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bellastraniera
a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.View my photography website.
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Tag Archives: Austrian food
Edi & the Wolf
We weren’t sure what to expect from Edi & the Wolf, a new Austrian place that opened on Avenue C. The stein-pounding din of Zum Schneider across the street? The restrained elegance of Kurt Gutenbrunner’s Wallsé?
Neither, as it turns out. Edi & the Wolf introduces New York diners to a different breed of Austrian restaurant, the type that’s usually attached to a wine cellar and serves typical Austrian fare like schnitzel and spätzle. It’s the brainchild of Eduard Frauneder and Wolfgang Ban of Seäsonal, an Austrian place that was overlooked by many New York critics until it earned a Michelin star. (more…)
Posted in food
Tagged Austrian food, bars, beer, East Village, gastropubs, German food, New York, restaurants, wine bars
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Dressler
Feeling overwhelmed by the number of new restaurants opening these days? As New York gets caught up in a vicious cycle of newness – diners relentlessly pursuing the latest trends, chefs quickly moving on from one restaurant to cash in on the next, and dining rooms that feel like pop-up shops – the thing we crave is not the latest It food item, but consistently good cuisine and genuine warmth.
To be able to return to a place year after year and still find the chef in place and the atmosphere reliably charming is a European dining standard, so it’s no wonder that the Michelin guide reviewers have taken to Dressler, making it one of three places in Brooklyn to get starred. But it’s also a reminder that more New York restaurants used to be this way too until we got so incurably faddish. The turn-of-the-last-century craftsmanship of the metalwork in Dressler’s Viennese-style bar and dining room – exquisite latticework over panels of light and ornate chandeliers, both made by artisan sculptors in Brooklyn – indicates that this place was never intended to be some flash in the pan. (more…)
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Tagged Austrian food, bars, Brooklyn, French food, New York, restaurants
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The Vanderbilt
In its Prospect Heights neighborhood, the Vanderbilt is known as “the expensive place.” Mobbed at first and then dismissed for its small portions at higher-than-usual price tags, the Vanderbilt is quieter now. You can actually see the reclaimed wood in the industrial but rustic front room when it’s not jam packed with people, and when you order one of the excellent cocktails at the marble-topped bar, you can hear yourself speak. You can even walk in and get a table. And if you’re from Manhattan, land of the $15 glass of wine, $15 for thick, peppery slabs of hamachi crudo by Brooklyn’s Michelin-starred chef Saul Bolton will seem like a bargain.
The problem seems to be one of clarification: the Vanderbilt was probably never meant to be cheap. It brings Saul’s artisanal, global cuisine from the more formal restaurant on Smith Street to a wider audience via a small plates menu that touches down everywhere from Japan to Germany. Could you go down the street and get bigger portions for less? Yes. If your idea of fancy food involves Hollandaise sauce, then by all means keep walking. But if you want a kitchen that can do artisanal food very well, you’re in the right place. (more…)
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Tagged American food, Asian food, Austrian food, bars, Brooklyn, New York, restaurants
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Klee
Looking up Klee on Menu Pages, I found a headline that best describes my own reaction to this place: “Please keep it a secret.” I hoarded Klee for as long as possible, but with a long winter ahead of us and a dearth of places that have a warm, cozy atmosphere and fabulous, comforting food, it’s high time to share the secret.
The influence is Austrian, a cuisine that Kurt Gutenbrunner could once claim for himself in New York, but happily, it’s a cuisine that is branching out even further than Gutenbrunner’s mini empire. Daniel Angerer, a young Austrian chef who has worked everywhere from Robuchon in Paris to Jean Georges, Bouley Bakery, and most recently at Fresh in New York, runs the kitchen at Klee (pronouced CLAY, like the artist), while his charming, knowledgeable fiancee Lori Mason mans the front of the house. And a pleasant house it is: underwater maple wood trims the exposed brick walls, Klimt-like curlicues adorn the back wall, and the ambient lighting makes everyone in the eclectic crowd look good. Elegant but casual, lively but not too loud, the room hums with background music of Bowie or the Velvet Underground, bands that many of the diners are old enough to have heard the first time around. And I mean that in a good way.
The menu is divided into several different levels of courses, as is the fashion these days. The first, called “snacks,” features a variety of amuse bouches that would have been free at a place like Bouley. Though I find this trend of paying for food unfortunate, the divine lobster rolls are worth the extra couple of bucks. Two tiny, crisp, light-as-air pieces of white toast are fileted and slathered in a lobster salad that tastes more rive gauche than East Coast. The secret ingredient seems to be excellent-quality butter, which appears in plentiful supply in a lot of Klee’s dishes.
The char-tartare appetizer arrives as a martini glass filled to the brim with buttery (again) Arctic char cut into small chunks, almost like a fish pate served with bread crisps. It is so good that we order it again the next time we visit Klee. Candied, crunchy, maple-roasted hazelnuts make the blue cheese and radicchio salad a stand out as well. But by far the most innovative dish at Klee – and one of the better dishes I tasted in 2006 – was the Kurobuta pork tonnato. Thin slices of tender, silky, pink pork are folded on a plate and brushed with Albacore tuna sauce (a puree of preserved tuna?), then topped with capers and dill. It looks and almost tastes like gravalax.
Despite the abundance of meat and fish, vegetarians won’t feel left out. Just as much thought goes into the preparation and presentation of a Mason jar of vegetables, filled with carrots, scallions, cranberry beans, brussel sprouts, and mushrooms as the other main courses. My friend the pescatarian was relieved to find a place where at last the vegetarian entree isn’t “another vegetable plate.”
Pastas rotate daily, and if you want to try what must be one of the most decadent pasta dishes in New York, go on a Friday and get the macaroni and cheese with lobster. How the chef manages to create something so rich yet so light I’ll never know, except I think it might have something to do with the aforementioned secret ingredient, butter, and lots of it.
The black hog pork chop is perfectly good. Firm and juicy, prepared medium-rare unless otherwise specified, and served on a delicious slaw of roasted red cabbage, apples, and Calvados – a grown-up applesauce of sorts.
The wine list is quite nice, thought Klee has a lot of niche wines you may not know, so you may need to ask for advice as I did. The only disappointments were an uneven Mason jar of vegetables one day (it wasn’t as good as the first time) and some bacaloa croquettes that tasted bland compared to the ones I’d just sampled at Boqueria. But these were minor flaws in an otherwise great performance.
So: by all means go to Klee. Just don’t tell anyone.
Klee
200 Ninth Avenue, between 22nd and 23rd Streets
212-633-8033
Blaue Gans (Oktoberfest Has Begun)
When Blaue Gans first opened last year, chef Kurt Gutenbrunner was criticized for not even bothering to redecorate. The single, high-ceilinged loft dining room originally belonged to Le Zinc, which shut its doors after a suspicious hiatus by the owners “at the beach,” as the chalkboard sign in the window once announced. It was terrible to lose not only Le Zinc’s country-style pork paté with its grainy mustard and little cornichons, but the serene yet stimulating space it occupied. The old posters from art shows past – Clemente at the Guggenheim, Kiki Smith in Vienna – would presumably be demolished to make room for someone else’s idea of cool.
Shockingly, the only thing different about the space are the floors – nicely refurbished with a mahogany stain – and the chairs and tables. The Clemente poster is still there, and the Warhol silkscreen poster of Marilyn Monroe. The music is jazz, the pace is leisurely but efficient, and any people watching is done on the sly. Just walking into Blaue Gans is a relief.
I came here in the first place because a friend recommended Gutenbrunner’s other restaurant Wallsé, which, like Café Sabarsky, I have never tried, Wallsé because it’s fancy, Café Sabarsky because it’s mobbed. Gutenbrunner just left Thor, a restaurant that never seemed to fit in with the rest of his portfolio. Though the food was quite good, the dark, cold space, presumably designed by the Hotel on Rivington, had all the warmth of a Gattaca set.
Try convincing a mixed group to go out for plates of bratwurst. It’s not an easy sell, because sausage and sauerkraut don’t exactly fit into the “lite” theme of the moment. If you can put aside any memories of Christmas at Rolf’s, where each entree represents approximately a week’s worth of food, here you’ll discover bratwurst that is actually light. Gently boiled then briefly seared, Blaue Gans’s bratwurst bears no resemblance to the charred stubs of unchewable links that make their way off barbecue grills every summer. This sausage is a delicately balanced dish, served alongside crunchy sauerkraut and mustard with a real kick to it.
The smoked trout appetizer also demonstrates the same kind of balance: the fish salad is served very cold, sandwiched between crepes. Had I known smoked trout, like riesling, tastes so much better at near icy temperatures, I would never have eaten it lukewarm off a bagel. Next to the trout are sweet cooked beets, the perfect complement to the smoky savoriness of the fish, and a very fresh mache salad. Don’t forget to eat the warm rye bread (this means you, carb-phobes) and order a draft of Hofbrauhaus Oktoberfest beer (ditto). Each flavor goes so well with the next; it is the kind of harmony that is almost always achieved by sticking within a certain region and a certain cuisine.
Which seems to be the real gift to Gutenbrunner’s thinking. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? There is nothing lacking in the old décor, just as there is nothing lacking in the Austrian cuisine he promotes. Instead of aiming for something so new-fangled it hurts, Blaue Gans reintroduces a European idea to New York with its casual, arty atmosphere and expertly prepared food, served in restrained portions on Herend-esque porcelain. Sometimes respecting tradition is the most revolutionary thing you can do.
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