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)

I guess Dr. Vino and I are not the only ones with outdoor summer drinking on the brain. I woke up this morning to find an article in the New York Times about just that, called, summerily enough, “Ah, the Heat, the Crowd, the Park, and the Booze.”

“New York City is somewhat of a drinker’s paradise year round,” reporter Cara Buckley writes on the first page of the Metro section, “but a certain extra layer of permissiveness seems to infuse the city in the summertime, along with a wellspring of opportunities to get sloshed, slightly or mightily.”

Although I don’t remember seeing the following paragraph in the print version of the article this morning, a parenthetical disclaimer of sorts touches on the legality question we discussed yesterday:

“The official line from the city’s parks department is that alcohol cannot be brought into city parks, though in the summer of 2003, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suggested that drinking wine at concerts in Central Park was O.K. At Bryant Park on July 7, a security guard said he turned a blind eye to booze on movie nights, ’so long as it is covered, like in a bag.’”

I remember a Swiss friend of mine in Spain making fun of having seen gainfully employed Americans carrying open bottles of wine in brown paper bags at outdoor events to elude the authorities, “like the hobos you see in the old movies, ahahaha…”

Laugh all you wish, Hans. Tonight, as I settle in to watch Bamako at the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema Series in Queens, and pop open a paper-shrouded bottle of 2001 Sierra Cantabria Gran Reserva whilst digging into a plate of lamb tagine cooked up by the folks at Mundo Cafe in Astoria, the summer sun setting over the East River and a nearly full moon on the rise behind me, I’ll drink a toast to you, my good man, wherever you are.

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.

After years of dawdling, I finally decided to begin the long and uncertain road towards attaining the title of Master Sommelier, an accreditation administered by the American chapter of the Court of Master Sommeliers and the top recognition for wine (and spirits) knowledge, service abilities, and professionalism in the hospitality trade.

At present there are 96 Master Sommeliers in the U.S.–including, of course, my mentor and colleague, Roger Dagorn–and 187 worldwide, according to a February 20 Business Wire article announcing the nine wine professionals most recently awarded the prestigious title, Jesse Becker, Chris Blanchard, Drew Hendricks, Geoff Kruth, Joseph Linder, Joseph Phillips, Steven Poe, Sean Razee, and Emily Wines. (You might recall that two MS’s, Jason Smith and Juan Gómez, joined us last fall in Rioja, while we were filming our educational documentary.)

There are four distinct levels of examination, the Introductory course and exam, the Certified Sommelier exam, the Advanced exam, and the Master’s Diploma exam. Each level of exam is more rigorous than the last, as what you’re expected to know becomes more detailed and arcane, and the less forgiving judges become in assessing your service abilities and deductive blind-tasting assessments. Pass rates for the first level hover around 85% or so; by contrast, only 5% of candidates pass all three components of the Master’s diploma exam. Candidates for the Master Sommelier title get three chances to pass all three, otherwise Master’s candidates lose credit for those components they did pass and are obliged to start the level from scratch. The top scorer at each Master’s exam, who manages to pass all three components in one go, is awarded the Krug Cup. The most recent Krug Cup winner was Emily Wines.

Last Friday, I passed the first level, after two days of sitting with 77 colleagues in the private dining room of Gilt Restaurant in the Palace Hotel, reviewing viticulture, vinification, and the world’s major wine regions. We also reviewed and practiced the Court’s Deductive (”blind”) Tasting Format–also known as “building the grid”–a fascinating and surprisingly reliable means of drawing conclusions about a wine only after systematically assessing its color, viscosity, and likely age, and identifying at least three fruit associations, all of its non-fruit aromas and flavors (flowers, spices), and its degree of earthiness (a category further subdivided into organic–mushrooms, for example–and inorganic–wet stone, for example).

It was cramped and chilly and jam-packed with minutiae, list making, and map gazing–and I loved every minute of it. I am also happy to report that I missed only two of the 70 questions on the exam, and along with one other candidate, was singled out at the reception on Friday for having the top score.

It ain’t no Krug Cup, but it’s a start.

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.

Dutch Angle/Spanish Wine: (From left) ADM, photographer Nigel Barker, and Rebeca Gomez of Rioja’s Consejo Regulador, New York City, Wednesday, December 5, 2007. Photo: Kendyl Wright.

While admittedly not an avid television watcher, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t pretty damn cool to lead a Rioja tasting a few weeks ago at the studios of photographer Nigel Barker, a judge on the CW Network’s America’s Next Top Model.

Mr. Barker is a professed fan of Rioja and of pretty much all things Spanish, having lived in Spain for many years with his family, and he struck up a friendship with Vibrant Rioja’s Kendyl Wright during September’s Fashion Week, for which Rioja was the official wine. In the event, Kendyl arranged for a tasting at the photographer’s studio in the Meatpacking District in early December and asked me to lead it.

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It’s rare to find a piece of entertainment quite like Matt Gould and Dina Millan’s brilliant and utterly original “USC ‘Unofficial’ Holiday Video”. Full of knowing little nuggets bound to be satisfying holiday confections for NYC restaurant insiders like me, the video, produced entirely by employees of one of New York City’s Downtown perennials, nevertheless has so much universal appeal that I wouldn’t be surprised if it took the country by storm in the next couple of weeks. A must see.