Blame it on Rioja

Breakfast today, courtesy of LESP. Photo: ADM

One of the more glorious advantages of living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is my proximity to Russ & Daughters. The Harry Winston of smoked fish, a downtown New York landmark, and a living history of classic Jewish-American gastronomy, Russ & Daughters today is owned and operated by third-generation Mark Russ Federman, alongside members of the family’s fourth generation, including his daughter, Nikki Russ Federman.

Every so often, when I need a physical and/or emotional boost, I walk down to their Houston Street shop, take a number, and breathe it all in, settling my excited nerves until it’s my turn to order.

My go-to sandwich used to be smoked sturgeon and caviar cream cheese on an ‘everything’ bagel, an idea inspired by a dinner special created back in the late 1990s by one-time Picholine chef de cuisine and now Esca chef/co-owner Dave Pasternack (grilled sturgeon fillet with a caviar butter sauce), but lately I’ve been mixing it up a bit.

Just two weeks ago, I ordered a slight variation: slices of smoked sturgeon and Wild Western NOVA (a lightly smoked wild Pacific salmon) on an everything bagel, with horseradish cream cheese, sliced red onion, and sliced tomato ($12.95). As my counter guy was preparing this decadent gem of a breakfast, one of his colleagues who happened to have witnessed the structure being built turned to me and said,

“Aha! The king of sandwiches.”

Whether or not she’d seen it before mattered little to me; her comment made me feel like a king for having ordered it. As for eating it, well, let’s just say noises of delight were made.

Rioja pairing: El Coto Rioja Rosado 2007. Available for purchase online at www.winechateau.com ($11.29/750ml bottle)

One of these days I will use the word “summer” as a verb, and at the end of that sentence will be someplace–Shelter Island, the Catskills, Andalucia–that conjures up lazy afternoons and high-end seasonal foodstuffs, but until that day comes, I make it a point to compile a list of cool outdoor summer activities that take place in the city, which is where I’ll be summering this year.

Two of the season’s best outdoor events involve film and food, are both just a stone’s throw from the East River, and began last week: Socrates Sculpture Park’s Wednesday night Outdoor Cinema Series and The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy’s Thursday night Movies with a View,a few miles downriver.

Each summer Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, teams up with curators from the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, and a handful of local restaurants and musicians or DJs, to create internationally flavored theme nights. Each week, weather permitting, they’ll have music and dance from a specific locale, food from the same part of the world, and at sunset, a movie similarly themed. On my personal event docket are Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic The Red Balloon on August 6 (I don’t think I’m the only American with special memories of watching this film on 16mm in elementary school) and one of my favorite movies ever, Fellini’s 8 1/2, on August 13.

At Movies with a View at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, films are also preceded by music, and food is provided by Rice (a restaurant group with a branch in DUMBO that began back in the mid-1990s with a hip tapas bar called Ñ 33 Crosby which is still there). On August 21, I will be there for Hal Ashby’s Being There. Best known for having written and directed Harold and Maude, Ashby was also the director of the politically charged Coming Home, which has the crazy sad scene that still ranks as one the top marriages of music and cinema in film history: Bruce Dern’s beach dive and Tim Buckley’s “Once.”

But back to the East River: Check out Dr. Vino’s NYC wineshop map to find a wine shop nearby to find a bottle to accompany your meal; just be discreet. As Dr. Vino mentions in his latest post, it’s not technically legal to crack wine at public parks, but the consensus is that as long as you are not obvious about it, the authorities are inclined to look the other way.

Potatoes have become something of a theme for me this past week.

Whip(ped) Lash
Working my weekly maitre d’/sommelier shift at Chanterelle on the first day of a menu last Monday, I had a spoonful of David Waltuck’s Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes (bound with olive oil instead of butter, flavored with roasted garlic), a key component to David’s crispy-skin New Zealand Snapper with Bouilabaisse Broth. I just happened to be in the kitchen when David placed a saucepan of that hedonistic stuff on the hot slide just after a big pick up.

The degree to which my head tilts back in pleasure on my way to the dishwasher station to drop off my spoon in the silver soak is usually an accurate measure of how much I’ve just enjoyed something, and I am pretty sure an outsider looking into the kitchen at that moment would have been convinced that I was engaged in some kind of limbo lunge under an unseen pole.

Potato Lover’s Month at Gourmet
On Thursday, I opened my weekly newsletter from the revamped Gourmet.com to discover that February, according to Gourmet Editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, is officially “Potato Lover’s Month,” an occasion she celebrates with links to four potato-based recipes and another to “Heirlooms-to-Be,” a recent blog post by Cristy Harrison on Gourmet’s new interactive website (very impressive, by the way, if you haven’t checked it out yet) about two promising new potato hybrids created in the last five years by scientists at Cornell University, the Adirondack Blue and the Adirondack Red, bred specifically for taste and performance in the kitchen.

For Cornell potato breeder Walter De Jong, Ms. Harrison writes, “culinary quality trumps other agricultural factors like yield and pest-resistance. What’s more, Cornell researchers have worked with culinary students at the CIA and elsewhere to test the Reds and Blues in various dishes, and ‘we are using chefs’ feedback to develop even better future varieties,’ says De Jong.”

Potato Apotheosis: A Match for the Ages
Potato Interlude 2008 reached its high point on Tuesday night, however, on the beautiful and blustery evening my friend, fellow close Dylan listener, and Chanterelle line-cook Charles Imbelli (he made an appearance on BIOR once before, in a post on a fishing trip we took late last summer) and I met uptown for an evening of uniform deliciousness at Thomas Keller’s per se restaurant in the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle.

All twelve courses were so good, so consistent, such little marvels of harmonic flavor concentration and uncompromising product sourcing and technical execution, it seems a little unfair to single out one dish, but the cheese course, combined with the wine I chose for the meat and cheese courses, La Rioja Alta Viña Ardanza 2000 Rioja Reserva, just so completely knocked me out at a point in the evening when I didn’t think anything else could knock me out, that it merits special consideration.

The cheese course was Pyrenées Ossau Vielle (an aged, very buttery, and slightly ‘lamby’ sheep milk cheese from the western Pyrenées of France) served with Twice Cooked Red Bliss Potato and Applewood Smoked Bacon Vinaigrette. I am still thinking about it longingly a week later. The texture and intensity of the cheese, the way its fattiness just seamlessly melded with the creamy potato mash inside the shell of the Red Bliss’s skin, and the way everything came together under the heady flavor spell of that awesome bacon vinaigrette, it was just…wow. A sip of the Viña Ardanza, earthy, tart, wintery in its own right, measured in its fruit, and we had on our hands a match for the ages.

After a moment of silent reverie, and a grateful-to-the-universe look outside the window toward Central Park, I turned to see what Charles thought.

“Man,” he said, “I wish I could wake up to that every morning.”

That makes two of us.

Yesterday, my brother Pablo and I decided to grab a bite and catch a movie. He met me at my place in the East Village and we walked down to Kampuchea, a modern and cozy Cambodia-inspired noodle and pork joint on Allen Street just a few blocks south of my apartment. Although we contemplated ordering at least one fish dish, we chose instead to do what we both wanted to do anyway, which was to carnivore (I know that carnivore is not a verb but it should be).

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The lovely and eminently capable ladies over at Vibrant Rioja set up a Rosado tasting last night in the outdoor garden of Ono at the base of the Hotel Gansevoort, renting a little self-contained cabana and inviting a group of young journalists–one guy and six very attractive women–to taste through a selection of 2006 Rioja Rosados while tapeando un poco among platters of sushi, duck spring rolls, crispy risotto balls with porcini and white truffle oil, chicken satay with peanut sauce, and coconut shrimp.

I’ve always been a sucker for rosé, not the insipid sweet stuff that’s made gazillions for Beringer since the 1980s, but the pink juice with character: Bandol, Champagne rosé, Franciacorta rosato, and Rioja rosado. The best rosés have exuberant aromas of red berry fruit–think cherry and strawberry–but are not the least bit sweet. A clean, almost citrusy finish is what you want to quench your thirst on a hot day, maybe just a touch of what wine nerds like to call “grip”, which is to say, textural astringency that grounds the wine and makes it friendly with food, the result of minimal skin contact the grape juice–known as must–has with its red skins.

And then there’s the simple joy of merely looking at the wine in your glass–that beautiful color reminiscent of the first warm day of the year, when, blessedly, the women of New York city put away their overcoats and bust out those flowing dresses made of soft and colorful fabric, making summer in the East Village much more tolerable.

The wines we tasted last night are as follows (with approximate retail price):

Light and easy drinking - the summer sippin’ wine:

• Marqués de Cáceres 2006 Rosado ($9.99) This has the cleanest style - simple and thirst quenching, the aperitif Rioja Rosado

Fruity, fragrant and full - wines for an outdoor summer seduction:

• Faustino V 2005 Rosado ($8.99) - Bursting with gobs of cherry fruit, the favorite rosado of wine writer and Rioja expert John Radford.
• CVNE 2006 Rosado ($12.99) - Great color, mucho cherry as well, one of the crowd’s favorites.

Lean and herbaceous - wines that call out for food:

• Muga 2006 Rosado ($10.99) - The only wine with a white grape–Viura–in the blend. Most complex of the bunch. With a faded salmon color the Spanish call ojo de gallo (eye of the rooster).
• El Coto 2006 Rosado ($9.99) - Firm and “gastronomic”, as a Spaniard would say, another crowd favorite.

Foods to eat with Rosado: Paella, grilled salmon, cherry tomato salad with goat cheese, grilled razor clams with garlic and lemon, Peking duck, shrimp cocktail, pulled pork sandwich, fried clams.

A note on vintages: The 2006 bottlings for all of these wines will soon be on the market, if they are not already. Rioja Rosado–with the notable exception of the complex and delicious Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia Rosado, whose latest release is a 1995–is meant to be drunk young, so look for the ’06’s. The Faustino 2006 was not available for this tasting, and the ‘05 showed some signs of fading.

In the restaurant business, profit margins ride largely on alcohol sales, and wine markups can often reach up to 300% of cost, even more when served by the glass. With such high rents in New York City, drinkers here for a night on the town can expect to pay even more of a premium. Now that wine bars are everywhere, this has led to the lamentable $12 crap-ass wine-by-the-glass phenomenon, when lazy or downright greedy wine list writers have the cojones to pour schlock into my glass whilst reaching deeply into my wallet.

No me gusta.

Which is why I nearly shed tears of joy when this morning I saw that the SoHo Park Cafe, on the hoity-toity corner of Prince and Lafayette, was offering a glass of Loriñon 2001 Rioja Reserva by the glass for the very reasonable price of $9. They’ve got killer burgers here, served on a potato roll no less (it’s truly the world’s most underrated bread), along with hot dogs, bratwurst, and grilled cheese, and an awesome little outdoor nook with picnic tables that I’ve never seen full, a rarity in the big city at this time of year.

If you’re downtown dropping big bucks on labels, skip the long wait at Shake Shack uptown and head to SoHo Park instead. Order a Park Cheese (with Cheddar) with hand-cut fries ($8.50) and a glass of one of the region’s best value wines from one of the best recent vintages, and you will spend less than $20 for a great little lunch. And while you’re sitting outside, basking in such beautifully matched deliciousness, swirling your glass of wine knowing you’ve gotten a deal, think of me and smile.

Much as I love beer in the summer, especially Belgian summer ales enjoyed outdoors at d.b.a. around the corner, BBQ lunch today with the boys up at Maxim Radio, substituting a couple of bottles of Rioja Crianza in place of the cold brewtarskis usually served with ‘cue, was an exceptionally rewarding pairing experience. “Maxim Lounge” Producer Laura, who celebrates a birthday tomorrow, asked me to come up to the Maxim studio at Sirius Satellite Radio headquarters in Midtown to talk about Rioja and help her celebrate. To help illustrate the food-pairing merits of Rioja, I also brought along some dynamite BBQ from Daisy May’s on 11th Avenue, and man alive, was it good. Former Chanterelle line cook Adam Perry Lang deserves a giant fruit basket for his cooking over at Daisy May’s. His Memphis Dry Rub Pork Ribs and Carolina Pulled Pork were slamin’, especially when mixed together on the plate with Cole Slaw and Baked Beans with Burnt Ends. We tasted a Puerta Vieja 2002 Rioja Crianza from Bodegas Riojanas (a classic style, aged in American oak) and the more modern-styled LAN 2003 Crianza, and both wines’ fruity and slightly earthy liveliness turned the wines into seamlessly integrated liquid condiments to the smoky-sweet-spicy porky wonderfulness of our lunch. Producer Laura, Bower, Scooter, Laura Leu, and I passed around plates of food and bottles Rioja on air and chatted in between bites, as a way to give the Maxim crowd an alternative to brew with ‘cue (and maybe help them find a great way to impress the ladies in the process). I think we managed to lift the food even higher than beer would have. All the joy without the beer gut.