Only Two Days Left in Miami Pizza Poll

Until yesterday, Casale and Pizzavolante had been running neck and neck comfortably ahead of the rest of the pack, but now there's been a late surge from Piola and Andiamo and it's all close to even. There's only two days remaining to cast your vote for the Best Pizza in Miami over on the right hand column. (Sorry, there's no category for "No Miami pizza can possibly compare to any New York pizza, even one scraped up off the sidewalk after three days festering in the sun").

Kingdom - Manliest Restaurant in America?

[sorry, this restaurant has closed]

I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but I'm comfortable enough with my manhood to admit that on more than one occasion, folks that have emailed me through the blog or responded to chowhound posts have assumed (erroneously) that I'm female. But I didn't volunteer that fact to the folks at Asylum.com when they asked for my suggestion of a Miami candidate for their "Manliest Restaurant in America" contest.

After finishing a beer or three, scratching myself, and doing a little tribal drumming, my recommendation was Kingdom, the bar and burger joint on Biscayne Boulevard and 67th Street. The burgers are great, the beer is cold and reasonably priced, the TVs are always tuned to whatever sporting event is in season, and your choices are to sit at the dark dank bar, or to sit outside on the sidewalk along Biscayne Boulevard, where if you're there at the right hour you'll still see folks working the oldest profession. The burgers start at 1/2 pound and work their way up to the 2 pound "Doomsday Burger," with the testosterone-driven dare that if you finish one along with an order of fries and rings in 15 minutes, it's free. And there's a great big concrete lion out front.

Que es mas macho than that? (My alternate choice, by the way, was Las Vacas Gordas). The voting is proceeding in regional brackets, so if you want to support Kingdom, here's where to cast your vote on the "Manliest Restaurant in America."

Phony Bagelmania Has Bitten the Dust

I know it seems odd that after a week in northern California I should be talking about bagels. A case of recency trumping primacy (there are many good things to eat in San Francisco - the bagels are not among them).

After returning home to South Florida, I was intrigued to read on the Florida Chowhound board of a new bagel place opening up in Delray Beach called "The Original Brooklyn Water Bagel Co." The pitch is that they claim to have found a way to duplicate, through "purification and modification," the supposedly magical effects of the New York public water supply on bagel-preparation.^[*]

Opinions among the chowhounds seem decidedly mixed, with some pronouncing them the "Best bagels in S. Fl.," while others declared them "really nothing special." As is somewhat typical, many of the posters (particularly the cheerleaders) are first-time posters, miraculously roused to action by the appearance of a new bagel place.

Anyhoo ... I happened to be up in Palm Beach this morning, and Brooklyn Water Bagel was only a brief detour on my drive back to Miami. I stopped in and they do indeed have lots of fancy metal tanks on display which create the Brooklyn holy water. Other than that, it's a modified fast-food setup where you order at the counter, pour your own coffee or soft drink, and get a card which plugs into a little device on your table to tell them where to deliver your order.

I had requested a lox eggs & onions with a toasted poppy seed bagel, but alas, their toaster was behaving over-aggressively and had been put on time out for the morning. Considering they just opened a week ago, I was not going to hold this against them; besides, it gave me a better opportunity to sample their bagel au naturel, and they assured me the bagels were still warm from the oven. There was another mild snafu a few minutes later when, instead of getting a LEO with a bagel on the side, I instead got a LEO stuffed within said bagel (which was a different but very similarly described menu item). I can deal with that in stride too. It's all about the bagel anyway, right?

As for that bagel. I was underwhelmed. It had a nicely crusty exterior, but otherwise it struck me as too fluffy and risen, and too dry. In fact, for a bagel fresh out of the oven, it felt oddly stale. I can't imagine driving all the way from Miami to Delray even for an authentic Brooklyn bagel, but this one certainly wouldn't be worth the schlep.

But maybe I'd just forgotten what a good bagel tasted like - an easy thing to do amidst all the imposters these days. So as I continued driving south, I recalled another small detour along the way - Sage Deli in Hallandale. Lacking Brooklyn Water Bagel's fast-food franchise aspirations, Sage is an old-school Jewish deli that bakes its own bagels on premises, and also offers the full gamut of the usuals - several different smoked fish, corned beef and pastrami, deli salads, knishes, blintzes, etc. They also had what I recalled to be some of the best bagels in South Florida, though it had been some time since I'd had one. I grabbed a quick sesame bagel (toasted with a working toaster!) topped with scallion cream cheese at the counter, and was reminded what a good bagel should be. Crusty on the outside, but still chewy and even a bit dense on the inside - substantial, serious and not in any way fluffy. It's not a New York bagel, but it's as close as I've gotten here in South Florida - even without any Brooklyn water.

The Original Brooklyn Water Bagel Co.
14451 S. Military Trail
Delray Beach, FL 33484
877.224.3580

Sage Deli
800 E. Hallandale Beach Blvd.
Hallandale, FL 33009
954.456.7499

^[*]Having been open a week, Brooklyn Water Bagel's website already optimistically has a link for "Franchise Info" though it's a dead link.

Going to California ...

... with no aching in my heart. Actually gone last week and came back, late last night, which explains the dearth of posts here of late. But fear not, I'm working up my reports from the other coast. A preview of what's to come: Yank Sing, Great Eastern, Fifth Floor, Zuni Cafe, Incanto, Citronelle Carmel, Manresa, Bistro Laurent, Artisan, Le Colonial.

Experiment #1

The first run of the "Cobaya - Gourmet Guinea Pigs" dinner was earlier this week at Talula with a menu crafted by Chef Andrea Curto-Randazzo and her sous chef Kyle Foster. There was a preview of the menu here the evening before the dinner, and now there's some feedback in the comments there from some of the other guinea pigs.

Before recapping the meal, some general thoughts. The goal here is a very simple one - to get talented chefs to cook great, interesting meals for an audience of adventurous, open-minded diners. That may happen inside a restaurant, it may happen outside of one. It may be a multi-course tasting menu, it may be a family-style whole hog dinner (here's hoping). For those who question the "underground" street cred of this mission, those questions are perfectly legitimate. My answer is, "I don't care." We're not limiting ourselves to meals cooked in abandoned warehouses in secret locations disclosed the day before the dinner; we're also not limiting ourselves to white tablecloths and silverware changed between every course. I'm very open-minded that way: all that matters to me is if the food is good, and I think there's enough similar-minded folks to make that game plan sustainable.

In any event, here are my thoughts on the first Cobaya experiment (the restaurant was very generous on corkage and so several of us brought bottles, wine pairings are noted below where I can recall).

diver scallop crudo - a couple thin slices of cold, sweet sea scallop, topped with a Blue Moon Beer sorbet, some micro-greens tossed with some pickled ginger, and a sprinkle of mint sea salt, all presented on a big scallop shell like Venus on the Half-Shell. I enjoyed the texture of the sorbet against the scallop, though I thought the sorbet was too sweet which overwhelmed the beer flavor; the minted salt did a nice job of perking up the flavors.

Had a Hubert Slovakian sparkling wine with this, which I thought was a perfectly nice bubbly though not a great pairing.

foie gras - the foie was perfectly seared, with a very fine cross-hatch across the surface. A great set of accompaniments, too - a sort of hash of Homestead lychees, toasted almond slivers, and house smoked bacon (Talula does a lot of in-house charcuterie and the results are outstanding), and a drizzle of a root beer gastrique that provided a tantalizing sweet-spicy component. You can also find this root beer gastrique on the Talula regular menu where it accompanies a seared scallop app.

Poured a Bodegas Gutierrez Casta Diva Cosecha Miel (2003) with this, a sweet muscatel from Alicante which showed some nice citrus, honey and spice.

quail - rubbed with ancho chile and roasted, served with a raisin-cocoa nib jus and a puddle of buttered popcorn puree. The quail was perfectly roasted and it was reassuring to see that this group wasn't remotely self-conscious about getting down to business and using their hands to pick up and gnaw on those little leg bones. The raisin-cocoa nib component did a neat job of mirroring the notes of the ancho chile, though it was curious that the flavors more fully revealed themselves on their own (particularly the cocoa) rather than when had in combination with the quail. The popcorn puree was also a nice complement, though the flavor -surprisingly to me - was not dramatically distinguishable from just a simple corn puree.

Paired with a Finca Sandoval (2004), a syrah-based blend from Manchuela that had nice dark fruit and some smoky, chocolatey notes.

tripe risotto - one of my favorites of the night among several very good dishes. Talula always does great risottos but this was a real knockout. Creamy rice and lots of slippery, velvety braised tripe, smoky spicy house-smoked tasso, along with some textural and flavor contrast from some softened but not melted green apple dice and red cabbage, and walnuts. Just an absolutely beautiful dish. I could have happily had another bowl after dessert.

Had with a Poggio San Polo Brunello (1997) which was beautiful, both elegant and robust, but still felt really young and could have used some more aeration. Lesson for next time.

spinalis - another of the favorites of the night. The spinalis is, as I understand it, basically the cap of the ribeye, the strip of meat outside the fat layer of a typical rib-eye steak, taken cross-wise off the top of the cut. It is a fantastic cut of meat, with deep meaty flavor, and a great combination of texture and tenderness. It was accompanied with a summer stone fruit panzanella (slices of nectarine (?) and plum (?) tossed with cubes of toasted bread), "blackberry wine" and a toss of crispy fried shallots. The unconventional pairing of the fruit with the beef nicely lightened up the dish some.

This was possibly one of the best semi-fortuitous wine pairings of the night (when I saw the description it was screaming for a zin for me), a C.G. di Arie "Southern Exposures" Shenandoah Valley Zinfandel (2006), a really nice zin with plenty of berry fruit but still good balance and even elegance.

cheeses - a couple artisan cheeses from Carr Valley, the menu listed a River Bend sheeps' milk cheese and a Bessie's Blend goat & cow's milk cheese, though some of us at the table believe we actually got a Mobay (Carr Valley's take on the French Morbier) instead. The pairing with a house-made mostarda (cherries in a syrup pungent with mustard seed and horseradish) and truffle honey was intriguing, but ... I prefer Talula's cooking to Carr Valley's cheeses.

panna cotta - a beautiful creamy-white panna cotta speckled on top with vanilla beans, with a hint of fresh tarragon and a scatter of strawberries macerated in a white balsamic syrup. This was a nice light dessert, with an excellent texture. Jay Rayner got some titters on Top Chef for noting that a proper panna cotta should wobble like a woman's breasts, and that's an apt description. Sadly, there are so many fake ones on South Beach, it would be hard to tell (panna cottas, that is).

This made for an unexpectedly brilliant pairing with another of the Hubert Slovakian bubblies, this one with just enough of a hint of sweetness to complement the dessert. Unfortunately I can't tell you the particular label on this, only that it was one of those serendipitous moments.

It was a great meal, and a great group of people with whom to share it. The real pleasure of this, from my perspective, is having the opportunity to tell a great chef, "Cook me what you want to make." More such experiences will be coming.^[*]

^[*]Chef Curto-Randazzo has given hints that she may start doing a "Cobaya Happy Hour" and offer some more adventurous tapas-style items at more affordable prices. When there's more information I"ll be happy to pass it along.