Mayahuel - A Spanish speakeasy on E. 6th Street

These are some notes I just posted on e-gullet about Mayahuel, a terrific new bar opened on E. 6th Street by the former head bartender at Death & Co. 

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We visited Mayahuel last night. Didn't have too much trouble getting in - the fellow at the door led us to a small standing alcove near the umbrella depository first, but quickly got us over to the bar.

I'm probably the least knowledgeable person about cocktails in this thread, but I loved the drinks. The Italian Inquisition was fantastic - to be honest, it tasted a little like my favorite standard cocktail, the martinez. Laugh at me all you like. But I have to give my prize for the night to the Whoopsy Daisy, which is outrageously good, and the Division Bell(sp?), which I got when I asked the bartender for something with more pronounced mezcal. The DB reminds me of the Laphroiag based drinks I order sometimes at D&co - almost peaty. 

We were starving, so dug into a quesadilla - although small, it was darned tasty. A nice combination of spicy and sweet (it's topped with mango,I think, though by that time I was getting a little shaky). Makes me excited to consider a more full menu. 

So, one little complaint - if you could catch swine flu from air conditioning, I swear we would have caught it sitting at the bar right under the look through to the top floor. I think the seats at the bar nearest the door don't have this problem. 

8 shots?

If I'm reading this right, the Washington Post's food critic (Tom Sietsema) drinks eight shots of expresso a day. Yikes.

Sulking Salad

I was sulking about something or other this weekend when my fiancee suggested that we have a nice, light, salad and sit outside on my porch. A quick shopping trip and some half-hearted rooting around in my fridge yielded this salad - a sort of pseudo greek take on panzanella.

There's no reason whatever for there to be a recipe, since you can just put anything you want in such a salad, but for the record, I seared some Murray's chicken breasts dressed with smoked paprika, fried cubes of stale pain au levain and soaked them in a vinaigrette briefly, tossed some asparagus and zucchini in oil, and added some dodonis feta and giant kalamata olives from Astoria (the best feta we can get easily). Toss together and munch.

Pegu Club

Saturday night, we found ourselves in a bit of a yuppie conumdrum. We wanted nice cocktails. But it is flatly impossible to walk into our favorite cocktail bar/speakeasy, Death & Co., on Saturday night. So we went, for the first time, to Pegu Club, another in the 5 or 6 strong pantheon of bars that can plausibly claim the title of best cocktails in New York City.

(I think the consensus list of the top 4 is Pegu Club, Milk & Honey, Death, and Please Don't Tell. I haven't been to all of these).

Anyway, the vibe at Pegu Club is completely different than at Death & Co. Younger, I think. Less solely cocktail focused. The place is a lounge rather than a sort of pseudo speakeasy. But the drinks are indeed terrific and worthy of their comparison to the best cocktails I ever had. And, even better, Pegu Club is easier to get into, and in a better location than Death.

My martinez was delicious, but I have to say I was very impressed by the Pegu Club Cocktail, apparently revised from a 1930's drinks manual. It was extraordinarily potent, but tasty, balanced, and a pleasure to drink.

Money, money

I've been trying to figure out a place to park a fairly substantial sum of money that I can't risk but also don't like the sub-2% interest rates I'm getting on. By the by, I remembered Premium Bonds, a UK government bond I used to invest in when I was a college kid (invest in = put 20 pounds I had saved over the week into). I called National Savings & Investments, who administer the Premium Bonds program, and was told that Americans living in America were not really eligible. Why not? Because the US Post Office won't deliver mail sent about Premium Bonds due to US law.

A little puzzled, I emailed the Post Office about it, not really expecting an answer. Yet, this morning, here it is:

"Thank you for contacting us about investing in "premium bonds" run by the United Kingdom government.Lottery and raffle tickets are not permitted mailings within our Postal Service. This prohibition is based on a Federal law (Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302) passed by Congress and signed by the President of the United States. "Lottery or raffle is a scheme or promotion, whether lawful under the laws of any state, which, on paying a consideration, offers a prize dependent in whole or in part on lot or chance."We have no authority to grant exemptions to this law, and are specifically mandated by Congress to enforce it.If I can be of assistance to you in the future, please don't hesitate to contact me.Thank you for choosing the United States Postal Service®."

A bond run by a foreign sovereign in which the person investing can't lose any money is a violation of US gambling laws? Really? And what of free speech?

* UPDATE: A big thumbs up to USPS service, by the way. I'm very surprised they had something cogent to say.

UPDATE 2: The relevant case turns out to be Horner v. United States, 147 U.S. 449 (1893), in which a very similar bond issued by the imperial government of Austria was ruled to be a lottery within the statute's remit. As for what I think is one of the main reasons why a premium bond is not a lottery, the Supreme Court had this to say, citing an earlier case with yet another premium or bonus bond:


The court further remarked that it had been vigorously argued, that because the money ventured must all come back, with interest, so that there could be no final loss,
it could not be a lottery, and added: "At some uncertain period determined by the revolution of a wheel of fortune, the purchaser of a bond does get his money repaid; but we do not think this
deprives the thing of its evil tendency, or robs it of its lottery semblance and features. The inducement for investing in such bonds is offered of getting some `bonus,' large and small,
in the future, soon or late, according to the chances of the wheel's disclosures. The investment may run one year or it may run thirty years, according to the decision of the wheel. It
cannot be said this is not a species of gambling, and that it does not tend in any degree to promote a gambling spirit and a love of making gain through the chance of dice, cards, wheel or
other method of settling a contingency . . .

Home cooking

Ozersky's current twitter post:

"Last Meal: Corned beef sandwiches on onion rolls. Home cooking is boring."

My answer - yes, if you don't bother to cook.

Simple weekend dinner

I can hardly claim credit for most of this weekend's dinner, given that the chicken dish is a Colicchio recipe, but I still think I did a bang up job cooking.

For the chicken, simply brown the chicken, and reserve. Add mushrooms (it's supposed to be morels, but I didn't have them), asparagus, and some sort of oniony thing (again, it's supposed to be ramps, but I didn't have them either). Cook until soft, add the chicken back, and then add a couple of tablespoons of chicken stock at a time until you have a nice glaze.

The game is to add the chicken stock slowly, in part to keep the chicken skins nice and crisp.

I served this with a simple salad of thinly sliced cucumbers and watercress, dressed with a classic vinaigrette.

For dessert, I had two slabs of wedding cake/duncan hines doctored with sour cream sitting in my freezer. I sliced two rounds into thirds, and made some layers with cooked rhubarb. I added a few streudel crumbles and confectioner's sugar. Actually pretty darned tasty, though it could have done with a topping of greek yogurt for some extra tang.

Taverna Kyklades

I note that Frank Bruni raves about Astoria's Taverna Kyklades on his blog today. Given the other choices in the area (and most notably, Agnanti) I think he's just wrong.

Also, Kyklades smells, as I have mentioned on this blog before, and mention again in Bruni's comments.

Restaurants of the month

I thought it would be nice to list the restaurants I visited this month, as I work on my end of credit-card cycle budget process:

Christos Steakhouse - We just bought a steak to cook at home, but from that experience, think it's probably a solid restaurant.

Mojave - Sister restaurant to Agave in Manhattan, this is our stand-by place for a quick meal with a nice tequila.

Xai Xai Wine Bar - Neat wine. Too expensive.

Daniel - The weakest of the four great New York City French restaurants, but still a very great restaurant with high ambitions.

Sushi of Gari - Not as good as Yasuda if one is after purity, but Gari's amazing twists on traditional sushi are exceptional (and the plain old sushi is pretty good too).

Porter House New York - Do you want Per Se's view onto Central Park for a fraction of the price, and to get a fantastic burger to boot? Porter House at lunch is the answer.

Motorino New York - excellent artisanal pizza.

Sripraphai - The best thai restaurant in New York, though the menu is hit or miss.

Motorino Neapolitan Pizza

We were in Williamsburg, Brooklyn over the weekend to meet some friends at Duff's Bar, and we were hungry. Luckily, I realized we weren't too far from Motorino Neapolitan Pizza, one of the new breed of artisanal, Italian style pizzerias sweeping through the city.

Without waxing too lyrical, Motorino is excellent. A light, charred, crust, with a perfect chew. Good sauce, and excellent mozzarella (including di bufalo, if you'd like). If I had any complaint at all, it was that the pizza's dusting of pecorino was a little too strong, but that's not really a serious gripe.

I haven't been to the grand-daddy of all the artisanal pie shops, Una Pizza Napoletana, but I don't see how it could be too much superior. And at $10 for a margherita, this is good value.*

*Please spare me the whining about how $10 for a small pizza is too much, and back in 1998 you could get a slice for a buck. This is good pizza, made with good ingredients, baked in an amazing custom oven. It's not $1 a slice pizza.

A quick question

Does "work product"* mean anything different than "work"?

* Compare, "I'm trying to make my work product top notch" and "I'm trying to make my work top notch".

Toys!

I didn't get to cook this weekend, due to various bits of hubub, but I did raid Bed, Bath & Beyond for various toys (oh, the excitements that made up my life, let me tell you).

Included in the haul was a new pizza stone, a candy thermometer (goodbye, hairy episodes of plunging my fingers into syrup to determine whether we had reached the hard-ball stage) , a new salad spinner (ever since I broke my old one, I've been eating wet salads), and two new hard anodized pans. Woohoo!

Restaurant Daniel

Restaurant Daniel's position in the New York restaurant stratosphere is somewhat like its chocolate coulant's position in the world of desserts.  A most delicious thing, but in the end, just a molten chocolate cake. 

I'll explain.  We ended up dining at Daniel tonight for nuptial related reasons.  It was the last of the four great French or New American 4-star restaurants in New York I hadn't visited in the last few years.  Each of Per Se, Le Bernardin, and Jean Georges had endured my presence fairly recently, actually, and I've listed them in order of their excellence (the fifth 4 star restaurant is Masa - the greatest sushi restaurant in North America, which is beyond even my tolerance for spending money on food).  

Daniel  cannot match Le Bernardin's pristine magnificence, the surgical beauty of fish stripped of artifice.  Nor is Daniel really a peer of Per Se.  Thomas Keller's east coast flagship serves better food, with better service.  As one egulleter put it, at Per Se it feels like the waiters think they're lucky to serve you.   And Jean-Georges? Well, I don't really like Jean-Georges, but everyone else does, and I accept that Vongerichten has a certain genius about him, whatever I think of his signature and yet god-forsaken foie gras brulee.   Daniel, to me, is perched in an uncomfortable place between the aspirant three star restaurants (the new Corton, and Eleven Madison Park, and perhaps Momofuku Ko, though the last will never have the service to justify a place among all these big boys) and its three 4-star colleagues.  

I realize this is all angels on the heads of pins level granularity, especially in our economic end times.  But what else can I say, for example, of our loup de mer?  A fantastically flavorful dish, anointed with a sauce of the greatest subtlety (a reduced Syrah and BUTTER jus, emphasis on the butter), but topped with a chewy, puzzling, fish skin the servers insisted was meant to be eaten. I get the impression that Le Bernardin's Eric Ripert would rather have worn the skin as a hat than serve such a thing.  Or raviolis with a little too much salt, a too crunchy roll, a truly delicious potato croquette that nonetheless appeared to have emerged from one of the used Time-Life "Frou-Frou Cookery and other methods to lord it over your friends " volumes from the 1970's that I have somewhere on my shelves.  Those dishes which truly were flawless, like Daniel's signature duo of aged beef, (a combination of the most unctuous short rib possible and seared sirloin) and the chocolate coulant I mentioned above (imagine the best molten chocolate cake possible, filled with a sort of caramel) or the poached pineapple (Hawaii on a plate) are from the past.  We live in a world where Chili's serves molten chocolate cake.  As unfair as it is, because molten chocolate cakes are tasty indeed, Daniel just has to move on. 

Am I unhappy?  No, to some extent because I didn't pay tonight (for long and boring reasons).  But also because most of the food really is very good, and one can sort of sink into a happy complacency at Daniel, surrounded by people who look and sound like Henry Kissinger nibbling happily at white asparagus brought up in some sort of silver trivet, awash oneself in wine, chomping through extraordinary madeleines with coffee later, and helped out in a sozzled stagger into the Park Avenue dimness of a cold New York April night.  But in the end, one can't help but feel that Boulud could push his kitchen more. 

And he doesn't.

Balsamic Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've been playing around with chocolate chip coookies recently (I like them, and they freeze so well before baking for a warm, impromptu late night treat). The last recipe I tried was the "chewy" cookie recipe from the magisterial King Arthur Flour Cookbook (really - if you don't have this cookbook in your library, purchase it now). I realized in the middle of whipping the butter and sugar, however, that I didn't have corn syrup. I'm not really sure what corn syrup is meant to do anyway (I suppose I should look), but I rooted through my pantry and found this crema di balsamico. Even if it didn't replace the corn syrup's function, I thought, it might heighten the molasses flavor that to me stands at the center of chocolate chip cookie perfect-hood (this after several experiments where I used white sugar instead of the canonical brown sugar - it's not as good).

I think it gave the cookies a certain something, but maybe that's bias.

The King Arthur cookbook recommends baking a test cookie to see how it spread. What a great idea - I was able to add a little flour to save this cookies, after the test cookie spread like an oil slick in the Pacific.

How to make that awful wedding cake at home

A great thread on Egullet about making wedding cake at home.

I'm on record as not liking traditional wedding cake (although I had one recently that was almost acceptable). But the crazy dedication in threads like this is so interesting that I'm sucked in regardless. I now need to at least try the wedding cake base that's recommended (which, of course, is half cake mix).

The rogue cobbler of Balmoral Boots

Sometimes I think I forget how amazing our age really is. Before, a retired shoemaker from Northampton (the center of British shoemaking) would, presumably, have lived out the rest of his life on his company pension, if he had one.

Now, he sells custom made Balmoral boots through Ebay to the extremely small number of men who love Balmoral boots, most of whom live nowhere near Northampton.

Bizarre.

Is good food a constant?

My fiancee and I were having a debate recently after having been served some truly wretched food of a cuisine with which we were familiar, but the preparer was not (and had obviously stretched to accomodate us).

My view is that while one cannot expect authenticity in such a circumstance, taste is a universal attribute, and thus if the chef who made the food were talented, he would have known that the food was not good, even if he did not know what it was supposed to taste like. In other words - I have some confidence in my palate, if not my cooking skill. If asked to produce, say, Ethiopian food, I suspect I would produce inauthentic but tasty food, and if I erred and produced inauthentic and unappealing food, I would have noticed.

My fiancee is somewhat more inclined to the view that the badness of food made by people unpracticed in a cuisine is excusable. I don't want to put words in her mouth (and I'm sure I will be chastised if I am mischaracterizing her views), but I think her bottom line is - "maybe that chef's normal food is actually good, and his efforts to accomodate us hamstrung the man".

All this, of course, circles delicately around the cultural relativist question of whether food can be poorly done or can only be differently done. Obviously, I cling to the former position. And, of course, I once got myself in hot water with apparently the entire readership of another blog when I declared that I didn't understand people who claimed they didn't like foods.

Xai Xai

We visited the South African wine bar Xai Xai last night, after meeting with yet another wedding vendor (as a side note, New York is an amazing place - South African wine bar?). I had wanted us to visit for a while now, as we both like pinotage, however much real wine afficianados might snicker, and I was interested to see what kind of food emerged from their kitchen.

We shared a 250 ml pour of Bellevue Tumara 2004 Pinotage from the Stellenbosch valley, which had all the fruity heft of the typical pinotage, and which we enjoyed very much. We weren't all that hungry, so we went light on the very expensive food, but did enjoy our plate of puff pastries (curried vegetables, chicken, sausage and spinach, with a tasty mango chutney) and smoked salmon with polenta. Service was a little bit clunky, but the room was pleasantly lit and well decorated. And, most importantly, Xai Xai is about a block from my office.

Bottom line: Excellent wine. Pleasant space. But everything should be 25% cheaper.

Grandma Pizza

I love the purity of real Italian pizza. Nothing but flour, yeast, salt and water, slid into a flaming hot oven, off a peel slick with cornmeal, onto a pizza stone to sizzle to perfection in just a couple of minutes. Buffalo mozzarella, if possible. A basil leaf or two, simple tomato sauce, and nothing else.
But that's not pizza here in Queens. In Queens, the kings of the pizza scene (is anything better than Gino's of Howard Beach?) make a different pie, a rustic pie, a pie known around here as the "Grandma". An olive oil, flour, yeast and salt dough, square, baked in a pan with more olive oil, with cheese layed out to be cut into hearty squares. It appeals to me because my grandma also made rustic versions of things in pans. Souh bourek, or cheese pie in a pan rather than in individual packages. Seene kofte - layers of bourghoul and lamb crust sandwiching fried ground meat rather than individual kofte.

I suppose this is called a sicilian elsewhere, but a Grandma is a thinnish pie, very unlike the thick wedges that are sicilians elsewhere. The tomato sauce is always extremely garlicky. The cheese is usually polly-o. And when you want this pizza, only this pizza will do.



Here are some pictures at my effort last night. I used fresh mozzarella because I prefer it, but otherwise this is a very simple olive oil heavy dough, spread in a sheet pan and baked. The sauce is just crushed san marzana tomatoes with lots of garlic.

Leftover choux

What to do with leftover choux pastry?  Obviously, best funnel cake* ever. 

 * Where I grew up, at least, funnel cake is a fried dough poured through a funnel into hot oil.  I figured that pate a choux piped into oil would be just as good.  It was.

UPDATE: Do I really need to note that home-made funnel cake should only be eaten piping hot, off a kitchen towel, with another funnel cake still sizzling in oil?  Consider that noted.