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Isn't this what eating always should be? |
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Written by asap
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Tuesday, 06 March 2007 |
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It’s an idea whose time we shouldn’t have had to wait for: green market cuisine.
I’m not just talking about shopping at your neighborhood farmers’ markets, as much as I jump at the chance.
No, I mean those restaurants that take it to heart and search out the seasonal and the fresh — pea shoots in spring, celery root in winter, fresh-killed chickens and just-caught fish and local beets and small-farm cheese an hour’s drive away — and bring it to your table with pizzaz.
Sometimes a diner and a blue-plate special is just what you need. But sometimes you need a celebration. This one, a multicourse tasting menu at a New York City restaurant called Telepan, was worth the wait.
Pictures and words don’t really do justice to wonderful food, since it’s really all in your taste buds. But that’s what we’ve got to work with here, so take a look:
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- There were chickpea pancakes: thin, just-so crisped cakes, soft carrots mixing sweet and spicy, chickpeas and onions and what the menu called “wild greens” (might’ve been kale, or chard) — all sprinkled with cayenne pepper. There were echoes of Italy and the Middle East.
- A triple-taste of duck: a slice of duck prosciutto, a pear (or was it an apple?) stuffed with foie gras and a small piece of seared foie gras. Obscenely deep flavors. Sure to offend the animal rights groups.
- A cassoulet of lamb, a slow-simmered dish of lamb shoulder and lamb sausage with perfectly cooked white beans. Is it possible to be hearty and elegant at once? It should’ve been snowing for this dish.
- Slices of roasted sirloin and an over-the-top bone-marrow potato cake that was blissfully all crunch. Oh, and I can’t leave out the melting tiny onion the size of a pincushion, all sweetness and light. Steak, onions and potatoes can mean so many different things.
- Shrimp poppers are that kind of theme-park approach to food that I didn’t expect at this white-tablecloth place. They were delicate, fresh, but sadly, not spicy. Honestly, it’s hard to ever top the New England-style fried shrimp dinner (usually with fried clams and fried haddock). This didn’t, though the green chile aioli helped.
- Instead of dessert, cheese. It was hard to pass up the chocolate. But this place’s devotion to the food and the wine promised an eye-opening selection of cheeses. Vermont, Virginia, Oregon; goat, sheep, cow; a hard, nutty cheese here and a soft, grassy cheese there. Bringing the farm to your plate.
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This was a restaurant that was worth taking an earlier-than-you’d like table, worth skipping lunch, worth the price of a sitter. One of the pleasures of the green market restaurant fervor, around the country and in New York, is the willingness to be rough around the edges.
But rough or refined doesn’t matter if the food is good.
A talented chef and a conscientious kitchen go a long way toward making a meal special. But the quality of the ingredients can send a dish beyond good. If anything, the rush of attention to green market-style eating is an indictment of what happens to our food the rest of the time. We’ve all got our list of produce that disappoints — flavorless tomatoes and bananas, chicken or rib-eye that don’t deserve the name, bland bread and washed-out butter.
Thankfully there’s a backlash, and the farmers markets and the restaurants that treasure them are opening people’s eyes to what they’ve missed.
Isn’t that what eating should always be?
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asap columnist Robert Tanner has eaten his way around the world as a national writer for The Associated Press.The restaurant Tanner visited last week, Telepan, is at 72 W. 69th St. in New York. The tasting menu, without wine, cost $59 per person. | Only registered users can write comments.
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