Smoked Trout Deviled Eggs
by Celia Cheng
February 17th, 2006
PEGU CLUB
77 W Houston St
2nd Floor
(W Broadway & Wooster St)
212-473-PEGU
The great thing about blogs is that you can add amendments, just like the U.S. Constitution, except you can do it whenever you feel like it.
So I went back to Pegu Club after a great first experience. Only this time, it wasn’t before the largest snowstorm in New York in twenty-six years, but on a normal Friday night. And here’s what I found.
I still love the feel of the place, the décor of a colonial Southeast Asian bar. However, a couple of things jumped out at me:
Pegu Club occupies the old space of Shanghai Tide, a Chinese restaurant whose main branch is still located in Flushing. It’s a long railroad-style space that spans the entire length between West Broadway and Wooster streets on the second floor. The strange space didn’t work to Shanghai Tide’s advantage, but for a bar/lounge it’s perfect. The entrance is downstairs, right next to Sweet Melissa’s, the Brooklyn-based patisserie. Pegu Club has used this two-floor complication to its advantage by placing the coat check downstairs. So when you enter, you are greeted by what seems like a bouncer, whose main duty seems to be to intimidate guests. On my way out this time, around 10pm on a Friday night, there were plenty of empty tables to choose from upstairs, but I overheard a party at the coat check asking about availability and getting typical New York attitude: “You might be able to find something.” I find that annoying. It’s unfriendly and pretentious.
This time, I tried two more dishes in addition to the smoked trout deviled eggs, which is still my favorite and so far the only thing I want to introduce. Service is slow although not entirely unpleasant. One thing that caught my eye that bothered me was the fact that they carry out Brita pitchers to refill your tap water. I find it to be supremely unnatural to see the waitresses walking around with Brita pitchers across the floor. There is just something not right about this picture. I guess I’m supposed to be glad that they actually filter their tap water, but I don’t need to see this.
I was less impressed this time and am not so excited to keep Pegu Club as a part of my regular repertoire. But at least I can say that I tried.
Posted in Drinks , Eclectic , SoHo
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6 Iced Oysters: Tomatoes and Ponzu, Ceviche, Caviar and Wasabi
by Mort Hochstein
February 8th, 2006
L’Etranger
36 Gloucester Rd
London, SW7 4QT
020 7584 1118
As I type the words “London 2006” at the top of this page, I quiver in pleasure at the thought of my recent trip with my wife, Rollie, and in a bit of horror over the cost of London in this year when the dollar is pitifully weak against the pound. But I bit the bullet because I wanted to get back after several years away.
We stayed at The Capital, our favorite London hotel. A small but very comfortable accommodation in Knightsbridge, we’d visited it a few years back and enjoyed the meals we had there. This time, however, the restaurant was booked solid since just last month Condé Nast Traveller anointed The Capital Restaurant the “Best Hotel for Food” in the UK on their 2006 Gold List, and on top of that, it is the only British hotel dining room to hold two Michelin stars.
Each night as we left the hotel for humble fare somewhere near the theater we were attending, we watched as ‘tout’ London jammed The Capital’s intimate bar, waiting their turn at table. And we observed the last stragglers finish late at night as we returned from the theater. One night, our play for the evening, “As You Desire me,” was scheduled to finish at 9:30 so we reserved dinner at a well-reviewed restaurant, L’Etranger on Gloucester Road in Kensington.
We chose well. L’Etranger attracted a crowd similar to the one at The Capital. At the next table, our neighbors were a show-biz mix of French, southern Californians and Bostonites, and we heard a wide palette of languages from diners at other corners of the room, all making happy noises.
L’Etranger’s interior is minimalist in color and decoration. Gray and black predominate and the eye immediately gets the impression that wine, as well as food, is important here. At one side of the dining room is a glassed-in wine cellar, which contains more than four hundred French offerings as well as a fine selection of international wines, including some good choices from Sonoma and Napa. By London standards, the prices are quite fair, a flute of Taittinger Brut Réserve at £9.50, ’93 Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill at £140 (the Brits prefer their champagne old), a ’99 white Hermitage from Jean-Louis Chave also at £140, and from Bordeaux, the ’85 Chateau Latour at £310. Brit critics like the list and the prices, though they still seem high to me when converted to dollars.
Rollie and I skipped the degustation menu — tempting as it was to think of tuna tartare with beluga caviar, yuba tempura with king crab, caramelized black cod with miso (ah, the influence of Nobu, even hotter in London than in New York), Kobe beef fillet with black truffles, tofu yuzu ice cream and a chocolate platter — a good buy at £65.
Instead, I had a half dozen iced oysters with tomatoes and ponzu, ceviche, caviar with wasabi, and Rol had a crisp lettuce salad. The oysters were tangy with enough bite of the sea to do away with the need for any fancy dressings. We continued in the seafood vein with a succulent, moist, full-flavored cut of eel for me and toro sashimi with seaweed salad and ponzu sauce for Rollie. The plates went back clean.
That was more than enough for both of us, so we skipped desserts and ended with strong coffee, black for me, light for Rollie.
Oh yes, our wine was a modest and thoroughly fitting Mercury white. I was sold on our wine experience from the start when our sommelier, Guillaume Glipa, from Bordeaux by way of New York and a half dozen of London’s better restaurants, told me he had worked at Jewel Bako and Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, a twinned pair of outstanding albeit tiny restaurants in my neighborhood in Manhattan’s East Village. Guillaume — William by any other name — and I swapped Manhattan foodie anecdotes and became friends. You can be sure we’ll be back.
Note: The exchange rate at press time is at £1.73 to US $1.
French Onion Soup Dumplings
by Celia Cheng
February 3rd, 2006
THE STANTON SOCIAL
99 Stanton St
(Ludlow & Orchard St)
212-995-0099
In a million years, I don’t think people (including me) would expect me to write a review on The Stanton Social, the trendy Lower East Side (LES) restaurant that opened last April.
I went there by accident, albeit, willingly. I was out with friends. We were looking for some place to have drinks and ended up in the LES. Someone suggested The Stanton Social, and I said let’s go. Okay, so maybe not all that accidental, but I was curious, and I was also with a twenty-something LES resident, so that’s my excuse.
At 9pm on a Friday night, the crowd in the upstairs bar was still somewhat interesting with a few attractive, local neighborhood hipsters hanging out. But as it got later, the crowd got grosser and grosser. I don’t know how else to put it. I had to ask myself if it was possible that the guys just kept getting more and more disgusting.
Our objective that night was not food. My friends and I met up to have drinks. But really, in my book, food is always in the picture. The second floor at The Stanton Social is divided into three sections: extra dining room seating from the restaurant downstairs (in which you better have a reservation or be ready for a two-hour wait), a crowded main bar area and a lounge seating area where you can drink and munch. The wait for the lounge seating was supposedly an hour. I’m pretty sure we waited two, but since we were having fun hanging out at the bar, I wasn’t outraged by the wait, which logically speaking was ridiculous.
Sufficiently liquored up and having a good time, I had entirely no expectations about the food here, except that after a two-hour wait I was hungry. I ordered a bunch of dishes to sample, including the recommended French onion soup dumplings, and was pleasantly surprised by how good the food was. I mean, I came here to drink, not to eat, but the food at The Stanton Social is better than a lot of restaurants where I go specifically to eat. The French onion soup dumplings are severed in an escargot platter, in which six little puff-looking “dumplings” sit. The French onion soup is enveloped by cheese-covered bread balls and it’s yummy. I love the fact that they are bite-sized. The idea is rather ingenious and made me wonder why no one thought of that before? The Chinese have Shanghainese soup-dumplings, but to do this with French onion soup is rather brilliant. The hanger steak also left quite an impression on me, while the mini Kobe-beef burger did the opposite. Kobe-beef burger on a menu always seems to be more of a gimmick and rarely taste as amazing as they sound, and the one here only confirmed my theory.
I know I’ve said this several times about Thor, but with The Stanton Social I really mean it: I don’t think I would return to suffer the crowd and atmosphere. The difference with Thor is that I really crave the excellence of the food. At The Stanton Social the food is good but a two-hour wait upstairs or down — and a meat market crowd where the women all think they are in Sex and the City, and the men, happily picking them up — will certainly make me think twice about going back. Maybe brunch?!
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