the center for that. The dough was otherwise the strength of the pizza, though, with good texture and just a little charring around the outside. I went with one of their signature combinations, a pistachio pesto and sausage pizza with mozzarella but no tomatoes or sauce; the pesto itself was kind of heavy and gave the pizza a nut butter-like flavor that just didn’t seem to belong on a pizza. I’d like to try this place again with a more traditional set of toppings to see if the dough holds up better under a lighter load.

Nicoletta, also in the east village area, was a big disappointment – their pizza is a hybrid of New York-style and Italian-style but doesn’t grab the best traits of either of them. The crust was crispier and held its shape when pulled off the plate, with very little lift at the edges. The tomato sauce tasted overcooked and acidic, and there was grease on the top like you’d expect at a mediocre pizza shop. I can’t imagine why it was on Food and Wine‘s list.

Florida eats, March 2014.

Recent posts over at ESPN: on young Dodgers players, on Jose Abreu and other White Sox, and on Nick Gordon and other Florida prep kids. I also held a regular Klawchat this morning.

After I posted my dining guide to Arizona, I was asked – as I am every year – when I’m going to do a similar one for Florida. The answer, of course, is never. Here’s why:

* I lived in Arizona for just under three years. I have never lived in Florida.

* All of the spring training sites in Arizona are located within about 30 miles of downtown Phoenix. The biggest gap between any two parks is a 75-minute drive. It might take you that long to get through Tampa, never mind far-flung sites like Fort Myers or Viera.

* Arizona has a wonderful, thriving culinary scene. Florida has oranges. Actually, the food scene in Miami is supposed to be pretty good, but there are no teams there.

So this is more of a quick round-up of where I ate on last week’s trip, not an exhaustive guide to eating in the state where you shouldn’t even bother going for spring training unless your favorite team is there. And even then you should think twice.

In the greater Orlando area, I had two meals of note at off-Disney sites (I stay at WDW because they own us and it’s cheaper to stay there than anywhere else), but also wanted to mention two others. One meal was at 4 Rivers, a wonderful Texas-style barbecue joint in Winter Garden about which I’ve waxed poetic many times. Get the moist brisket, the corn, and the collard greens. The smoked sausage is pretty good too, although it’s not always that hot. Their “burnt ends” aren’t my idea of burnt ends, so I haven’t ordered them again. There’s another location of 4 Rivers in Longwood.

I also ate at Prato in Winter Park, a trattoria focused on pastas and pizzas located on a cute, expensive-looking street well off I-4. I had dinner with a scout, so we split their meatball appetizer – three small, moist meatballs, firm enough to hold their shape, served with just a coating of tomato sauce on a bed of creamy polenta with some sauteed onions. I had to get the pizza, because I’m pizza-obsessed, and it was solid-average – good crust, a little doughy without much char, but with great toppings, including mixed mushrooms and arugula. I wouldn’t go well out of my way again to eat here, but if I were in the Winter Park area to see a player I’d consider it worth visiting again.

The Ravenous Pig was the best meal I had during the winter meetings, but I never had the chance to write the meal up afterwards and won’t dare to do it the injustice of writing it up now. I’ll just say that it’s the best restaurant in greater Orlando in my own experiences, and I want to try its sister restaurant, the more casual Cask and Larder, the next time I’m in the area. There’s a focus on local fare, artisanal ingredients, house-made charcuterie, and cocktails. You can’t lose.

I had to see a prep pitcher in St. Petersburg and went to Bella Brava, which has a little bit of a chain-restaurant feel (think Carrabba’s) but better food than that would indicate, other than the use of dried rather than fresh pasta. I had their slow-braised pork belly (which apparently is also smoked) rigatoni with pepper/onion confit, fresh rosemary and fennel, and crispy lardons, with the jus from the meat serving as the sauce. It was as good and rich as it sounds other than the dried pasta, which seemed flat and incongruous next to the powerful flavors of the meat and the sweetness of the pepper confit.

With two games in Dunedin, I took the chance to visit some old haunts but had mixed results. Eli’s BBQ Shack disappointed; Eli passed away a year ago of leukemia, and unfortunately the chopped pork wasn’t the same, coming out dry and tough with no bark. Casa Tina in downtown Dunedin was just as good as I remembered, solid-average to a tick above, serving authentic Mexican food with great attention to detail in the food; my entree was good but it was actually the salsa that blew me away, as the tomatoes tasted like they had just been picked that morning. The Whistle Stop Cafe in Safety Harbor still had good food, although the menu has changed and is now much bigger with more upscale (expensive) fare as well as the old sandwiches and salads, but the service – never good – was unbelievably slow.

Pizzeria Vetri and Barbuzzo (Philly eats, part one).

Today’s Behind the Dish podcast featured physics professor Alan Nathan plus my thoughts on the World Series and the two Cuban free agents who just signed.

I’ve now had two meals at Pizzeria Vetri, the latest outpost of the Vetri family empire of Philly restaurants (including Vetri and Osteria), and am thoroughly impressed by their authentic Neapolitan-style pizzas and commitment to simple recipes with a handful of fresh ingredients. The pizzas come with the appropriate char on the exterior, moderate air bubbles in the exterior crust, and enough interior crust to hold together but not enough to support the weight of the toppings (which is correct, oddly enough). That exterior crust was softer than some other authentic Neapolitan pizzerias I’ve tried, but it was a net positive as it didn’t become tough once it cooled.

The margherita is dominated by the bright, sweet flavor of San Marzano tomoates, with huge basil leaves and a few dollops of fresh mozzarella, light enough that my daughter, age 7, could eat five of the six slices and still have room for dessert. I preferred the crudo, with prosciutto crudo, mozzarella di bufala, and shaved Parmiggiano-Reggiano, which had better balance across all the flavors with a slightly salty profile from the meat and the hard cheese, but the crusts on both were very good and cooked perfectly from char to center.

Vetri also offers a rotating special of Silician-style pizza (thicker crust, cooked in a sheet pan), which often reflects the chef’s caprices on that particular day. For our last visit, the “pizza al taglio” (pizza by the slice) special was roasted quince that had been cooked with red wine, along with fresh herbs including rosemary, and mozzarella and shaved pecorino romano. It was peculiar, a little like a wine-and-cheese course on top of a thick pizza crust, but the sharp crunch of the crust was the main selling point of the slice, with a little dose of olive oil like the underside of a good focaccia (which is pretty much Sicilian pizza dough cooked without toppings).

Vetri’s non-pizza offerings are limited, but they do include a Caesar salad and a “wood-fired” salad, the latter coming with roasted corn, green beans, and chanterelles, along with a generous portion of sliced prosciutto cotto and some Microplaned ricotta salata. With a drizzle of olive oil and a hint of vinegar, it’s an earthy mixture bound by the powerful umami notes of the roasted chanterelles and sweetness of the corn, and far more satisfying than I’d expect an item in the salad section of the menu to be. Vetri also offers a few dessert items and my daughter would like you to know that the fior di latte (sweet cream) soft-serve ice cream is the best soft-serve she’s ever had, although I warn you her affections can be fickle.

My daughter also accompanied me to Barbuzzo earlier this month, a restaurant I’d wanted to visit since coming across their salted caramel budino recipe in Bon Appetit several years ago; I’ve made them four or five times and wanted to compare my results to the real thing. Aside from a small lapse in service, the entire experience was superb, with some huge highlights from the savory part of the menu.

The kale salad was the surprise hit of the meal for me, featuring thinly sliced ribbons of dino kale (a.k.a. Cavolo nero or Tuscan kale or lacinato, it’s all the same damn leaf) tossed in a pistachio pesto dressing, served over a few slices of roasted red and yellow beets with soft goat cheese. I find kale an incredibly versatile ingredient, pairing up well with other flavors from across the spectrum, from bacon to nuts to cranberries or pomegranate arils, so I wasn’t shocked that it played well with pistachio, but was shocked by how much body the pistachios gave to the entire salad; kale can be a little tough, and a little bitter, but the broad coating of the dressing reduced the feeling that this was just a pile of leaves. The only problem with the dish is that the menu refers to it as a roasted beet salad when that is maybe the third or fourth ingredient on the list; this is a kale salad, plus some beets and goat cheese.

Although the various pizzas on the menu were hard to ignore with the wood-fired oven right in my line of sight, I went with the server’s suggestion of the pan-seared gnocchi with bacon, mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes, with no sauce but the slight glaze of the bacon fat. The gnocchi were the lightest I’ve ever eaten, strong enough to hold a brown crust from the searing but light enough that an entire plateful was more like an appetizer than a full entree (so it’s a good thing I was full of kale salad by that point). They were powerful bacon-infused pockets that crushed all other comers, the rare example of a plate delivering a bacon punch without delivering a similar blow to your gut. My daughter was satisfied with the burrata plate with several kinds of fresh tomatoes, nut-free pesto, and sliced onions along with a serving of grilled country bread (an add-on for $2), all of which was fresh across the board, even the tomatoes, which surprised me with their sweetness given the time of year.

The dessert … well, the salted caramel budino didn’t quite live up to expectations; the recipe may have changed, but there’s nothing tangy in the version I make at home, whereas something in the mason jar I received at Barbuzzo was, possibly due to the incorporation of crème fraiche somewhere along the line. I can’t say mine is better, since it’s their recipe, but I prefer it without that sour note. My daughter ordered the apple raisin bread pudding with bourbon sauce and malted buttermilk gelato, which tasted strongly of bourbon and, not surprisingly, which she loved. The only real complaint I had about the meal was the 15-minute lag between when we ordered dessert and when it arrived; to a seven-year-old, or her anxious father, that’s a long time. The bread pudding had clearly just come out of the oven, though – it was practically in flames when it reached the table – and their expediter was otherwise on the ball as everything reached the table quickly and at the right temperature. I’d love to go back and sample other parts of the menu, including the pizzas, the other house-made pastas, and the wild mushroom bruschetta and sheep’s milk ricotta starters.

Keste and more NYC eats.

I’m chatting today at 1 pm ET.

In the last three weeks, I’ve hit three more places from Food and Wine‘s list of the 48 best pizzerias in the country (I don’t know why they chose 48, and it’s 47 now anyway with one closed), and I’ve at least found one rival to Pizzeria Bianco for the best pizzeria in the country, as well as hitting the first of the four spots from the list located in Brooklyn.

Keste, located on Bleecker in Greenwich Village, is run by an Italian pizzaiolo who was born and raised outside of Naples and learned the craft of pizza-making in that city, the capital of pizza in Italy. The style is true Neapolitan, with a thin crust and a soft center so that the crust struggles to support the toppings, and Keste does it correctly, something few places that boast of serving “authentic” Neapolitan pizzas manage to do. The menu is quite large, with a huge selection of pizzas with tomato sauce, a small selection of “white” pizzas, and a number of gluten-free options. My friend Toby and I ordered two pizzas and split them – the margherita with buffalo mozzarella and the daily special with burrata, prosciutto, and truffle oil.

The crusts on both were spectacular, exactly as promised, with a little char on the exterior, good tooth on the exterior crust, and just enough underneath to keep the toppings off the plate and give some texture contrast. The special was among the best pizzas I’ve ever had thanks to the creaminess and bright flavor of the burrata, and the salty-but-not-too-salty prosciutto, as well as the hint of truffle flavor that didn’t overwhelm any of the other ingredients. The margherita was notable more for the brightness of the tomatoes than anything else, with good balance between that and the mozzarella di bufala. The flavors on both pizzas were loud, in a good way, and everything was balanced and fresh and just incredible.

A few weeks ago, I managed to sneak into Co., the pizzeria founded by Jim Lahey of no-knead bread fame, for dinner with my family on a trip to Boston. The crust was outstanding, as you’d expect, but the rest of the experience fell very short for us. For one thing, the pizzas were small and sparsely topped, skimping especially on cheese, which is kind of the essential ingredient when pizza is the entree because it’s the only real protein source on any pizza without meat. For another, I am not sure when I have ever been in a colder restaurant than Co. was on that night – it could not have been over 65 degrees in there – and it was incredibly loud. I was more impressed with the bread and olive oil starter, which does a better job of showing off Lahey’s technique, than I was with either of the pizzas we ordered. I’ll tolerate atmosphere issues if the food is amazing, but the crust was just good, not enough to make me want to deal with the conditions there.

Franny’s in Brooklyn was an outright disappointment, however – so sparsely topped that it was more like having bread for lunch than pizza, with almost nothing beyond a thin layer of tomato sauce on top. The crust was gorgeous, with some blistering on the exterior, great tooth to the exterior, and a good contrast between the edge and the interior. But man, you need to put something on top of the pizza to get me to fight my way down Flatbush to come eat at your place.

Moving on from pizza … After Keste, Toby dragged me kicking and screaming to Grom, a gelateria (one of two Groms in the city, plus a summer location in Central Park) that imports the product from Italy. Their commitment to product quality is insane, with organic eggs, spring water for their sorbets, and fruit from their own farm in Costigliole d’Asti. And the gelato is amazing – the dark chocolate “sorbet,” made with egg yolks and Colombian chocolate but no dairy, is as intense as eating a bar of very dark chocolate but with the creamy texture of actual gelato; the caffè flavor uses Guatemalan coffee beans to create a dark coffee flavor that doesn’t hide the coffee behind sugar and cream. It’s a hell of an experience even when you’re already overstuffed with pizza. (I also love that their URL is grom.it; too bad walla.ce isn’t available.)

Culture Espresso on 38th Street doesn’t roast its own coffee, but buys from some of the best roasters in the country – currently using coffees from Heart roasters in Portland, Oregon, a micro-roaster that specializes in very light roasts of single-estate coffees. Culture is currently using a blend of two coffees, an Ethiopian and a Central American (I think the barista said Colombian), which produced a medium-bodied shot that still had the bright strawberry notes of the east African half of the blend.

Chicago eats, 2013.

My trip to Chicago was very brief, by design – I flew in on Saturday morning, had lunch, went to the Under Armour All-American Game, had dinner with Old Hoss, and flew home that night – so time was short and I had to leave a few Chicago places I’d love to try for a future trip. In the meantime, I at least accomplished two small goals: I got to one of Top Chef wniner Stephanie Izzard’s restaurants, and can cross yet another pizzeria off that Food and Wine list.

Izzard is most famous for her flagship restaurant The Girl & the Goat, which I still have yet to try, but I’d heard good things about her diner, The Little Goat, in the same neighborhood but offering more comfort-food fare while serving breakfast and lunch as well as dinner. I popped a photo on Instagram of my meal, the Fat Elvis Waffles – two waffles with sliced bananas, peanut butter butter (a compound butter with peanut butter blended into soft unsalted butter), small bits of bacon, and maple syrup. It sounded amazing, looked great, and was thoroughly disappointing – only the peanut butter butter lived up to expectations. The waffles were dense and soft, difficult to cut with a butter knife, and lacking flavor. Waffles should be airy inside and crispy outside, period. If you don’t use enough fat, you won’t get that. If you skimp on leavening, whether it’s an acid/base reaction or yeast or an egg white foam, you won’t get that. The Little Goat didn’t. Even the bacon fell short, as I thought I was going to lose a filling when I bit down on one piece. I’d take a pound of the peanut butter butter to go, though.

Dinner with our favorite syphilitic pitcher was more successful, at Bar Toma, one of three Chicago places on Food and Wine‘s best U.S. pizzerias list. (The others are Burt’s Place, which does that vile thing called “deep dish” pizza, and Great Lake, which has since closed but may reopen this fall.) The odd thing is that Bar Toma doesn’t get high marks from locals – I’ve not gotten great feedback from readers or friends in Chicago, and its ratings online (not that any of those are terribly reliable) aren’t strong. I thought it was solid, and that’s without adding points for Lucy, our rather gorgeous Irish server who probably received a few more questions from our table than was appropriate.

We ordered two pizzas, the August special, with duck sausage, goat cheese, and red chili flakes; and the off-menu burrata pizza, recommended by our darling Lucy. The burrata pizza was by far our favorite; it’s topped with burrata (large balls of fresh mozzarella with cream inside), truffle oil, and arugula, and the crust on this pizza was better than the one on the duck sausage pizza, crispier at the edges and underneath as well. The duck sausage pizza was a little unbalanced, with too much red pepper, too much tang from the goat cheese (which was soft like chevre but tangier than goat’s milk feta), and nothing on the other side. The duck sausage even got lost a little beside those other ingredients.

We started with a kale salad, which was topped with a medium-boiled egg and contained bread crumbs and an anchovy vinaigrette; it was outstanding as well as moderately healthful and actually quite pretty with the mix of purple and green leaves. Bar Toma also makes about a dozen flavors of gelato in-house; I went with the chocolate and amaretto, both with excellent texture, served just warm enough to begin melting at the table (that’s a good thing – gelato shouldn’t be too cold). The chocolate was a little underflavored for me, with texture and flavor like Belgian milk chocolate, but the amaretto was like tipping the Di Saronno to the head like a forty. I’m not sure why its local reputation is mixed – it’s good, probably a 55 if we’re rating the burrata pizza, a 60 if we give points for Lucy, and infinitely preference to that tomato-cake nonsense Chicagoans like to eat instead.

Motorino pizzeria.

Catching you up on recent ESPN content:
* Cape Cod League All-Star Game notes
* Team USA notes, including potential #1 overall pick Carlos Rodon
* K-Rod trade analysis
* Matt Garza trade analysis
* Last week’s Klawchat
* Last week’s Behind the Dish, featuring Phillies beat writer Matt Gelb

Continuing my Food and Wine pizza crawl, one pizza at a time, I stopped by NYC’s Motorino on Thursday night en route from Delaware to Cape Cod. Motorino was on the list and the recommendation was seconded by one of you, and it more than lived up to expectations, a solid 60 or 65 on the 20-80 scale.

I went with the pizza with Brussels sprouts, smoked pancetta (so an Italian bacon, in essence), garlic, and “fior di latte,” which is a fancy way of saying fresh cow’s milk mozzarella. Although Motorino bills itself as authentic Neapolitan-style pizza, they’re not quite at that standard; the center of a Neapolitan pizza should be wet, and impossible to pick up as a slice, while Motorino’s crust is thin at the center but strong enough to hold together, without any pooling of liquid. Americans don’t care for that traditional wet center, so many pizzerias avoid it, but you can’t truly be Neapolitan without it.

The crust itself was soft with good tooth, not as crispy at the exterior as I like (you only get that from very hot ovens, like Bianco’s), but hitting that spot where you know it’s pizza but you get moments where you think you’re chewing very fresh artisan bread. Brussels sprouts are a bit of a trendy ingredient, but I happen to like them a ton – maybe I’m a trendsetter, as I’ve been making them weekly when in season since I first got Joy of Cooking in 1998 – and they’re very good for you, so I tend to order them if they’re on a menu. Like most members of the cabbage family, they pair well with smoked pork products, with pancetta giving you more pork/ham flavor than you get from standard American bacons, where you get more smoke flavor and less meat. Anyway, Motorino’s combo was just a bit too heavy on the garlic but otherwise outstanding, prompting me to eat more than was reasonable for one person who had actually had dinner four hours earlier.

The place is tiny, and very dark – if I hadn’t been reading a book on my iPad, I wouldn’t have been able to read while I waited – and does a brisk takeout business. At about 10 on a Thursday night, it was half empty, but service was still prompt and my pizza came out very quickly, enough that I was in and out of the restaurant inside of 40 minutes. I liked Ribalta quite a bit but Motorino’s traditional pizza was better than Ribalta’s.

Nine down, 33 to go. I crawl on…

New York eats, July 2013.

The best meal I had on the weekend wasn’t the signature meal (or the most expensive), but was from the Food and Wine list of the country’s best pizzerias, which I’m working my way through as travel allows. Ribalta, located near Union Square in the space formerly occupied by Piola, is one of the newest restaurants on the list, and is known for a style of pizza called pizza in pala, where a very high-hydration dough is prepared on a long wooden paddle and cooked directly on the floor of the oven, producing maximum oven spring and a very crunchy exterior, similar to pain a l’ancienne. Ribalta cooks theirs twice, which I assume means once without the toppings and then again with toppings, although they didn’t specify – and, in an odd detail, they don’t use wood- or coal-fired ovens, but use gas and electric. But the results, especially on the pizza in pala, are superb – you get subtle hints of the caramelization of the sugars that have started to appear in the dough around the exterior crust, and it’s strong enough to support a healthy (but not excessive) load of toppings, such as the pancetta and porcini mushrooms on the pizza we ordered. The traditional pizza napoletana we ordered, the “DOC” (a margherita by another name), wasn’t as crispy or strong, and the crust didn’t have as much air in it, but the tomatoes were incredibly bright and fresh and the buffalo mozzarella was creamy and smooth (but there wasn’t quite enough of it). The brussels sprouts starter with, of course, pancetta (i.e., bacon) and pecorino romano was solid-average, but could have used a little more color on the halved sprouts. It’s all about the pizza in pala, people.

Sunday night after the Futures Game, I went to Momofuku Ssäm Bar with a slew of other writers and a few folks from outside the business for a group dinner where we all got the prix fixe bossam menu, built mostly around pork. I was completely fired up to try a David Chang restaurant for the first time, but may have created the unfortunate situation where I was disappointed with a 65 because I expected an 80. Some dishes on the prix fixe menu were amazing – the bark on the giant roast Niman Ranch pork shoulder, served with lettuce for making wraps, was among the best things I have ever eaten, caramelized and crunchy with no off notes that would come from overcooking it – while others were just solid, and the dessert, a cake made of pancakes layered together with raspberry jam as a filling and served with bacon and melted black pepper butter, was disappointing, far too dense and heavy to be edible after such a huge meal. (Or after any meal – pancakes do not keep well at all, and served cold, they have the texture of a used tire.) The pork belly buns, riffing on the Chinese baozi but serving them in the style of a Venezuelan arepa, were superb if a bit messy, and the striped bass sashimi with spicy candied kumquats was bright and fresh with a great balance of acid and heat. It’s an excellent culinary experience, just not a Hall of Fame meal.

On the recommendation of reader Stan, who works in the business, I stopped by a Stumptown coffee shop on Monday morning to get an espresso and some whole beans to bring home. Their roasts are relatively light, not quite as light as Intelligentsia’s (where they don’t even heat the beans, they just show them pictures of warm places) but light enough that you taste the bean first and the roast a distant second. That produced an espresso with a lot of vibrant, fruity notes like tart cherry and blackberry, but with a little bitterness underneath that always reminds me of cocoa. Their beans are quite expensive, again in relative terms, but you’re paying for quality as well as sourcing, as most of their offerings are single-estate, and the results so far have been solid even on my cheap Gaggia machine.

I actually didn’t get to Shake Shack before the Futures Game, but for a great reason – so many of you came out to say hi to me that, by the time we were done, it was just 20 minutes till first pitch. So I took the recommendation of several readers and tried Blue Smoke, whose Carolina pulled pork sandwich turned out to be excellent, in part because it’s about as Carolina as molasses (that is, there’s little or no vinegar flavor). The meat was actually smoked, and came without sauce, so you could see and taste that the pork had actually been smoked rather than braised or boiled or God knows what else they do to make “pulled pork” at most ballparks.

The final stop (actually the first, chronologically) on my New York trip was actually in Port Chester, NY, where I visited Tarry Lodge, a Mario Batali/Lidia Bastianich endeavor that includes an Italian market as well as a pizzeria with a full menu of pastas and entrees, yet another entry on that Food and Wine list. I tried the pizza with prosciutto and arugula, maybe my favorite toppings for an authentic Italian-style pizza, but overall found it just good, not great, with a crust that had a little char on the exterior but was overall very soft. The toppings resulted in an overly salty pizza, although I get that anything with prosciutto will end up salty – this was just too far in that direction. Port Chester’s main drag is cute, and there seem to be a lot of good restaurants there, but it’s far enough off the highway (factoring in traffic and parking) that it’s not an ideal stopping point, especially with Tarry Lodge’s pizza grading out as a 55.