Back to Tria

Philly has a number of great restaurants, but I've found myself returning to a select few so far to get to know them better. So it was no surprise that after a rainy Sunday spent in the movie theater (I will not divulge the movie we saw in order to protect innocent male parties), AP, MS, and BH and I found ourselves gunning for wine and food at Tria.

We ranged widely over the wine list, from zinfandel to pino & toi (which was my choice-- a bit of a thin and unmemorable white wine). A glass for each of us was just the right way to ease into Sunday evening.

Pino & Toi

And then a few bites to continue: some rosemary marcona almonds to start, which were decent but nothing to return for.

Almonds. Not quite spicy, not quite warm.

MS and AP shared the warm Tuscan white bean spread with baguette. There was some sort of spice on the toasted baguette (paprika?), and the dip appeared a tad oily, but AP especially seemed to enjoy it.

Looks almost like creme brulee with pink bread

Then there was the brie and strawberry bruschetta. The portion was tiny, but it was rich and very tasty. Oozy brie, sprightly strawberries, crunchy bread... nothing beats that.

Classy!

My choice was the beet and goat cheese salad, which I'd promised to return for when I saw it last time. I ordered it without the onions, and it was really good. There were enough beets so that the salad was substantial, and enough goat cheese not to be outmatched by the beets. The dressing was bright, and the bits of toasted almonds added nice crunch and heft. It's a really good salad, especially with a glass of wine.

Chee-EE-eese mountain

Is there really any better way to wind down a weekend than food and wine with friends? Don't think so. Tria made it happen, and I suspect we'll be back.

Tria
18th Street and Sansom
215-972-TRIA

Dipping into the Philly wine bar scene at Tria

During my week to settle in before classes started, I met up with my cousin AB for drinks and bites at Tria, a highly acclaimed Center City wine bar that was close to both of our apartments. When I arrived, AB had snagged a sidewalk table, so we got to dine and people-watch at the same time. Score! That means I can't comment on the decor of the place inside (I literally haven't been in), but they do have a few sidewalk tables that are quite nice.

The menu at Tria is extensive and amusing. There's a solid selection of small plates as well as a long list of wines by the glass, beers, and cheeses, all divided into whimsical subsections (e.g., "stoic" vs. "racy" cheeses--?). We both chose glasses of prosecco, perfect and bubbly on a warm summer evening.

To eat, AB got the beet salad (a girl after my own heart, eh?). With a very generous portion of tender beets complemented by goat cheese, crushed almonds, thin red onion, and a tangy vinaigrette, this salad was very flavorful (I had a bite) and is definitely something I will return for.

Mound of cheese!

I got two cheeses to pair with my wine. From the "clean" section of the cheese menu, I got a wedge of Humboldt Fog goat cheese, which had a crumbly middle as well as an oozy layer just under the rind. It was very tasty, and I loved the interplay of textures, although it got a little salty by the end (or maybe I was just experiencing cheese overload at that point). I also got a hefty wedge of Malvarosa, an "approachable" cheese that our spunky server described as very salty, but in a good way. I actually didn't find this cheese all that salty at all (it was the Humboldt Fog that turned out to be the salt bomb); it was slightly chewy, kind of like a more crumbly Swiss cheese, with a mild emmenthal-like flavor. It was appealing but perhaps not something I would get again, simply because it wasn't especially special. Oh, and the cheese board also came with small ramekins of glazed almonds (for the Malvarosa) and some sort of compote (Humboldt Fog), which tasted slightly of beets to me, to be scooped by the tiniest and cutest spoons I've ever seen. The almonds were munchable on their own, while the compote actually did complement the Humboldt Fog quite well. The bread, planks of squishy, chewy, and almost stale baguette, was plentiful but utterly forgettable.

Really big portions of cheese, too

Overall, our first experience with Tria was a high-three-Offset-Spatula success. I hope to return soon to sample more of the wares-- from snacks to salads to bruschetta to more cheeses, the menu has quite a bit to offer...

Tria
18th Street and Sansom
215-972-TRIA

LWF&D goes to Napa: More fish and salads at Celadon

The Thursday evening of our trip found us at the Napa Chef's Market, which we wandered around until we were tired of walking. Then we sat on a bench and debated dinner. I wasn't hungry (and my stomach was telling me that probably wouldn't change soon), so we simply went someplace nearby. As we were perched outside the Napa General Store, to Celadon we went.

It turned out to be one of the better meals of our trip, starting, as all good meals do, with good bread and olive oil/balsamic mixture.

Starting on a good note

Then Mom started with the macadamia-crusted goat cheese, served with port poached figs, apple slices, and crostini. It was with this dish that she learned the pleasure of cheese + fruit + bread in one bite; a smear of goat cheese plus a slender plank of apple topped with a piece of stewed fig brought her around.

Positively Parisian

Next up, for Mom, was the special fish of the evening: halibut. The kitchen even graciously substituted mushrooms and eggplant for the vegetables it came with, which didn't delight her. The finished product, however, did.

Hugely portioned AND delightful

My choice was the endive and apple salad with goat cheese instead of blue (sense a theme here)? This was quite delicious, actually, with a tangy vinaigrette and an appealing crunch from the julienned endive. It's a creative preparation for endive that's so much better than the usual plain spear; points to Celadon for that.

Craveable

Our meal ended, as all good meals do, with more ice cream from Three Twins at Oxbow. But Celadon truly impressed-- the service was kind and friendly, and the food was unexpectedly good. If we'd had more time, we probably would have been back to Celadon for another meal. As it was, it's highly recommended.

Celadon
500 Main Street, Suite G, Napa
707-254-9690

I'm back! And LWF&D goes to Napa

Dear readers,

I've been a bad blogger recently, I know... there's been travel, there's been me trying to prepare for my move to Philly... essentially a whole bevy of excuses. My week in Bermuda was food-photography-free, so that brings us up to last week, which I spent in Napa with my mom. Since these are restaurants that might be of interest to some of you, what follows are some reports of our culinary travels.

The first night, we convened at Cuvee, since it was right next to our hotel. It's a beautiful restaurant with a lovely, sun-drenched courtyard and a very friendly staff (actually, the service was uniformly good throughout the trip). We elected to sit inside due to the oppressive heat and got started right away.

Mom started with the "Tumble of Local Organic Lettuces," which had a few radishes and a bit of goat cheese. It was a small portion, but she complimented the flavors, particularly the goat cheese.

Basic but fresh

My salad was the wild arugula, sans pancetta and with goat cheese instead of blue. The crispy parsnips and roasted muscat grapes were both flavorful and creative; I only wished there had been a touch more cheese.

Wine country on a plate

For an entree, Mom chose the salmon, which she enjoyed. She also ordered a side of Cedar Roasted Forager Mushrooms, which I was planning to share. That is, until they arrived positively BATHED in butter. They had clearly been cooked in butter, and then they'd been drizzled in what looked like a butter sauce. I ate a half dozen of the mushrooms and cut myself off-- while tasty, the mushrooms were unfortunately ruined by the lack of fat restraint.

Pretty fish

Butter with a side of mushrooms

We decided to try the desserts, and in retrospect we should have stopped at the savories. Mom chose the fruit cobbler, which she pronounced "okay." I went with the bronzed tart apple, which was also just "okay"-- everything, from the poached apple to the wan strips of puff pastry, was just all right, nothing special or inspired. That is, until I found a dead mosquito floating in the melted ice cream when I was halfway through. Um, ick. I doubt it was the restaurant's fault (I suspect it may well have dive-bombed the plate while I was eating), and they were appropriately apologetic (and removed it from the bill), handling it in textbook good-restaurant fashion. Unfortunately, it was a bad way to end what was otherwise a good experience.

Mediocre cobbler

Apple, pre-mosquito?

Overall, I'd recommend Cuvee for the atmosphere and the savory foods. Bugs aside, the desserts weren't worth returning for, since as you'll see there were many delicious sweets to be found elsewhere in Napa...

Cuvee Napa

1650 Soscol Avenue

707-224-2330

Finally: The Modern (Bar Room)

It's kind of hard to believe that I haven't eaten at the Modern yet. As a die-hard fan of Danny Meyer, it's one of the only Union Square Hospitality Group establishments I hadn't yet patronized (and yes, I realize that's a ridiculous statement in itself). Until last week, that is. My mom was in town for work, and as is her custom, she invited me out to dinner. Lo and behold, the Modern Bar Room had an early opening on Opentable. And so we went.

The Bar Room is buzzy and upbeat, a bit on the louder side due to all the hard surfaces, but full of good cheer nonetheless. I arrived first, and the hostess seated me immediately without giving me any runaround about waiting for my complete party (thank you, thank you, thank you). We were seated at a large, four-person table, which afforded us a luxurious amount of space for two people.

I had had a miserable day earlier, so for the first fifteen minutes I was ranting obnoxiously to my mom while our poor server attempted to take our drink orders many times. After we finally were ready to order, she brought the wine I had requested-- a Gewurtztraminer-- for me to taste. Unfortunately, while she had described it as "having a bit of residual sugar," I found it sickly sweet-- delicious, but really more of a dessert wine than something to drink with dinner. She suggested some alternates and I ultimately ended up with a glass of Pinot Gris. It was quite tasty, but it was also $28, even more expensive than the original glass of Gewurtz (which was already going to be the most expensive glass of wine I'd ever had). I don't think this was a conscious effort to upsell, but it was a bit of a shock when the bill arrived.

Anyway, on to the good stuff. There was bread, of course, while we sipped our beverages (mom went with a stiff club soda with lemon). It was presented in a really cool little bread holder and came with a dish of softened, salted butter. The sliced bread was mealy, dry, and forgettable, but the baguettes were superlative-- shatteringly crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, and perfect with an ample slather of butter.

Definitely stick to the baguettes here

Mom had chosen the fresh grilled shrimp with green cabbage and gruyere salad as her appetizer. Once again, the presentation was notable-- look at those little interlocking shrimp! Mom found the cheese-and-cabbage mixture to be enjoyable and added that the shrimp were perfectly cooked and tender, not rubbery at all.

So organized

Then to the entrees. Mom had chosen the day's special, a sea bass with a cauliflower and olive salad and a cauliflower foam. When Mom hesitated upon ordering due to her dislike of olives, the server (whom we'd definitely put through her paces at this point) offered to ask the kitchen to hold the olives, which they did. Extra points to the house. Sans olives, Mom really enjoyed this dish, particularly delighting in the blanket of foam covering the plate and the occasional floret of purple cauliflower.

Purple cauliflower! It's like an inside joke

My entree choice was the red endive, arugula, and Westfield goat cheese salad, which (according to the menu) came with pumpkin seeds, pomegranate, and chestnut vinaigrette. I think there were also a few slivers of mushrooms in there, and I actually think the nuts were pine nuts rather than pumpkin seeds, but regardless the mixture was delicious. I usually think of endive as huge, unwieldy, bitter spears, but when served in julienne fashion, it added appealing crunch and just a bit of bitterness to the salad. Truly creative and well done.

So much going on with this salad

Since the portions are rather small, by mutual consensus we forged ahead to dessert. For Mom, dessert was a dark chocolate tart with chocolate ice cream. This was a long and lean sliver of the richest chocolate resting on a thin chocolate crust. The perfect golf-ball-sized orb of ice cream was another pure expression of chocolate. Chocoholics (of which my mom counts herself a member) delight, but non-chocoholics beware-- a few bites of this dessert are enough to send you into chocolate coma.

Chocolate heaven!

I chose the hazelnut dacquoise with milk chocolate Chantilly. This dessert was just so appealing in many ways, from the precarious but fun presentation to the mixture of textures in the dessert. The bottom layer of the dacquoise was a crunchy, hazelnutty mixture with a texture almost reminiscent of the wafers in a Kit Kat (but crunchier). Then there was a huge dollop of chocolate whipped cream sandwiched by two thin layers of pure milk chocolate. The five candied pecans anchored to the plate with more Chantilly cream added more delightful crunch. This dessert was a truly nutty pleasure, and since it was rather small it didn't cross the line into gutbomb territory.

Nuttastic

To nobody's surprise, the Modern earned four Offset Spatulas easily. The service was truly accommodating, even as we were a pain in the ass in several ways. And the food, while expensive (again, to nobody's surprise), was thoughtful, well-crafted, and even whimsical at times. It's a special occasion place (and the dining room even more so), but if you have the means, give the Modern a try.

The Modern Bar Room
9 W. 53rd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
212-333-1220

To Brooklyn for some spanish food and wine

Last weekend, I ventured out to Brooklyn to hang out with my friend KS and her lovely husband CC. After a brief first stop at One Girl Cookies (more on that later), we made our way to Frankies to try to grab a table. We had decided our wait tolerance was 30 minutes; the kind manager informed us the wait would be approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes. Yikes! Off we went to Prime Meats around the corner to try our luck there. Two hours! Hooo boy. Down the block to Buttermilk Channel-- that would work, right? One hour 45 minutes! Welp, there we go. So we decided to check out Palo Cortado, a smart-looking wine bar that was only about half full at around 7:45 when we finally abandoned our search.

Palo Cortado is very, very new (only a few weeks old at this point), and it's like the new kid in school-- shiny, eager, and still getting used to its surroundings. The space is a nice brand of rustic-chic, but the setup is odd: there's a large bar dominating the room, a handful of two-tops lining the wall, and then two high communal tables for larger parties at the front of the room. The problem was that the communal tables only seat around 7 people, so it's really more of a two-party table... not quite communal, not quite private. A little odd.

Seating arrangements (and the fact that the front door didn't quite close, leaving us in the line of fire for chilly breezes the whole night) aside, we dove right into the menu. Our laid-back server gave us a 5-10 minute talk about the menu and the specials, clearly wanting to please but not quite in the swing of the game yet, if you know what I mean. We finally ordered some wine-- two glasses of a red on special for KS and CC; a glass of vina costera white blend for me. This was actually a delicious choice-- the wine was bright and snappy and very good with the food to come.

Bright and cheerful

Oh, and how about the food? This is a tapas bar, so we ordered a smattering. My own two choices were a dish of olives and a salad. The olives came as a mixture of mostly tiny little olives; they were tasty enough but seemed almost underdone, if that makes sense (a little too hard texture-wise, as if they hadn't cured long enough). Nonetheless, olives are always fun (especially when they have the occasional caperberry buried inside), and this went well with the wine.

Colorful and tiny

The salad was advertised as market greens with sherry braised onions, idiazabal cheese, almonds, and house vinaigrette. I can say that this salad was more certainly interesting than I had anticipated. The sherry-braised onions were sweet and silky and tasted almost like cherries; the large hunks of cheese were classically delicious, and their quantity was much appreciated. The only curious choice was the greens, which were rough-textured winter greens, much better for braising than for eating raw in a salad. On balance, the salad was tasty enough, if a little small for $8 (an ongoing theme of the meal, as you'll see).

Creative

KS and CC ordered a mixture of the hot and cold tapas. There were a few winners in there, including the goat cheese croquetas (they also sampled a bacalao croqueta, which wasn't quite as pleasing). The spiced lamb meatballs with mint cucumber yogurt were also celebrated, although they curiously came with only three skewers for four meatballs. Huh.

How can you not win with fried cheese?

Don't worry, one skewer was re-used

The not-quite winners included the poached shrimp in green sauce, which were a bit plain; the pan con tomate, which suffered from textural issues (the tomato topping didn't quite meld with the bread); the anchovies, which were definitely fresh but were a bit underseasoned; and the mushroom and potato tortilla, which was decent overall but lacked salt and had too much creme fraiche on top. In fact, underseasoning was a common complaint; while it's certainly better than over-salting food, a bit more oomph with the salt shaker in the kitchen could certainly elevate the flavors here.

Chorizo chips?

Not quite bruschetta

Little fish

This was probably the best value of the night

We had dessert waiting for us at home, so we passed on the dessert options and paid the bill. Palo Cortado is a tough nut to crack, review-wise. The space was welcoming and comfortable, if not physically (awkward high communal tables, gusty cold winds from the door) then emotionally (they seated us immediately and let us linger). The food had its highs (creative presentations, stewed onions, goat cheese croquets, delicious wine) and its lows (underseasoning). And, of course, it's not cheap. Our meal, with one drink each and eight very small tapas, was almost $100-- it's a good way to taste a lot of dishes, not stuff yourself on high-value food. I think Palo Cortado has lots of potential and is essentially just getting its sea legs. It's likeable, and if I'm ever in the neighborhood again, I'd certainly return; it earns its three Offset Spatulas heartily along with an encouraging thumbs up.

Palo Cortado
520 Court Street, Brooklyn
718-407-0047

Duck and beets with the Bossman

Last week, the Bossman was in town from across the pond, and since this was a rare period for us to spend some face-to-face time together, we celebrated with a dinner at 44 & X.

I was battling a tenacious and mean-spirited cold, so my appetite wasn't what it should have been. In order to get some food in me, I ordered the terrine of roasted beets and aged goat cheese, with wild watercress, blood oranges, candied walnuts, and blood orange vinaigrette. Apparently, I'd ordered this dish in a past visit to 44 & 10, to mixed results. This version was pretty much the same-- sweet, firm beets, cut interestingly Ruffles-potato-chip-style, with a sprig of watercress, a few stewed figs, and a tiny little dollop of piped whipped goat cheese (note: don't think this was actually aged goat cheese... it tasted like fresh chevre to me). The dish is still sweet, but if you're craving lots of beets, this'll do.

Golden and sweet

Bossman ordered the sauteed breast of duck, which came with sweet potato hash, the same stewed figs, and a red wine reduction. He called the duck "fantastic," although he largely bypassed the veggies. No matter-- we had a side of spinach to complement our other choices, and it was predictably green and virtuous.

Duck buried under veggies

Vibrant emerald

No dessert (see "lack of appetite" above), and we were on our way. No change here-- 44 & X maintains its three OS rating as a decent, ever-so-slightly overpriced neighborhood restaurant.

44 & X
622 Tenth Avenue, at 44th Street
212-977-1170