I think side dishes are the most overlooked aspect of cuisine, and the most skilled practitioner of that art is Vongerichten, whose chickpea fries and beet tartare should be celebrated as his signature side dishes.
I am thankful for muffins, because their acceptance has made it permissible for us to eat cake for breakfast.
F O R K I T O V E R
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I have also never been able to resist the classics. When Eric Ripert, the current owner and chef of Le Bernardin, prepared sole almondine using fish from Brittany and fresh almonds, I declared it one of his greatest triumphs and announced that the item had to go on his menu. He replied, “You’re crazy if you think I will put a dish two hundred years old on my menu and go out of business.” I love the hopelessly outdated dessert cart at Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia. Georges Perrier’s pastries include buttercream dacquoise, opera cake, and even a slice of all-but-forgotten marjolaine, an ancient cream cake. I cannot resist cheese steaks, regardless of how little I respect them, because all Philadelphians are drawn to them. I don’t admire Sunday buffets; the steamship round of beef is invariably tough. I don’t enjoy eating outdoors, although folks in Manhattan make a habit of it, inhaling the bracing scent of buses passing by. I despise menus with heart symbols alongside the low-fat items, which only goes to remind me that the food I’ve ordered amounts to suicide. I refuse to dine out more than once with anybody who orders a Cognac when the rest of us are finished and ready to go home. I miss tableside preparations, even though they were typically done by captains who couldn’t cook.
I also have a dream menu. My perfect meal would start with an assortment of amuse-gueules from the French Laundry in Napa Valley, supplemented by lobster-and-black-truffle beggar’s purses from March in Manhattan. The first course would be carne cruda (raw chopped veal) with white truffles from Trattoria della Posta in Mon-forte d’Alba, and if truffles weren’t in season, I’d happily switch to the red-curry steak tartare from Lumiere in West Newton, outside Boston.
Then soup—I have stronger feelings about soup than the average man. No soup surpasses the artichoke puree with black truffles and Parmigiano Reggiano from Guy Savoy in Paris, but I equally love the steamed pork-and-crab soup buns topped with fresh ginger and black vinegar sauce from Shanghai Tide in Queens.
I’d slip in something Tuscan about now. First the ricotta-and-potato flan with ragu from Cibrèo, followed by tagliatelle made from chestnut flour and topped with fresh ricotta cheese and toasted pine nuts from 1 4
A L A N R I C H M A N
Da Delfina in Artimino, outside Florence. My fish course would be rum-and-pepper-painted grouper from Norman’s in Coral Gables, Florida. I’d also want a shrimp-and-roasted-garlic tamale from Mesa Grill in New York. I’m a little ashamed to admit that this is my favorite Mexican dish, because it almost certainly isn’t authentically Mexican.
If some kindly wine collector would supply a 1978 Bruno Giacosa Santa Stefano Riserva Barbaresco, the meat course would be a buffalo filet with porcini mushrooms from the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. You can’t count on those wine collectors, though, so I’ll happily accept the cured, poached, braised, and glazed pork breast from Restaurant Daniel in Manhattan. It is so soft and savory I think of it as Kobe pork.
The cheese: Vacherin, perfectly ripe, or Epoisses, almost over the hill. The wines: white and red Burgundies from the list at restaurant Montrachet in Manhattan, even though I can’t afford any bottle labeled Le Montrachet.
For dessert I’d have Pavlova the way it’s done at JoJo in New York: soft meringue, passion fruit sorbet, whipped cream, and passion fruit seeds. The Pavlova is light, though, and I might also require a small crème brûlée, most profoundly prepared at Manhattan’s Le Cirque 2000.
I want to have this fantasy meal at Le Cirque, at my favorite table.
It’s down the corridor from the entrance, halfway to the bar, up a few steps, out of the way. From there I can see everybody and everything without being noticed. I’m certain I’m the only patron who would consider this an ideal table, but, after all, I am a restaurant critic.
— Alan Richman
June 2004
A P P E T I Z E R S
A M O T H E R ’ S K N I S H E S
When my mother was a younger woman, scarcely into her eighties, she required surgery. The procedure did not go well, which surprised me, because she is so resilient I’d expected her to check into the hospital before dawn and be out in time for an Early Bird.
I immediately flew to southern Florida, both to comfort her and to take my father out for a meal. The nurses on her floor had alerted me that he wasn’t eating, which they blamed on anxiety. I had a different interpretation. Anybody who had dined at my mother’s table for nearly a half-century would find it depressing to eat at anybody else’s.
My mother rallied long enough to brief me on the contents of her freezer, should we wish to stop home for a bite, and my father and I left for lunch. We drove to Sam’s, in the nearby town of Margate, an informal kosher spot he would grudgingly patronize on the occasions when my mother refused to cook. That occurred rarely, and only after she decided she was being exploited because the other Jewish women in her building had negotiated freedom from the culinary arts as part of their retirement packages. Within twenty-four hours, my mother would be back at the stove, drawn like a blintz to sour cream.
My father tolerated Sam’s because the food seemed Jewish
