The Encyclopedia of eating Now
BEST NEW RESTAURANTS 2013
Twenty places you should eat tonight! • Esquire’s Chef of the Year • Veal parmigiana A legendary restaurant family • Chinese food, German food, and bar food • And pretzels • A heated debate about tipping • And Esquire’s 2013 Restaurant of the Year
JOHN MARIANI
There is just too much. There are just too many exciting phenomena happening in the world of American dining right now. Fabulous Peruvian food, a German wurst palace, lots of shrimp and grits, the continued onslaught of Italian. Cronuts. To try to ascribe a singuH lar meaning to it all would be like trying to ■ drink a pork chop. So we’ve done something far more useful: distilled what’s important and innovative and fun right now into a simple list, A to Z. Twenty astonishing new restaurants highlight this abridged encyclopedia. The rest is just really good gravy
SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS, page 92 WASHINGTON, D.C., page 98 BROOKLYN,pag-e 100 EMBEYA CHICAGO, page 100 LOS ANGELES.page 102 NEW YORK, page 104 ATLANTA, page 106 MARIZA NEW ORLEANS,page 106 MC KITCHEN MIAMI,pa^ei06 CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, page 108 STAMPEDE 66 DALLAS, page 112 ..... TROIS MEC LOS ANGELES, 3, page 112 SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA, page 114
L^> ADD-ONS Things that used to be free. Acceptable: $4 for heirloom-tomato focaccia with Old Bay butter at Range in Washington, D. C. Less acceptable: $4 for béarnaise sauce to top a $55 steak at Costata in New York.
Blue Dragon BOSTON
Fifteen years ago, Esquire honored a young ChineseAmerican chef named Ming Tsai as Chef of the Year for his groundbreaking Asian restaurant, Blue Ginger, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Since then, his trajectory has been ever upward, propelled not least by his role as host of the long-running TV show Simply Ming, on which Tsai’s gentlemanly approach is a balm to all the screeching kitchen-throwd own nonsense these days.
He certainly took his time to open a new place, which helps explain why Blue Dragon, a ninety-seat Asian gastropub, is jammed from lunch till after midnight. The restaurant is a revelation of flavors and preparations, with Tsai right there in the open kitchen, picking up plates and schmoozing with wide-eyed guests. The quandary for you, the diner, is what to order. How do you stop yourself from ordering six, seven, or eight dishes when they’re serving Japanese sweet-potato chips with an addictive charred-scallionand-meat-jus dip; pot stickers jammed with rich braised beef cut with celery; curls of tender pork tail crisped to perfection over sticky rice studded with pulpy chunks of sweet mango; the phenomenal Mom’s Salt-and-Pepper Shrimp; and a dozen other dishes I had to
save for my next trip? Best not to try. Bring your friends, order rounds of the craft beers, and don’t make any other plans. 324 A Street; 617-3388585; ming.com/blue-dragon
Bronwyn
SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS
I'm not positive GermanAustrian food will be the next big thing (though it’s got more grounding than the pffft New Nordic cuisine fad ever did). But Bronwyn, in the Boston suburb of Somerville, is a stellar new addition to the growing number of restaurants elevating wursts and beer to new heights. Chef and co-owner Tim Wiechmann is rendering everything from house-made wursts—a gargantuan platter for $25 gets you six varieties— to the best, tangiest Sauerbraten outside Düdenbüttel.
You might begin your meal by smearing roasted-apple mustard on a giant Bavarian pretzel, then move on to beer soup with a cheddar-cheese kreplach (dumpling). The crisp, buttery jägerschnitzel are made to go with any of the forty beers, from the Warka pilsner (5.7 percent al cohol by volume) to the Zywiec Baltic porter (9.5). This is a neighborhood place that deserves national attention for reinventing food we thought we knew (or always wanted to).255 Washington Street; 617-776-9900; bron-
wynrestaurant.com
O BROOKLYN PROBLEM,
THE Persistent influence of a certain borough on the national dining scene. Signs your town is afflicted: No reservations • No credit cards •
Q Tonic • Brick • “Forty-five minutes to an hour.” • One bartender. A man. Very deliberate. One. • No memory later of exactly what you ate. • Pork chop. Spoon bread, piquillo, corn, bacon.
Carriage House
CHICAGO
Anyone who argues that authentic southern food has no place in Chicago probably also thinks a New Yorker couldn’t edit a Faulkner novel. The Great Migration brought millions of southerners to northern cities in the earlyto mid-twentieth century. Moreover, chefs today tend to go where the work is, so it’s logical that a chef from, say, Johns Island, South Carolina, ends up cooking his
heart out in Illinois and finding takers.
With communal tables and farmhouse accents that avoid Epcot Center phoniness, Carriage House is close in spirit and flavor to the best restaurants in Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, and Memphis, and better than many. It’s easy to love creamy she-crab soup and Carolina rice balls spiked with pimento cheese— that stuff is irresistible even when it’s just okay, and these are stellar. But chef Mark Steuer has a deep strain of the
low country in him, especially its sea islands and marshes. He refines beloved dishes so that they’re true to form yet entirely his—like skillet corn bread with foie-gras butter, nectarine marmalade, and smoked salt. His low-country boil bub-
bling with shrimp, clams, corn, and rabbit sausage is, like everything he serves, steeped in history. But history isn’t what makes his reimagined dishes so great. It’s the reimagining. 1700 West Division Street; 773-384-9700; carriagehousechicago.com
O co*ckTAIL FOOD Maybe our favorite trend of the year: more attention being paid to what we eat with what we drink when we are primarily drinking. The award for best attention paid goes to the Rooftop Bar at the Revere Hotel in Boston. What sound like humdrum bar bites are actually some of the best dishes this year, including perfect mini lobster rolls. Another round, please.
Coqueta
SAN FRANCISCO
Back in the 1980s, Michael Chiarello pioneered what came to be known as CalItal cuisine (that’s CaZ-ifor-
The Tiny Recipe
WHITE-ALMOND GAZPACHO: Soak 1 lb almonds in water overnight. Reserve liquid. Boil almonds with fresh water and two garlic cloves. Drain. Puree almonds, 3/4 cup rustic bread, 1 cup olive oil, 2 Tbsp sherry, and 2 tsp gray salt with enough reserved liquid until smooth and medium-thick. Garnish with fruit and olive oil.
nia and Ital-y) at Tra Vigne, his Napa Valley restaurant. He went on to become one of the most consistently rewarding TV chefs, so much so that he disappeared from restaurants for a while. He roared back to the kitchen in
Del Campo
2008 to open the acclaimed Bottega in Yountville, California, because, he said, “my chef friends were having all the fun.” With nothing more to prove, Chiarello has turned his attention to the traditional foods of Spain, whose tapas bars and restaurantes inspired Coqueta, now open on the Embarcadero. Its immediate success, with Ryan McIlwraith as chef de cuisine, is easy enough to understand: The shadowy waterfront place has a bighearted buzz, with Chiarello popping in and out of the kitchen to say hello to regulars and pose for smartphone photos with newcomers. He might bring out a tray of a dozen gobble-’em-up San Sebastían-style tapas, including fried nuggets of potato and Spanish ham, head-on prawns poached in Spanish olive oil, and smoky, grilled Iberian secreto (secret cut) pig—what wagyu is to beef, this is to
pork—with a hot-sweet tximitxurri sauce. The paella ($40 for two) has already become a signature dish in San Francisco, and the warm chocolate cake flavored with pimentón paprika is not coming off the menu anytime soon. I’ve never eaten better food in Spain. For that reason, and for decades of innovative, irresistible food, Michael Chiarello is Esquire’s Chef of the Year. Pier 5, the Embarcadero; 415704-8866; coquetasf.com
Del Campo
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Smoke—that’s what hits you first. The aroma of sweet smoke coming off everything from skirt steak and sweetbreads to charred beets, mortadella, and cheese sizzling on a grill the size of an airstrip. That smoke underpins most of Peruvian chef Victor Albisu’s phenomenal cooking at Del C ampo, a grand South American restaurant in D. C.’s Chinatown. Albisu, whose grandfather was a Cuban baker and whose mother ran a market where her son learned to grill from Argentinean and Uruguayan butchers, has created a menu on which everything tastes as if it were prepared because you came to visit. Seafood and ceviches lashed with good olive oil share plates with chiles, charred onions, corn, yucca fries, romesco sauce, chimichurri, and salsa criolla (a tangy onion relish). The bar serves street food when the kitchen closes— empanadas, albóndigas (plump, juicy meatballs), chicharones (fried pork), and chivitos (sandwiches stuffed with seared rib eye, mortadella, ham, cheese, olives, hearts of palm, and fried egg). But the heart of the matter is a platter piled high with chorizo, short ribs, rib eye, lamb shank, and pork belly, all of them gleaming, fat-rich, and deep red, rosy, or pink, but always charred black. If the Peruvian food trend in the U. S.—which has been about to become a trend for a couple years nowneeds a leader, Del Campo is it. 7771Street NW; 202-2897377; delcampodc.com
O DESIGN, BEST For
years, Europe has had firstrate department-store restaurants—Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Harrods in London, KaDeWe in Berlin—while America’s remain largely conveniences. Stella 34, at Macy’s New York flagship, challenges that idea with a $12 million space anchored by a 240-foot
marble bar and three woodburning ovens. The windows, painted over for decades, now reveal the mighty torso of the Empire State Building. If you get lulled into blissful delirium by the lasagne with black kale and sausage, mattresses are three floors up.
dP” EGGS Tasty orbs hatched by chickens and other fowl, which happily are migrating from the breakfast table to the dinner menu. See: chef David Santos’s duck egg with house-made sausage and kimchi rice at Louro, in New York. See also: Scotch eggs at the Gage, Chicago; egg custard and caviar at Serpico, Philadelphia.
Paul Liebrandt may never live down his grandstanding days, during which he pulled stunts like having guests dine in total darkness. But after prov-
ing how serious a chef he is at Corton for the last five years, he now has shown himself to be a masterful avatar of what modern cuisine truly is. At the Elm, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—heart of Hipsterville, America—Liebrandt has stripped down his historically high-flying cuisine. His dishes are sleeker, the elements on the plate fewer.
The short menu has four categories: Raw, Sea, Land, and Share. The last includes dishes meant for two, priced between $48 and $56; most others cost about $20. The dining room, down a flight of stairs but with sufficient glass to see outside, has a cool coffee-shop look, with an open kitchen and lighting soft enough to make everyone look good. It’s a local clientele—Rag & Bone boots, Warby Parker glasses—and they come here not just to get something to eat but for cooking. Liebrandt’s cuisine is about classic good taste embellished with whimsy: a two-inch-round foie-gras terrine comes with a spiced strawberry gelée, tiny pickled strawberries, and ginger. And his homage to chicken Kiev is a marvel: a juicy, seasoned chicken breast that, when cut into, floods forth a gush of butter. Such triumphs are the result of the intellect going beyond the sensational in search of true excellence. 160 North Twelfth Street; 718-218-1088; theelmnyc.com
Embeya
There is a tendency among aficionados of Southeast Asian food to resist high-end restaurants in favor of storefront eateries where no dish costs more than $12. This can indeed be a rewarding way to go through life. But Embeya—“little one” in Vietnamese, the childhood nickname of chef Thai Dang— is that rare, beautifully designed Asian restaurant that can please big spenders and dumpling sniffers alike. It’s a large corner space with a hundred seats and a lively bar, done up with carved teak panels and chandeliers that look like airborne ice crystals. Vast windows frame the streets of the West Loop. You’re greeted by the gorgeous Indianborn Komal Patel and her impeccably dressed Hungarian husband, Attila Gyulai, whose ing at the bar. Bars are growing deeper and longer, a welcome development for people who, on occasion, want a good meal out without having to, you know, talk to anyone. (For a list of the best new places to eat alone, turn the page.)
long tenure with the Four Seasons hotel chain invests Embeya with civilized hospitality. Dang learned the precision of Asian-fusion cuisine under two D. C.-based chefs, Eric Ziebold of CityZen and Susur Lee of Zentan, before helping Laurent Gras win three Michelin stars at Chicago’s L20.
Embeya’s menu is predominantly Vietnamese but reels in Thai classics, like plump mussels in a limey coconut broth, maitake noodles with sea scallops and the crunch of
Chinese celery, pungent garlicky chicken, and head-on prawns with roasted pineapple, tamarind, and chiles. The flavors all sound promis ing on the menu. They deliver on the plate. 564 West Ran dolph Street; 312-612-5640; embeya.com
FOR TWO A menu designation once reserved for a few large dishes, like a whole chicken or bananas Foster. Now, instead of a thick slab of prime rib, you can order a Tomahawk steak for $144 (at Marc Forgione in New York). At the Elm in Brooklyn, a whole section of the menu is called “Share.”
O HAMBURGERS, LISTS OF "THEBEST" A tired practice in which unimaginative media types rate the most basic of American dishes based largely on how much crap restaurants pile on top.
Hinoki& the Bird
LOS ANGELES
At the curiously named hut
enchanting Hinoki & the Bird, executive chef Kuniko Yagi and chef-owner David Myers have allied to show the world what California cuisine has become this century—an amalgam of American-Pacific and Asian ideas melded with extraordinary finesse.
Myers’s West Hollywood restaurant, Sona, shows a fastidious respect for Japanese food culture, and he has five restaurants in Tokyo. At Hinoki & the Bird, he has given Angelenos a spectacular twolevel dining room with a ceiling of twisted cedar planes, a walnut stairwell, a coppercovered communal table, denim-covered seats, and a huge open kitchen. It’s like a tree house for gourmands.
No dish is composed of more than three ingredients. Yagi marries seemingly incongruous flavors and textures with impeccable grace, making friends of unlikely ingredients like a culinary secretary of state. Ramen salad is jammed with succulent ginger-braised short ribs and spiced English peas. An outstanding beef tartare is finely chopped and barbed with jalapeño. Monkfish, it turns out, pairs beautifully with a lovely yellow-curry noodle and soft eggplant. I don’t know which of the two is Hi-
noki and which the bird, but all you need to know is that together, Yagi and Myers are working some magic. 10 West Century Drive; 310-552-1200; hinokiandthebird.com
O INDIVIDUAL DINING
Aka dining solo, aka eat-
THE MACCIONI FAMILY
RESTAURANT HALL OF fame
It seems enough simply to say that no restaurant in America, perhaps the world, has graduated so many renowned chefs as Le Cirque. Since it opened in 1974, Daniel Boulud, David Bouley, Terrance Brennan, RickMoonen, Jacques Torres, Michael Lomonaco, Alex Stratta, Geoffrey Zakarian, and many, many more have passed through its kitchen. But Le Cirque is an odyssey that began with a tall, skinny boy from Montecatini, Italy. After German soldiers ransacked his parents' house and his father was killed by a bomb, young Sirio Maccioni eventually made his way to America and became maître d' of the Colony Club, the most famous society restaurant in New York in the 1960s. When Maccioni eventually opened his own place, his suave manner as host and manic attention to detail propelled Le Cirque into the epicenter of grand dining. It became a restaurant that attracted Sophia Loren and Woody Allen as easily as it did nouvelle cuisiniers Paul Bocuse and Roger Vergé. His sons, Mario, Marco, and Mauro, hung around the kitchen with their mother, Egidiana, whose role as den mother intensified when the Maccionis opened Osteria del Circo, a Tuscan-style trattoria on Manhattan's West Side. By the time the boys were grown, they were overseeing operations in the New York restaurants, a new Le Cirque in Las Vegas, and other venues, which now reach to the Dominican Republic and New Delhi. This year, the family opened Sirio
Ristorante in New York's Pierre Hotel.
The Maccioni restaurants are exemplars of the evolution of both design and cuisine at the fine-dining level, pioneering innovations like pasta primavera alongside classics of haute cuisine and cuisine bourgeoise—sole amandine, osso buco. Today, Sirio sits like a pope, greeting old and new friends, while his sons balance restrained civility and refreshing nonchalance. Without this family, theworld of fine dining would be different today—archaic, safe, bereft of charm. After all these years, the sight of at least one of the Maccionis working the dining room is a comfort too many restaurants have forsaken.
By the way, the name Le Cirque? When the Germans retreated from Montecatini and the Allies moved in, young Sirio watched them. "The Americans," he says. "They looked like the circus coming to town!"
Juni
NEW YORK
When last in these pages, Australian-born chef Shaun Hergatt won honors for his sprawling namesake restaurant in Manhattan’s Financial District. It should have lasted. Now in midtown, he’s opened a restrained but thrilling fifty-seat venue where he is simplifying his cooking while intensifying his flavors. He calls one dish warm pork soup, which is like calling Esperanza Spalding a bassist. There are indeed elegant, smoky shards of pork, but it’s the reduction of Tuscan kale to a deep forest green and the quivering golden egg yolk on top that make this a dish of astonishing goodness.
I could make the same case for the masterpiece of a maincourse salad made from nothing more than artichoke, oats, and lovage oil.
The diningrooms, in subtle variations of earthy brown, evoke the natural colors of, well, the earth. Hergatt’s plate presentations are composed in colors that reflect the seasons—yellow corn, fresh cream, purple plums, fuchsia flowers. There is no artifice here, no mutations of ingredients. A great chef needs to do so little to make so much of what he finds perfect to begin with. 12 East Thirty-first Street; 212-995-8599; juninyc.com
Best New Brothers: Chef Louis and general manager Michael DiBiccari of Boston's sublime Tavern Road.
King + Duke
ATLANTA
Last year, chef Ford Fry’s the Optimist was Esquire’s Restaurant of the Year. He must be in what they call the zone: Fry’s new place, King + Duke, is his second-straight can’tmiss spot. Where the Optimist celebrates great seafood, King + Duke (named after two grifters in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is all about chef de cuisine Joe Schafer and Fry cooking over a hickory-wood fire on a twenty-four-foot hearth. The roasted carrots and beets with sheep’s-milk feta transport you to a field (in a good way). The fire torches a candy crust on succulent lamb belly served with sheep’s-milk feta, and sweet fire-roasted lobster is heightened simply by baby bok choy, garlic, and chiles. Even pastry chef Chrysta Poulos works the fire, grilling the sugariest of Georgia peaches to accompany a quivering dark-chocolate panna cotta.
Also, King + Duke serves thirty-two beers. So the place pretty much made this list before we even sat down. 3060 Peachtree Road NW; 404-4773500; kinganddukeatl.com
Mariza
NEW ORLEANS
Nothing brings a neighborhood more vitality than bright lights shining forth from a booming new restaurant. In what’s known as the Sliver by the River, an area hit hard but not totaled by Hurricane Katrina, Mariza, with its distressed-concrete walls, mile-high ceilings, and old woodwork, wears its scarred history proudly—only a crystal chandelier lends a touch of the soigné. Laurie Casebonne and Ian Schnoebelen fell in love with Venetian seafood on a trip to the watery city and thought it a fine fit for a seafood-rich sister town like New Orleans. They had little desire to serve up more Creole food to locals already gorged
on it and had no pretense of copying strict Venetian culinary models. But they were inspired. At Mariza, in a converted rice factory, Schnoebelen fashions his own style in dishes like pappardelle with smoked duck breast and liver mousse. His very unusual pepperoni soup teems with salumi and meatballs. And he knows enough to respect a fine fish right out of the Gulf by treating it with nothing more than a perfect grilling, a glossing of lemon vinaigrette, and a cool fennel salad. Mariza is a leap of faith—especially in tradition-bound New Orleans—that challenges local chefs to go beyond what is safe without going overboard. 2900 Chartres Street; 504-598-5700; marizaneworleans.com
MC Kitchen
MIAMI
Quick: Name a great Italian restaurant in Miami. No? Okay, how about a real good one? Take your time. Nothing? Then here’s news: MC Kitchen is not just the best and best-looking Italian restaurant in Miami; it’s also
one of the best in America.
The partners behind it— chef Dena Marino and Brandy Coletta—share more in common than iambic names. They both have impeccable taste and skill. Marino’s repute comes from working with Michael Chiarello (see: Coqueta) and at Ajax Tavern in Aspen. Coletta, a business developer, has a canny sense of south-Florida style, shown in a clean, stripped-down decor befitting MC Kitchen’s Design District location. Gauzy curtains hang from a sixteen-foot ceiling, chrome and mirrors envelop the bar, and a white marble counter serves as a threshold to an open stainless-steel kitchen.
In that kitchen, Marino adapts Italian cuisine with gusto in dishes like pappardelle with spring ramps and “forever braised” pork ragú (which is as rich and luscious as you would imagine forever-braised pork to be). Miami being a hot town, she has a light touch with hsh—try the juicy mahimahi with arugula, fennel, tiny Ligurian taggiasca olives, and sweet-orange vinaigrette. Her food and Coletta’s savvy coalesce in a sophisticated balance rare in a city where glitz often trumps taste. 4141 Second Avenue NE; 305-456-9948; mckitchenmiami.com
Ordinary, The
CHARLESTON,SOUTH CAROLINA
Every ten years, without fail, Mike Lata opens a new restaurant. The man is patient, never rushing off to New York or Vegas—not even Hilton Head—to stamp out some imitation of himself. And so, a decade after opening Figstill one of the best restaurants on the Eastern Seaboard—he has unleashed the Ordinary, whose name belies the canny intelligence that went into
The Tiny Recipe THE UR~INARY
MIGNONETTE: Zest one Meyer lemon (in season now!) into a bowl. Add the juice of three Meyer lemons, one small minced shallot, I Tbsp rice-wine vinegar, afew sprigs of tarragon, and several turns of a black-pepper mill. Chill.
making it a bellwether American seafood house built within the stately lineaments of a historic bank building, with sixteen-foot Palladian-arch windows and a backlit skylight. It’s a big, echoing room with a fine long bar, a six-seat marble raw bar, and a lofty mezzanine overlooking the diningroom.
Lata is a master of the trick of making the simple into small marvels of invention. You could, of course, just share tiers of iced shellfish lavished with peel-andeat shrimp, clams, mussels, and lobster. And you would be happy. But you don’t want to miss the finegrained smoked-trout pâté with brown bread or the meaty skate wing with potato terrine and rémoulade sauce. One of the best main courses I had, which depend on what’s best in the market that morning, was a southern triggerhsh done ingeniously as a crisp schnitzel, with a simple brown-butter vinaigrette.
And for dessert, what else but a creamy, cool Carolina-
gold-rice pudding? Wear seersucker or jeans—you’ll find both here—and listen in on the lilting Daisy Buchanan-like drawl ofwomen for whom local gossip is one of the high arts. 544 King Street; 843-4147060; eattheordinary.com
O
Paichë
MARINA DEL REY, CALIFORNIA
The success of the Latinobased Picea and Mo-Chica of chef Ricardo Zarate and his partner, Stephane Bombet, has led to the most exciting restaurant to open in Marina del Rey since Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in the
1980s. Zarate has taken the small-plates ideas of his other restaurants and raised them several clicks at Paichë (named after a huge Amazonian hsh), focusing on the concept of a Peruvian izakaya—a casual place for friends to drop by, drink some beer and pisco, order more than they can eat, then order more because everything is so delicious. Zarate offers salads, ceviches, grilled items, frituras (fried) dishes, mains, and vegetables, all spread over a large menu. You can’t go wrong with the $29 Cuzco meal: two appetizers, something grilled, an entrée, and dessert.
There’s so much here you won’t find anywhere else, not least of which are the pacu ribs, made from piranha and dashed with lime miso and zapallo (pumpkin) puree. Chaufa de langosta means “fried rice with lobster”— can’t go wrong there. And the namesake hsh is cooked in a jalapeño-cilantro stew with pallares (limabeans). Chow it all down with a pisco sour expertly made by bartender Deysi Alvarez. The rest of the day (or night) will hy by before you know it. 13488 Maxella Avenue; 310-893-6100; paichela.com
RETRO A return to American classics, the most notable trend of 2013, from the baked Alaska at the Grill Room in Washington, D. C., to patty melts and carrot cake— and the year’s best co*cktail, a highball made with Michter’s rye and smoked Coca-Cola syrup—at the Butterfly, chef Michael White’s new homage to the Midwest, in New York. You’ll find chicken soup with carrots and clam chowder with pork belly and Wellfleet clams at Will Gilson’s Puritan & Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Donald Link serves fried fish sticks and chocolate-peanut-butter-banana pie with Butterfinger crumbles at his new restaurant, Pêche, in New Orleans. In Las Vegas, Kim Canteenwalla of Honey Salt is going against the high-roller grain by offering a rich cornedbeef hash seared crisp and hot. The trend actually began a few years ago, when the bottom fell out of the economy and serious chefs started gussying up mac and cheese. By now it’s clear that we— diners, writers, chefs—ac-
tually like this kind of food. (See also: veal parmigiana; wistfulness.)
Rolf and Daughters
NASHVILLE
Everything about Rolf and Daughters is suffused with gentle southern understatement. Its Web site tells “a little bit about us,” saying it’s really a “neighborhood restaurant” in the historic Werthan factory in Germantown that “takes
reservations for dinner by phone, you can leave a message and we will call you back to confirm,” and that they’re “humbled and superexcited to be a part of what’s happening right now in Nashville.” The site doesn’t even give the name of the shy owner, Philip Rolf Krajeck, who says he cooks “modern peasant food.” What that actually means: tender heritage chicken with lemon and soft, sweet garlic; fabulously rustic pastas, like gemelli with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, black kale, and Parmesan; and generous meatballs with a pungent gremolata (crushed garlic, lemon peel, and parsley). Or a simple plate of heritage country ham sliced thin on chewy sourdough toast with pretty little local radishes.
The vibe extends to handcrafted communal tables and the way walk-ins are cordially greeted. There is abo-
na fide industrial cast to the space, a former boiler room: worn brick and heavy metal framing and a lumberyard of reclaimed wood on the ceiling. It all fits together at Rolf and Daughters, an exemplar of the kind of excellence now found in great southern cities like Nashville. 700 Taylor Street; 615-866-9897; rolfanddaughters.com
Spoon Bar & Kitchen
DALLAS
At a time when the cosseting of guests seems rarer and respect for the hard-won mastery of cuisine is fading, chef John Tesar’s Spoon Bar & Kitchen is a reminder that excellence is not about spontaneous combustion in the kitchen. Tesar built his reputation at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas. Following a zigzag career, he has returned to open Spoon, certainly the most exciting new seafood restaurant in America since New York’s Marea opened four years ago.
Tesar’s restraint shines in dishes like rawyellowtail sweetened by chunks of Texas ruby-red grapefruit and roasted beets, and Singaporestyle chile lobster on Texas toast. His classic French training shows in the intensity of his red-wine reduction with a swordfish steak in a wild-mushroom crust. His recipe for potato gnocchi with jumbo lump crabmeat and black-truffle essence should be required reading at every culinary school.
Serve all this in a low-lit, low-decibel-level dining room in soft grays and seafoam colors, with a pleasantly dressed staff that knows its stuff and is cordial, and you have a restaurant whose coalescence of great, innovative food and sophisticated, casual ambience conspire to make it a totem of fine dining in Texas right now. 8220 Westchester Drive; 21 4-368-8220; spoonbarandkitchen.com
The Tiny Recipe
JALAPEÑO OIL: Stem, seed, and mince two medium jalapeño peppers. Combine with ‘/4 cup canola oil in a blender until creamysmooth. Strain, cool, and refrigerate until ready to use. Spoon over grilled seafood or meats as a spicy finishing touch.
Stampede 66
DALLAS
Thirty years ago, Stephan Pyles’s restaurant Routh Street Café, a pioneer of New Texas cuisine, appeared on this list. His namesake, Stephan Pyles, won him Chef of the Year honors in 2006. Now, with Stampede 66 (Pyles’s family once owned a Phillips 66 gas station), he has culled all he truly loves about the old and new traditions of his home state and brought them to vivid life
in a hugely entertaining restaurant. Video screens project rodeo scenes and Texas wit (Molly Ivins: “Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention”) alongside sculptures by western artists and a wondrous collection of longhorns. Then there’s the food—the sublimation of down-home cooking into great cuisine, from the crunchy honey-fried chicken with buttermilk biscuits and mashed-potato tots to the smoky barbecued beef brisket with potato salad. For dessert, go with anything— butterscotch pudding with salted caramel, sweet-corn icebox pie, chocolate custard and an ice cream float, with a rare bottle of the real-sugar Dr. Pepper. Anyone who can’t
wrap his arms around this food is likely without a pulse. 1717 McKinney Avenue; 214550-6966; stampede66.com
Trois Mec
LOSAMELES
Trois Mec (loosely “three guys”) is a bewildering exception to at least three of my ironclad rules for restaurants: A restaurant should have a telephone; it should invest in some kind of decor; and it shouldn’t use the previous tenant’s sign. In this case, the previous tenant was Raffallo’s Pizza, and its neon sign still glows in a dark strip mall where you hope nobody will hit you with a lead pipe. I’ve always said I’d rather eat great food in a dungeon than poor food in a castle, and at Trois Mec the cooking triumphs over its snarkily grim setting. A seat at the counter is a lucky perch from which to watch a master at work.
I first met Ludo Lefebvre when he was at the posh
L’Orangerie inL. A., doing haute French cuisine. At Trois Mec (the other two guys are chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo of Animal; the role of both here seems to be that of high-profile backer), his cooking is more personal. The place is hip, but the fey seriousness of hipster minimalism is absent. You can joke around with the now heavily tattooed Lefebvre, even asking him to turn down the dreadful French rap music (he may or may not oblige). And then you start to marvel at what’s on the plates: dishes like beef carpaccio with grilled yogurt (don’t ask how he pulls that one off), fermented black walnuts, and sweet caramelized eggplant. Or shredded-boiled-potato pulp with a rich brown butter and bonito flakes, an even richer onion béchamel, and a richer still flowery-sweet Laguiole cheese from southern France. Trois Mec is about nothing more than great taste, at least on the plate. The atmosphere you can laugh along with. Five courses, lots of extras, for about $75, with wine pairings another $49—cheap for sheer bliss. 716 North Highland Avenue; troismec.com
O VEAL PARMIGIANA
The most-talked-about dish of the year, as served each night by the dozen at Carbone in New York—at a whopping $50 per order. Yes, it’s good. That good? Your call. Keep in mind you’re paying for an experience: The waiters wear maroon tuxedos straight out of 1958, one cuts a hunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano onto your plate as you sit down, the Dino is blaring, and the menu offers joyfully updated versions of rigato ni alla vodka and lobster fra diavolo. Still: The veal parm is 50 bucks. But it’s great. But it’s 50 bucks. But...
Fake poll! 1.1 want to know my server's name. 2.1 don't really need to know my server's name. 3. Servers have names?
O VEGETARIAN DISH, BEST NEW Glazed-vegetable pastiche with sweet-andsour broth and black quinoa, at Nopa in Washington, D. C. The vegetables are cooked separately to their own perfect texture. (Get the meatballs as a starter.)
Virtù
SCOTTSDALE,ARIZONA
I've long admired the inventive southwestern cooking of chef Gio Osso, and now, with just twenty-five seats at Virtù, he’s proven himself one of America’s finest interpreters of Mediterranean food—though he adds some Arizona swagger. It’s always obvious when a chef cooks
what he himself loves to eat, and Osso does, turning out inspired dishes like grilled orata (a fish also known as bream) coated with lemonoregano crumbs and sided with a Calabrese peperonata that has a scorpion’s bite. He makes his own cream-centered burrata and tomato marmalade, whips fat-mottled mortadella into a puree for spreading on smoky country bread, and reduces cherries, hazelnuts, and chocolate to make a soursweet gianduja sauce to lavish on his smoked duck.
If you can’t decide what to order, then drop in for Outspoken Hour, from 4:00 to
6:00 P.M., when Osso offers smaller versions of dishes from the regular menu, at $4 to $6, so you can get a taste of most everything. Every restaurant should do this. 3701 North Marshall Way; 480946-3477; virtuscottsdale.com
O WATER Tap is fine, thanks.
O WISTFULNESS Two
years ago, I coauthored a book called Menu Design in America: 1850-1985. Now comes Cool Culinaria (coolculinaria.com), a company that collects vintage restaurant artwork—from menus, co*cktail lists, and signs—and reprints it on thick stock. Something is afoot. (See also: retro.)
O WORST NEW DISH
Three thin fingers of pasta stuffed with a forgettable filling, on which the waiter pours strong black coffee, brewed tableside in a Chemex pot. Served, with a
straight face, at the Pass in Houston.
O XANTHAN GUM Still one of the favorite pantry items of the great chemist/chef Wylie Dufresne, whose groundbreaking modernist restaurant, WD-50, in New York, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2013. He also opened Alder, a captivating place nearby, where the fettuccine tastes of pastrami on rye.
O ZABAGLIONE One of the
greatest desserts of all time: a foamy custard made from egg yolks, sugar, and sweet wine. For some reason—maybe the funness of saying zabaglione— it’s showing up at a lot of restaurants, like Stella 34 in New York and MC Kitchen in Miami. Plus, we needed something for Z. ft
RESTAURANT OF THE year
Betony, New york
You step off the Fifty-seventh Street sidewalk into a soaring dining room lined with cozy tufted banquettes; shafts of soft light slide down faux-antique moldings and painted brick walls. Behind the twelve-seat bar, bottles rest on stacks of ascending backlit cubicles. Servers outfitted discreetly in black and white buzz around Eamon Rock\ I ey, the friendly, utterly professional general manager, impeccable in Brooks Brothers. I I Guests know not to dress for some gastrodive on the Lower East Side. I I The wine list by sommelier Luke Wohlers—who, like Rockey and chef Bryce Shuman, I I is a veteran of the vaunted restaurant Eleven Madison Park, downtown—is fifty pages ^B well-thought-out, and to consult him is to engage in gentlemanly conversation. No menu item tops $36, and some people just nosh at the bar on small dishes, which include tantalizing whipped-foie-gras bonbons marinated in Calvados brandy, with a crunchy bark of candied cashews revealing a cool, soft center and a dusting of black pepper and cinnamon sparking them up. There's also a canny playón the tuna melt, transformed here into a round of brioche layered with sushi-grade tuna, chive mayonnaise, creamy melted Valle d'Aosta fontina cheese, tomato, and a dash of wood sorrel. Canny and addictive. Shuman wants every ingredient to reinforce the others and pack a surprise. He cooks short ribs in beef fat to a rosy succulence at 135 deg rees for two days. The ribs, now suffused with flavor, are then seared over charcoal and paired with nubbins of sweetbreads and romaine. It is a stunning sublimation of beef that joins a pantheon of iconic dishes that include Daniel Humm's foie-grasstuffed roast chicken at the Nomad and Daniel Boulud's truffled DB Burger. Betony is a signal that fine dining can thrive without pretense or ridiculous prices when driven by a brilliant young American chef and buoyed by a staff eagerto grant each guest's request. 47 West Fifty-seventh Street; 212-465-2400; betony-nyc.com
Half croissant, half doughnut. Unleashed by Dominique Ansel Bakery in Manhattan. May cause idiocy in people who refer to themselves as foodies. Symptoms include waiting in line for four hours starting at 6:00 A.M.
— Çÿiào$ ík QjeaJi —
At EMBEYA in Chicago, chef Thai Dang combines tender rabbit meat with blazing Thai chiles, fresh garbanzo beans for texture, and royal-trumpet mushrooms for a woodsy backbeat in a dish that is as hearty as it is bursting with flavor.
BOOK COVER
OFTHE YEAR
Those are chef Paul Liebrandt's hands inserted into a fish, holding its guts and touching his face. Who's hungry?
ghatuity
A subject of debate, instigated by the elimination of tipping by New York's Sushi Yasuda in June. ("Following the custom in Japan, Sushi Yasuda's service staff are fully compensated by their salary.") Others weighed in:
“The tipping svstem catches us all in a regressive cesspool of our own worst prejudices.” -ELIZABETH GUNNISON, ESQUIRE.COM
“Considered eliminatingtippingyears ago, and then servers asked to keep things as they were. Your opinion please?” -@DHMEYER, RESTAURATEUR DANNY MEYER
“We are more than kicking around the idea @momof*cku of figuring out how to increase prices removing tips w/o revolt” —@DAVIDCHANG
“[Tipping! is irrational, outdated, ineffective, confusing, proneto abuse and sometimes discriminatory” -PETE WELLS, THE NEW YORK TIMES
THE BEST NEW PLACES TO
EAT ALONE
WASHINGTON, D. C. Number of seats at the bar: 18 EMBEYA CHICAGO Number of seats at the bar: 20 STAMPEDE 66 DALLAS Number of seats at the bar: 35
ÇpktjeA Which are showing up everywhere— from the fat house pretzel at Bronwyn to the salted-pretzel ice cream at Tongue & Cheek in Miami Beach to... the pretzel bacon cheeseburger at Wendy’s.
Rye
American whiskey made from at least 51 percent rye, and the unofficial spirit of 2013, thank heavens. Small-batch producers like Redemption and WhistlePig along with standbys like Old Overholt and Rittenhouse have reacquainted us with rye’s notas-sweet-as-bourbon pleasures. Bully Boy, a new distillery in Boston, is using rye in its excellent American Straight whiskey All are so rich ana interesting and delicious that you won’t mistake them for Canadian Club. (Due respect.)
