I Can't Get Enough

Pizza.  That's right: pizza.  I wouldn't want to miss paying my respects to the establishments I visited during my sojourn upstate earlier this week.  On Wednesday night, I dined at Schlesinger's, the kind of steakhouse that reminds me of what steakhouses were like when I was younger.  A shared French onion soup was sufficiently cheesy and bready and terribly unhealthy.  A Ball canning jar on our table housed over a dozen tiny half-sour pickles. My complimentary salad was large, crunchy, and judiciously dressed.  And my ribeye, 20 ounces without a bone and a good inch-plus thick, came with the requisite grill marks and deckle fat.  What it didn't come with was the New York City price tag (this baby only cost a paltry $24).

The next afternoon, it was more meat, this time at Richard's Dairy Shed, where I enjoyed a burger on a plain roll with lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup, and mayo.  It would have been better with pickles, but it was fresh and hot and wrapped in wax paper.  In my hands, it didn't last long.

For an evening snack, we visited Wildfire Grill in downtown Montgomery.  Somewhat rubbery calamari and decent Southwest "wontons" (egg roll wrappers filled with chicken, cheese, corn, and black beans) gave way to sublime tail-on shrimp wrapped in crisp bacon and roasted.  It was a shame to see so few on the plate. 

But back in the city, it was pizza time.  We headed to Franny's in Park Slope, where I had heard the pizzas were too good to keep secret.  Marinated pickling cucumbers came with delicate and perfect buffalo ricotta and sliced red onions.  Sugar snap peas, blanched and served cold, had been dressed with a mint-infused oil and lemon juice and topped with fresh cracked pepper.  They were highly addictive.  A piece of crostini with ramp butter and thin strips of pancetta tasted like the best garlic bread I have ever eaten.  

So the pizzas?  They were okay.  We ordered a pie and a pasta.  The Franny's go-to is the clam pie, but I ate a clam pie two weeks ago at Tarry Lodge and was feeling a tomato base.  So we had pizza with buffalo mozzarella and sausage and it was crispy and black at the edges and that was lovely.  But the pizza's center was soggy and didn't hold up to meager toppings.  I found myself a little disappointed. 

The pasta was tasty enough, peppered with sweet peas and chiffonades of salami.  The sauce was green, but less overtly vegetal than a basil pesto.  The spaghetti itself, cooked very al dente, picked up the sauce well.  It could have used a few more peas.

For dessert, we ate almond pound cake (impressively moist) with macerated tristar strawberries and a spoonful of whipped cream.  It was the perfect June dessert, even if the pizza wasn't all that. 

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Schlesinger's Steak House 

475 Temple Hill Road

New Windsor, NY 12553 

845.561.1762

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Richard's Dairy Shed

1103 State Route 17k

Montgomery, NY 12549

845.457.5112

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Wildfire Grill

74 Clinton Street

Montgomery, NY 12549

845.457.3770

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Franny's

295 Flatbush Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11217

718.230.0221

Pizza Par-tay

You just can't take me anywhere.  

I realized this a quarter of the way into dinner at Tarry Lodge, where I was celebrating a birthday with family on Wednesday night.  That was when I recognized the sommelier in the blue dress, a friend of mine from a few restaurants back whom I knew had moved "upstate," though I couldn't remember where she'd landed.  

I thought that eating dinner in Port Chester would mean no random encounters with industry peeps, but, sigh, that's increasingly impossible.  You bet your lucky stars I got a free dessert. 

Tarry Lodge has the warm, wainscotted feel of a Vineyard restaurant (I thought of a placed called Atria in Edgartown, where I once dined two tables away from a tall and loud Denis Leary).  It didn't have the airy turn-and-burn quality unique to all other Batali-Bastianich enterprises.  That was fine by me.  It was nice to dine on tablecloths for a change--Babbo has them, but most of the others do not--and to sit in a warm, cream-colored room.  My passion fruit bellini upstaged the birthday girl's pear version.  Shrimp with melon and mint were halved and grilled jumbos, served with ample slices of cantaloupe and honeydew, alongside pickled onions.  A "chopped salad" was, more accurately, a play on antipasto, included chiffonades of the requisite players: salami, mortadella, provolone, roasted red peppers, artichokes, onions.  Roasted fennel and strawberries provided a toothsome contrast to all that soft meat and cheese, crunchy blackened chunks of anisey fennel up against season starter straws.  As Rachael Ray would say, Yum-O.  

The pizza course included one white (vongole, with in-shell littleneck clams and plenty of garlic) and one red (hot Italian sausage and black olives).  Both were unevenly shaped and black in parts.  The pizzas were better and more pliable than the Otto variety.  Our pastas--stinging nettle tagliatelle with braised lamb, linguine carbonara, spaghetti with Manila clams and pancetta--couldn't have been closer to perfect.  The nettle pasta was greenish with a deep herbal flavor.  The carbonara came with an egg yolk on top, the perfect binder for a perfectly hedonistic dish.  Spaghetti was undercooked in the right way and touched with a little pancetta, but not too much.  

For dessert, we settled for simple, strawberries with mascarpone and aged balsamic.  You can imagine how basic--and satisfying--it was.  A panettone bread pudding also arrived, alongside a rum-raisin gelato.  Not a bad way to end the night. 

Maybe it was unwise to follow great pizza with pizza, but I owed my coach a dinner out due to his effective (and free) services leading up to my marathon, so we went to Company, or Co., as everyone's been calling it.  People have been lauding the pies since the place opened a few months ago.  I'm not sure I agree. 

A chicken liver toast was way too mealy.  There was so much liver on the bread that I got totally grossed out and stopped eating it halfway through.  My radicchio salad was sufficiently bitter and well-dressed with a good balsamic, but the raw shitake mushrooms that adorned it seemed to serve no real purpose.  

As for the pie, I ordered the veal meatball.  It came with crushed tomatoes, olives, and parmesan cheese.  But because of the balls' heft, the pie was weighed down in the middle, losing the crispy crunch I craved.  The pizza bianco--dough doused with olive oil, sea salt, and rosemary, provided to us by a server to eat while we waited for our table--fared better in the crispness department.  Maybe it was just my pie with the toppings I had.  If I went back, I'd order the acclaimed Popeye, or maybe even a simple Margherita.  

Tarry Lodge: 1, Company: 0.  Sorry, Mr. Lahey.  Batali wins this round. 

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Tarry Lodge

18 Mill Street

Port Chester, NY 10573

914.939.3111

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Co.

230 9th Avenue

New York, NY 10001

212.243.1105

Winter Storage

I've noticed, during my short stay up north, that the diets of my northern friends pale in comparison to my own diet. Literally.

Up here, beige carbohydrates, beige fried chicken cutlets, and other beige delicacies constitute a solid New England diet. Italian restaurants, sub shops, and pizza joints run rampant. Back in New York, we're overrun with protein and vegetables. Aside from my insidious pizza adventures in the City, I couldn't tell you the last time I sat down to a carb-based meal.

People up here walk less; they just don't have to spend as much time on the pavement as New Yorkers do. The weather is colder and they turn to satisfying, high-fat, low-protein meals. The population at large is heavier and less fit. Could New Yorkers, with their home-cooking anemia, be the model for a healthier America?

Possibly. These days, New York is the hotbed of the local food movement, which is ironic given how many small town dwellers coexist with farmers and still buy their food from large chains that source produce from California and Mexico. Nutritionists say that a healthy plate is a colorful plate, but most New Englanders, despite their access to all kinds of colorful foods, fall back on the beiges of fried fish and potatoes and pasta and the other devils of the food pyramid.

So New Englanders, take note: throw out the fryer and the ecru dining palette. Your body and farmers will thank you.

Mama Celeste Does It Best?

I'm a New Yorker, so pizza is really important to me. I consider it a cornerstone of my diet and I really don't want to spend time thinking about how unhealthy that probably is.

Then again, if you run like I do it's okay to crave carbohydrates and pizza is the ultimate cross-food-group carbohydrate, including dairy (most of the time), vegetables (some of the time), and meat (in my case, almost none of the time). In my estimation, there are few more complete meals on the planet.

You're probably thinking that I'm some kind of pizza snob who turns her nose up at anything non-New York. Au contraire. Actually, my dirty little secret is that I will eat any kind of slice you shove in front of me.

Stouffer's French Bread pizza? Check. Papa Gino's soggy-crusted monstrosity? Double check. English muffin pizzas made in my substandard kitchen, the result of debilitating hunger and absolute poverty? Well, you get the picture.

One of my favorite slices (ok, let's get real; when I order this baby, I eat the whole pie) comes from a dive in my hometown, The Park Lunch, whose BLT I described ad nauseum about a month ago. I know their pizzas are frozen; they have the same anemic crust those Mama Celeste single-servings I used to eat have. But their oven must be really hot because the pizza is always crispy and dripping with cheese.

Dried flakes of oregano are no sophisticated touch, but I like them. Fresh mushrooms and other veggies make me feel like a healthier person, although I'll admit that I'm totally a sucker for canned mushrooms on pizza. Call it a shortcoming.

With my friend's help last night, I polished off a pie in record time. But I did a long, snowy afternoon run, trekking through almost nine miles of slushy terrain. And so I believe, as I always have, that the best restorative soul food is a fine little re-heated pizza that wouldn't hold a candle to a New York eatery and that I love all the same.

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Park Lunch
181 Merrimac Street
Newburyport, MA 01950
978.465.9817