Rucola

Issue: How to get inside my brain and create my perfect restaurant.

Rule: First you must mess with the time-space continuum and quite literally go into my head. Then you must create a restaurant in Boerum Hill. It must be on a quiet corner with exposed brick and a wonderful window seat. This restaurant must also be open in the morning for iced coffee and be placed directly in my path on my walk to work. It is also of extreme importance that the menu focus on seasonal vegetables and all of those buzz words that I fall for every damn time- local, artisinal, delicious.

Application: Rucola is on the corner of Dean Street and Bond in Boerum Hill. It opens up early in the morning to fulfill my coffee needs but also to stoke my jealousy of the beautiful Boerum Hill families that apparently don't need to work, but do get to enjoy the pleasure of a long breakfast watching the sun rise above the brownstones. Mornings are a great time to take in the simple beauty of restaurant with potted herbs out front and sunlight streaming through the windows. The cold brewed Stumptown coffee somehow manages to be much better than my home made cold brewed Stumptown coffee. Weird.
Dinner at Rucola is also a great experience. I have been remiss in waiting so long to write about a delicious dinner I had with 4 wonderful ladies over a month ago. We got the best table in the room with windows on two sides of us. The wine list had many affordable bottles and we settled on a delicious crisp white (my usual) for less than $30. We started with an amazing bread and cheese course. The fresh bread was certainly one of the highlights. A soft cheese and rhubarb chutney went well with the salty, soft bread. A side of asparagus (now regrettably gone from the local markets) was served with egg and a whole artichoke was a big hit for appetizers. The main course was house made strezapretti with green garlic pesto and zucchini. The pesto was delicious and not too sharp and the strands of zucchini were the perfect vegetable accompaniment. Another diner had a lamb ragu with an awesome, clean tomato taste. The menu changes frequently and seems influenced by the seasons and what looks good.

Conclusion: Overall, my new favorite place. The staff is friendly (even before 9 am!) and knowledgeable. There are some familiar faces including a former bartender from Prime Meats who made me a mean Champagne cocktail once upon a time, guests who eat out in Brooklyn often should recognize many people here.
The room itself is simple and pretty and the meals are also quite simple and pretty. A whole day at Rucola would mean coming for the coffee, staying for the cheese and bread, finishing with a cocktail and a smile on your face.

Frankies Spuntino

Issue: How to take the stress out of a small birthday dinner.

Rule: When planning a celebration dinner you dear blogger can go a little crazy. (Your dear blogger is also a bit of a worrier.) There is no perfect way to make it happen. The list of invitees has to be much smaller than the list of friends so I always fear making someone feel left out. I also worry that the expense will price people out of a delicious dinner. Finding a central location is always tricky. How can I take the stress out of the dining experience?

Application: Well, to help me explain I have re-enlisted former guest blogger Eric Mancini for his view on Frankies 457 on Court Street. Eric can attest to whether this group dining experience worked. Eric, take it away:
Planning a birthday dinner with ten guests is deceptively hard. Just pick a restaurant the birthday boy or girl likes, make invitations and send out the carrier pigeons, right? Well, it's more complicated than that. You've got ten different palettes, ten different income levels. Different social worlds (friends, colleague's, spouses) colliding. I realize I am not breaking new ground with these observations. What I'm trying to do here is explain that when we ended up at Frankies 457 on Court St. for a birthday dinner with friends, it was no accident. Frankies represented the best possible triangulation between great food, affordable prices, and festive (but classy) atmosphere. We had an amazing meal.
Frankies has apparently made a name for itself among the upper levels of Brooklyn dining establishments. Living outside of Brooklyn near one of its feeder cities (Providence – sort of a minor league baseball team version of Brooklyn), I came into Frankies unburdened by expectations. The street itself gave me hope, since I had had such a great meal at Buttermilk Channel during a past visit, and Prime Meats always intrigued me, though I could never physically get it (both times it was as packed as an Italian airport tram). The restaurant itself is intimidating at first: it's shaped like a bottle, narrow in front with a wider back dining area and a spacious (for the city) outdoor area. The first glance from the front door had me worried that we would be fighting with our elbows for every square inch, but seconds later we were standing outside, drink in hand with the elbow alert lowered to light green.
With a party of our size, family style eating is the de rigeur standard at Frankies. Family style as a restaurant mode brings up some unpleasant, button busting memories for me. With a subpar restaurant what it means is 'you pay a little more, and we add so much pasta to your chicken parm that it can feed your whole table twice over, with plenty of leftovers to slowly coagulate in Styrofoam containers in your fridge. This was ideal in college, but nowadays just give me a small, well prepared portion of something real and good.
Fortunately, Frankies does it right. First of all, there's no ordering. At some point in the night, the food starts coming, and at some point it stops. No input is required between these two sign posts. Lack of control might be a negative for some, but I welcome sitting down at a good restaurant and submitting to the will of the chef, knowing I'm in good hands. And the portions were calculated with scientific accuracy. Everyone left full, but no worse for the wear, with some very small boxes of leftovers that were just too delicious to leave behind.
Speaking of which – the food! The plates of meat, cheese and vegetables came out first – high quality products heaped on the plate along with baskets of spongy, salty focaccia bread. All of the plates differed in some basic way, leading to many family style moments of passing, grabbing, and ladling and secret snacking before the real eating began. The main courses came next, and they revealed the real strength of Frankies: unbelievably fresh, delectably springy house made pasta. Our two main courses were cavatelli in brown butter sage sauce and gnocchi in a sweet red. Now, being Italian myself, I'm fairly critical of this kind of food. So much of the food I enjoy in Brooklyn has no reference point in my past (ahh...crispy pork belly, just like my mom used to make). But I grew up with one of those grandmothers your Italian friends are always boring you with stories about, and I'd like to think I know a thing or two about home made pasta. And I can tell you that Frankies has the perfect gnocchi: soft, cottony on the outside with an elastic center that gives the perfect amount of resistance before splitting between your teeth. Not pasty; no trace of mealiness. Meanwhile, if forced to choose I would say the brown butter sage sauce won the night. It is classic Italian: four ingredients, sage, butter, cheese and lemon, achingly fresh and surprisingly complex. The giant meatballs may have been the only miss of the night, and that is just my opinion. The waiter slid them onto the table like a rack of pool balls, and their raw size, along with the odd mixing in of raisins that caused them to not hold their shape just didn't work for me. Hardly cause for concern.
Application: After a few dessert plates and some unwanted happy birthday singing we were back out on the street and off to Abilene, another hip star in the natty constellation that is Court street, full of potato pasta but not feeling overstuffed, in fact, feeling like a family. If you get to Frankies 457, and I suggest that you do, don't skip the gnocchi.

Your blogger would like to take the reigns back to first thank Eric for his lovely post but also to defend with full force the famous Frankies meatballs. I LOVE the raisins for their unexpected sweetness and for the depth they lend to the dish. The meatballs were indeed huge pool ball sized (all the more to enjoy!), moist, and yummy. One of the best things about the meatballs is how easily they can be adapted to home cooking. Some of my favorite dishes to make at home are meals that I previously ate at a restaurant. With the assistance of Frankies cookbook we have been able to replicate these meatballs at home to a cheering audience.
And while I loved the cavatelli with brown butter and sage, the gnocchi in red sauce with amazingly fresh and delicious ricotta stole the entree show for me. I still contend that the best part of the whole meal is always the veggies in the antipasti. Carrots, cauliflower, mushrooms, and other vegetables are slicked with delicious olive oil and roasted up. There is no better way to celebrate a new year.

Philly!

Issue: Where to get a relaxing lunch in Philadelphia the day after a beautiful wedding?

Rule: When traveling I love to find a place to either a) enjoy the local delicacies or b) enjoy a restaurant that looks a lot like the other restaurants I enjoy in my home town. After some web searching (sadly there is no laweatlaw Philly edition) we decided on Fork on Market Street.

Application: This restaurant falls under category (b). Fork is a beautiful New American bistro in Old City. The interior is dark but homey with an imposing bar and many small tables. We were fortunate to visit on a warm Sunday and were able to grab one of the three tables out front.
Service was prompt, friendly and lovely. Everything we wanted arrived timely and our waitress was attentive and sweet. We started with a beer and wine because it was too wonderful outside to not sip a white wine. Sometimes it is impossible not to want just one little glass of white while dining al fresco.
At the end of the meal we had spent $50 for two which is definitely a little pricey for lunch but the quality and amount of food (plus 2 drinks) was certainly worth it. I ordered a spinach risotto which turned out to be a lovely bright green dish with salty and creamy parmigiano reggiano in the middle. The temperature was perfect, something that can often go wrong when dining al fresco. I savored the savory dish for as long as I possible could. We also ordered a side of crisp, browned french fries- a real treat. The highlight may have been the Maryland crab cake sandwich on a home made brioche bun with lettuce, lemon pepper aioli and a light slaw on the side. ("Really good slaw.") The crab cake was not heavy or greasy like some cakes end up, but but light and well seasoned.

Conclusion: Fork was a lovely way to spend a slow afternoon in Philadelphia. We were never rushed out of there, even though there was another group of people eye-ing our spot. We were allowed to finish our drinks and nibble on our fries in peace. Man, sometimes it sure is nice to get out of New York.

Blue Hill

Issue: The Blow All Your Money Meal.

Rule: Very, very rarely a person feels they owe it to themselves to take advantage of this great culinary world we New Yorkers live in and blow a bunch of money on one fabulous meal. In this particular instance your blogger had the assistance of a wedding gift certificate as well as four months of change collected and cashed at TD Bank in order to achieve this rare but important pleasure.

Application: Blue Hill in the West Village is one of those restaurants famous for being associated with the words: farm, local, fresh and Obama. Tucked into a brownstone half a block from Washington Park and packed with eaters on a Friday night, it is certainly destination dining.
Your blogger's reservation was made a few weeks in advance and so we were able to be seated right away. Small table near the bar are stacked so closely together that I now know what food is served in McKinsey's cafeteria and how best to celebrate a fabulous octogenarian's birthday. But I could still hear my dinner companion and waiter.
A Blow All Your Money Meal requires at least two appetizers at the table as well as at least one dessert. We ordered the fabulous, hearty corn soup. The texture was fabulous and not super creamy like some corn soups can be, instead there was a bit of a crunch and a density not usually present. The other winning appetizer was fennel served two ways- braised and roasted. Roasted fennel is something I have never thought about but it was not as licorice-y as I would have suspected and tastier than I could have imagined. We were also presented with small beet burgers served with ricotta on an almond bun as a small starter. It may have been the best part of the whole meal.
My main course was milk fed pig which I felt very silly saying aloud but it was worth it. This again appeared in two ways. One was as luscious, buttery and crispy pork belly and the other as a salty, slightly tough loin. The greens were also a bit too well salted. Whenever this happens at a good restaurant I tend to think that maybe it was supposed to be that way and maybe I just don't get it. However, the more I eat, the more I can recognize a heavy hand in the kitchen. Besides the salt issue, the pork was tasty and the two of us almost licked the plate when it was finished. The other entree was braised hake with brussels sprout leaves and grapefruit. This was a combination that I would never have picked but the acids and bases played off each other very well and everything worked.
Remember when I said the beet burger may have been the best part of the whole meal? Well, now I remember the dessert. With honeycrisp apples, maple ice cream and almond cake it is impossible to go wrong. I didn't think I could squeeze anything into my stomach after the fennel and pig, but I found room for this amazing dessert.
It is also worth mentioning a yummy, crisp bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that kept giving and giving for less than $50.

Conclusion: Our night of two appetizers, two entrees, one desert and one bottle of wine (a healthy amount of food by any standard) ended up costing a little over $200. Certainly pricey in this recession starved world, but absolutely worth it for a Blow All Your Money Meal. I will be saving my quarters for the next six months to check out Blue Hill at Stone Barns next time.

Donatella

Issue: Where to hold WoPAC.

Rule: What is WoPAC you ask? It is a secret. However, I will tell that it consists of about a dozen beautiful women. All those beautiful women like to enjoy a few glasses of wine, share meals, laugh loud and linger at the table for a while. All without spending a boatload of money. We also like to celebrate accomplished women (ourselves very much included) and so picking a place run by Donatella Arpaia made perfect sense for the occasion.

Application: Donatella is a pizza joint in a way that can only happen in Chelsea. A huge, golden pizza oven sits in the back of the restaurant, the lights are turned way up- the better to scope out fellow eaters, and the pizzas themselves range up to $28 a pie. Yet our waiter was straight out of the Midwest and almost intimidated with our group of 10 increasingly tipsy ladies.

The best way to enjoy Donatella involves sharing, sharing and more sharing. For appetizers our table split three types of bruschetta- the stand out involved lemon and mint. We then split three salads including one with arugula and zucchini that was a personal favorite.

For the main course of pizzas we decided on five pies in total. A marinara for our vegan friend (delicious tomato sauce), two margheritas (crispy, cheesy and salty), cappellaccio (mushrooms and mozzarella) and diavola (the one with a kick). On an ambitious day with a full stomach I could have probably finished an entire pie by myself, but splitting with along with the salads and bruschetta made for a lovely meal. The pizzas were gobbled up quite quickly. We ended by sharing a cannoli, chocolate cake and zeppolli.

Conclusion: Oh, and we also split about four bottles of wine. The wine list has many reasonably priced bottles and out waiter was kind enough to suggest a light red for our final bottle of the night. We all hailed cabs or entered the subway in a downpour but everyone made their way home with a smile on her face. Our awesome group of ten accomplished women celebrated in style. When is the next meeting?

John Dory Oyster Bar

Issue: Where to go to trick your friends into thinking you are hip and cool?

Rule: I am not hip and cool. But I like to pretend that I am. I recently picked the locale for a small dinner get together with old friends. Both live in the NYC area and are both pretty hip and cool. I thought we should try to go someplace perhaps a little out of our usual price range and a little outside our usual cool zone. So began our journey to the John Dory Oyster Bar at the Ace Hotel.

Application: The journey started with me asking everyone in my office if I looked hip enough to gain entry into the restaurant. I was worried about it due to the Times review which mentions "young bucks in selvage jeans and attitude". My attitude is far from actual attitude.
The John Dory is technically a hotel restaurant but the hotel is the Ace Hotel which is also home to No. 7 subs, Stumptown coffee and The Breslin (The John Dory's cousin). There are no reservations so we arrived at 6:30 and were seated pretty quickly. There were plenty of modelriffic people at the bar, but not eating. The clientele tended to match the wait staff. No less than three handsome bearded men waited on us or ordered us wine or dropped off our food in our time there. All three were friendly but one forgot a component of our meal (and was terribly apologetic about it) and one tried to give us a lobster that we did not order (and clearly thought we lying to him about it). The hostesses (again three vaguely hipster pretty ladies) were welcoming.
But enough about the cool factor- let's talk food. April Bloomfield is a well known chef responsible for the flavorful meals at The Breslin and The Spotted Pig. She actually popped by the table next to us and I was totally star struck. Not so hip and cool, huh? The menu is composed of an extensive raw bar, bar snacks, small plates and desserts. There were three of us so we ordered an assortment of hits and split them. We started with west coast oysters- yum. We moved on to bar snacks with an order of parsley and anchovy toast and roasted peanuts with garlic and rosemary. We may never know how those peanuts are, since we never got them, but the parsley and anchovy toast was salty without being fishy and green without having the after taste of parsley. A warning- the parsley is a similar consistency to a heaping dollop of pesto. This is not a dish to eat while on a date unless you appreciate green stuff on your teeth. But do eat with friends because it is damn delicious.
Our main small plate dishes were adventurous and tasty. After we sat down to dinner we realized that none of us really like seafood that much. Oops. But I strong-armed us all into trying meals we would never normall try. We started with a delicious roast beet salad to ease our way into the seafood. Then we snacked on octopus with potatoes and aioli, chorizo stuffed squid with smoked tomatos, Maine lobster chowder and deliciously salty Parker House rolls. The chorizo stuffed squid was served on top of amazingly creamy white beans and was a tasty and unique flavor. The octopus had a delicious crispiness to it and the potatoes were an unexpected joy. Potatoes- who knew? The Parker house rolls were almost pretzel-ish as my companion remarked. I literally licked my finger tips to soak up every last grain of salt.
We ended with a malt chocolate ice cream with honeycomb. OMG it was to die for. The crunch and sweetness of the honeycomb was genius.

Conclusion: I want to go again, right now. As I write this I get to re-live the delicious squid and on-tap sauvignon blanc, the crisp honeycomb and full length mirror in the bathroom, the roast beets and perfect white beans. Maybe I did not have to be hip and cool to enjoy this place. Or maybe I am even hip and cool enough for it.

Bogota and Dinosaur

Issue: Where to celebrate a big birthday with a big guest list.

Rule: Dinner for more than 6 people is extremely difficult. Many restaurants are not equipped with tables set for more than 6 or 8 people unless you book for a large party. A very large party. But what if you just want to celebrate with a big group without the hassle of pre-ordering or getting a separate party space? Two friends recently celebrated their 30th birthdays with big dinner parties out minus the headache.

Application: Sarah celebrated her 30th birthday at Bogota in Park Slope with 17 of her closest buddies. Bogota is always jam packed and busy, but this was especially true since Sarah's birthday falls on Valentines Day. Beware that almost every single person needs to be present in order for your party to be seated. This always becomes an issue with big birthday parties because someone is always late. Once seated we were able to enjoy a delicious meal with amazing drinks. The drink list in two pages with fruit margaritas, mojitos, beers and specialty cocktails. Due to the large number of drinks ordered there was a bit of a mix up. The cocktails took a few minutes to arrive and my margarita without salt became a margarita with salt when I got too thirsty to ask for my correct order.
Our meals arrived much faster than anticipated and I believe everyone got what they requested. For only $14 I had the vegetable taco entree which comes with two side orders. Everyone around me was getting the maduros so I could not resist. My second side was kale- another item I have trouble resisting. Two tacos came with my order stuffed with mushrooms, corn, feta and tomatoes. They were super filling and delicious, especially with the chipotle tomato sauce on the side. The long table was filled with smiling faces all dinner long and even though the place was busy, you could truly hear all conversations and never felt like yelling was necessary. Service was friendly and attentive and everyone seemed to enjoy their meals.
Dave celebrated his birthday in a slightly different fashion at Dinosaur BBQ in Harlem. The group dinner was enjoyed family style with a HUGE amount of food ordered ahead of time. And I do mean HUGE. Corn bread, deviled eggs, pulled pork, ribs, mac and cheese, potato salad... the list goes on and on. Family style made dividing the monster check a little easier and we left with approximately 10 take out boxes. And the food was terrific! I will always root for an upstate NY icon but the tasty food makes it impossible not to. The only problem with family style dining (especially family style dining at a BBQ joint) is the lack of vegetarian options available. I loved the fried green tomatoes but I certainly ate much more pork than I normally would in a month.
The noise level was insanely high at Dinosaur. The place is gigantic and the service was right on top of everything but it was difficult to hear the person sitting right next to me. However, yelling while passing a big plate of pulled pork and creating hand signals to express the desire for more mac and cheese certainly made for a friendly atmosphere.

Conclusion: When booking a big birthday party with a big group of people it is always important to factor cost into the equation. (No one wants to be stuck holding a check and cash while $400 short) With friends and family members being in different wage brackets it is always nice to try to make dinner out less of an anxiety producing affair and more budget friendly so that everyone feels welcome and excited to be there. Both Dinosaur (family style) and Bogota (individual orders off a regular menu) were not terribly expensive for good meals that included drinks. Dinosaur ended up being a little more pricy but there was a lot more food that went around.
Another important factor is flavor. Both meals were delicious yet entirely different cuisines. Everyone had a lovely time and I think the birthday kids were pleased. Which is, of course the most important factor of all!