food, and other musings

Artichokes

Aren't these baby artichokes gorgeous? When I bought them at the farmer's market, the vendeuse sighed, "They look just like little flowers, don't they?" Indeed: artichokes are the flowers of the thistle plant. The buds pop out all along the stalk, and the smallest buds towards the bottom are picked and sold as baby artichokes. They range in color from deep eggplant to bright green. These were a mix, but all had prickly tips so long and sharp they looked like talons!

Trimming an artichoke is a depressing exercise since so much is thrown in the garbage (though I did it with these since I wanted them for a risotto). I usually prefer to buy jumbo 'chokes, cut off the stems, snip off the prickly tops with scissors and whack off the top inch and then steam or boil away for 45 minutes. To eat, I peel off the leaves, dipping the bottom of each one in melted butter or mayonnaise and tugging at the soft meat on the end, eating my way around the artichoke till I get to the thistle inside. Once this fuzzy part is scooped out, the luscious heart is all mine for the chomping.

Beats those puckery store-bought artichokes every time.

Recipe: Risotto de Printemps

Inspired by Spring's bountiful display at the farmer's market last weekend...

I've always wanted to start a piece that way, mainly so I could make fun of it. Who writes those kinds of things??? I hate food writing like that. I don't do that.

Do I?

Moving on, it was actually at the grocery store (gasp!) that I noticed fava beans are back in season. I love their long pods, all fuzzy inside, the little beans snug and safe in their soft beds. Sure, shelling them, parboiling, then peeling is a bit of work but it goes fast. I started thinking risotto and looked around the kitchen. I had some shell peas from my biweekly veggie delivery that have finally plumped up with nice-sized peas, and a bowl full of baby artichokes in shades of mahogany and green. All that went into a spontaneous spring vegetable risotto I snottily named Risotto de Printemps. But hey, folks, it's ironic.

Risotto de Printemps
Yield: 4

1.25 lb. fresh fava beans in pods (approx. 1 cup shelled)
6 fresh baby artichokes (or 1 cup artichoke hearts, chopped)
1 lemon
1.25 lb. fresh shell peas in pods (approx. 1 cup shelled or thawed from the freezer)
2 TBSP olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 onion, diced
1 cup arborio rice
4 cups chicken stock (plus 2 cups water if needed)
1/3 cup Parmigiano cheese
salt and pepper to taste

1. To prepare fresh fava beans: Bring pot of water to boil. Meanwhile, shell beans. Parboil shelled beans 60 seconds, then using a slotted spoon scoop out into a bowl of cold water. Let cool, then peel. Set aside.
2. To prepare fresh baby artichokes: Mariquita Farm does a great job explaining this and if you've never done it before it's nice to have a diagram. But I'll give it a shot. Cut off the stem till flush with the bottom of the artichoke. Snap back all the tough outer leaves. Once you've reached the soft, yellow-green inner leaves, cut off the remaining green or purple tops, about an inch (or so). Cut remaining artichoke in half length-ways, then into bite-sized pieces. Rub with lemon while cutting to prevent discoloration. Set aside.
3. To shell fresh peas: Duh.
4. Bring chicken stock to a near boil. Meanwhile, in a large soup pot, heat oil over medium till hot but not smoking. Add garlic, then 30 seconds later onion. Saute till soft, 5 minutes. Add artichokes and saute, maybe 3 minutes just to start to soften and warm them. Add rice and stir to coat.
5. Add one cup of stock to rice mixture and stir almost constantly till absorbed. Continue adding stock, one cup at a time, waiting till all the stock in the pot has been absorbed by the rice before you add more. It's hard to say how much you'll need, but I usually use between 4-6 cups. If you run out of stock, just start using hot water. Add liquid for about 15-20 minutes until the rice is soft but not falling apart.
6. Grate fresh Parmigiano cheese into risotto, saving a few shavings for garnish. Salt and pepper to taste.

"I look like an EGG but I identify as a COOKIE"

Sunday night my friend J. and I went to a one-woman show at the Hotel Rex near Union Square. I'd read about it on Cooking with Amy and it sounded like a fun performance. Heather Gold, a stand-up comedienne, bakes chocolate chip cookies on-stage while talking about her life growing up Jewish in Niagara Falls, Canada, then going to college at Yale and figuring out that she's gay. She spends the next decade trying to figure out if that's okay with her or not. Her deeply personal journey aside, the real selling point for me was the chocolate cookies the audience gets to eat at the end of the show!

J. and I met at the cozy hotel restaurant, Cafe Andree, for the convenience, but dinner was pretty good and reasonably priced. The small dining room seats about 50; lone diners could borrow one of the many books lining the shelves to enjoy over dinner. We skipped the tasting menus - 4 courses for $34 (or a vegetarian option for $25) - in favor of small and medium plates like empanadas with beef, potato and hard-boiled egg; lightly dressed organic field greens; grilled prawns with fava beans and a queso-filled corn cake; and grilled sirloin mini-tacos with vanilla/habanero pepper pesto. We walked out $21 poorer each, with just enough appetite for the cookies.

The show was fun, if long in a few stretches. Gold had a guest chef that night. Lewis Rossman from Cetrella down in Half Moon Bay chopped pecans ("pronounced PEE-cans in the South," Gold accurately noted) and Scharffen Berger chocolate and answered questions about learning to cook, favorite foods (as a kid, cheesecake, as an adult, pizza). He was one of the highlights of the show. Gold tells her story according to the phases of baking: dry, wet, mix, form, bake and serve. Funny, insightful, even cute at times, Gold interacts with the audience (we get to stir the dough). She makes fun of of who she is but leaves you feeling that, like many of us, she's finally made peace with her place in the world.

The audience was a mix of gay and straight, the laughs were plentiful, the empathy real, and the cookies damn fine.

I look like an EGG but I identify as a COOKIE, tickets available now for new shows starting in June. Guest chefs like Tartare's George Morrone visit the stage often. Moving to NY sometime this fall.

Antique Garage

Next time you're in Soho (she writes, oh-so casually) and in need of a late afternoon cuppa or early evening glass of wine, stop by Antique Garage. On an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in April, Little Sister and I found ourselves longing for a quiet place to sit and watch people float by on the afternoon breeze, resting our feet, mine blistered from the new shoes I'd bought. (Fabulous shoes, I might add, all silver sequins and sultry beads, très harem girl.) We went in search of a wine bar Little Sister had found a while back with M., wandering from street to street aimlessly, but didn't chance upon it. Just when that blissful glass of white seemed out of reach, Antique Garage appeared from the shimmering black pavement like a mirage in the urban desert.

Literally built into a garage, the storefront has a door and a garage door, both open to the city that pleasant day. Tables and sofas spilled out onto the sidewalk. We nabbed a two-top inside next to a long sprawling table that surely once was set with silver pitchers, crystal cut-glass goblets and creamy tablecloths to serve mustachioed dignitaries, robber barons and coquettish debutantes. The place is decked out entirely like your grandmother's living room, from the elaborate chandeliers that drop sparkles from the ceiling, to the velvet claw-footed sofas, to the mismatched china plates and faux silverware. Walls are crammed with old oil paintings, portraits of children and matriarchs and horses. A whiff of faded fortunes permeates the air. We settled down to a half carafe of Pinot Grigio, served in an old medicine bottle. After a few glasses, our lips loosened and hair tumbling down, we ordered a small snack. The menu, billed as Mediterranean tapas, has strong Middle Eastern and Turkish influences. We scooped up hummus, thick and intensely sesame-d, on unctuous fried pita sticks, then dipped soft foccacia into a light bright cucumber tatziki. Definitely not your grandmother's comfort food, but perfect for a pre-dinner, post-shopping nibble.

Antique Garage, New York, 41 Mercer Street, 212-219-1019

Recipe: Strawberry Bread

Strawberries, the smell of childhood summers. Sweet, plump to bursting and heart-shaped, like a box of chocolates on Valentine's Day. Red and sun-ripened, staining my fingers pink as I pick them fresh from the fields of Pungo, Virginia, age 10, walking the rows with Little Brother and Little Sister, enjoying the small, dull thunk each berry makes when I throw it into my plastic bucket. We eat a few along the way, the June heat beating down on the tops of our heads, and when our short legs grow tired we find our father. We raise our buckets up to the farmer to weigh, proud of our haul, eyes shining. "Look what we did!" we seem to say with pink smiles. Little Brother especially loves strawberries - in shortcake, on cereal, plain.

Strawberry Bread
Yield: 2 loaves

This recipe is courtesy of Kew on eGullet. I'd never seen a recipe for strawberry bread till I ran across the thread there, and it sounded delicious, sweet, a perfect breakfast bread to accompany Spring as she continues to battle the lingering days of Winter here in our City by the Bay.

3 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 cups sliced strawberries, mashed
1 1/2 cups cooking oil (or a healthier option, 1/2 cup oil + 1 cup milk)
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour two bread loaf pans (or butter and flour one pan and bake one loaf at a time).
2. Beat eggs with an electric mixer on medium until thick and lemon-color, 5 minutes. Add sugar and beat just until combined. Add mashed berries and oil, and mix till combined.
3. Stir dry ingredients together. Add to the above and stir until just moistened.
4. Pour batter into pans and bake until toothpick inserted in centers comes out clean, about 50 minutes. Cool in pans 10 minutes. Loosen edges and remove from pans and cool completely on wire rack. Wrap and store overnight before slicing.

Babbo

Oh, Babbo...(sigh). More a temple than a restaurant, where the faithful go to kneel in reverent worship of that delicate combination of flour, eggs and salt that we call pasta. When it's truly good, it is nothing less than a celebration of the divine. At Babbo, it is, in a word, perfect.

On our second night in New York, Mr. Food Musings, Little Sister and The Boyfriend made our pilgrimmage to Mecca. It was the one place I most wanted to eat in the city, even rousing myself at 7 am one morning a month prior to get on the phone and secure a table. I coerced my dining companions into choosing the pasta tasting menu with me - either the table orders it, or no one does - and then sat back to count the days.

The taxi dropped us off at the restaurant owned by larger-than-life chef Mario Batali and his partner Joe Bastianich, and I paused outside the door. I wanted to savor the "before." Deep breaths taken, we crossed the threshold and were promptly seated downstairs after handing off coats. Our waiter greeted us with a plate of ceci bruschetta, a salad of warmed chickpeas, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, crushed black olives, garlic, and a mysterious green herb that kept me and Little Sister guessing all night long. We gobbled it up on toasts, looking up at one another only to moan and marvel at its genius. Little Sister and I tried to identify the ingredients; stumped by the herb, we tossed ideas back and forth in a volley that would have made Venus and Serena proud. At first we thought mint, for its cool hint of sweetness, then basil when the peppery flavor grew stronger, and finally wondered if the subtle anise taste could be tarragon. "You have to figure out how to make this," Little Sister begged. A week later, research produced the recipe and solved the mystery: rosemary and basil, no mint or tarragon in sight. As for the soupçon of licorice, it could have been a phantom of my imagination, but I stand by my palate and wonder if the Chef added a little something extra the night of our visit.

Ordering was a snap - "We're having the pasta menu," I said, swallowing my grin - but the wine was up for discussion. Our sommelier (Colim, I think he said) tended to us all night long, selecting a white to start that would take The Boyfriend, who suffers migraines at the mere whiff of a red, all the way through the meal. The 2000 Vespa Bianco Bastianich ($49) is a mix of chardonnay, sauvignon blanc and picolit grapes. We got melon and fig from the bouquet and my hesitation about drinking a wine produced by one of the owners - it smacks of self-promotion - was dispelled in a sip. The bottle lasted us through the first and second pastas, a tagliatelle black with squid ink and tossed with peas and Parmigiano cheese followed by asparagus and ricotta "Mezzalune" with scallion butter. The tagliatelle was sweet on the tongue with each new soft explosion of freshly shelled peas; the half-moon ravioli were redolent with lemon and scallion (I later wrote "paradise!" in my notes about this dish).

Colim returned to suggest a wine from the bonarda grape, similar to barbera. The Vercesi del Castellazzo Oltrepo Pavese Bonarda "Fatila" 1999 ($55) stands up well to Batali's spicier meat dishes, but first we had a sort of palate cleansing pasta, a garganelli with "funghi trifolati," simple tubes with a few slices of earthy mushroom and a dousing of cheese. (I noticed the waiter grated less cheese on the ladies' plates then he did on the mens', out of care either for our tender palates or for our even more tender thighs that threaten to plump up at the slightest hint of cheese. He needn't have worried about mine, rock hard with muscle as they are. Ahem.) As he cheerfully poured the wine, Colim professed the garganelli to be his favorite dish.

Next came what was probably my favorite of the night, a pasta Batali is famous for: Marco's pyramids with passato di pomodoro. Squat pyramids, boxier than the name implies, were moistened with tomato and hid rich hunks of beef shoulder. We each had four, but thankfully Little Sister's unpractised stomach was beginning to tire and I snagged an extra off her plate with little resistance. We moved on to our third and final bottle of wine, a 2000 Ioppa Ghemme ($44) to take us through the final course, a pappardelle with lamb bolognese.

Each pasta was, literally, perfect. It was like supping on pasta's Platonic ideal, a fantasy of humble ingredients from forest (mushroom), farm (beef shoulder) and sea (squid ink) transformed by the touch of a master no less talented than da Vinci. And yet - and yet - it was not like dining at the French Laundry, where most of your dinner conversation is taken up beholding the exquisite meal in front of you and searching for adjectives to describe each swallow. Batali's cooking produces food that, through its flawless simplicity, takes a step back and permits the dinner table's natural joie de vivre to shine.

Dessert was gorgeous: plump mozzarella with Cara Cara oranges, mild and spare of juice, with a fruity olive oil and dash of salt, a harmonized presentation of four simple flavors. The menu indicated the last dessert would be saffron panna cotta with mango sorbetto, and we were delighted when the kitchen sent out a different dish for each of us. In addition to the trembling panna cotta, we devoured a chocolate pistachio semi-freddo, warm pineapple crostata and a sultry yogurt cheesecake.

You may have noticed that our sommelier, Colim, is mentioned nearly as much as the pasta. He truly made the night, not only because of the wines he suggested, but because he was so engaged in his craft. We never once discussed price, and noticed at the end of the meal that none of the wines had cost more than $55. His mission was to stretch our palates, not our wallets, and he lingered with every pour to tell us as much about the wine as we wanted to hear. I peppered him with questions about the grapes, many unfamiliar (picolit, bonarda) and the regions. Each new glass came to the table with the smallest dribble of wine having washed down the sides of the glass. When I asked him why he did this, he explained that it dispels any hint of detergent that might linger in the glass and influence the wine's bouqet or taste. Little Sister and The Boyfriend confessed to being intimidated by sommeliers; like many people, they think when you have a nice meal you are supposed to know what wine to order, that it marks you as a pathetic amateur to ask for help. They are dead wrong. The sommelier's job is to taste wines and select them specifically with the menu in mind. They know their wine list far better than you do, unless you are Robert Parker, and will happily work with warring palates to find the one bottle on the list that suits. Think of it as having access to the chef, the person whose tastebuds and vision have put together the flavors in front of you. Wouldn't you jump at the chance to consult with him before ordering from his menu, asking about each dish, how he prepares it, how he selects ingredients, reading his face to uncover which dish is his special baby, which might make your eyes light up at first bite? That is the joy of consulting a great sommelier.

That night, ours was the joy of eating and drinking well, from the first bite to the last sip.

Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, New York, 110 Waverly Place, 212-777-0303

Recipe: Southwestern Chicken Salad

Little Brother was visiting me last week, all the way from...well, from where he lives. (Sorry, I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you. He works for the Government.)

Anyway, he's been traveling for work a lot and eating in restaurant after restaurant, which gets pretty tiring after a while, so I promised him some home cooking. We invited a few friends over and crammed five folks around our tiny kitchen table for a simple meal. Little Brother made his famous salsa (sorry folks, a secret recipe) and I made guacamole and a southwestern chicken salad. It's one of those dishes that I make all the time that came about one day when I was trying to use up leftovers. The secret, I hate to say, is in the store-bought dressing. One day I'll don my white lab coat and buckle down with beakers, test tubes and a Bunsen burner to reproduce the special sauce in my own kitchen, but till then you'll have to find it on your grocery store shelves.

Southwestern Chicken Salad
Yield: 6

This salad is robust with lots of protein and vegetables, but if you want to make sure you don't go away hungry, just make a few cheese quesadillas to cut and serve alongside. I just shred cheddar onto a corn tortilla, stick it in a non-stick pan with another tortilla on top and work it around with my fingers till it's time to flip it over. When the cheese starts to ooze out the sides it's ready to eat. Olé!

1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breasts
2 TBSP olive oil
1 TBSP cumin
1 TBSP coriander
1/2 TBSP pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1 head of lettuce (red leaf is what I use, but most anything will do)
2 large tomatoes, diced
1 (10-oz?) can corn, drained
1 14-oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 green pepper, diced
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
6 TBSP (or so) Briannas Home Style Chipotle Cheddar Dressing
handful tortilla chips, crushed

1. Preheat oven to broil. In a small pan over medium heat, stir cumin, coriander and pepper 45 seconds, till just fragrant. Add salt and set aside.
2. Oil chicken breasts and drag them through the spice mixture, coating both sides. Broil 4-5 minutes per side, turning once, till cooked through. Cool thoroughly, then cut into inch-long pieces.
3. Meanwhile, combine lettuce, tomatoes, corn, black beans, green pepper and cilantro in a large bowl. Add chicken, then toss with dressing (to taste). Top with crushed tortilla chips and serve.

R. to the Rescue!

You may recall that while in New York, our trusty digital camera slipped off by itself for a night on the town and has never been heard from again. Well, my oh-so cagey plea for help has been answered! My friend R. was recently in Vega$ where she was the lucky winner of a Sanyo digitial camera, and she's been nice enough to loan it to me for use on the blog. My exciting award-winning photos will be back as of my next post. Thank you, R.!

Katz's Delicatessen

You haven't had pastrami till you've had it at Katz's. In fact, you haven't even seen it till you've watched the cutters (that's what they call those fellows behind the counter in their flimsy paper caps) carve it off for your sandwich.

(The observant reader will note that I did not use the more elegant verb "shave" when describing how they shear the meat. Trust me, shave is the wrong word. So is slice. Those wimpy verbs imply thin wisps of meat falling off the knife. Katz's pastrami - well, thin it ain't.)

A few days earlier, Mr. Food Musings and I had botched our first lunch in the City - jet lag and some work emails got in the way of an early start - so we bagged visiting John's , a pizzeria in Greenwich Village coveted for its charred, thin crust pies, in favor of anything still serving food at 3 pm in mid-town.

We were determined that our second lunch would be a quintessential old New York experience and settled on Katz's. We took the subway to the Lower East Side and marched down Houston till we saw the sign. As soon as we walked in, we were each handed a ticket similar to the kind you get when you enter a raffle in the fruitless hopes of winning a brand new color TV. Signs warned us not to lose it, or risk paying $50. I looked at Mr. FM with alarm, and confusion. "What is the ticket for?" I wondered. He shrugged. We made our way to the counter which runs along the far wall. More signs instructed us to get in a cutter's line. Menus were posted on the wall behind the counter. The customers milled about in no kind of discernable line, like puppies fighting for a teat, bumping into each other and changing direction. Feeling confusion come between me and my pastrami sandwich, I started to panic. "Where do we order?" I wailed. Sensing a storm, Mr. FM spied tables that indicated waiter service and quickly steered me to safety. I sat down and immediately the smile returned to my face. This I knew how to do!

The menu was basic: a list of sandwiches, cold or hot, of Katz's famous meats: pastrami, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue. Traditional cold cuts like turkey and ham were offered in sub sandwiches, and potato and cheese knishes or french fries could be had on the side. I saw a bowl of chicken matzo ball walk by; the day was too hot to try some ourselves, but it would have been my choice if there was snow on the ground. We started with a hot dog to share. Mr. Food Musings doused his in spicy mustard while mine was dressed with both mustard and God's gift to the condiment world, ketchup. The dog was hot, just pulled out of boiling water, and had a strong beefy taste, nothing like the dogs you get at the ball park. Our teeth pulled at the casing to release the meat within.

Then the waiter brought a plate of pickles, big dill slices and chunks of bright green cuke, barely pickled, and some dull grayish-green pickled tomatoes (which we declined to try. Who knows what we're missing, you say? Who wants to know, I say!)

Then the sandwiches arrived.

Mine was rye and pastrami. Nothing more, spicy mustard optional. I eyeballed the fat hunks of pastrami, piled 10 or more to a sandwich; I'd say they each measured nearly 1/3 of an inch thick. They glistened with fatty juices that soaked ever so slightly into the sturdy rye bread, which had but a few caraway seeds, very mild next to the smoky meat and peppery black crust. I had to remove half of the pastrami to even fit my mouth around the sandwich, and though I did my best, I couldn't manage even half of it.

Mr. FM did a more admirable job, eating a full half and a touch more of his combo - half pastrami, half tongue. (Blech! I didn't try that either.) "This is the best pastrami I've ever had," he confessed in reverent tones.

Following a Katz's tradition, we both ordered Dr. Brown's sodas (cream soda for me and root beer for him). We looked around while we finished them up; the place is nothing fancy, cheap tables and floors, the walls crammed with photos of the owner and all the celebrities who've visited. We picked out Michael Imperioli and James Gandolfini from The Sopranos and Madeline Albright. The owner made the rounds during lunch, stopping at each table to ask how we were enjoying the food.

And then, when we had cried "Mercy!" the waiter came by and took our tickets to write the total on. Aha! After careful observation, Mr. FM confirmed that if you order at the counter, the cutters take your ticket and do the same, and then you turn those into the cashier on the way out. An efficient system - the cutters don't have to handle the cash register and there's no bottleneck of people trying to pay for their food, balancing a tray piled high while their tummies rumble with hunger. Satisfied with the food and the ticket mystery solved, we paid and went off for a walk in Greenwich Village. A perfect New York afternoon.

Katz's Delicatessen, New York, 205 East Houston, 212-254-2246

Les Halles

In the end it came down to the frites.

Faced with hundreds – thousands? – of New York restaurants, Mr. Food Musings and I had to make some tough choices for our first meal together in the Big Apple. We settled on Anthony Bourdain’s Brasserie Les Halles. Oh, you could argue that carnivorous lust or curiosity about the place Bourdain immortalized in Kitchen Confidential drove us there; Mr. Food Musings and I both get a kick out of Bourdain-the-writer’s irreverence, bawdy sense of humor and brusque determination to tell it like it is. But the proverbial straw was the frites, considered by many to be New York’s finest.

Our left-coast stomachs surprised us by rumbling an hour ahead of our 11 pm reservation, so we set off for dinner early, fingers crossed. Outside on the streets of the Flatiron district, a handful of people, their backs hunched against the wind, trudged home after a long day at the office. We ducked inside, thankful to be out of the blustery night. Globe lights that could have been stolen from a Parisian sidewalk cast a dim glow, and we grabbed stools at the battered bar while the hostess readied our table, graceful about the last minute change in plans. The décor was so French I was surprised not to see a cloud of cigarette smoke hovering above our heads, and the noise was a steady, unapologetic roar.

As we sat down, glasses of the house Sancerre in hand, snatches of conversation in German, French and Spanish bubbled up from the din; keeping us company was an international crowd out for a comfortably late dinner. I knew what I wanted without even glancing at the menu: frisée aux lardons and steak frites. The bed of crunchy frisée, pale at the roots and green at the lacy tips, hid fatty nuggets of bacon, enough that I could scoop them up three to the forkful rather than mete them out parsimoniously bite-by-bite. I missed the softly poached egg that traditionally sits ready to spill its golden guts over the lettuces, but made do with the “Roquefort crouton” that leaned precariously to one side, no doubt overburdened by its tower of crumbly blue cheese as well as its fussy name. My empty salad plate dispatched to the kitchen by an insouciant waiter, I swayed to the faux-filet Bercy’s siren song of sirloin and red wine butter that slowly leaked over the hot steak as I cut into it, juices pooling next to the frites. And oh, the frites! Glorious frites! They looked as though they’d spent the afternoon in a tanning booth, so bronzed and crisp were they on the outside, still soft and fluffy inside. Tart mountains of ketchup helped me lap them up. I seem to recall a small salad on the side of the plate, but shrugged it off as garnish. Why bother?

Mr. Food Musings was in the throes of a nearly epileptic duck craving that night, but a stern glance from me was enough to steer him back to steak. (You see, I, er, we had romanticized that our first night in New York would take place over platters piled high with nearly rare beef and hot fries; one silly little duck was not about to get in the way of that memory-to-be.) He slaked his duck thirst by ordering a salade landaise instead. A leg of duck confit and toast smeared with duck pâté accompanied the lettuce. He allowed me a nibble of the pâté, and it was everything a pâté should be: creamy, slightly smoky, the deep, throaty bass note in the culinary symphony. Then he tucked into the ribeye, appropriately cross-hatched on the grill, all thoughts of duck banished for good. We washed it all back with a 2000 Chateau Redortier Gigondas from the Rhone Valley.

Groaning, we pledged to skip dessert, but Mr. FM’s natural gluttony got the best of us. (What? I’m just a dainty little girl. Blame him.) He was about to vote for crème brulée when our waiter told us about the special, a strawberry rhubarb tart. I’ve been eyeing the fresh rhubarb at the market for weeks, and with the assurance that a scoop of vanilla ice cream could be added, Mr. FM gave his blessing. The tart, cutely miniature, was circled by a moat of crème anglaise that, even without the ice cream, was much too sweet and we left it on the plate.

Next time we go, if I’m feeling truly decadent, I’ll order the hamburger. Ground to order in the butchery next door, it’s grilled and topped with slices of foie gras and truffles, then shoved onto a plate next to a pile of frites. Oh, Anthony, how could you?

Like its chef, Les Halles does not apologize for its ways – you either love it or you get the hell out, and tant pis for you. But what is not to love?

Brasserie Les Halles, New York, 411 Park Avenue South, 212-679-4111