Up West And Elsewhere: Ten Years Ago

[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid:  January 14, 2012]

Last week it was Aix.  I followed that dinner with an overdue visit to a restaurant which was already making waves on the UWS: Ouest.  This is a story which comes around periodically -- the Upper West Side has restaurants! In 2007, it was Dovetail and Eighty-One. In 2002, it had been Ouest and Aix.

I also ate in some other neighborhoods.

That spot on Avenue C, next to Zum Schneider, which had been Vicala (and is now Arcane) was Sen at the beginning of 2003.  Kind of Vietnamese, I guess.  I dined on spicy coconut frog legs with noodles, and shared taro fries and sweet yucca cake.  Tapioca and ice cream for dessert, and a hearty Ardèche chardonnay as accompaniment. 

Ten years ago, the fine food store Citarella was also running a swanky and eponymous two-level restaurant at Rockefeller Center.  The menu was heavily dependent on the store's seafood sourcing.  Dinner started with smoke salmon and crispy onons.  Then hamachi sashimi with daikon.  I'd eaten sand dabs in  Monterey, but I don't remember seeing them often in New York.  Here they were sautéed and served with spinach and fingerling mash. Warm vanilla cake for dessert.  Following Veuve Clicquot, two chardonnays,  the Plumpback 2001 (Napa), and the Kistler 2000 (Sonoma). Inniskillen ice wine with pudding.

A lunch at Otto punctuated the week: beet, walnut andhorseradish salad, then pizza quattro formaggi.

I well dinner at Ouest, in one of those almost absurd Mad Men booths. It started strange, and finished weird.  I ordered a "French martini" from the cocktail list.  It came with a pickled string bean, but the really strange thing about it was its dimensions.  Like a goldfish bowl.  I can drink, but halfway through the martini I knew we wouldn't be ordering a bottle of wine.

Dinner started with a truffled savory soufflée.  I like tripe, and shouldn't order it in restaurants because I'm so impressed with my own tripe dishes.  But I did.  It was Italian-style, soaked with tomato sauce, and ballasted with mashed potatoes.

If Jehengir Mehta's dessert at Aix had been challenging, the dessert at Ouest was vile.  It's described in my diary as "pumpkin cheesecake with nasty stuff." I still hesitate to describe the nasty stuff, but I know what it reminded me of.  Thin and viscous will have to do.  It had a mouthfeel one doesn't expect from dinner.

That was the week, plus an honorable mention to Rosie Perez in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.