Rules Restaurant | London

Fergus Henderson may have helped convince the world that British food was worthy of attention with his restaurant, St. John (some more thoughts on St. John here). But at Rules, they were never in any doubt.

Rules bills itself as the oldest restaurant in London. Over the past two centuries, it's been owned by only three families: Thomas Rule opened it in 1798; just before World War I, one of his descendants decided to move to France, and arranged a swap with a Brit running a restaurant in Paris named Tom Bell; and then in 1984, Bell's daughter sold the restaurant to its current owner John Mayhew.

The dining room, with its red velvet-wrapped, gold-piped banquettes, polished wood dividers, oil portraits and old cartoons on the walls,^[1] the occasional marble bust here and there, looks every bit the part. If not for the bona fides of its history, the stereotypically posh decorations would seem almost laughable. I adore the place.

We first came here on a family trip to London more than ten years ago. Our daughter was about six years old at the time; she did not adjust well to the jet lag, and within an hour she was sliding under the table.^[2] This time around, I was the one who wanted to throw a fit when I learned that we had just missed game season. Through the present owner's inheritance of the Lartington Estate in northern England and relationships with local game dealers, Rules sometimes has a glorious assortment of wild things on the menu – its "famous grouse," but also woodcock, pheasant, partridge, wild duck, hare and more. Alas, not on this visit.

(You can see all my pictures in this Rules - London flickr set).

Before getting to the food, I highly recommend a visit upstairs to the Edward VII Room, a/k/a the cocktail bar, a snug spot with a carved wooden bar counter, a few tables and couches, and a fine assortment of hunting murals and trophies adorning the walls. The bar program is run by Mike Cook, and his crew can handily make the classics like a pitch-perfect Negroni. But they also have their own creations, like the intensely aromatic Lucia Sciarra, named after a character from the last James Bond film, Spectre.^[3]

Once I'd recovered from having missed game season (my recovery aided by a pleasant cocktail), I focused my attention on the menu, which also helped ease my disappointment. You get the sense it could have been written a hundred years ago. Chef David Stafford shows occasional flashes of whimsy, like a duck leg "pastilla" paired with a spiced duck breast, but for the most part he proudly and lovingly cooks traditional British dishes. And this he does exceedingly well.

So there's potted shrimps, a mound of tiny, tender brown crustaceans caught in Morecambe Bay, preserved in butter and spices in the way it's been done for hundreds of years. There's Middlewhite pork terrine, which makes use of a rare heritage breed of pig that originated in Yorkshire, served simply with picallili and cornichons. The shrimp taste of shrimp, the pork tastes of pork, and I couldn't possibly be happier.

For her main, Mrs. F chooses the Uig Lodge smoked salmon, sourced from a smokery on the far northern reaches of the Outer Hebrides. The salmon is served with fat slabs of brown bread and offered either with or without scrambled eggs, but surely this is a rhetorical question? The salt and smoke on the fish whisper rather than shout, and its texture is all silk, matched by the soft, creamy eggs.

For me, a real taste of tradition: a steamed suet pudding. It arrives at the table completely unadorned, looking like a doorstop from a giant's castle. Cut it open, and beneath a layer of dense, chewy suet pastry, a stew of venison, red wine and chestnut mushrooms issues forth. There's nothing light or delicate here, but it has a brawny beauty all its own; it's rich, and hearty, and sticky, and satisfying, and I love that such things still exist in this world.

Along with our mains, we have some bronze-crested, buttery-interiored potatoes Anna, as well as a perky salad with sprightly pale sprigs of frisée, crispy bacon lardons, toasty croutons and a bracing shallot vinaigrette.^[4]

We always enjoy ending a meal with some good cheeses, but Mrs. F is not so much a fan of the blue-veined varieties. So I'm pleased to hear that the cheese plate, which features a few English cheeses served with biscuits and a sweet shallot jam, can be supplemented with a portion of the Cropwell Bishop Stilton. The entire wheel is brought to the table, from which they will scoop the paste onto your plate until you say "enough!" Made by a third-generation creamery in Nottingham, it's more creamy than crumbly, tangy enough to balance the fat but not so much to blow out your sinuses, and just lovely stuff.

There's a certain danger in a place like this getting weighed down by its historical baggage, but Rules manages to avoid that. It doesn't feel, or taste, like a museum piece, but rather like a living, breathing restaurant that just happens to be from another century. But good food is timeless; I hope Rules remains so as well.

Rules Restaurant
35 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England
+44 0 20 7836 5314

^[1] There's also a massive mural on one wall of a stern-faced Margaret Thatcher looking as if she belongs on the prow of a ship.

^[2] She didn't actively misbehave. She just sort of ran out of steam, started to fade and get a little teary-eyed, and quietly mewled "I'm broken." We still say this when it gets a little too late in the evening for any of us.

^[3] The concoction includes Star of Bombay Gin, Lillet Blanc, Benedictine, Gammel Dansk Bitter Dram, and a lemon twist. You can see Cook making one here. Delicious. You can also see Rules make a cameo appearance in a scene from Spectre which was shot at the restaurant. Rules has made many other literary appearances, including in novels by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, among others. Speaking of things literary, I think it's just wonderful that the restaurant proudly republishes an absolutely scathing review by Kingsley Amis entitled "Where Disaster Rules," written sometime in the 1970's, on their website ("There are cheaper eating-places than Rules where the atmosphere and service are so pleasant that they drive out other impressions. Far from the case here; but then I find it hard to imagine an establishment Elysian enough to dispel the memory of two of the most disgusting full-dress meals I have ever tried to eat in my life.")

^[4] We also drink a really nice wine, the 2010 Rossignol-Fevrier "Robardelle," a premier cru vineyard in Volnay from a producer which I don't think gets distributed in the U.S. Happily, the wine list at Rules mostly shares my predilections for Burgundies, Rhones, and sub-$100 wines.

St. John Bread and Wine | London

Until recently, British food has been saddled with a terrible reputation. I'm reminded of the old George Carlin joke about heaven and hell:

"In heaven, the Italians are the lovers, the French cook the food, the Swiss run the hotels, the Germans are the mechanics, and the English are the police. In hell, the Swiss are the lovers, the English cook the food, the French run the hotels, the Italians are the mechanics, and the Germans are the police."

That reputation, I've always thought, has been undeserved. Even thirty years ago, when I spent a summer in Oxford "studying," I ate very well. Ploughman's lunches with good cheese and bread, rich steak and kidney pies, crisp, steamy fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, fiery Indian and Jamaican food – what's not to like?

Over the past couple decades, general sentiment seems to have shifted, and now London is regarded as one of the world's top dining destinations. Partly that's been driven by international attention for this very moneyed, lucrative market; one of the odd things about planning a recent brief visit to both London and Paris (three days in each) was realizing that many of Paris' top chefs have opened outlets in London so that, in Epcot-like fashion, you could arguably taste some of the best of Paris without ever crossing the Channel. But even more so, it's been driven by English chefs' internal reflection: recognizing, and promoting, great British cookery.

One of the individuals who was formative in that shift was Fergus Henderson. His restaurant, St. John, which opened in 1995, and his cookbook, first published in 1999 as "Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking" (released in the U.S. in 2004 as "The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating") are mostly recognized for being a manifesto on the joys of offal and whole-animal utilization. They are most definitely that, but they also are an ode to traditional British dishes – things like cock-a-leekie soup and bath chaps and game birds and Eccles cakes – and the value of native ingredients.

I'd never been. So it was the first dinner reservation I made for this trip.

We actually booked at St. John Bread and Wine, a sibling to the original St. John around the corner from Smithfield Market. Bread and Wine, originally intended to be a bakery and wine shop (thus the name), makes its home across from the Spitalfields Market,^[1] and is slightly more casual than the mothership. More of the menu is offered as small plates, and they ascribe to the "dishes come out as they're ready and are meant for sharing" school of service. Since this gave us an opportunity to sample broadly, it was perfect.

(You can see all my pictures in this St. John Bread and Wine flickr set).

Of course, you have to start with the roasted marrow bones – Henderson's most famous dish, one that has been lovingly duplicated countless times in countless restaurants around the world, one that Anthony Bourdain declared his "always and forever choice" for his Death Row meal. The formula is now well-known: roasted femur bones; toasted bread; a pile of parsley salad; a mound of coarse sea salt. Scoop the oozy marrow from the bone, spread on to the toast, dress with a sprinkle of salt and a pinch of the salad, and enjoy. I've had it dozens of times, but never until now the original. And yes, it's the best: the marrow at the magic borderline between solid and liquid, the acid and salt and herbaceous bite of the salad right on the edge of too aggressive without crossing the line, with just the right punch of caper and shallot. I can't say it better than Fergus himself:

"Do you recall eating Raisin Bran for breakfast? The raisin-to-bran-flake ratio was always a huge anxiety, to a point, sometimes, that one was tempted to add extra raisins, which inevitably resulted in too many raisins, and one lost that pleasure of discovering the occasional sweet chewiness in contrast to the branny crunch. When administering such things as capers, it is very good to remember Raisin Bran."

Though not as famous, the other dishes we tried exhibited the same winning combination of good, honest ingredients, intense, robust flavors, and attentive execution.

I loved these tender curls of lamb's tongues wrapped around cubes of bread, all enrobed in a bright, verdant green sauce, like a meaty panzanella salad. Picking at a smoked fish nearly always brings me joy, and the minimalist approach here – the unadorned back end of a smoked mackerel, served simply on a plate with a potato salad given a sinus-clearing blast of mustard dressing – is my kind of happy meal.

Another testament to the joy of simplicity: slabs of toast spackled with a rich, intense mousse of duck livers and foie gras. It's just nearly too much; then you take a bite of cornichon, your appetite is restored, and you go back for more. The smoked cod's roe is like salt, smoke and sea wrapped in silk, but maybe the best part are the crispy batons fashioned from thin layers of potato perched on top. We finished with deviled kidneys: chewy, soft, springy, and ferrous, served over toast drenched with cooking juices spiked with mustard powder and Worcestershire sauce.^[2]

We ordered dessert whilst draining the last of a bottle of Beaujolais, starting first with St. John's version of a classic – Eccles cake. There are whole families of traditional British desserts of which I know nothing, this being a good example. Every time I'd peruse the online menu at St. John I'd see it, and so of course I had to order it. The sweetness of the "cake" – a flaky pastry wrapped around a filling of sticky currants – is balanced by an accompanying slab of fresh, crumbly, sharp, faintly salty Lancashire cheese. Then a few minutes later, a batch of warm, airy madeleines, fresh from the oven. We trusted our server for something to drink with these, and our trust was rewarded with a glass of Pineau de Charentes.

Honestly, I wondered if St. John would live up to its nearly mythical reputation. Bourdain, in his foreword to the U.S. release of Nose to Tail, acknowledges, "My enthusiastic rant in my book A Cook's Tour made him sound like George Washington, Ho Chi Minh, Lord Nelson, Orson Welles, Pablo Picasso, and Abbie Hoffman – all rolled into one." And Henderson, both in interviews and on the page, evinces such unbridled enthusiasm, humble charm, and subtle wit that it's hard to imagine not liking his food. This is a man who can make curly parsley sound good!^[3]

But this was just a joyous meal: great ingredients; straightforward, bold, intense flavors; presented without any fanfare but prepared with subtle finesse. In my version of heaven, Fergus is welcome to cook the food.

St. John Bread and Wine
94-96 Commercial Street, London
020 7251 0848

^[1] While Smithfield is still a functioning meat market, Spitalfields has been refurbished into a shopping mall.

^[2] I rarely get to eat kidneys, and even more rarely get to eat properly prepared kidneys, but even so, their sort of crumbly, bouncy texture still puts them fairly low on my Favorite Offal list. Tripe, or livers, or sweetbreads, or hearts, would all rank before kidneys in my book.

^[3] "As the swish, swish, swish of bunches of flat Italian parsley is to be heard in kitchens across the land, it seems time to celebrate the strength and character of the indigenous curly parsley. Its expression of chlorophyll and well being, strong flavor, slightly prickly texture, and its structural abilities enable such things as Parsley Sauce."

Cochon 555 Miami - Sunday March 26

I'm not a regular on the food fest circuit, but there are a few events I always eagerly anticipate. One of my favorites is coming to town this Sunday, March 26 at the Ritz Carlton South Beach: Cochon 555. Started back in 2008, Cochon turns a spotlight on heritage pork producers with a simple formula: five pigs, five chefs, five winemakers – do something great with them. The chef who is crowned Prince or Princess of Porc goes on to the Grand Cochon, which pits the winners from ten cities against each other, with own becoming the Queen or King of Porc.

Cochon first landed in Miami in 2012 (you can see my pictures here), and the event has gotten more elaborate ever since (more pictures from Cochon Miami 2014 and Cochon Miami 2016, if you'd like to see). Now, in addition to featuring five South Florida chefs working with five heritage breed pigs, you'll find craft cocktails – including a rum cart, a margarita bar, a smoked old fashioned bar – charcuterie bars, farmstead cheesemongers, a pop-up ramen bar, a tomahawk ribeye bar (!), and more.

This year's competitors include Rick Mace and Clarke Bowen of DB Bistro, Tito Vargas of The Bazaar, Paula DaSilva of Artisan Beach House, Jeremiah Bullfrog and a contingent of the P.I.G. (Pork Is Good) crew, and John Gallo and Rene Reyes of Pinch Kitchen, plus lots of contributions from Cochon Miami alumni and several others.

You can see the full lineup here at the Cochon 555 Heritage BBQ Miami site.

There's a link on that page to buy tickets, or go straight here to get them at Eventbrite. General Admission is $125 per person, or $200 for the VIP pass which guess you early entrance before the madding crowd. And, stay tuned for updates on the twitter @frodnesor and the instagram @frodnesor – I may have a couple tickets to give away.

Sushi Deli / Japanese Market - an appreciation

Many, many years ago, when I first started writing this blog, I made a big mistake: I wrote about Sushi Deli.

It's not that my recommendation was off target. The once-tiny sushi counter^[1] inside a Japanese market (called, simply enough, "Japanese Market") was the classic hidden gem, a place where, among the packaged ramen noodles and bags of rice and frozen fish and togarashi spice mixes, you could get ridiculously good sushi, some of it flown in from Japan every week, at an incredibly reasonable price. There is surely no place I'd visited more often, or that had been the source of more satisfying meals, despite the peculiar hours (closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and never open later than 6:30 p.m. – a closing time which moved progressively earlier over the years as the place became ever more popular).^[2]

Truth is, a good portion of what I know and love about sushi, I learned sitting at that counter: the joy of the many different varieties of hikari mono, or silver-skinned fish, the differences in flavor and texture among uni from different parts of the world, the seasonality of sushi offerings and the sense of paying attention to what is best when. But perhaps most of all, I learned the importance of trust and loyalty.

I don't claim to be particularly close to Chef Kushi: our brief conversations across the counter would mostly be limited to what was good that day, or his last trip home to Japan, or how his golf game was doing, or – most frequently – how he was working too hard. But he knew how much I appreciated his food, and his passion; and I always felt appreciated there too. From what I can gather, the root word of "omakase" is "entrust." After several visits, I entrusted my meals to Michio, and more important, he trusted me enough to let me experience many things I might never have tasted in Miami otherwise.

You could go full omakase at Sushi Deli if you wished, which would often bring a procession of sashimi and other items. But my standard order was something of a variation on the theme: I would ask for six pieces of nigiri – whatever Chef Kushi chose^[3] – along with a battera roll, an Osaka-style pressed sushi roll topped with vinegar-cured saba, a sheet of cured seaweed, and toasted sesame seeds, plus, usually, a "triple-egg" temaki (uni, ikura, and quail egg) for "dessert." And this was how I discovered any number of things: sayori (halfbeak, or needlefish), with a shiny strip of silver along its gorgeous translucent flesh, tai (Japanese snapper) lightly cured in kombu to enhance its flavor, kazunoko (herring roe), a new years' tradition. Often, these came adorned: grated fresh ginger, a daub of uni, a smidgen of yuzu kosho, a sprinkle of sesame seeds, a dot of miso or ume paste, a sheet of cured seaweed, a sliver of shiso.

(You can see several of these in this Sushi Deli / Japanese Market flickr set).

Though Michio is, in his way, very much old fashioned – I've tried, unsuccessfully, to count the dozens of signs posted around the restaurant warning customers not to use cellphones and not to take pictures, among other rules – these creative elaborations show that he actually was not particularly bound by tradition. So, too, does the fact that he had women working behind the sushi bar – including his daughter Erika, who, it's reported, is looking to open her own place in the neighborhood within the next year.

My mistake was that some things are perhaps better left unsaid. Not that I claim credit for blowing it up on the blog. FFT has never exactly raked in the page views, and I could probably name every person who visited the site in those first few months when I first wrote about Sushi Deli. And many folks with exponentially bigger megaphones than myself have been guilty of breaking what some of us eventually tried to make the "First Rule of Sushi Deli" (You do not talk about Sushi Deli), like chefs Michelle Bernstein, José Andrés, Norman Van Aken, and Kevin Cory of Naoe. But that post is also among the top 25 in all-time visits here, many of those over the past few years, so I guess I'm guilty too.

As Sushi Deli became more and more popular the past couple years, I unfortunately found myself going less and less often (of course, considering there was a stretch that I made almost weekly visits, that was bound to happen). What had once been a place where we would just pop in on Sunday afternoons had become one where you had to show up a half-hour before they opened to get on the list for seats. When I was able to score a seat, Michio – who is now a very spry 68 years old – would be in non-stop motion, and often seemed as harried as a Tokyo salaryman.^[4] Maybe, Sushi Deli should have stayed a bit more under the radar. Selfishly, anyway, it would have been better for me.

Chef Kushi himself always seemed ambivalent at best about Sushi Deli's increasing popularity. In fact, he often seemed to actively resist it. Those shortened hours, and all those rules, seemed at least partially designed to discourage customers – or certain types of customers, anyway. In a story last month which announced the impending closure, he admitted, "I wish I could choose the customers. Each of them."^[5] And this isn't the first time he thought about calling it quits. A few years ago, he started a rumor that he was about to close – which may have been serious, or may have just been a ploy to try to get the restaurant listing off of Yelp.

But this time, it's for real. All the merchandise had been cleared off the shelves, and the several dozen folks who were lined up outside yesterday – some as early as 8:30 a.m. – will be Sushi Deli's last customers.

I will miss it dearly. I can't even begin to count the moments of quiet happiness I've had at that counter over the years, many of them shared with my family. But I am thrilled for Chef Kushi and his lovely wife to finally get to relax, as they so rightfully deserve. And I am incredibly excited for what's in store from the next generation ... but maybe I shouldn't say any more about that.

^[1] Not that it ever got very big: over the years, they perhaps doubled the original capacity of about a dozen, if you counted a small table in the back underneath the Japanese video DVDs.

^[2] It's entirely possible there's also no place where our kids ate more frequently than Sushi Deli, as we've been taking them from a very young age. Frod Jr.'s regular order at first was the salmon teriyaki lunch plate, and he eventually branched out to the rest of the menu. Little Miss F's regular order was the crunchy shrimp roll, though she came to like the battera roll nearly as much as her dad.

^[3] On my last visit to Sushi Deli a couple weeks ago, another customer saw this coming out and asked Chef Kushi what it was. He opened his eyes wide and exclaimed "I don't know!"

^[4] It is customary if you're drinking sake at the sushi bar to offer your itamae a pour, but a few years ago, Mrs. Kushi cut Michio off because the sake would slow him down too much in the afternoons.

^[5] I was always baffled by the people who would wait an hour for a spot there, and then order a California roll and a spicy tuna roll. But maybe even worse were the ponderous blowhards loudly "educating" their companions about Japanese food, usually while drowning Chef Kushi's sushi in a viscous slurry of soy sauce and wasabi.

Cobaya SoBeWFF 2017 with Chefs Brad Kilgore, Jeremiah Stone, Fabian Von Hauske and Jean-Luc Royere

It was a little more than five years ago that we did a Cobaya dinner at Azul restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel which included a special guest: Andrew Zimmern of the TV show Bizarre Foods, who ended up featuring the dinner on the show.There was another special attendee that night, but he wasn't very well known at the time, and he wasn't in the dining room – he was in the kitchen. Joel Huff's sous chef at Azul was Bradley Kilgore, who had come to Miami to work at Azul after spending time with some of Chicago's finest: Alinea, Laurent Gras's L2O, Boka.

Brad was actually part of what drew us to Azul in the first place, with his online updates of what was happening in the kitchen. Zimmern has a pretty keen eye for talent too, and even though Brad was third in command in that kitchen, by the end of the night Zimmern had bestowed a nickname on him: "Wall Street," for the Gordon Gekko-esque slicked-back look he sported at the time.

Eager to see what Brad could do on his own, several months later a few of us organized a one-off dinner at Azul where we gave him free rein. He killed it – his "anatomy of a suckling pig" remains a benchmark for me when it comes to nose-to-tail utilization. Shortly afterwards, his career path took him away from Azul: a brief gig as head chef at a tough location on Key Biscayne, then to a much better gig at the St. Regis Bal Harbour for Jean-Georges Vongerichten's J&G Grill, then, nearly two years ago, to open his own place in Wynwood: Alter.

Brad Kilgore a/k/a "Wall Street" circa 2012

At Alter, all of his potential has been fully realized. The food is some of the best I've ever eaten in Miami, and recognition has been both voluminous and well-deserved: last year Brad was named one of Food & Wine magazine's Best New Chefs; and his restaurant, Alter, was a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation Best New Restaurant award (a national category), and was included in Eater's list of the 21 Best New Restaurants in America.

Jeremiah Stone and Brad Kilgore, circa 2017

So for the third Cobaya dinner we've done in conjunction with the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, we orchestrated something of a reunion, bringing Brad back to Azul to cook for an evening. Kilgore looked pretty comfortable back in the kitchen where it all started for him in Miami, and even slicked his hair back for the occasion.

Joining him were the Mandarin's head chef, Jean-Luc Royere, and a couple New York City chefs whose careers have followed a very similar trajectory of late: Jeremiah Stone and Fabian Von Hauske, of Contra and Wildair.

Stone and Von Hauske were also included in that 2016 F&W list of Best New Chefs; their new restaurant, Wildair, was a Beard Best New Restaurant finalist, and was on that same Eater Best New Restaurants list (their first restaurant, Contra, was on the list in 2014 when it opened as well).^[1] Kindred spirits.

(You can see all my pictures from the dinner in this Cobaya SOBEWFF 2017 flickr set).

Each of the teams contributed one of the passed appetizers which made their way around the room as guests arrived. From Royere, tranches of tuna cured in kombu and wrapped in fragrant shiso leaves, concealing tiny finger lime sacs that provide a citric pop as you chew. From Kilgore, a spoon of greenish-hued olive oil "snow," garnished with green apple, a sliver of serrano chili, and a dollop of caviar – a lot of flavor in one bite.^[2] And from Stone and Von Hauske, a local specialty – stone crab claws – garnished in an unorthodox way, with smoked pepper and feathery flakes of chicharrones.^[3]



Once everyone was settled into their tables, dinner got started with Stone's course: raw shrimp and lobster, hidden away under a mosaic of thinly sliced butternut squash and sage leaves. It was an odd dish, and I say that with a fondness for odd things. The seafood was sweet and soft and fatty, the squash – still raw, or if cooked, just barely – was firm and earthy, and the sage's strong, camphor aroma cut its way through every bite.

Brad followed with a super-soigne version of an izakaya staple: kama, or fish collar. Here, he used kanpachi, a smaller variety of amberjack, which he smoked and flavored with koji miso (Brad told me it was quite a process to gather enough collars for the 80+ covers at our dinner). The collar meat may be the most lush and fatty on the fish, and here it came out all supple and silky, like a cross between smoked sable and Nobu's famous miso cod. Even better, he topped each plate with a big, puffy black truffle cracker, made with tapioca and a pound of Urbani truffles. I was dubious that the flavor would carry through in that format, but I guess it works out just fine if you use enough truffles. It was a great dish.

Royere's Azul crew had been tending to slabs of beef on Korin binchotan charcoal grills for a good part of the evening, and we finally got to see the result. Fat, crimson slices of lush Japanese A5 wagyu beef were anointed with a miso bordelaise, and plated with roasted maitake mushrooms, a purée of golden caramelized onions, and a light smoked potato espuma. My only disappointment was that after a week of eating while on vacation (we got back from Paris the night before the dinner), I lacked the appetite to finish it.

Dessert was turned over to Fabian Von Hauske, who handles the pastry chef responsibilities at Contra and Wildair. Like Stone's course, this was odd, in a good way: halved grapes and a sweet-tart grape soup (not quite viscous or sweet enough to be called a syrup), with a dollop of a rich, pink-hued coconut and grape semifreddo, simultaneously fruity and creamy and tart, dappled with some olive oil for a little extra richness.

There was something particularly fitting about having Brad back in the kitchen at Azul, where he started in Miami and where Cobaya had its fifteen minutes as well (OK, not quite that, maybe ten minutes of airtime). The only one missing was Zimmern (who cooked for our first two Cobaya / SOBEWFF collaborations), though he made his own visit to Alter a couple weeks later.

It was even better to have the wonderfully creative talents of Jeremiah Stone and Fabian Von Hauske sharing that kitchen, along with our gracious host, Jean-Luc Royere, and the rest of his crew at Azul (some of whom, at least in the front of  house, were veterans of our Cobaya dinner from five years ago). Thanks as well to Jeffrey Stambor, director of winemaking at Beaulieu Vineyards, who supplied the pairings for the evening, to the crew at SOBEWFF, and as always, to the guinea pigs whose interest and support make these kind of events possible.

^[1] We were supposed to have Curtis Duffy of Chicago's Grace as well, but he backed out.

^[2] In a nod to the great Quince iPad Plate Kerfuffle of Late 2016, these spoons were served from iPads which had a rotating display of logos from SoBeWFF and the chefs' restaurants.

^[3] The printed menu also listed sumac crackers with blood and Flagsheep cheese, which sounds awesome, but either I missed them or they never made it out.

first thoughts: Arson | Downtown Miami

I can't believe it's already been nearly three years since a small, curious spot called Niu Kitchen opened in downtown Miami, on a nondescript block across from Miami-Dade College. Despite its diminutive size, Niu manages to turn out Catalan-inspired food that is more creative, and more delicious, than many local restaurants with much bigger spaces and budgets. Now, the team of chef Deme Lomas and manager Karina Iglesias has doubled down, opening Arson just a few doors down.

The roomier space may be twice the size of Niu, and as the name suggests, the focus is fire: pretty much every dish is touched by flame or smoke, mostly generated by the Josper, a Spanish-made, charcoal-fired oven / grill rig that is fast becoming many chefs' favorite new plaything. And while Niu remains more or less faithful to the Catalan theme, Arson is unbounded by genre: they'll set fire to anything.

(You can see all my pictures in this Arson - Miami flickr set).

The menu right now is pretty short and tight: four appetizer-sized dishes, four ocean-based proteins, four land-based proteins, rounded out by a few more items listed on a blackboard as daily specials. Prices tend to cluster around the $20 mark, and portion sizes run small, so that you might consider splitting an extra item among two people if you show up with a healthy appetite.

We started with a couple of the smaller dishes (Arson is a "dishes are meant for sharing and come out as they're ready" kind of place; for our meal, apps came out before more substantial dishes, though not necessarily at the same time). Roasted red peppers, served at room temperature, were tender, sweet, and a little bit smoky, blanketed with garlic oil, grated hard boiled egg, and crunchy migas. I liked this a lot. Another cool dish, anticipating summer: a chilled roasted vegetable soup, thick and creamy like a salmorejo, garnished with a crispy rice cracker bearing a payload of cinnamon and curry powder. Shatter the cracker and the warm spices perfume the bowl.

Spanish octopus looks like something from mid-aughts El Bulli, and tastes a bit like it too: a fat tentacle burnished on the grill, a broad stripe of frothy star anise infused cream, transparent cubes of tomato gelatin, dots of spicy (pimentón?) aioli. The octopus happens to be grilled just right, and the unusual accompaniments somehow work together.

We order a couple of grilled meats from the chalkboard: the Spanish rabbit, and the secreto de iberico (there's also a whole fish, a duck, and a couple steaks, in addition to what's on the printed menu). The cut of rabbit is from the plump leg, which I've usually seen braised or confited, and there's a reason: this is a tight, muscular piece of meat, and slow cooking in liquid or fat lets it slacken and relax. Here, it's flavorful and juicy – and won't be mistaken for chicken – but still somewhat tough.

The secreto, on the other hand, is pure joy. This "butcher's secret" cut eats like a skirt steak of pork, with a rippled, chewy but still giving texture and deep, intense flavor. It would be perfect as is – just grilled and assertively salted – but Deme adds little buttons of pungent garlic confit and cubes of tart apple around the edges of the plate.

As we're almost finishing, Karina comes over from Niu and spots us (full disclosure: we spent lots of time at the counter at Red Light with Karina stalling for time, entertaining our kids, and plying us with beers as Kris Wessel sweated away in the kitchen), and sends over one more dish. It's a pasta: tagliatelle dyed black with squid ink, studded with briny nubbins of grilled cuttlefish, awash in a tomato sofrito, and dotted with creamy aioli. It's excellent. It also fills the spot that might otherwise have been occupied by one of a few desserts that are available, which also make some use of the Josper's flames.

Like its sibling Niu Kitchen, Arson is a quirky place, and the short, simple menu can make it a bit of a challenge to cobble together a meal. But it's interesting, intriguing stuff, most of it quite delicious, and it's great to see something new from the Niu crew.

Arson
104 N.E. 2nd Avenue, Miami, Florida
786.717.6711

best thing i ate last week: Oysters Ciancio at Mignonette Uptown

We've kind of let the "Best Thing I Ate Last Week" routine fall by the wayside. Let's remedy that right now.

A couple months ago, I attended a friends and family at Mignonette Uptown, the new oyster bar and seafood place from Daniel Serfer (who also runs Blue Collar in the MiMo District and the original Mignonette Downtown in Edgewater) in the old Gourmet Diner on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami. I liked it. I finally got back there this weekend, and tried a dish I missed on that first visit: the Oysters Ciancio, named after the restaurant's chef de cuisine, Anthony Ciancio.

They're topped with a paste of garlic, shallots and white miso, basted with beef tallow, and broiled, and they come out plump and savory and just a little bit meaty and a lot delicious.

(You can see more pictures in this Mignonette Uptown - North Miami Beach flickr set.)

At Mignonette Downtown, you might instead get the Oysters Frank, named after chef de cuisine Bobby Frank, which come topped with melted Manchego cheese, crispy bacon, sherry and butter. It's just one example of how the theme of the two locations is consistent while the particulars of the execution vary. Some more: the really suave squid and tomato stew which was the "CBGB" (chowder, bisque or gumbo) of the day at Uptown, and a clever Thai-French mashup of tom kha moules frites. I'm pretty happy that I can now go seven miles in either direction from home and run into a Mignonette.

Also: big shout-out to chefs Jeremiah Bullfrog and Kurtis Jantz, who reminded us it's Mardi Gras season by throwing an Ole Bay All Day party at BoxElder Saturday (pics here). All afternoon they were slinging Natchitotches meat pies, muffulettas, crab gumbo, boiled crawfish and king cake donuts. It was a great time.