Boulud Is Back

Walking into Boulud Sud on the Upper West Side is like walking into any three or four star establishment of the late 90s and early 2000s. The room is quiet, filled with patterned banquettes, carpeted, and dotted with the oldest dining crowd in recent memory. The only people in my age group were being taken out to eat by their parents.

That didn't bode well for my wallet.

Actually, the menu is conceptually brilliant, divided into seafood, vegetables, and meat dishes. Every category has a series of small plates, appetizers (which might as well be called "slightly larger small plates), and entrees, all priced accordingly. This means that you can skate by without ever ordering a main course, which I took advantage of, instead ordering six small dishes, a side, and two desserts.

But the service left something to be desired. Before our server had even taken our drink order, our first four dishes had arrived at the table. Once I ordered a drink, ten minutes elapsed before the server came back to report that they were, in fact, out of the cocktail. After our final courses were cleared, we waited twenty minutes for dessert menus and another twenty minutes after our menus arrived, waiting for our order to be taken.

Nonetheless, the food was largely impressive. A take on a Greek salad was crisp and clean, speckled with fresh oregano. A plate of hummus, babaghanoush, and falafel came with thin, wafter crisps and a spicy mayonnaise. The bread that came gratis was two kinds of focaccia--one with black olives--and a crispy, fatty flatbread that went perfectly with our harissa marinated mussels, cooked out of the shell in a brunoise of tomato and carrots. Duck legs were wrapped in phyllo pastry and atop a sweet and thick date puree.

A rabbit porchetta, weirdly served cold, lacked flavor (as did the sad, underseasoned market carrots that accompanied it), but the blue prawns, head on, made up for that misstep. The prawns were perfectly cooked and seasoned and the heads were crunchy--I ate all four heads. Broccoli rabe was another disappointment, but dessert, when it finally arrived, was a dinner atonement. A grapefruit sorbet came in a hollowed grapefruit with halvah and segments of the fruit. Our second dish featured sweet and tangy plums over squares of a soft cinnamon cake that resembled, in texture, the fluffy inside of a sourdough loaf. It was a delicate and lovely end to a long meal.

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Boulud Sud

20 W. 64th Street

New York, NY 10023

212.595.1313

Snow Angels

Another snowy weekend.  Sigh.  Snowy weekends means no car rides to extreme outer borough destination hot spots.  Snowy weekends means sweatpants and--dare I say it?--Uggs.  Snowy weekends means making the best of your own neighborhood. 

For us, that meant a short walk to Ovelia, a shiny and sleek Greek-ish restaurant that opened in Astoria two years ago.  Pros: huge menu with tons of tasty things that definitely aren't on the 1,700-calorie-per-day diet by which I'm hoping to adhere.  Cons: terrible European techno soundtrack that would be much more appropriate if it were night, if it were Saturday, if this were a dance club, and if I were on drugs.  

We sat at the bar.  My girls, to my left and my right, drank red wine while I enjoyed Ovelia's version of the bellini, lychee puree and sparkling wine.  We ordered kobe beef sliders, three to an order (how perfect!), White Castle-sized sandwiches that came adorned with haloumi cheese, lettuce, onion and tomato.  The burgers also came with a side of herbed mayonnaise and thick, fresh potato chips.  

The so-called apple, bacon, and cream cheese toast was actually more like a panini, two thin pressed pieces of toast holding together a sandwich that included all the above elements as well as apple marmalade.  The sandwich's only real imperfection was that sweet overwhelmed salty; more cheese (or a saltier variety) would have offered a more staggering contrast.  But the bacon was fresh and chewy, the marmalade the consistency of quince paste.  The dish arrived with a heaping Greek salad, full of oversized squares of fresh feta, green and red peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and kalmata olives.  The salad satisfied my daily need for ruffage.  

At the request of my chocolate-fiend companion, we ordered the menu's least heart-healthy finale, a deep fried Snicker's bar, something I have only ever seen before at state fairs.  Not that I was ever allowed to order desserts like this growing up, but at least I'd seen them.  With this, the advertising didn't lie.  Two medium-sized candy bars had literally been battered and deep fried.  They melted when cut, although the caramel seemed to rebel against the hot oil and became tougher than normal.  It was gooey, salty, sweet, and the kind of dastardly dessert that I'd prefer not to know the nutritional information on.  

Well, that's okay.  As Jennifer Aniston once said, all dieters need a seventh day.  My seventh day is Sunday.  

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Ovelia

3401 Astoria Avenue

Astoria, NY 11103

718.721.7217