Restaurants: January 2004 Archives
Chain or no, Cafe Spice is one of my favorite Indian restaurants. It has an open kitchen, too, so while we waited we watched them cook, roasting meats on skewers, scooping thin dosa off the cooktop. Their lunch is a pretty good deal. Yesterday Todd and I ate and had drinks for $31 with tip. I had the South Indian lunch special, which had some familiar and some not-so-familiar items on it. One of the most pleasant surprises was the idli.
Idli are fairly bland cakes (almost like cornbread) shaped like little UFOs and made from ground rice, dal and water. I was actually pretty sure I wasn't going to finish them until I dipped them in the bowl of sambar, a spicy broth that had chiles, tomatoes and eggplant in it. It soaked the flavorful juice right up and turned out to be a great way to eat it.
The special also included a mini potato dosa, a crepe-type bread filled with curried potatoes, onions and cashews. The coconut chutney, a smooth puree, had this wonderful, milky-watery coolness, like really freshly made mozzarella has (it was awesome with the dosa).
The third item on the platter, my least favorite, was uttapam topped with onions and peppers. It turned out to look kind of like little pizzas made out of pancakes. Still OK, but not as great as the other two.
Chain or no, Cafe Spice is one of my favorite Indian restaurants. It has an open kitchen, too, so while we waited we watched them cook, roasting meats on skewers, scooping thin dosa off the cooktop. Their lunch is a pretty good deal. Yesterday Todd and I ate and had drinks for $31 with tip. I had the South Indian lunch special, which had some familiar and some not-so-familiar items on it. One of the most pleasant surprises was the idli.
Idli are fairly bland cakes (almost like cornbread) shaped like little UFOs and made from ground rice, dal and water. I was actually pretty sure I wasn't going to finish them until I dipped them in the bowl of sambar, a spicy broth that had chiles, tomatoes and eggplant in it. It soaked the flavorful juice right up and turned out to be a great way to eat it.
The special also included a mini potato dosa, a crepe-type bread filled with curried potatoes, onions and cashews. The coconut chutney, a smooth puree, had this wonderful, milky-watery coolness, like really freshly made mozzarella has (it was awesome with the dosa).
The third item on the platter, my least favorite, was uttapam topped with onions and peppers. It turned out to look kind of like little pizzas made out of pancakes. Still OK, but not as great as the other two.
The weather was sunny, cold, with a frigid wind (but not as cold as it had been the two previous days). The company was Todd and two friends who moved to Minnesota a few months ago and who had some big news. The place was Pigalle, a French bistro that's just two blocks down from my office. All these elements came together to take me out of my day Friday, to forget about the office and the cold and the things I don't like about my life for a while.
Tucked into a table along the back wall, we had a view of the big, bright room lined with windows and mirrors. We almost all ordered bistro standards: fragrant onion soup with a thick layer of melted cheese on top and bread soaking up the broth, a thick, fluffy omelet, steak frites (and one order of ravioli that looked great). I had a frisee salad with lardons and a poached egg on top. Happy, happy, happy.
I have to get back to try the onion soup. It smelled awesome. And it's easy to see myself stopping in there for lunch one day, alone with my magazine without feeling ill-at-ease, for a warming crockful.
It's amazing how good food can make up for a host of ills. After our meal at Divane last night I made a trip to the restroom. It turned out to be nicely designed, with one stall and three women squeezed into the tiny room in front of me. Plus it was about 30 degrees warmer than the dining room. The sauna-like temperature and the good meal made all the women talkative, so we chatted and laughed as we waited, complaining about the cold dining room and the scatty service (two different waitresses were trying to take our orders, and they were a little too aggressive about drinks and starters, which there were only four of, including salad, hummus, spicy lamb pita and something else).
The bad: the aformentioned service, the cold (which they couldn't do much about, it was 10 below outside), the vinegary-tasting shiraz that was their house red.
The good: the donor kebab with yogurt. There were three piles on a huge platter. To the left was a salad of sliced onion, cilantro and peppers. To the right, a shredded carrot salad that was really good, with a hint of something acidic but not enough for me to identify it (lemon juice?), and big round slices of some kind of watery-tasting radish. In the center was a huge pile of thinly sliced lamb with hot sauce and yogurt. Under the lamb, swimming in the yogurt and sauce, were these spongy, chewy squares that I couldn't identify until Todd said they were toasted pita, and then it was obvious (a great texture).
About $45 for two main courses and two drinks, but you could almost get away with just a starter and one main for two (I took home more of my dinner than I ate at the restaurant). I thought I didn't really like lamb until I tried this; it had a hint of that lamby-gamey taste, but just enough to be nice. Good stuff.
This Vietnamese restaurant is at 9th Avenue and 20th Street, so it's relatively close to the Charles Cowles gallery, where we went last night to shake hands with a photographer Todd really likes, Edward Burtinsky (I really like him, too, but Todd's the photo junkie). I'd never had Vietnamese before so it seemed like a good time to try it.
The place isn't well-marked (in fact, I never found the name of the place anywhere on the storefront), but I had read somewhere that it was the shop with palm trees or ferns or something out front, which is how we identified it. It's kind of too cool for us, with an entirely glass front, waitstaff all in black and a little square pot of live grass and candles on every table, but the staff didn't come across as haughty or anything. We arrived around 7 and it was about 1/3 full, but by the time we left they were busy.
The wine I had, a riesling-type white, was sharp and flavorful, perfect for the spicy food. I had barbecued pork, which came in a bowl of brothy sauce, with piles of lettuce and thin noodles on the side. I don't know how I was supposed to eat it, but I ate the pork, sometimes with the lettuce, then dipped the noodles in the sauce left in the bowl (the sauce was really good, salty and meaty). We also split an order of tuna summer rolls with cilantro and a salty, spicy dipping sauce.
Looked at the dessert menu, but nothing sounded quite enticing enough. I kind of wanted to try ginger flan, because it sounded kind of odd, but Todd wanted the chocolate mousse cake (boring) so we opted for nothing. (He said whatever I wanted was fine, but I really wasn't that interested. What a shock.)
The last week in January is Restaurant Week, where participating restaurants around the city serve $20.04 prix fixe lunches and $30.04 dinners. I'm not a huge fan of prix fixe to begin with, and I've had some not-so-good Restaurant Week lunches. Maybe it's the places I've chosen. I know I had a great meal at Molyvos, but it wouldn't have cost me a whole lot more to just pay the a la carte prices. Are there good meals to be had during Restaurant Week? Are there places you can go where you don't feel like a schmuck for order the prix fixe? Is it too late to get a reservation at said places?
A lot of times the dishes just seem kind of assembly line to me, more so than usual. I've gotten so I don't even participate anymore. The winter Restaurant Week usually happens just before my birthday, and I tend to view that as a hassle; I have this idea that reservations are more difficult to get because of it.
The last week in January is Restaurant Week, where participating restaurants around the city serve $20.04 prix fixe lunches and $30.04 dinners. I'm not a huge fan of prix fixe to begin with, and I've had some not-so-good Restaurant Week lunches. Maybe it's the places I've chosen. I know I had a great meal at Molyvos, but it wouldn't have cost me a whole lot more to just pay the a la carte prices. Are there good meals to be had during Restaurant Week? Are there places you can go where you don't feel like a schmuck for order the prix fixe? Is it too late to get a reservation at said places?
A lot of times the dishes just seem kind of assembly line to me, more so than usual. I've gotten so I don't even participate anymore. The winter Restaurant Week usually happens just before my birthday, and I tend to view that as a hassle; I have this idea that reservations are more difficult to get because of it.
