[Pigging by Wilfrid: October 27, 2008]
Believe it or not, there are at least two gastronomic fields in which the country of my birth, the United Kingdom, excels: wild game and cheese. There was a time when Picholine was one of the few restaurants in the city which served a stellar selection of the latter.
And thanks to a truly bizarre legal situation, it remains one of the few places in New York which, each fall, offers the former.
For reasons I can't begin to understand, it's illegal for restaurants here to serve game shot in the United States. At the same time, they are perfectly free to serve birds and animals hunted overseas and imported. This has the effect, of course, of keeping the price of game artificially high, to nobody's particular benefit except those shooting it in the forests and glens of Scotland and mailing it across the ocean.
This means that "game" is usually something of a misnomer on New York restaurant menus. Quail? Pheasant? If it's local, as it almost always is, it's not wild game; it's farm-raised and slaughtered like ducks and chickens. Wild game generally has a finer taste, thanks to its foraging diet, is usually leaner, and there are some delicious creatures - grouse, for example - which stubbornly refuse to be farmed.
Assuming honesty in advertising, one clue that a restaurant is serving the real thing is the phrase "Wild Scottish" on the menu. Not that there's any particular virtue in a grouse or deer being shot in Scotland rather than across the border in Northumberland; it's just that Scotland has a lot of the stuff. The other clue is that game is only served in the fall - there are strictly controlled shooting seasons in the United Kingdom. If you see grouse on a menu in April (and I have seen such things), you know it's either frozen or not grouse at all.
Picholine, which I hadn't visited since a major refurbishment many months ago, offers an annual fall game tasting menu, as well as game dishes on the carte. Owner Terrance Brennan is a true believer, and wields the rifle himself on occasion. The full feast is certainly expensive - $145 - but I had a $50 gift card generously sent out by the restaurant to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary: time to deploy it.
It's old news, but the redecoration has removed the eighteenth-century, country-house, tapestried look of the place and substituted a cool art deco theme which, in comparison, looks modern. Picholine inherited too the old-style lay-out of restaurants like La Caravelle and Le Pavillon. A narrow front dining-room is the place to sit, but there's a larger, less well-lit room in the rear too.
From the vantage-point of a corner table in the front-room, I was pleased to discover that our captain (one of many) was enthusiastically willing to substitute one dish on the game tasting, replacing the venison carpaccio for one squeamish diner with a pretty salad garnished with a smooth stilton mousse fanned with thin slices of pear. Proceedings had commenced with a selection of amuses which included a strikingly unpleasant, medicinal thimble of Alpine cheese soup.
I ate the carpaccio of course, and it was rich, dark, and wisely seasoned with "chocolate salt". Venison, like hare, takes well to chocolate. I wasn't quite as enamored of the pomegranate seeds, which add a sharp note but tend to get stuck in your teeth. The venison was funky enough that it reminded me of horse, and it's been a while since I ate raw horse-meat.
Next up, a sensationally good version of foie gras "shabu shabu". Slices of raw foie are arranged in the bottom of a soup bowl. A rich, distinctly sweet game bouillon is poured from a coffee press, cooking the foie, which ultimately melts into the soup. The strength of the dish was the depth of flavor of the bouillon, and I wish I knew the secret. This was the hit of the evening.
The next dish was perhaps the least successful. Partridge is a delicate bird, with pale, sweet, mildly flavored flesh. It can't be roughly treated, or you might as well eat chicken. Not a good idea, then, to encase it in a tempura batter and shower it with a tart apple-celery salad. It could have been almost anything in the batter parcels, and the overall effect, despite the black truffle vinaigrette, was of fancy sweet 'n' sour chicken. I'll take my partridge gently braised over Savoy cabbage any day.
It turned out that I had casually overlooked the main reason for the meal's steep price tag. The menu does stipulate white truffles, and I had somehow not even noticed. Sure enough, as plates of steaming chestnut tagliatelle were set down, another captain popped up with what he described as probably the largest white truffle in New York. So it is, I thought, but I wonder how much you're going to give me. In fact the shaving was exceptionally generous, practically obscuring the pasta, and well worth $40 or so.
The sauce on the pasta, a "bolognese" made from the game offal lying about the kitchen, was very tasty.
Hare is truly rare on New York menus. Understandably considered nothing more than a large rabbit for most purposes, hare is another beast which as far as I know has never been raised domestically. Unlike rabbit, its meat is very dark, and strongly-flavored. The portion in the game menu was restricted to the saddle, or filet, and I estimate there was rather less than a full filet on the plate. I understand that the general preference is for dishes in a multi-course menu to be scaled down, but it seemed unduly restrictive given how much meat there is on the average hare.
The real mystery, of course, is what happened to the legs? These are excellent jugged - an old British term, I suppose, for confit, and the dish would have benefited from some braised leg meat for contrast. Either Picholine is importing the saddle only, or they having some fine staff dinners - it's odd that there's no hare elsewhere on the menu.
The saucing was very good, though: a gamey reduction and a foie sabayon, and the little turnips were full-flavored and nicely salty.
From the expensive wine-list, strong in Bordeaux and Burgundy, weak in Rhone, and ignorant of French country wines save one Saumur-Champigny, I chose a Spanish bottle. I had been tasting reds from the Ribera del Duero earlier in the weak, and was happy to find the pick of the tasting, Emilio Moro's 2005 Malleolus, available here in an earlier vintage, the 2000. Hardly a steal but well-priced. It's a big, bacony wine, with an initial tannic grip, and matched the food well.
Cheese remains an important event at Picholine, the heavy cart trundling back and forth all evening. You are permitted to choose a generous selection: I ate Pierre Robert, Roquefort, the tangy Rolf Beeler Hoch Ybrig, Flada from Switzerland (Vacherin-like, and spooned into a bowl), a rather bland Schaf Reblochon, and strong, orange-jacketed Casinca from Corsica.
After a one-bite pre-dessert - a spoonful of Concord grape mousse with a smear of chocolate sauce - the apple brioche with caramel-salt ice cream was almost too much. After a succession of delicate savory courses, it seemed odd to present such a sturdy sweet option, although it was certainly good.
And then chocolates and petits fours, and madeleines to take home.
A stylish performance by a restaurant which remains one of the city's most expensive - although it was doing hearteningly good business on a weekend evening. Some will prefer their game more lustily cooked and presented: roasted and served on the bone, or long-braised in blood. Brennan's approach is modern, lighter, New Yorkified, and not entirely successful. For all that, the foie "shabu shabu" is a dish of the season.
Picholine is on the web right here.
