The dish

Troquet brings a different concept to fine dining by trying to integrate the wine into the meal experience. Each appetizer and entrée is paired with a set of three wines which can be ordered by the glass or half-glass or which can be ordered as a full tasting. It’s a clever idea, and if you’re more oenophile than gourmet, it’s probably a dream restaurant. I’m much more interested in the food, however, and I thought Troquet really fell short there. I ordered a seared sea bass served with a corn and potato succotash; the bass was seared perfectly, but the dish was bland and unremarkable. My wife ordered the ricotta cavatelli with wild mushrooms, which was better, mostly because of the impressive mix of fresh mushrooms, but not the type of dish I’d expect at a high-end restaurant. The dessert menu was totally uninspiring as well, without a major chocolate dish. Granted, I’m not a wine guy – I drink it but can’t say I really know it – so perhaps it was just a poor choice.

Given the lack of an appealing dessert option, we headed to the dessert buffet at the Four Seasons Hotel’s Bristol Lounge. We hadn’t been in probably three years; the quality was still really high – they had a chocolate mousse and raspberry sauce “cocktail” that was superb – but I thought the selection was a little smaller, and the price is now up to $26 a head, not including drinks. I think they still serve the best restaurant coffee in Boston, though.

The next morning we headed to the Pour House Bar & Grill to try out their breakfast … can’t say I was optimistic about heading to what looked like a dive for breakfast, but I’d read some good reviews online about what they offered. And it was legit – some of the best pancakes I’ve had in ages, so light that I could eat them without syrup. My wife had the French toast and also liked it, although it didn’t measure up to the brioche version offered at Arlington’s Tryst, which offers brunch on Sundays from Labor Day till Father’s Day.

Finally, we found a great little Greek place in Needham called Fresco, where they only offer breakfast and lunch. We were there for the latter and even my mother-in-law (who’s roughly half Greek) approved. Their avgolemono (an egg-and-lemon soup) was outstanding, nice and thick with a solid chicken-stock base. The fresh feta appetizer was huge, and the cheese was delicious with a great texture and that tang you only get from good, imported feta. I went with a lamb kabob with rice and a Greek salad; everything was solid, with good flavor on the lamb, although it was cooked rare and I prefer my lamb closer to medium. My wife went with the spanikopita and approved, although I’m not a fan and can’t vouch for it. We’ll definitely head back there for breakfast, since they offered a large menu of breakfast standards like the menu at the Pour House.

My trip Albuquerque last week was my first visit to the fine state of New Mexico (43 down, seven to go), and one I was really looking forward to because of its reputation for outstanding chili pepper-based food. Calvin Trillin’s Feeding a Yen first turned me on to the existence of a whole new cuisine within the borders of the U.S., and I’ve been dying to get out there. Granted, Santa Fe was my first choice, but the game in question was in Albuquerque.

I only ended up hitting two places for four meals – more on that in a moment – but both places were hits. Frontier Restaurant is apparently something of a local icon; it’s open 24 hours and works from the not-always-successful strategy of giving large quantities of food for a low price. The food at Frontier really is outstanding, and it’s fast and cheap. I can’t see how any fast-food joint within five miles stays in business. For dinner – twice – I went with an enchilada plate with the “green chile stew” topping, which is apparently the mildest of the three offered (the others being red chile sauce and chopped green chiles). For $7, the dish includes two enchiladas, rice, and two fresh flour tortillas. It was enough food that on my second night there, I ate that full meal around 6:30 and still wasn’t hungry when I got on my redeye five hours later. I did try the guacamole on the first night, but it was kind of bland and was puréed smooth – not my favorite style.

Their breakfast is what really set them apart. I hadn’t originally intended to go to Frontier again for breakfast, but the place I’d picked out, Perea, was closed for three days that week, and when I stopped into the Flying Star nearby, the menu looked very … corporate. So I kept driving and ended up back at Frontier, which turned out to be a huge stroke of luck. I went with the #1 special – two eggs (scrambled), meat (carne adovada – hey, when in Rome), hash browns, and tortillas – plus a side of pancakes, which you can order by the flapjack. The pancakes were to die for – buttery, fluffy, and not at all like the leadcakes you get at most chain restaurants and even some mom-and-pops perpetrating breakfast fraud on unsuspecting diners. The hash browns were almost like a rösti, with a crunchy brown crust on the outside but soft and moist potatoes on the inside; they could have used more salt, but that was easily remedied. The only misses were the carne adovada, which was extremely acidic and wasn’t really hot in temperature – mind you, I’m no expert in that genre – and the coffee. I ordered tea and didn’t realize I had coffee until I took a sip, which tells you something about how weak it was.

The one other meal was Monday’s lunch, when I headed west to El Charrito at 4703 Central Ave NW. (Props to Dan McKay, a poster on McCovey Chronicles, for suggesting this place.) The menu is simple – seems to be a theme out there – and the service was excellent. They had no problem preparing one of their combo plates – a tamale, an enchilada, and a taco – without cheese for me, which is usually a great sign because it means everything’s made to order. Despite that substitution, the food still came out pretty quickly, with the tamale and enchilada served Christmas style (red and green sauces). The taco was good, straightforward, just served as ground beef in the shell so you can fix it as you’d like. The tamale was a little too spicy for my Northeastern (read: untrained) palate, but the pork inside was delicious. The enchilada wasn’t quite as good as Frontier’s, with the chicken tasting a little blander to me, but was otherwise fine. The green sauce was definitely the less spicy of the two. The dish was also served with fresh sopapillas and a big squeeze bottle of honey. I left full. The one negative on El Charrito came when I left – the counter was covered with political stickers and pamphlets, all left-leaning and mostly anti-Bush. I don’t care how these people vote or what their beliefs are, but I don’t want to be assaulted by it while I’m eating there. Food and politics don’t mix, because the politics invariably spoil the food.

Anyway, sorry for the long lag between posts, but with the draft over I should be writing a little more frequently.

So last Monday, my wife and I headed into Manhattan – I had a scheduled TV appearance and she wanted to hit a fabric store in Soho. We decided to have lunch and headed to Mario Batali’s Otto Pizzeria, which promised authentic, Italian-style pizzas, an enormous wine list (wasted on me, but I thought I’d mention it), and – according to at least two things I read on line – the best gelato in Manhattan. The pizza could be Velveeta served on cardboard for all I care, as long as there’s real gelato on the premises.

Unfortunately, the experience ended up reinforcing for me why I tend to avoid celebrity-chef restaurants. The food was a disappointment, and the menu was too heavily influenced by the chef’s whims, not by the food itself. It surprised me to run into this at a Batali restaurant; one reason I like his shows and his books is that his agenda seems to be a noble one: to celebrate regional Italian cuisine using authentic recipes and ingredients.

We ordered a funghi misti appetizer – mixed wild mushrooms marinated in herbs and garlic, delicious, earthy, and reasonable at $4 for close to a cup’s worth of ‘shrooms. I went with the pizza of the day, a pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella. Pesto genovese is made with basil, which doesn’t take heat very well, so pizzas made with pesto typically are cooked partway before a thin layer of pesto is added. Instead, I got a pizza with a thin crust (not as thin as the ones I’ve had in Italy) and a thick layer of bitter pesto that tasted like it contained spinach rather than basil (I asked – the waitress said there was no spinach in it). There was also very little cheese, so I was eating a cracker with bad pesto on it.

My wife’s entrée was better, as she ordered spaghetti carbonara. The pasta was really al dente – I’m all for some tooth to the pasta, but even I would have left this in the water another sixty seconds – and the sauce was done right. The one problem was that the dish was extremely salty, probably the result of the huge amount of pancetta in it.

As for the gelato … we didn’t have any. The dessert menu came – it took forever, now that I mention it, and the service in general was inattentive at best – and the list of flavors read something like this: olive oil, vanilla, pistachio, coconut, ginger, hazelnut straciatella, mint chocolate chip. I might have forgotten one, but you get the idea. Notice anything missing? That’s right – nothing chocolate or coffee. Not even tiramisu-flavored gelato, which was in every gelateria I visited on my trips to Italy. At $7 for three scoops, those flavors weren’t enough to get me to stick around.