Not so Cochon in New Orleans’ Warehouse District. At this wildly popular little sister restaurant to Herbsaint, I had a terrfic dining experience with some good friends last week. Situated on the corner of Andrew Higgins Drive across the street from a Shell gas station and a manufacturing plant at the far end of Tchoupitoulas Street, Cochon is one place that perfectly matches a distinctive regional cuisine to a fresh approach. One wouldn’t describe the food as “haute” or “contemporary”—just thrivingly updated Southern cooking with authenticity intact.
As we know, “cochon” means pig in French, and here it also means Fudge Farm. Just north of Birmingham, Ala., that’s the source of Cochon’s pig. And these are raised to be the happiest pigs in America, practically waiting to be cooked and sliced and laid on a pan of creamed corn. Or so my waitress told me. The emphasis here is on small plates. You really could try just about everything on the menu in three or four nights. (First, of course, you’ll have to stop grabbing the piping hot potato roll biscuits and settle down to ordering.) The roasted corn cafa, a sort of crunchy corn pancake served on an heirloom tomato salad, becomes livelier and more delicious by the bite. The grilled shrimp was moist, offered with a pickled vegetable—the place calls that “chow-chow”—that amplifies and multiplies the flavors.
And then the alligator! It’s cut into small pieces—which, to someone from out of town, is a relief—breaded, grilled to a nice chewiness and lubricated with a dollop of lightly spiced aioli. Rabbit liver may not be your first choice of appetizer—I’m not one for offal or organs—but it might be once you’ve tasted it atop some pepper jelly toast. The entrees are not substantially larger than the smaller dishes, but you won’t be left unsatisfied. I had the cochon, matted and braised, with a small pile of turnips, cabbage and cracklins. The oyster and bacon sandwich on a hard-crusted pullman bread was also a hit: the oyster and bacon sang to each other like a Cajun fiddle and accordion.
And what did we drink among all these plates? Two bottles each of the Domaine Gros’ Noré Bandol Rosé and the 2006 Champalou Vouvray. Cochon’s is a well-chosen, reasonably priced wine list with a global perspective. Many of the producers farm organically. The most interesting wines I found to be among the higher-priced ones, and French—well, this is Louisiana—though no bottle sold for more than $150. Most notable whites were the Dom. Ostertag “Fronzholz” Pinot Gris, Dom. Weinbach “Cuvée Theo” and the savory Meursault by Pierre Morey. Among the reds was a small but outstanding assortment of Burgundies and Rhones, all among the higher-end offerings. I’d stay with the Hudelot-Noellat Bourgogne and the strong, seductive Joncier Lirac, depending on your meal.
Even better were the select wines next door at Butcher—a little deli-wine bar offshoot of Cochon—more affordable and interesting, and by the bottle or glass. Like the Ch. Thivin Côte de Brouilly and the Ch. la Liquière rosé from Faugeres. By the way, rosés, with their appealing versatility, pair superbly with this Southern fare and your wallet.
We made our second visit to Falai, and if anything it was even better than our first last fall. The room is chicly unpretentious, in the manner of many Ludlow area restaurants: a thin, long room, principally white. It could be a shoebox stood on its side. The food is refined Italian cooking that manages to deliver robust flavor along with a restrained hauteness. We both had roasted rabbit loin, deconstructed into a neatly methodical line of meat, kidneys and liver—with the legmeat shredded, braised in white wine and served up as a sort of dumpling to the side. The service is attentive but informal. Well, we were very happy.
And not just with the food: Many small and particular producers like to feature their wines at small and particular restaurants. At Falai, where the wine list is slender and focused, we experienced a delightfully obscure, greenish-gold aromatic white grape found only in the Carso, a tiny sliver of a DOC within the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region running down the southern border of Slovenia. This picturesque area, with its chalky limestone and sandy soils, is home to many traditional winemakers whose reputations outstrip their tiny properties. The Vodopivec family, who produce the Vitovska varietal, are among these winemakers. The family adheres to biodynamic agriculture and keeps their yields extremely low. The wine comes nonfiltered, aged in French oak for two years with an additional six months in the bottle before its release. If you’re lucky to find this 2004 vintage wine from the 240-odd cases the family produces each year, you’ll encounter a well-balanced, medium-bodied wine with exceptional concentration of flavors midpalate and a silky mouthfeel. The acidity is somewhat mild, but carries the flavors to a very long finish. And what might those flavors be? I noted oxidized apple, blood orange, wildflower and lemon. This wine can age a long time. The color is opaquely amber with pink tints. For this wine, you’ll likely spend in the neighborhood of $100—which may seem exorbitant in these times. But it was my birthday. Forgive me! Falai, 68 Clinton St., New York City.
Aldo’s birthday dinner at Corton in Tribeca was probably the finest culinary experience we’ve had in a year—the best, perhaps, since we ate at Beast, and that was in Portland, Oregon, and that was last summer. Absolutely nothing comparable in New York comes to mind, unfortunately. The restaurant scene here just hasn’t been as much fun since the economy collapsed. Aldo tried to rearrange his finances so that part of his portfolio could be redefined as a philanthropic nonprofit, the funds to be dispersed in the form of meals for two at top-flight establishments. But his accountant balked, and then oddly enough the accountant up and died, leaving Aldo unable to proceed.
Corton, though, is doing well enough that I had trouble getting a reservation. It certainly deserves its success and critical accolades. The meal we had there last week was much more memorable than one we had at the address’ previous tenant, the famous Montrachet. But we went to Montrachet late in its run, on a bring-your-own-wine night, and we uncorked a Sauternes so off it smelled and tasted like a banana wrapped in damp socks.
The restaurant’s name reflects one of the Grand Cru wine appellations of Burgundy’s northern Côte de Beaune, and so does its eminent wine list, from Chablis to the Jura. The room is boxy and pale and elegant: Most noticeable are the vines with gold leaves designed in bas-relief along the walls. The effect is something like a vineyard in the hush of a heavy snowfall.
The chef, Paul Liebrandt, gained a certain notoriety with his previous high-profile restaurant, Atlas, where some critics claimed he pushed the envelope so far the envelope eventually was perforated and the contents fell out onto the floor. Incidentally, I think I pushed that metaphor too far, and now it’s all over my lap. At Corton, at any rate, the cuisine was impeccably artful, playful and harmoniously delicious.
I started with something called, with a certain Martha Stewart poeticism, “Violet Hill Farm Egg.” It turned out to be a beautiful, omeletty puff—the egg floating on a base of salt cod and baby squid, the whole thing buoyed by pheasant consomme. Aldo, who once described himself in his diary as a “mad hog for foie gras,” was very happy with Corton’s presentation of it. The menu describes it as accompanied with “hibiscus-beet gelee and blood orange”—it was a small landscape of deep, burnished color. Aldo said it was the cleanest foie gras he has ever had. He couldn’t explain it further, he said, but meant it as a compliment.
The entrees, which so often are a slight letdown at high-end restaurants—as if the chef were an architect who took greater pleasure in crafting models than actual houses—were in fact a perfect continuation of the meal: Pheasant was served with a small but luscious cassoulet of coca beans, red-cabbage gelee and albufera sauce. And for Aldo, the unaging birthday boy, there was a happy little fish duet of John Dory and diver scallop.
My only complaint about the evening was that food was slow coming out of the kitchen. Then again, it was so good, neither of us cared. Besides, we were kept entertained with a veritable conga line of amuse bouches.
There’s no real reason to anchor this post with a photo (courtesy of Showtime) of Michael C. Hall in Dexter, except that the show is set in Miami, where we visited recently—and surely the Chamber of Commerce won’t complain about having an exceptionally attractive serial killer serve as a poster boy for their city. We could have used Jackie Gleason, I suppose, but where are the sex and sizzle in that?
What a gorgeous relief from the Manhattan skyline in winter. In Miami, you have the jeweled aquamarine tones of the water and, along all the shores, shiny new buildings touched with bursts of colored light at night: It’s like a city that somehow got into its head that it was really a cocktail bar.
New York had Robert Moses. Miami seems more like a resort dreamed up by the owner of Moss (a Manhattan hallmark of the Vivosian lifestyle). Playfulness, frivolity and prettiness were key accents of two hotel-lobby “scenes” Aldo and I investigated on a balmy, moonlight-saturated Friday. First was the new Mondrian on West: The concept is a consciously mod white-on-white fantasy of smooth gleaming molded plastic/fiberglass. Near the front entrance, where Aldo was stunned by the Gatsybesque sheen of someone’s parked Rolls convertible, one found an inspiredly silly automat, bathed in fuchsia light, selling jewelry, T-shirts and a paperback of The Valley of the Dolls (which, in case you didn’t know, is the source of our Patty Duke photo up top). In the main area, chandeliers were hung within giant golden bells. Moving outside, we were delighted with the poolside “umbrellas,” a sort of Jeff Koons sight gag: they were shaped into enormous table lamps.
The revelers were young and gorgeous and loud, except for one or two very old exceptions who were vigilantly lacquered and cossetted and watchful. If this scene ever gets old, it will be like them. It will be Liberace. How sad.
Next we hopped over to the renovated and recently reopened Fountainebleau, where we had a nightcap in the exquisitely tiled front room of Scarpetta (it has a sister restaurant here in Manhattan). The atmosphere there was somewhere between waterfront dock and Milanese fashion house. The Fontainebleau, designed by Morris Lapidus and opened in 1954, boasts an eye-seducingly luxe interior so full of polished stone, gleaming detail and undulating curves it suggests a Taj Mahal created to house the remains of Marilyn Monroe. The crowd wasn’t as hip as at the Mondrian, but the sense of space and flow and stone-cooled air were irresistible. (The Mondrian’s lobby-level staircase, by the way, seems to be an homage to the Fontainebleau’s famous “Staircase to Nowhere.”)
The newly popular Design District, oddly enough, didn’t offer nearly as much high-design amusement: it felt distinctly emptied out and Edward Hopperishy. But we enjoyed a very good meal outdoors there at Michael’s Genuine: The skirt steak came with a memorably rich green-olive aioili that I wanted to smear over everything, my forearms included. A few nights later, straight up Key Biscayne Boulevard by another forty blocks, we found our favorite meal at Michy’s. Aldo had a salad with beans and walnuts that he said was one of the best he ever had in his long and terrifyingly eventful life.
We always have lunch at that Little Havana mainstay, Versailles, which in its own décor of chandeliers and paneled mirrors is just as impeccably overdesigned as the Mondrian or Fontainebleau: What makes it real, and appealing, are the waitresses. They seemed a bit tired and frayed, in the old Thelma Ritter manner, but brought the huge portions without fuss and without attitude.
Now we are back in New York, and missing it all. But we DVRed season three of Dexter, and we’ll settle for that.
At any rate, there was no lack of bustle at chef Michel Richard’s Central, on Pennsylvania Avenue. I’d eaten before at his acclaimed Citronelle, in Georgetown. This new restaurant—a James Beard winner—is a casual nouveau bistro designed to move the crowds in and out.
The first impression wasn’t altogether favorable: The atmosphere was closer to loud than energetic, and in scale the room is long and boxy, as if it were a holding cargo for tourists famished after a day traipsing up and down the Mall. The blandly tasteful architecture of the squat corporate buildings just outside the door seemed to have swept in with the evening and rearranged itself as decor.
But, as they say nowadays, no worries. The food came with a quickness that was potentially disconcerting, but visually the dishes were enticing creations—just the right amount of fuss—and, better yet, on the palate they were warmingly robust and tasty: Our friend Diana, who joined us, thought her cassoulet was a bit dry, yet it was undeniably a handsome dish for winter, with a plump duck leg sitting neatly on a mound of beans in which the sausage was concealed like holiday coins. And my beef cheeks with tagliatelle were absolutely delicious, rich but not cloying—and amusingly presented as two columns, one of the meltingly tender medallions of beef, the other of the pasta, folded over neatly, with shaved carrots sprinkled down the middle.
The bread, by the way, was terrific as well, and a traditional salad of frisee, lardons and poached egg was very satisfying.
Given the heartiness of the fare, our server recommended we drink the Dom. Ligneres “Aric” from Corbieres, France, which I’d never had. We found the wine to be big and dusky and, regrettably, an uninspired, one-dimensional match for the sophisticated comfort food from the kitchen.
The wine list was dominated by California and French wines with a smattering of Italian, Austrian and Spanish labels. I noticed some interesting reasonably priced gems: a Chablis from Dom. Bernard Defaix, a pinot blanc from Marcel Deiss, a reisling from Dom. Weinbach, a Givry premier cru from Michel Sarrazin, a cabernet franc from Frederic Mabileau, a gamay from Christophe Pacalet, a syrah from Dom. du Tunnel and a banyuls by the glass from Dom. de la Rectoire. Central also offered by the glass a Cremant d’Alsace brut rosé from Lucien Albrecht.
So: We came away sated and pleased, if not quite relaxed—maybe that’s Washington?
Also, if I can momentarily join those tourists traipsing up and down the Mall: We visited the new World War II Memorial, a spectacularly unimaginative site that, apart from access ramps, looks conservative enough to have been first sketched around the time of the Potsdam conference. With its funereal iron wreaths and dancing waters, it looked like a forlorn little postmodern joke on Il Vittoriano, the enormous Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome. Grrr!
