→ March 24, 2019
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Portland eats.

I had less than a day in Portland this past weekend, but it was my first visit to the city in 20 years, so I had a little catching up to do, and very little time in which to do it.

I had two particular food targets for my weird trip through Portland – I was headed to Corvallis to see Oregon State play, and thus had small parts of two days in Portland after I flew in Friday morning and before I flew out Saturday evening – in Apizza Scholls and the ice cream parlor Salt & Straw. Apizza Schools has come recommended to me for years, by industry people, by baking teacher and cookbook author Peter Reinhart (whose The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is still my go-to source for making any kind of artisan bread), and by many readers. It was a little different from what I expected, but still very good, a solid 55 on the 20-80 scale.

Apizza Scholls’ pizza splits the difference between Neapolitan pizzas, cooked fast at around 900 degrees with a very airy crust that has some charring at the exterior, and both New York and New Haven styles, so their pizzas’ crusts are more evenly browned without charring, and have a hard crunch without the softer bread-like interior of Neapolitan crusts. Most of their menu combinations contain meat, and I was looking to avoid that, so I went with their “plain” pie (which still has sauce and fresh mozzarella) and added mushrooms and arugula, which meant a huge portion of the latter. The center of the pie wasn’t wet as in Neapolitan styles, but the crust was thinner than New York slice, closer to New Haven, while the toppings as a whole were correctly seasoned. I appreciated that, for lunch at least (only served on weekends), they offered an 11″ option for one person.

Salt & Straw now has locations in a few other cities – I know it’s in LA – but I’d never been to any of them before this trip. They’re legendary for the quality of their product and for the way the servers outright encourage you to sample all the flavors you want; I think I tried five before settling on one of their two most popular flavors, Almond Brittle with Salted Ganache, and one of their special flavors at the moment, Wild-Foraged Berry Slab Pie. The surprising part was the the ice cream itself wasn’t heavy or dense – more like a semifreddo in texture than super-premium ice cream. The flavors were absurd; actually everything I sampled was excellent, although the Chocolate Gooey Brownie wasn’t really my thing, since brownie bits get too dense and chewy in ice cream.

Canard was one of two places recommended to me by Jeff Kraus, the chef-owner of Tempe’s Crepe Bar (which you should all try when you go to that area of Arizona), and was open for lunch on Friday, allowing me to hit an extra spot before going to Powell’s Books, which was a bucket-list item for me. (It exceeded expectations by a few orders of magnitude.) They had a placard out from suggesting the “duck stack,” and if you’ve read this blog before you’re aware of my affinity for the meat of the Anatidae. This dish was a bit different, though: it’s a small stack of pancakes topped with some grilled onions, a rich duck gravy, and a duck egg cooked roughly over-medium. The gravy has ground duck – I’m almost certain this was only white meat – with a little bacon, some reduced duck stock, a little brown sugar, and a lot of salt and pepper. It was delicious, but I don’t think I would have known that was duck if I hadn’t ordered it. The flavors I associate with duck were muted enough in the gravy that this could have been any other lean poultry. It was expertly made, just not quite what I expected.

Eem was Jeff’s second recommendation, a cocktail bar and restaurant with Thai-influenced dishes, including a handful of curries and many small plates. I asked my server for a few recommendations without red meat, and ended up with the roasted beet salad and the stir-fry with mushrooms, long beans, cashews, and one of the most convincing meat alternatives I’ve ever tasted. The beet salad was good, as they were cooked properly and came with puffed rice that gave the dish some needed textural contrast, but that stir-fry, which came with a rich, deep brown sauce that was some sort of umami bomb, salty and complex and a little sweet, was superb. The meat alternative was soy, but it was much firmer than any tofu product I’ve ever tried; it seemed to be compressed and braided to mimic the texture of chicken breast prepared in the same method. I arrived at 5 pm, right when they opened, and there was a line already there; I got one of the last open seats at the bar and by 5:10 the host was telling parties of two there’d be a 35-40 minute wait.

I tried two Portland coffee places, which seemed like a better way to experience the city than getting a tattoo and a man-bun. (In truth, I did see far too many men with man-buns, clutching their yoga mats. It was a bit too on the nose, really.) Coava Coffee was recommended by writer Matthew Kory, recently of The Athletic. Coava uses Chemex for pour-overs; the Guatemalan Finca las Terrazas I tried had a great semi-sweet chocolate note with very low acidity. I was already familiar with heart roasters, having had their coffees at several other shops around the country, including Crepe Bar (which now uses local roaster Presto) and midtown Manhattan’s Culture Espresso. Heart offers a single-origin espresso in addition to their Stereo blend, so I tried that, just for something different; the Kenya Kiachu AB beans they used were fruity but not citric so it had good body without that lemon-drop flavor you can get from a lot of Kenyan or Ethiopian beans when made as espresso.

Townshend Tea Company has a huge menu of loose-leaf teas, steeped to order and with a CBD infusion available for another $2. I skipped the weed and just went with a hojicha, my favorite green tea because it’s roasted, usually made from leaves harvested after the first two flushes. The roasting removes the grassier notes in some green teas, and also reduces its caffeine content, although for reasons I’ve never understood I don’t get the same caffeine hit from any kind of tea that I get from coffee. 

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→ July 24, 2017
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Oakland & San Francisco eats.

I’ll have my annual re-ranking of the top five farm systems up this week, most likely Tuesday, for Insiders.

I only had two meals on my own during my trip to the Bay Area last week to speak at Google and sign books at Books Inc. in Berkeley (which should still have signed copies available), but both were memorable additions to my ongoing U.S. pizzeria tour. Oakland’s Pizzaiolo is on that list from Food and Wine from a few years ago that continues to inform some of my travels – it’s not a perfect list but I’ve done well by it overall – but the pizza wasn’t even the best thing I ate there.

Pizzaiolo is more than a pizzeria, although those are obviously the star attraction on the menu. It’s really a locavore restaurant that also does pastas, mains, salads, and vegetable-focused sides (contorni), with outstanding, largely local ingredients the common thread among all of them. I met a friend for dinner there and we split two pizzas, a margherita with housemade Italian sausage and a pizza of sweet & hot peppers, black olives, and ricotta salata. The sausage was probably the best element of all of this; the dough itself was good, maybe a grade 55 when comparing it to other Neapolitan pizzerias I’ve tried around the country (a list that has to number around fifty now). The pepper and olive pizza was surprisingly good, less spicy than I feared it would be, more briny and salty from the combination of the olives and the ricotta salata, a pressed, salted, lightly aged cheese made from the whey of sheep’s milk left over from other cheesemaking. But the best thing I ate was actually a salad of mixed chicory leaves (especially radicchio) with figs and hazelnuts; I love radicchio in spite of its bitterness (or perhaps because of it), but this had some of the least bitter chicory leaves I’ve ever tasted, and the sweetness of the black mission figs gave the perfect contrast to just that hint of a bitter note. The menu changes daily, however, and I can see it’s not on the Pizzaiolo menu today.

Una Pizza Napoletana isn’t on that F&W list of the country’s best pizzerias, which is kind of a joke because it’s probably a top five spot for me because of the dough. I’ve never had a pizza with a crust like this – it has the texture of naan, which is an enriched dough from India (usually containing yogurt or other dairy), whereas pizza dough is typically enriched with nothing but maybe a little olive oil. The menu is very short: five different pizza options, no alterations or substitutions allowed, with a few drinks, and one extra pizza (with fresh eggs) on Saturdays. Most of the pizzas use buffalo-milk mozzarella, and only the margherita has tomato sauce. I went with the filetti, which has no sauce but uses fresh cherry tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, garlic, and fresh basil. It’s really the dough that makes this pizza – it’s a traditional, naturally-leavened dough that takes three days to make, resulting in that incomparable texture. The pizzas are on the expensive side at $25 apiece, although I think given the quality of inputs and the time required to make doughs like this, it’s a reasonable price point. You’re buying someone’s skill and time for something you’re never going to make at home.

Una Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco. To die for.

A post shared by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

My new friends at Google also sent me home with a few gifts, including a bag of coffee from Philz, which a few of you have been telling me to try for years now. I haven’t opened the bag yet (I am a bit obsessive about finishing one bag before opening the next) but will report back when I try it.

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→ June 6, 2017
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Louisville eats.

I spent three nights in Louisville late last month for the ACC tournament, which was (mostly) held at the Bats’ AAA stadium right downtown, and I ate like a king for nearly the entire trip – to say nothing of the coffee.

Garage Bar had been on my to-do list for years, since Food and Wine posted a list of the best 48 pizzerias in the United States. (I’ve now been to 29, and one of the others closed shortly after the list was posted.) Garage Bar is, indeed, in a converted garage, and the space is very Brooklyn-hipster, but damn, that’s good pizza. The style is Neapolitan-ish, with a spongy, soft dough, but not the wet centers of true Neapolitan pizzas, although they use the classic ingredients (type 00 flour, San Marzano tomatoes) of that style and cook in a brick, wood-fired oven that hits 850 degrees. I tried the Local Mushroom pizza, a tomato-less pie that delivered just what I’d want in a mushroom pizza – big mushroom flavors complemented but not overwhelmed by the flavor of the cheese, here fromage blanc, a soft, fresh cow’s milk cheese where the fermentation is stopped fairly early in the process. I also recommend the Caesar salad, which is lightly dressed, not overly garlicky, topped with fried kale strips and two stripes of white anchovy (the good stuff).

After the last game ended on Friday, I walked over to Milkwood in downtown Louisville, mostly because I just wanted to try one of Edward Lee’s restaurants even though I wasn’t that hungry. The menu is a sort of Korean-southern fusion, but I went traditional with the vegetarian bibimbap, a Korean rice dish served in a smokin’ hot bowl that continues to cook the food at the table. Granted, I could eat plain white rice till the cows come home (and it’s a good thing I don’t because white rice is nutritionally worthless), but I killed this dish despite, as I said, not being very hungry. I even got dessert because the bartender told me the peanut butter ice cream that comes with the chess pie can’t be missed, and he was right – you can keep the pie, just give me the ice cream. (Chess pie is an acquired taste; it’s a southern custard pie that typically contains cornmeal and vinegar in the filling.)

Royals Hot Chicken has only been open for about a year and a half, offering what they call Nashville hot chicken, although their version is a little different – it’s all white meat “jumbo tenders” (each of which is a half breast halved again the long way), available at any spice level you like. I’m generally not a fan of chicken breast meat because it’s so lean and, in most cases, flavorless, but the crust at Royals’ has plenty of flavor, even on the mild setting (I like capsaicin more than it likes me). They have a long list of southern comfort-food sides, but I went with the roasted sweet potato with sorghum butter (the cashier’s rec) and the cucumber salad, both of which were excellent and didn’t make the entire meal into a heavy soporific. Speaking of which, I was surprised how little oil I had on my hands after eating the chicken, which is how it should be but rarely is.

Also in New Lou is Mayan Cafe, and I’m going to tell you up front, get the lima beans. It’s a signature item for them, and they’re damn good, and so popular that the restaurant posted the recipe. I ordered the salbutes, a regional Mexican preparation of a fried (flour) tortilla that puffs up and is topped like a cracker, with toppings that change daily; the chilaquiles; and the “chocolate on chocolate” dessert, which I was told was vegan and still can’t believe given how rich the cake was. I’d probably do something different for an entree, as the chilaquiles, while vegetarian (my goal), weren’t remarkable, but everything else I ate was.

Gralehaus was a recommendation from Stella Parks, aka BraveTart, whose first cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, comes out on August 15th; she lives in Lexington but gave me a short to-do food and coffee list for my trip that also included Quills (see below). Gralehaus is a bed & breakfast with a restaurant and bar that’s open to the public for all three meals, and the menu is influenced by southern comfort food but hardly limited to it (there’s a tofu banh mi on the lunch menu, for crying out loud). I couldn’t pass on the black pepper biscuit with duck sausage gravy, served with a sunny egg and and some duck cracklins; it was … decadent isn’t quite the word, but certainly rich and hearty, although the biscuit itself was on the dry side. They have an excellent coffee program, with beans from several artisanal roasters including Intelligentsia and one from right near me, La Maquina, of West Chester, PA.

Against the Grain is a brewpub attached to the Bats’ stadium, with the brewery on-site, but since it was midday I didn’t drink anything, I just ate, and the food was fine – better than ballpark food, certainly, but not on par with the other meals I ate around Louisville. I had the BBQ pork belly, which was served just as a giant slab of what was essentially bacon, and it was fine, nothing special, probably in need of a first step to tenderize the meat a little more before hitting the smoke. Get the Brussels sprouts side if you do go.

The one bad meal I had was at a place called Toast, which is just a mediocre diner that doesn’t execute particularly well and doesn’t list major ingredients in some dishes on its menu. If there’s cheese on a dish, that has to be listed, as you’d list something like nuts or shellfish. That aside, the food just wasn’t good and the service was indifferent.

Louisville has quite a thriving coffee scene, including Sunergos, a local roaster whose blend won a “best espresso in America” competition in 2014 – and it’s damn good, top five for me easily (Blue Bottle, Intelligentsia, Cartel, Four Barrel), so good I went back and bought a half-pound before leaving for the airport. Their blend is mostly Central and South American beans along with some Indonesian beans as well, and the result is noticeably sweet on its own, and there’s a cocoa undertone that I adore in coffee.

Quills was Stella Parks’ suggestion and they also do a solid espresso, not as bold or sweet as Sunergos’ but creditable, and I loved their space over in the Highlands, within walking distance of Gralehaus and Carmichael’s Bookstore; it was big, bright, and full of people working, chatting, just hanging out, the way a neighborhood coffee house should be. I also tried Press on Market, where I had a light-roast Sumatran bean as a pour-over – notable in and of itself because Indonesian beans are typically roasted until dark – and was surprised to find that the beans had some character beyond the roast. It’s a stone’s throw from the Bats’ stadium if you’re downtown.

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→ August 28, 2015
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Top 40 pizzerias, ranked.

This won’t start any arguments.

I adore all kinds of pizza – New York-style, Neapolitan-style (thin crust, wet center), Roman-style (also thin-crust but with a cracker-like crust), Sicilian, coal-fired, wood-fired, whatever. Except “deep dish,” which is just a bread casserole and should be avoided at all costs. I try to find good artisan pizzerias everywhere I travel, and I’ve hit just about all of the most highly-regarded places in Manhattan and Brooklyn too. I grew up on Long Island, eating by the slice and folding as I did so, but a couple of trips to Italy convinced me of the merits of those very thin crusts and superior toppings. We’re the beneficiaries of a huge boom in high-end pizza joints in this country, and while I haven’t tried all of the good ones, I’ve been to enough to put together a ranking of the 40 best that I’ve tried. There is, I admit, a bias to this list – I’ve tried more places in greater Phoenix than any other metro area other than New York – and I’m sure I’ll get some yelling over where I put di Fara or Co. or Paulie Gee’s, but with all of that out of the way, here’s how I rank ’em. Links go to my reviews here on the dish.

1. Pizzeria Bianco, Phoenix
2. Kesté, New York
3. Motorino, New York
4. Roberta’s, Brooklyn
5. Pizzeria Vetri/Osteria, Philadelphia
6. Frank Pepe’s, New Haven
7. Pizzeria Mozza, Los Angeles
8. Pizzeria Lola, Minneapolis
9. cibo, Phoenix
10. Lucali, Brooklyn
11. Forcella, New York
12. Pizzeria Stella, Philadelphia
13. Paulie Gee’s, Brooklyn
14. Don Antonio by Starita, New York
15. ‘Pomo, Phoenix
16. Marta, New York
17. Ribalta, New York
18. Totonno’s, Brooklyn
19. Via Tribunali, New York/Seatte
20. Federal Pizza, Phoenix
21. Il Cane Rosso, Dallas
22. Antico, Atlanta
23. City House, Nashville
24. Tarry Lodge, Port Chester, NY
25. Desano, Nashville
26. Franny’s, Brooklyn
27. Grimaldi’s, Phoenix
28. Il Bosco, Phoenix
29. Di Fara, Brooklyn
30. 800 Degrees, Los Angeles
31. Co., New York
32. Rubirosa, New York
33. Bar Toma, Chicago
34. Punch Pizza, St. Paul
35. Toro, Durham
36. Dolce Vita, Houston
37. Stella Rosa, Santa Monica
38. Grimaldi’s, Brooklyn
39. Basic, San Diego
40. Nicoletta, New York

There’s a long list of pizzerias I still need (okay, want, but where I’m concerned pizza is a need) to try, so they’re not on the list: Flour + Water & del Popolo in San Francisco, Apizza Scholls in Portland, A4 in Somerville (near Boston), 2 Amy’s in DC, Sottocasa in Brooklyn, al Forno in Providence, Pizzaiolo in Oakland, Mani Osteria in Ann Arbor, Vero in Cleveland, Iggie’s in Baltimore, Garage Bar in Louisville, Vinny & Jon’s in Los Angeles, and more. It’s a good time to be a pizza lover, and unless you have to be gluten-free, how could you not love pizza?

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→ September 5, 2014
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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.

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→ August 25, 2014
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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.

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→ September 6, 2013
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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.

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→ August 27, 2013
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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.

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→ July 28, 2013
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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…

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→ July 17, 2013
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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.

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