[Pigging by Wilfrid: July 20, 2009]
There has been even more bloviating than usual, the last few weeks, about so-called "food bloggers," their lack of qualifications, their unreliability and mendacity, and all the rest of it.
And I am sure restaurant occasionally get unfair, ill-reasoned, inaccurate reviews. I am also sure restaurants send out ill-considered, badly prepared dishes, and when I get one I'll write about it.
I am, after all, a paying customer, and - here's my criterion - if a restaurant with any claim to ambition sends out food worse than I can cook myself, I consider the money ill-spent.
Which brings us to the case of "Crispy Duck Confit, Fingerling Potatoes, Bitter Greens and Mostarda" at Union Square, which prices itself a dollar shy of thirty bucks. Consider the description. Crispy. Well good, duck confit should have a crispy skin. Potatoes; duck and potatoes; what can be wrong with that? Bitter greens? As a garnish, perhaps. And "mostarda" - mostarda di frutta, I assume - preserved fruits in a sweet but mustard-flavored syrup, often used to cut the fat in heavy meat dishes like cotechino or zampone. Not canonical with duck, but after all we eat it with cherries or an orange sauce, so why not?
And this is what arrived.
A massive, heaped plate of food. Not too stylish, but you can't slam a restaurant for feeding you. Half a duck, in fact. But matching the duck pound for pound, a pile of steaming greens too. This is now looking like country-style duck confit platter, and I start to wonder if I should expect cornbread. What kind of greens were they? Mustard greens? Not collards, I think. I know, I know, anyone who can't distinguish his greens has no right to comment on food. I'll tell you this much - the menu was right - they were bitter as bitter can be.
Unlike the "mostarda."
Yes, that's it, all over the top of the bird and the vegetables, a ladleful. Home-made too, I suspect, because I have been eating mostarda di frutti from good Italian delicatessens for many years and it doesn't taste like this. Mustard? Not a hint of it, but plenty of sugar. I think I could discern cherries in the mush, but what really sticks with me is pineapple. Pineapple in mostarda - and if this wasn't canned pineapple, someone had taken great trouble to make it look and taste like canned pineapple.
So bitter greens, sweet fruit in syrup dumped on top. Wait. There were potatoes, right? Fingerlings. Right. There was one, anyway. One fingerling potato which had been delicately cut into thin, rubbery slices, and stuck in among the greens.
The duck could yet save the day. I cut into it. Crispy! Yes, a brittle, crunchy skin (could have used seasoning, but hey...). Then I was engulfed in a cloud of steam. I cut again. Puff! More steam. Several minutes after the dish had been served, I could still communicate with neighboring tables through the medium of smoke signals.
The crispiness of the skin had been achieved, as far as I can tell, by blasting the poor bird at an extraordinary temperature. The corollary was that the flesh was as bone-dry and crumbly as a bad Thanksgiving turkey. I pushed the food around the plate.
I know duck confit. I first ate it in a restaurant in Tarbes, in southern France, in 1980 or '81. I make it. By which I mean I make the real stuff: not just braising duck legs, but preserving them in a jar of fat. This was a duck confit which shouldn't be coming out of a professional kitchen. Just wrong.
(Oh, but what a wonderful restaurant, you should have ordered differently.) Undoubtedly I should have ordered differently, but this was on the menu. I had nothing against this place until I tried the duck - hadn't eaten here in years. What else? Oh, service was sweet and the oysters were fine, but so what? I didn't want to try anything else, or go back any time soon, so a full review is not forthcoming.
