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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: seafood
Mo-Chica
Ricardo Zarate of Peruvian restaurant Mo-Chica in LA was recently named Best New Chef by Food & Wine Magazine, so naturally we had to eat there during a trip to LA last week. In New York, this would be a near-impossible reservation to get. Best new chef? Working at an inexpensive restaurant? Expect mobs.
We called Mo-Chica and booked lunch for 3pm on a Monday, figuring it wouldn’t be too crazed at that time. One GPS-navigated trip from LAX later, we pulled up at a big boxy structure in downtown LA that looked a lot like… well, a mall. Inside, past a shop selling Mexican tchotchkes, a juice bar and a Thai take-out place, was Mo-Chica. It turns out it’s little more than a stand in a high end food court, complete with plastic tablecloths and a woman taking orders behind a cash register. “Don’t tell them you made a reservation,” D. said. Obviously, something had been lost in translation. (more…)
Hammer and Claws Blue Crab Festival
If you live in New York and love food, chances are you’ve been to some pretty disappointing food festivals. Many are plagued by long lines, small portions, huge crowds, dwindling food supplies, limited selection and VIP favoritism. So it was a relief to find that last weekend’s Hammer and Claws Blue Crab Festival, an all-you-can-eat crab feast in NYC benefitting the Chesapeake’s Save the Bay Foundation, was the exact opposite. This was really all the crabs you – or anyone! – could ever eat. Perhaps in a lifetime. (more…)
Lobster Rolls: Nancy’s in Martha’s Vineyard
When it comes to lobster rolls, the more bare bones a restaurant is, the better. The best lobster rolls we’ve ever had were usually served grumpily through a kitchen window and eaten on picnic tables, often in a crab grass lot by the side of a major thoroughfare. Because why would you need table linens, atmosphere or attentive service? They would only detract from the main event. (more…)
Posted in food, travel
Tagged bars, Bloody Marys, lobster rolls, Martha's Vineyard, restaurants, seafood
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Amalfi Coast: Dining & Drinking Guide
Long before farm-to-table dining was all the rage in the U.S., this verdant peninsula on the western coast of Italy was home to some of the finest, freshest cuisine anywhere. The fruits and vegetables grown right on the Amalfi Coast – terraced gardens of olives, lettuces, tomatoes and lemon trees, all whizzing by as you take the Circumvesuviana train down south – make a startling difference on the plate. Over the course of seven days this May, we sampled some of the best the Amalfi Coast has to offer. (more…)
The Dutch
If you haven’t made it to Andrew Carmellini’s new place the Dutch yet, remain calm, take a deep breath and stop speed dialing the restaurant. It may be booked for the next month, but it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. In fact it could use some time to settle into itself, like a good bottle of wine that gets even better with more breathing room.
In the annals of the New York restaurant world, the Dutch represents an interesting play on Carmellini’s part. No longer just the chef with an award-winning Italian restaurant in Tribeca (Locanda Verde), he is stepping to center stage with this American place in Soho in the old Cub Room space. Like Blue Ribbon down the street, it’s open late, it serves fried chicken and it’s courting an industry crowd including Mario Batali, who sat placidly surveying the dining room the other night. It’s already shaping up to be the next late-night hang for chefs and food world insiders, who often tweet from the premises. (more…)
Posted in food
Tagged American food, Andrew Carmellini, bars, beer, Mario Batali, New York, restaurants, seafood, Soho
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Fish Tag
Sometimes it feels like there are two parallel New Yorks: the men’s New York, consisting of sports bars and barbecue joints, and the women’s New York, with its wine bars and California-light restaurants. Any guy walking into Fish Tag, the new Upper West Side seafood restaurant helmed by bad-boy chef Ryan Skeen, would find lots of single, attractive women with newly blown out hair, drinking white wine and sharing plates. But alas, all the guys seem to be next door at the grittier, meatier Sunburnt Cow. Boys: will they ever learn?
Which is too bad, because despite the inconsistencies at this new hot spot, there’s plenty to recommend Fish Tag to both genders. There are 10 craft beers on tap and even more by the bottle, rare bourbons and even more scotch. In addition to that smoked salmon, Fish Tag has a whole charcuterie board of meat, an impressive selection of cheese and a kick-ass burger.
Posted in food
Tagged bars, burgers, New York, restaurants, seafood, Upper West Side
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The John Dory Oyster Bar
If April Bloomfield were a fashion icon instead of a chef, she would surely be a maximalist along the lines of Anna Dello Russo or Daphne Guinness. Just as those two specialize in outrageous outfits that elicit stares of utter disbelief, Bloomfield serves up food that makes you want to put down your fork and say: No she didn’t.
A pot full of pigs’ feet? A bowl full of liquified butter? A bag full of fried pork skin? Yes, yes and yes. Her fearlessness in the kitchen makes it surprising to hear a note of vulnerability in a recent profile in the New Yorker, as she wondered if there was too much butter in the fare at the original John Dory on Tenth Avenue, paraphrasing a New York Times review she’d apparently memorized. But fans of her maximalist culinary style will respond: of course it can be over the top – that’s the whole point. (more…)
The Net Result, Martha’s Vineyard
Still reeling from the $23 price tag of a pint of clams at the Bite, we approached seafood shack the Net Result in Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard with caution. This combination take-out joint and fish market gets their catch daily from Larsen’s in Menemsha, so they could charge a lot for the fresh quality. But we were pleasantly surprised to find some of the best prices on the island at this casual picnic spot with views of the harbor.
Don’t expect a lot of frills here; just get in line and follow the various instructions on hand-written signs around the room. (more…)
Posted in food, travel
Tagged lobster rolls, Martha's Vineyard, restaurants, seafood
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Atria, Martha’s Vineyard
There’s no shortage of fancy restaurants on Martha’s Vineyard – the only problem is choosing just one when you only have a few nights on the island. Alchemy is a perennial favorite, but if you want to get away from the hoi polloi in the center of Edgartown on weekend nights, head to Atria for its patrician atmosphere.
At Atria, whitewashed Adirondack chairs spot the gracious side lawn, where you can settle in for drinks or dinner outside, and inside there’s a dining room hung with antique fish prints and furnished with dark spindle chairs, plus a downstairs pub, Brick House, that serves up burgers, beer on tap and live music. It’s the sort of place you can imagine the Kennedys going (but that may be just because several people in the clubby dining room that night actually looked like Kennedys). (more…)
The Bite, Martha’s Vineyard
It may look pretty basic, but this famous seafood shack on the road down to Menemsha draws people from near and far. One one side of us, a family chatted in Italian, and on the other, a couple of summer people despaired the outage of fried scallops so early in the afternoon. What you see is what you get: a shack, sodas from a machine, fried seafood and some picnic tables, but there’s nothing ordinary about the quality of the Bite’s fried clams.
This seemingly simple dish is actually easy to mess up, and therefore I usually avoid it. More often than not, fried clams come out listless, dry and tasteless, with a leaden, greasy crust. But lesser fry cooks everywhere could learn from the Bite, where the batter is light and slightly spicy with a hint of cayenne and the finest grinding of sea salt, the crunch satisfying but not overwhelming, and the clams themselves still plump, bursting with juiciness and served whole. (more…)
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