South of the Empire State Building News

[I say south of the Empire State Building because this area along Fifth Avenue and just to the East and West really falls outside of the nearby neighborhood boundaries. ]

- One of my favorite go-to restaurants - Tabla Bread Bar - will cease to exist as I know it. Chef Floyd Cardoz has decided to merge his two levels of restaurant into just Tabla with a common menu that will include dishes from both parts. Let's hope some of the more affordable prices stay on the menu too.
UPDATE: Grub Street has a copy of the new combined version of the menu.

- Pamplona, a tapas restaurant on 28th Street between Park and Madison, has closed and may become a nightclub. I ate there once and while the food was decent, the service wasn't great, the prices were slightly high and the space was dark, and I never went back.

- A new coffeeshop called Birch Coffee opens in the Gershwin Hotel on 27th Street.

- The Breslin Restaurant, by April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman of Spotted Pig fame, is now open for breakfast and lunch in the Ace Hotel at 29th Street and Broadway. This area really needs some good neighborhood spots with decent food at good prices. Most of the new places I've tried have fallen short on the food front. I hope The Breslin doesn't turn out to be too trendy.

Szechuan Gourmet Review

There's been a lot of praise heaped on Szechuan Gourmet, a Chinese restaurant on 39th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Former restaurant critic Frank Bruni gave it two stars. Midtown Lunch raved about the Pork Belly with Chili Leeks lunch special. And I'd seen other blogs make note of this lunch dish. It sounded heavenly - fatty pork, a spicy kick and a great deal that comes with rice and soup. While I'd ordered other dishes from here before, I really wanted to test this particular lunch special. So one day not long ago I decided to go for it and ordered the pork belly as a takeout lunch.

What I got was a full container of very thinly sliced fatty pork with lots of leeks coated in chili, looking as though it would be spicy and filling, a side of rice and wonton soup. When I dug in, I found pork dull in flavor, perhaps too many leeks, and a disappointing lunch. The pork belly was hard to eat because the slices were long with large strips of fat. It's supposed to be fatty, but if it is fried up well, you can eat it and hardly notice. Or if the restaurant had used thicker cuts of it, the pork might have stood up better in this dish. Unfortunately this pork was soggy and hadn't absorbed any of the chili flavor; the meat tasted plain and not terribly fresh. The wonton soup thankfully was good and helped to fill me up.

This dish left me craving a better pork belly, so I consulted a friend who had once made an excellent version for me. A couple of weeks later I went to Hmart, the grocery store in Koreatown, got my own ingredients and cooked up a simpler, yet more palatable, dish of pork belly than I'd had at Szechuan Gourmet.

Small Bites

- The city's study of the effect of the calorie count postings is more positive.

- The Times asks: Can biotech food can cure world hunger?

- Some tips for restaurant waitstaff - a list of things they should never do. Most anyone who has ever eaten in a restaurant will agree.

- With the World Series going on, Sam Sifton, Times restaurant critic, and Pete Wells, Times dining editor, have a timely discussion about the cheesesteak. I had my first one last month from Tony Luke's at the Phillies ballpark.

More Meat on the Street

Yet another new option for street food: Frites N Meats, otherwise known as burgers and fries. It seems like an odd time of year for a new street vendor with the weather getting colder and fewer people apt to be on the streets. But they're on Twitter. (If you want to support the ones who do it the old-fashioned way - word of mouth, passersby etc - see last week's Times article on the more under-the-radar trucks.) Well, at least it has a catchy name!

Weird Fruits

People are always ready to get excited over hard-to-get or interesting new fruits. Like mangosteen, which Trader Joe's sells freeze-dried. Or the super fruit that people claim has every health benefit you can imagine, like acai. The one I'd most like to try someday is the miracle fruit. The LA Times takes a stab at what the next trendy fruit will be - the maqui berry.  Another LAT article introduces us to Buddha's Hand. If you've never seen this one, it has quite the startling appearance. A few years ago, I spotted this in the Manhattan Fruit Exchange in Chelsea Market, but have yet to taste it or see some innovative chef add it to a menu.

Taste Test: Pumpkin Bread

The Taste: Pumpkin Bread from Millport Dairy in Lititz, Pennsylvania.
The Test Verdict: 7.3 for flavor and taste (three tasters).
This pumpkin bread came from the Columbia greenmarket sold by an Amish man from Millport Dairy in Lititz, Pa. Pumpkin bread is my favorite of all pumpkin products and the best I've ever had was sold by the Amish at the Shaker Square farmer's market in Shaker Heights, Ohio. So, I was excited to try this bread. It had the basic key ingredients I'd hope to see in a homemade bread, listed on the wrapper: flour, sugar, pumpkin, water, oil, eggs, baking soda, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon. It had a strong flavor, but didn't live up to the perfect balance of my ideal pumpkin bread. It was extremely dense and sticky; I'd prefer a drier, fluffier texture. One of the other tasters said it was "quite good, but a bit too sweet." Its saccharine nature made it so that I couldn't eat much more than a small slice of this bread at a time. When I'd buy my favorite pumpkin bread in Ohio, it took willpower not to finish off most of the loaf at one time!

Perilla Visual Review

Brunch at Perilla Restaurant, opened in 2007 by Harold Dieterle, the winner of the first season of Top Chef.

Complimentary corn cranberry muffins

A French Appreciation for Pumpkin

Peter Mayle writes in The Times about the pumpkin and Halloween's place in France. The best part:

"“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that pumpkins all over America are massacred, with all that good honest flesh tossed away, simply to provide a primitive decoration?” He took a deep swig of rosé and shook his head. “Do our American friends know what treasures they’re missing? Pumpkin fritters! Pumpkin and apple sauce — so delightful with sausages! Then, bien sûr, there is Toulouse-Lautrec’s sublime gratin of pumpkin."

And at the end, a recipe for pumpkin risotto.

Fewer Pumpkin Pies This Year?

The Los Angeles Times reports that there is a shortage of canned pumpkin and pumpkin pie filling because bad weather last year made for a smaller crop. That might explain why on a recent supermarket outing for canned pumpkin, the supermarket clerk said "Whatever we have left would be in Aisle 15." And it's not even close to Thanksgiving yet.

Taste Test: Pumpkin Cupcake #2

The Taste: Pumpkin Cupcake from Billy's Bakery.
The Test Verdict: 5 for flavor, 7 for texture (three tasters).
This cupcake was light and moist, but if I had tried this blind, I would not have been able to tell from the scent or taste that I was eating pumpkin, only that it was a sweet baked good. While the frosting, a smooth decadent buttercream, was good, there was much too large a heap of it on a cupcake this size.

A Preview of the Momofuku Cookbook

Next week, Momofuku king David Chang's cookbook will be released. The Wall Street Journal gives us a preview. The book is apparently written in his straightforward, vulgar language and the tone reflects Chang's ambitious attitude, covering things like boiling a pig's head. And if you need a refresher on the Momofuku empire, the WSJ's article includes a guide to the restaurants.

Taste Test: Pumpkin Bar

The Taste: Pumpkin Bar from Billy's Bakery in Chelsea.
The Taste Verdict: 7 for flavor and texture (two tasters).
I really liked this one. Solid, moist cake with a cream cheese frosting and nuts. A robust, spicy pumpkin flavor. I don't mind nuts in my desserts, but those who do might not love this dessert. This tasted more homemade to me than the other baked pumpkin desserts, but one unofficial taster disagreed, saying the icing tasted like confectioner's sugar. (But maybe there is a reason she's not an official taster!) I don't love icing in general so tend to shun it if it tastes just like sugar. This icing was rich and cheesey to me and while there was a bit of it leftover at the end, I felt more able to eat it a proportional amount of it with the cake.

Small Bites

- The Los Angeles Times has a look at different kinds of milk out there from goat's milk to hemp milk.

- The employees of the USDA sadly get food that is no better than that of any other bad cafeteria.

- The Chicago Tribune profiles Chicago chef Rick Bayless as he adds a new restaurant, Xoco, to his Mexican empire.

- Alinea's chef, Grant Achatz, writes about the experience of losing his sense of taste as he underwent treatment for tongue cancer. He says that his appreciation for aromas increased even more after that period. See my review of Alinea to get a sense of how he incorporates smell into his meals.

- There is a good debate going on about the benefits of at-home cooking. Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic makes the point that cooking makes us more aware of what we are putting into our bodies even if the food we cook isn't necessarily healthier than what we get from eating out. Matthew Yglesias argues that there's reason why people don't cook as much and that cooking won't improve public health.

Taste Test: Pumpkin Parfait

The Taste: Pumpkin Parfait from Three Tarts.
The Test Verdict:  3 for both flavor and texture (two tasters).
The pumpkin parfait was composed of pumpkin puree, apricot compote, whipped cream, molasses and dark chocolate cookie. These flavors were out of sync, each competing for the strongest play - the pumpkin against the apricot, the sweetness of fruit against the sweetness of the chocolate cookie. One taster thought that any two of the flavors might have worked together, but all of them together just made for a weak, distasteful dessert. "A parfait should present the option of tasting the multiple layers at once," one taster said. "In this case, I can't imagine what utensil would have allowed that." The mini parfait cup made for difficult eating because our spoons couldn't quite squeeze into the narrow bottom. And so for all these reasons, this treat wasn't so much a treat.

Taste Test: Pumpkin Cupcake #1

The Taste: Pumpkin Cupcake from Penelope Cafe.
The Test Verdict: 7 for flavor; 7.3 for texture (three tasters).
This cupcake had a strong, spicy aroma with notes of nutmeg and ginger, but those things didn't come through as aggressively in flavor. The cake was fluffy, buttery cake with white raisins that blended in enough that they weren't noticeable except to someone analyzing the cupcake's texture! There was too much of the sugary sweet icing. But overall a decent cupcake.

For Lovers of Pumpkin Beer

Serious Eats recently took its own survey of several pumpkin beers. It includes two that Food in a Nutshell tried out recently.

Good Review

Good Restaurant in the West Village has seemed somewhat unfortunately named because I do think it actually puts out, well, good food. When I mention this restaurant, it always seems confusing enough that I feel compelled to explain that the restaurant's name is actually "good". Good is a popular spot for brunch and the waits can get long. Luckily, on my second vist here, I only had a 15-minute wait after which we were seated at a nice table in a cozy nook.

Good offers a terrific deal: The breakfast special allows you to choose any egg dish, pancakes or french toast (practically anything on the menu) plus a homemade bread or side and a choice of a Chipotle Mary or Passionfruit Mimosa. We both chose to go with the special.

Taste Test: Pumpkin Custard

The Taste: Pumpkin Spice custard cone from Shake Shack.

The Test Verdict: 9.5 out of 10 (two testers) for both flavor and texture.
The custard had a very deep, pumpkin flavor and visible specks of spice. My tasting companion noted that the custard tasted just like pumpkin pie before being cooked. The texture was thick and creamy and, as I said after finishing my cone, I could have gone for another one a few hours later!

Small Bites

- A little woman who eats a lot.

- Corby Kummer argues on The Atlantic's Food Channel that New York City's calorie counts ARE working.

- The New York Times Magazine put out the food issue this past Sunday with essays by Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Pollan.

- A hilarious slideshow of cakes gone wrong.

Taste Test: Pumpkin Ale

The Taste: Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale and Dogfish Head Punkin Ale at  Rattle N Hum.

The Test Verdict: The Smuttynose was a lighter, more gently-flavored beer while the Dogfish Head was dark-colored and seemed heavier. Both had faint tastes of pumpkin to them. I should note I am not a big fan of beer and know little about them, but I liked both ales. But, for me, the Dogfish Head was better because it had more flavor to it. Another tester appreciated the Smuttynose's subtlety and prefers pumpkin ale at Heartland Brewery. Heartland currently has  a limited-edition Smiling Pumpkin Ale.