A Classic Revisited And A Trip North

Walking into the Palm on Friday evening harkened an older era, one where waiters happily delivered steaks in butcher coats, where dark-paneled rooms and pedestrian American cabernet sauvignon by the glass was de rigeur. These days, steakhouses are sleeker, and with the emergence of the Bloomberg law, which states that restaurants with more than one outpost in the city must list the calories next to each menu item, the Palm has the character-less feel of a chain restaurant. Did you really need to know, for instance, that your wedge salad weighs in at a preposterous 960 calories, over 100 more than the boneless rib-eye?

Probably not. Such issues do not detract from the quality of a barely-bound giant crab cake, served with a tart and sweet salad of pineapple and mango and a spicy mayonnaise. Calories be damned; the bone IN rib-eye is still worth every one of its nearly 1200 calories, owing largely, I think, to the thick deckle of fat that surrounds the marbled meat. Wild mushrooms (calories? You don't want to know) are bathed in vinegar and salt, a sort of agrodolce take on a normally creamy classic. But with those three delicious items alone, along with a nine ounce glass of mediocre cab and a tiny onion roll with cold butter, I blew my calorie budget for two days. I didn't look at the dessert menu. It would have been too scary.

Hudson Hil's, in Cold Spring, New York, couldn't have been more different. The tiny white clapboard restaurant, with a wraparound porch that looks out onto Cold Spring's Main Street, facing the Hudson, features local meats and grass-fed beef. One side of the restaurant has a liquor license and the other does not, so we had to wait for a table on the boozy side to vacate before we could order our barely tippling Sunday afternoon bellinis. A pressed grilled cheese sandwich on toothsome French bread played the line between sweet and savory: aged gouda, thin-sliced apples, fig compote. A rueben on rye was delicate in its balance of corned beef, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing. In the damp spring air, surrounded by fresh bloomed trees and a population emerging from winter, the sandwiches approached perfection.

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The Palm Restaurant

250 W. 50th Street

New York, NY 10019

212.333.7256

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Hudson Hil's Cafe and Market

129-131 Main Street

Cold Spring, NY 10516

845.265.9471

Murray Hill Will Never Be Cool, But Still...

The restaurants are shaping up.  Thankfully.  

I found myself in the 20s/30s around snack time (aka mid-afternoon) ready to collapse from hunger.  Artisanal is expensive, but I'd recently read that they had launched a pocket-friendly bar menu. 

Actually, if you speak to any of the uninformed people working at Artisanal, you, too, will learn that they don't actually have a bar menu, per se.  What they do have, however, is a series of grilled cheese sandwiches that are less atrociously overpriced than the rest of the menu.  Not that spending $16 for a grilled cheese is a deal.  But whatever.

There are several different varieties and I wanted to order them all, but I settled for cheddar cheese, applewood smoked bacon, and apple.  The sandwich--and this is true for all of them--came with homemade potato chips (think Cape Cod), wide bread-and-butter pickle slices, and olives.  It was yummy, no doubt, and I ate almost all of it. But it wasn't really that cheap.  I'm intrigued by the version made with comte and truffle honey as well as the Berkshire pulled pork version.  Next time, assuming I'm willing to shell out the cash.  

Since I was in the neighborhood, I ducked into Szechuan Gourmet on dingy 39th Street for some Chinese takeout.  For later, of course.  I ordered so much food, the woman at the front actually asked me if she could give me some complimentary noodles.  

I don't care if my Chinese food is hot, I really don't.  The one dish that would have benefited from heat was the crispy lamb with cumin, which translated to soggy lamb that tasted only of cumin.  It was not good, but that's probably my fault for not eating it sooner.  

What was good was everything else.  Szechuan pickles included daikon, turnip, Napa cabbage, and carrot, doused in fiery chili oil.  That same oil made an appearance in all the different dishes, offering background flame in the wake of other flavors.  Despite the disconcerting orange slick it left behind on my plate, I found it quite addictive.  Prawns with ground pork and asparagus benefited from the spice.  Sliced pork belly with scallions swam in a sea of orange and brown, a sweet and spicy turn from the strict sichuan peppercorn. Yum.  

Ground pork dumplings, light as air, possessed a secondary spice: crushed ginger.  Sesame noodles, glossy and--you guessed it--orange, were everything you want in a noodle.  They had great texture, just enough grease, and a warming sensation that came mostly at the front of my tongue.  

There were leftovers, my favorite part about takeout, though I'm deep-cleaning today with millet, blueberries, and oat milk.  I'll save the hedonism for later. 

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Artisanal

2 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10016

212.725.8585

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Szechuan Gourmet

21 W. 39th Street

New York, NY 10018

212.921.0233