[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: September 15, 2008]
Bathos characterized the eventual failure of Wayne Nish and Joe Scalice's townhouse restaurant March.
Created in 1990, at the time of my first visit in '98 it was still serving an ambitious array of tasting menus, had a good wine program, and in my experience was one of the first restaurants in the city where there was no hesitation in matching sake or sherry with appropriate dishes.
Eating there could, in fact, be a studious affair. In early September, 1998, I took up a position on a comfortable banquette, and worked through six or more courses, each with a wine pairing. I have no notes on the latter, so we must be content with the food.
First, the expensive little beggar's purses which were a signature of the place in its heyday. Soft won-tons, essentially, stuffed with delicacies like foie and lobster. Then white truffles (it says here - early for the season?), shaved over a shirred egg with fingerling potatoes.
A signature dish of the times was Jean-Georges Vongerichten's twenty-seven (or however many it was) young vegetables cooked in their own juices; this was served at Jo Jo. Wayne Nish eschewed mathematical precision, but I remember his fricassée of young vegetables being very good.
A warm lobster salad was balanced in a pretty tuile. The main event was duck two ways, the breast roast and the leg braised. Panna cotta led off a parade of desserts. This was the first of a series of excellent meals I ate at March, the last featuring a show-off tasting for a vegetarian guest about four years ago. Then, in the last throes of the business, I experienced a distastrous and perfunctory serving of dishes which had once been fine. The restaurant then re-christened itself "Nish", rushed downscale with a less expensive and rather odd-looking fusion menu (I didn't dare try it), then vanished.
Myself, I vanished to London a couple of days later, taking a late supper at Marco Pierre White's Quo Vadis: assiette de canard, and pigeon de Bresse with a nice gratin of turnip rather than potato.
The city was a month into the short season for wild grouse, which famously begins on August 11th, and I went in eager search of a bird rarely seen in New York. There were traditional venues for grouse, like Rules, one of London's oldest restaurants. And there are expensive venues like Wilton's on Jermyn Street and the Savoy Grill. Although staying in the lovely Jermyn Street Hotel, I made for one of my quirkier standbys: Beoty's on St Martin's Lane.
Beoty's, which seems trapped in the 1950s, never seemed to change. The proprietorship was Greek-Cypriot, and half the menu was given over to that cuisine - taramasalata and moussaka, served by bow-tied waiters in comfortable and fairly formal surroundings. The other half of the menu was given over to "continental" dishes with which my father would have been happily familiar - steak Diane, for example, flamed at the table; fried whitebait; crêpes Suzette.
Additionally, the restaurant served a few classy specials which were posted in the window. Lobster, Dover sole, and in season roast grouse. I settled in for a classic meal. A glass of champagne, followed by garlicky snails, then the grouse with a bottle of Burgundy. Beoty's serves the whole bird, on the bone, the dark, pungent meat rare and bloody in the center. The accompaniments are standard: bread sauce, game chips (latticed potato chips).
This could really only be followed by port and Stilton. They served Stilton the old way, wheeling a whole cheese to the table and spooning a soft portion from the center. Me, I like the crust - but at Beoty's it was always 1956.
Next stop...Seattle.
