tea berry-blue

Last week, Rose and I went to a restaurant called San Rocco that Rose found on Savored.

Rose, apologies for writing this all up myself! I’ve been writing it up in fits and starts for over a week now and it just sort of ran away with itself.

I got there a few minutes before Rose, and I sat down at our table. The first thing I noticed was that this was an incredibly pretty restaurant:

There was a small problem of the lights over our table flickering oddly, but the staff re-seated us promptly and apart from that, the restaurant was lovely.

As we were looking over the menu, Rose drew my attention to a five-course tasting menu. There were ten options on the menu, and so we decided to do the tasting course for two, and each order five of the things on the list, so we could taste all ten. Since Rose had a bit of a cold, we asked also if they would be willing to split our dishes, which they did very graciously.

I also got a cocktail, “The Separatist,” which was made with bourbon, Amaro Ciociaro, and blood orange. It was quite delicious!

Here’s the menu we ordered from

The first thing they brought out was a little bite of tuna that isn’t even ON that menu– it was seared beautifully. Rose mentioned that she wasn’t sure she had had tuna outside of sushi before, so this was exciting! We talked a little bit about foods that we hadn’t tried for whatever reason: always curious when you have two adventurous eaters together!

After this, came a salad that was quite fresh and delicious, and had excellent goat cheese on it– the kind of dressing that requires bread to sop up.

Fortunately for your two intrepid eaters, they also brought out copious amounts of bread. When I say copious, I mean that we did not want for bread the entire meal. Every time our bread tray dwindled, it was quickly replaced, with even more bread than we had had before, a la Strega Nona’s bread machine. There were beautiful rolls, Tuscan-style bread, and grissini, all homemade. Since it was an Italian-influenced menu (with a lot of New American touches), the bread was very welcome, because we wanted to swab most of our dishes clean.

After this came a lovely little calamari dish with a whole roasted cherry tomato and a zucchini puree.

Full disclosure: I love calamari, but hate zucchini. I’m just…not a friend to the squash family, I regret to admit. This little zucchini puree was so incredibly delicious that I reached for the bread basket again to make sure I got every little bit of it.

Zucchini and calamari was followed by a thin slice of raw beef wrapped around a luscious bite of robiola and truffle oil, with a little drizzle of fig balsamic on the edge of the plate.

Rose is very sensitive to dairy, so she doesn’t often eat things like this, but for this night, she’d said all bets were off. I don’t remember what I was talking about when they brought out this course, but Rose put a hand up in the air for me to quiet, and I did, and then I saw the look on her face…because this was like this amazing little morsel of meat-and-dairy heaven. The cheese was so creamy, and the meat was so tender, and I felt like I could have just eaten an entire plate of this forever and been happy.

Across the top of that dish is a long stick of crunchy pasta, which was really funny as we had been discussing crunchy pasta earlier in the evening, before our food started to arrive.

This was followed up with a tuna carpaccio– two tunas in one night!!

The carpaccio was crusted with herbs– we think some kind of chimichurri– and had caperberries on top. The tuna itself was very delicate in flavor, almost too delicate for the flavors that accompanied it, but the texture was really perfect.

Next, they brought us a ravioli.

It was full of tomato, cheese, and eggplant, and I think the thing I must say here is that while this was the least exciting of the dishes we were served, I genuinely don’t remember it being eggplant– again, one of the very few foods that I normally despise with every fiber of my being. It was accompanied by pine nuts, which led to a discussion about whether pine nuts have any true purpose. Being Italian, I side with the “Pine nuts are awesome!!” school of thought.

The next course was Spaghetti di Mare, a seafood pasta with clams and bottarga. Rose ate a little bit of it, but opted to give me her clams.

This pasta was perfectly cooked but verged on being too briny even for me, connoisseur of all things that taste like the ocean (Atlantic oysters are pretty much my favorite thing to eat ever), but I scarfed down all the clams and most of the pasta.

It was about this moment that I began to feel very full.

Painfully full. Like, so full I wished I had brought my other stomach. Curse you, pasta!

Our next course was a lamb chop with the most delicious little crunchy potatoes. We had been discussing crunchy potatoes before they brought them out to us, and we were delighted: Rose asked the waiter if they had made them just for us…but, as you can see, they were on the menu originally.

I ate about a chop and a half, but by now I needed to expand my belt significantly, and I think we were both feeling like we couldn’t eat another bit, which was shameful because the lamb was amazing. The staff was very generous though in taking some time before bringing the next course.

Which was beautiful amberjack served two ways: A tartare atop a sauteed filet. I ate my tartare, which was delectable, and a generous bite of my filet, and Rose tasted each, but we promptly had it wrapped: it was exceptionally good, but we were really just full to the absolute brim with food at this point!

Of course, there was still dessert left.

TWO DESSERTS LEFT.

I would like to say that it was around this time that the great San Rocco Feast Miracle occurred. Do you see that chocolate cake and that delectable little scoop of ice cream? Suddenly, I had room in my stomach again! I don’t know where it came from. We have a theory that it was a result of that little bottle of Elixir Vegetal I mentioned in my previous post: I had put a few drops in both of our water glasses so we could try it. But I managed to scarf down all of the first dessert…

…and all of the second.

Of course, now that you see the second– you see it’s a half a passionfruit with another little frozen treat beside it, and…well, passionfruit. I’m a sucker for passionfruit; it has got to be one of my favorite flavors in the entire universe.

We finished up our desserts and it was just absolutely lovely, and then– and I neglected to take a picture of this– they brought us shots of homemade limoncello with the check as a finishing touch. It was just like the most wonderful end to a delicious meal.

Rose and I decided that we needed to go on a walk after such extravagant dining, and we walked from 24th street up to Times Square, chatting and oohing and aahing over our meal in turns. It was not just a great meal but wonderful company to have such a culinary adventure with!

It was quite wonderful and if you are in the New York area, I would highly recommend it.

Mirrored from Nommable!.

So, I’ve decided that for the purposes of Nommable, I have to stop just writing gushing mentions of places I eat and start actually talking about them in detail. Last night, my mother and I decided to take a little trip for dinner. It was just too hot to eat in the barn, so we got in the car, pulled up some reviews on my mother’s trusty iPad, and ended up heading for a wood-fired pizza place about 30 minutes from the barn: Stanziato’s Wood Fired Pizza.  This was a last-minute selection because we started out by trying to visit a pub that was highly-recommended by locals, until we got there and discovered that Friday night is karaoke night.  And as much as I love karaoke, I don’t really equate karaoke with a nice dinner out.  At least not when they happen in the same venue.

When we got to the pizzeria, we were met with this sign:

So, okay, you know, I love this sign. But I also have to take it as a challenge, because this is kind of a big claim.

A bit of a digression:

What you might not know, unless you’ve had the misfortune of seeing one of my internet arguments about it is that I’m kind of a pizza snob. I grew up eating my mother’s pizza, which is like something out of a pizza fairy tale. I have been making pizzas since I was about six. For a brief period when I was seven, my mother had a catering business making pizzas for private parties. The first food review I ever wrote was of a new pizzeria down the block from the house where I grew up. I was impressed at eight years old because it was the first local pizzeria that actually offered a pizza bianca, and I grew up with an Italian mother for whom sauce was an option on pizza and not a forgone conclusion, and I’d never been to a restaurant that fell in line with that way of thinking before.

My standards for pizza perfection are Trattoria Dante in Florence, although I haven’t been there now since 2003, so I can’t speak to whether it’s as good as it used to be. But I have the fondest memories of a pizza they used to do with arugula, mascarpone and speck (no longer on the menu, though there’s a different arugula and speck one with scamorza) that I used to gorge myself on whenever I was in Florence. And I can summon the taste of it back any time I want, and it is glorious.

Back to last night. I saw this sign, and I was like, oh, pizza, oh, you and your wonderful audacity.

Then I walked in, and unfortunately, a lot of my photos came out kind of grainy because I was taking them on my mother’s phone.  I was honestly not intending to write about this place until I got there and saw that sign outside. Seriously! So I didn’t have a camera with me.  And then the sign happened, and I was all, GAME ON. but I walked in, and the first thing I see apart from the oven is totally two big blackboard menus, labeled:

RED and WHITE.

Separate menus. So this is a plus. Then I started reading the separate menus, and discovered a few things:

1) flour imported from Italy
2) pizzas made with mostly-local ingredients including bacon from a smokehouse down the road.

Awesome? I think so.

Anyway, we ordered a couple of beers and look at the menu, which has a whole bunch of other stuff on it besides pizza. We ended up with a Pork Slap Pale Ale, which I’ve had before and quite liked, especially for a beer in a can – It’s a good malty beer- and City Steam Naughty Nurse Pale Ale, which was not bad but not particularly memorable, either. They had two beers on tap, UFO Hefeweizen, which I’m not a fan of– I find all the UFO beers to be a bit too light and watery for my taste– and Shipyard IPA, which I like a lot, so we split a pint of that once we finished our bottle and can. They had a pretty decent bottle selection, too.

We ordered a beet salad that had feta, edamame, sunflower seeds, and shaved marinated fennel. It was a pretty darn awesome salad and very large for the small-sized portion. We really liked the fennel on it best of all; it was shaved very thin and was tender, not crunchy.

We got two pizzas to split. One was the “Piggy Piggy,” which was a pizza with local bacon, caramelized onions, and cherry tomatoes. The other was the “Summer Lovin’,” which had a nice olive pesto on it, red onions, and then all the other toppings were put on after it came out of the oven– goat cheese, oregano, and cherry tomatoes. The oregano was really fresh, good, spicy oregano and I loved it.

So…best pizza in the universe? Here’s my take:

The toppings were all really amazing, really fresh, and yummy. They clearly timed when they put which toppings on, rather than throwing everything on at once, which is a nice detail and one I appreciate, because it means the ingredients are being used in their best state. Especially with the tomatoes, because I prefer raw tomatoes to cooked on pretty much every occasion. The crust didn’t do it for me, though. I was impressed with their whole attention-to-flour thing, but the flour didn’t work for the kind of crust they were doing, which was a much more American-style crust with a poufy edge, although the middle was relatively thin. It did have just the right amount of char on the bottom, and the wood stove made it really nice and smokey, but the texture was off for the style of crust they were doing; it was too stiff  and chewy and didn’t have quite enough flavor. I do suspect though that the crust would be better with a red sauce on it, and my mom and I have already made plans to go back and try the meatball pie.

So, no, Dante is still my number 1, probably followed closely by Otto in New York. But this was some pretty good pizza and our salad was excellent and I will probably be going back there soon!

Mirrored from Nommable!.

Those of you who follow my personal blog know that I have undertaken a project by which I am challenging myself to do things I’ve never done before.

Some of these things are exciting and brave things. Others of these things are kind of, well, a bit silly, because they are the sorts of things that one would expect I would have done at some point in my life.

This one is one of the latter.

Today, after work, I went for a bike ride, and after my bike ride, I was pretty hungry. I started thinking about what there was to eat in my neighborhood, as I felt a little too sweaty and gross to be up to cooking.

And then I recalled that there was one place that I had never been, and it was probably one of those places that I should eat at once in my life, if only to fully experience the breadth of culinary opportunity of the place and time into which I was born.

Yup, that’s right. I’ve never eaten at White Castle before. Was this really something that needed to be changed? Probably not. But since last night’s sliders at a bar that used to make a semi-decent burger and excellent fries proved to disappoint, I decided they couldn’t be WORSE than that. Especially since I was expecting…well, not as good a burger as I had been expecting at last night’s bar.

Now, I have to call attention to the single most exciting thing of the evening. When I walked in the door, I saw this thing.

I wanted to buy something out of it SO BAD. Do you know how bad? Gosh, really bad. But you know, I have this thing with vending machines where even now that I am an adult lady, I feel like I need to ask my mother’s permission to buy something out of it. Is that weird? Probably! But I totally forgot that I could just fish fifty cents or a dollar or whatever it was out of my own grown up lady purse and buy one for myself, so I just stared longingly at the false mustache vending machine. Alas, perhaps another day!

Anyway, unsure what to order, I decided I couldn’t go wrong purchasing something from the combo menu. I got combo #1, which is four burgers, fries, and a small soda. They gave me my soda cup right away. I declined cheese, because I have a hangup about processed cheese food (yes, I realize that is sort of silly given what I was about to ingest). Then I noticed that they did actually advertise cheddar on the menu, but oh well! I went to fill it and noticed a soda I’d never heard of before, Vault, which claimed somehow to be an “energy” soda. I don’t know what that means, but I figured I’d try it, and it was sort of like a flashback to Surge. Remember Surge? I sort of lived on Surge at one point. Man, I loved that stuff. And then I didn’t even really notice that they stopped making it!

Anyway, a flashback to it reminded me that it was probably godawful, then, too, and I filled my cup up with Coke.

The nice thing I noticed was that I could see the White Castle employees preparing every burger as it was ordered. It did take a bit longer than I expect fast food to take, but I actually got to watch them assemble my burgers and fry my fries. The nice thing about this was that my food was still piping hot even after the six or seven block walk home.

Here is my meal in all its incredibly caloric glory! It cost $5.94 plus tax. The fries were pretty darn good– probably better than the fries I got last night in my meal that was three sliders and a basket of fries for $10. They were hot and crispy and not too salty as fast food fries often are.

The burgers were…well, they were not quite the magical life-changing experience I was expecting. I mean, I didn’t expect them to be a culinary masterpiece, but I did expect them to be more different from your average fast food burger. I was at least hoping for them to be really, really hideously bad, but they were not. Mostly, they had more onions. I felt like two burgers could have made a good meal, and I am a little disturbed by the fact that I can still taste the onions four hours after the fact. Those are some powerful onions!

All in all, I am pleased that I have come through this rite of passage unscathed, but I was a little disappointed that they weren’t more terrible. Or more good. One or the other, you know? Like a romantic comedy. This was one of those ones where you just can’t bring yourself to be happy when the protagonist gets together with the love interest because you’ve just been looking at the screen saying, “okay, already,” for the past half hour. Except with more onions.

Also, for those of you reading elsewhere, I’ve added a whole slew of new cocktail recipes. Check them out!

Mirrored from Nommable!.