PurpleSunshine

INDEPENDENT FOOD FESTIVAL 2006. When Hillel at Tas...

INDEPENDENT FOOD FESTIVAL 2006. When Hillel at TasteEverything asked this blog to take part in the Independent Food Festival again, I definitely wanted to honor something here in New Orleans. But didn't know where to begin finding a worthy honoree. For the past six months, I've been picking restaurants based on factors I used to take for granted. As in, are they open? Past 8 p.m.? Can I sit down in less than an hour and a half?
     Fortunately, there's a cluster of decent restaurants on Prytania Street near Robert and Upperline streets. And while it wasn't a regular spot for me before the storm, I've been eating at one of them -- a Japanese place called KYOTO -- a couple times a month. Through friends I became aware of their off-the-menu "SARA ROLL," and I've ordered it every time I've been there since.
     Named after the restaurant's owner, Sara Molony, it's basically a shrimp and avocado roll. But it's topped with a bright red chili sauce an a "crunchy sauce," which would seem to be an oxymoron. (I gather that it's made with stray bits of tempura.) A simple recipe, really. But it's tasty and pretty and raises one's spirits. And it's a hell of a lot better than beef jerky and MREs.
     All of which is to say that this particular roll at Kyoto is the BEST POST-APOCALYPTIC COMFORT FOOD that I've come across.
     Since the storm, I've had some great meals at a number of restaurants. In fact, one gets the impression that at least some celebrity chefs (or celebrity-for-New-Orleans chefs) are actually running things in their own kitchens again. But insofar as a dish can embody the struggle to eat out, feel better and get back to normal, it's the humble Sara roll at Kyoto.

KATRINALAND. If everything had worked out like I e...

KATRINALAND. If everything had worked out like I expected, I'd have written this post two and a half months ago.
     In my office, we have the hurricane drill down: You take shelter at work, you bring a few bottles of wine, and you go home the next day (or sooner if the coast is clear). In this case, we started pouring around 5 p.m., with a Corton Clos du Roi, a Burgundy that Terri had brought back from France. (Not sure about the vintage.) Jon at Cork & Bottle had suggested that she save it for a nice dinner. Instead we ate it with ham and cheese sandwiches. My tasting notes started off lousy and trailed off quickly; the only thing noteworthy in them is this statement: "It smells like plastic cup, but that's because I'm drinking it out of a plastic cup."
     Next was the 2003 Acacia Field Blend Carneros Pinot Noir, a round, fruity wine that nonetheless has a nice, bracing asphalt-and-pepper undertone to it. At that point we thought we might be stuck in the building for a couple of days, so we figured we'd conserve the top-shelf stuff. The next few wines -- White Oak Syrah, Arroyo del Sol Pinot Noir, Pillar Box Red --were big, fruity and uncomplicated. The last one, the Cortello Vinho Tinto Red Wine, had an unpleasant bite to it. At some point that evening, Gary, Natalie and I went out to get more bottles from my wine fridge. Eventually, we went to sleep, as the wind picked up outside.
     What happened next has been amply documented elsewhere.

     :: :: ::

     After writing for weeks on end about what felt like the apocalypse, it's hard to go back to kvetching in print (or rather, pixels) about subpar pinot noirs. For a while I was only drinking whiskey. And I stopped drinking for a little while, for reasons having nothing to do with Hurricane Katrina. A few of us talked about holding wine club in exile in Baton Rouge, but we never pulled it together.
     Now I'm back at home in Mid-City; we live on that little strip of natural ridge that didn't flood too badly or for very long. Fortunately, the neighborhood wine store was just about the first business to reopen. Still, most of the surrounding areas are empty, so it feels like living on the frontier. And our wine group is scattered. Gary's in Houston for the time being, as is occasional wine club participant Laura. Mark is in Galveston. Pam and Shaun are leaving for Nashville. Delia has already moved to Indianapolis.
     But we're doing our first post-Katrina tasting next week. You gotta do something to fill the time.

W.B.W. #12: DRINK LOCAL. When you think of the wor...

W.B.W. #12: DRINK LOCAL. When you think of the world's great wine regions, images of south Louisiana do not flicker through your brain. Wine grapes seem to like places where the land slopes, the climate is dry and the temperatures are mild or even cool. I live at sea level, if that. At the height of summer, overnight lows drop into the mid-70s if you're lucky. The ground is wet, and if the air were any more humid you'd need a straw to inhale.
     The nearest winery is an hour north of here. Conditions up there in St. Tammany Parish (i.e., county) are more favorable, but it won't be mistaken for Sonoma anytime soon.
     This is a long way of saying that my expectations were low when I uncorked a bottle of the 2001 Pontchartrain Vineyards "Le Trolley" St. Tammany Parish Blanc du Bois. It costs $11 at the supermarket in my neighborhood, and it's made from a hybrid grape developed in Florida in 1968.
     The nose turned out to be simple and appealing -- honeyish and reminiscent of apple juice. So far, so good.
     But this wine makes a harsh first impression when you sip it. You get a powerful rush of something that doesn't taste at all like grapes. It's as though someone extracted all the juice from a fruit or a vegetable and then made wine from the leftovers.
     That distilled-roughage flavor quickly faded into the background. Nothing really took its place in the foreground. So while this Blanc du Bois looks like white wine, smells like white wine and feels like white wine on your tongue, the taste is blunted and affectless. Eventually, I did pick up some fresh grassy notes, like you'd find in a good New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.
     The b.f. tried it, too, and took an immediate dislike. He said it was "like those green apple candy bars in liquid form."
     After I'd sat with it a while (over a rerun of "Lost"), and the memory of that first sip faded, I decided that the wine was basically pleasant. Its lack of overt fruitiness made it an inoffensive blank slate that would go OK with spicy foods. The label bills this (along with other Pontchartrain Vineyards products) as a "distinctive regional wine to complement the regional cuisines of Louisiana." I'm not sure about all that. But I'd made a pasta dish with turkey tasso, Vidalia onions, tomatoes and fresh basil, and the Blanc du Bois went with it quite well.

B.Y.O.B. INFO AND ETIQUETTE. Somehow I missed wine...

B.Y.O.B. INFO AND ETIQUETTE. Somehow I missed wine diva Brenda Maitland's piece in May on the intricacies of bringing your own wine to restaurants. Brenda talks about some situations I've not yet encountered -- like when you try to bring a bottle that's on the restaurant's wine list. (Short version: It's not cool.)

WINE BOOK. Some thoughts on A Very Good Year by Mi...

WINE BOOK. Some thoughts on A Very Good Year by Mike Weiss. The book is an expanded version of the San Francisco Chronicle's 39-part wine series. Yes, 39 parts.

JUNE 1 RESULTS: ITALIAN WHITES. The attractive ske...

JUNE 1 RESULTS: ITALIAN WHITES. The attractive sketch on the Donnafugata Anthilia bottle originally inspired Chip and Charles to consider a "pretty labels" theme. (Scroll down to see it.) But ultimately, they went with other Italian white wines -- which turned out to be a good idea, given that at that point the weather was finally settling into a typical New Orleans summer. Most or all of these came from Cork & Bottle and cost in the $15 range.
     :: ::
     We started, as an aperitif, with the 2003 Almondo Giovanni "Bricco delle Ciliege" Roero Arneis. In this case, Roero is the D.O. -- it's in northern Italy -- and Arneis is the grape. We didn't discuss this wine, and I didn't take any notes, because we were waiting for everybody to arrive and get settled in. But some of us later decided that this opening wine was the best of the evening.
     1-tie) "Belarus." 2003 Tenuta di Nozzole "Le Bruniche" Chardonnay, I.G.T. Toscana. Avg. 13; range 12-14. A light, airy, simple, straightforward Tuscan white. Gary thought it smelled like melons and pronounced it a "great summer white." Not a tone of body; Steph thought it might be better with food. Chip thought it didn't really stand up to food and was better quaffed on its own.
     1-tie) "Carte." 2003 Broglia "La Meirana" Gavi, 100% Cortese. Avg. 13; range 11-14. This white, from Gavi in northern Italy, isn't one of those Old World wines that aspires to be a fruit-forward New World grape juice. (Or if it does, it doesn't succeed.) It's got an unusual brass-doorknob nose -- newly shined brass, Charles thought -- with a little Euro-terroir-stanky undertone. Reminded people of pears, green apples and honeydew rind. Chip thought it was a quiet wine. "A little girl with curls and glasses," he said, looking at Steph. Becky thought the nose was "chemically harsh" and couldn't get past it.
     3) "Album." 2003 La Carraia Orvieto Classico. Our assessments of this wine, which comes from Orvieto in Umbria, were all over the map. Becky found it clean and fizzy, like San Pellegrino. Chip thought it was chalky, and it smelled to him like lemon grass. It reminded Charles of an old lady with perfume. I thought it was more muscular than most of the others, big-boned rather than small-boned. But there are better big-boned white wines out there.
     4) "Snow." 2003 Donnafugata Anthilia; 50% Ansonica, 50% Catarratto. Avg. 11.3; range 9-13. Buttery nose with a hard metallic undertone. Becky thought it smelled like nail polish remover at first, but it improved as it breathed. chip, who'd had this wine before, said that previously it tasted like a little flower bud opening, but he didn't like it as much this time. Steph and Gary picked up some weird "bodily" flavors, but Gary thought it went down OK.
     5) "Du Bois." 2003 Terredora Dipaolo Falanghina Irpinia; 100% Falanghina. Avg. 9.5; range 5-11. This wine comes from Campania, and we didn't care so much for it. One person thought it wanted to be light and fruity but had a weird chocolate flavor cutting through it, and it reminded another person of gin. Somebody else was "intrigued by how you get a wine to taste like peanut butter."
     Statistical note: Charles liked these wines the most, and Becky the least.
     As for the fake labels: All the names suggest, in one language or another, things that are white.
     :: ::
     Gary and I hosted. I did the cooking. I've been stir-frying a lot lately and wondered if you could get the ultimate Asian technique to produce Mediterranean results if you use basil, rosemary, olive oil, chicken stock and various Western spring/summer vegetables. Short answer: No, not if you also use as much fresh ginger as I did. My attempt at Asian-Italian fusion failed, but at least the dish went OK with the wine.
     The menu also included a salad with salami and pine nuts, a grits souffle with a pesto sauce (modeled on a recent Cooking Light recipe) and a basil-infused version of key lime pie.

MONDOVINO. I've been meaning to post something on ...

MONDOVINO. I've been meaning to post something on "Mondovino," the semi-controversial wine documentary that touched down at Zeitgeist in New Orleans for a few days last week. It goes on forever and ever, and much of its argument -- basically that capitalism is killing wine, as Billy Bragg might have put it -- struck me as disingenuous or naive. But I still enjoyed watching it.
     The director, Jonathan Nossiter, is the son of a New York Times diplomatic correspondent (and, according to Steph, the brother of one of the AP writers in Louisiana). The filmmaker is thorough, and to his credit his interview subjects tend to let down their guard. Elderly Bordeaux and Burgundy vignerons who make traditional wines come of as curmudgeonly but endearing. Particularly Hubert de Montille, who hands over control of his estate to his humorless son but whose soulmate is a daughter who's gone to work temporarily for a modern wine conglomerate.
     Meanwhile, an executive for that company, along with everyone else who makes a more "international" style of wine, comes off in the movie as shallow, soulless, misguided or evil. Michel Rolland, a wine consultant, looks like an ass in "Mondovino," and maybe he is one. James Suckling, an obsequious wine critic from Wine Spectator, lives up to his name.
     But Nossiter also lets on that everyone who hires Rolland or does business with the Mondavi family or gets good ratings from Robert Parker is a barely disguised fascist. A member of the Antinori family defends an ancestor's support for Mussolini; an Argentine estate owner makes racist comments about indigenous people; a California winemaker expresses himself to a Mexican migrant worker in broken, condescending Spanish.
     It's icky to watch. But Nossiter doesn't subject old-style wineries to the same withering scrutiny. My uneducated guess is, not every winemaker who collaborated with the Nazis went on to get 97 Parker points (and vice versa). And you might well find a National Front voter or two among the sort of "terroir" winemakers that the movie celebrates.
     The movie does give you a flavor for how the international wine business operates. But you might walk out of "Mondovino" thinking that traditional winemaking is a fragile flower that just popped up out of the gravel, untouched by the filthy hand of commerce. Which is nonsense. Thanks to one set of business trends, there's long been an international market for French wines built for drinkers who buy by the case and store bottles for years before uncorking. More recently, a different set of trends has created a market for a different type of wine. If the pendulum has swung toward big, dark, fruity, extracted reds, it will likely swing back in another direction eventually.
     In the meantime, enough with the gloom and doom. Sheesh.

W.B.W. #10: WHITE PINOTS. I tend to like white win...

W.B.W. #10: WHITE PINOTS. I tend to like white wines from Oregon. So for this month's virtual wine tasting, hosted by My Adventures in the Breadbox, I picked up the 2002 Seven Hills Oregon Pinot Gris for $12 or so.
     Come to find out, this is a lively, sturdy wine with only a hint of the grapefruit flavors that jump out of a lot of other wines made with this grape. There's a lot of cantaloupe in the nose, along with a little bit of honeydew and maybe cardamom. When you first taste it, it's fruity but not a fruit bomb; it's just restrained enough. The finish is zippy and leaves a tingle on the side of your tongue. On the downside, the fruit dissipates when you sip on the wine for a while. Still, I enjoyed this wine, which stood up OK to an Asianish barbecue beef dish I'd made. (Pork would have been a better match.)
     Gary wasn't so generous; he found the wine to be harsh and didn't want much to do with it.
     Seven Hills turns out to be based in Walla Walla, Wash., but they make wines with grapes from all over the Pacific Northwest. They seem to be pretty indifferent to the 2002 Oregon Pinot Gris, because I couldn't find a word about it on their Web site. The back of the label merely describes the winery's approach: "Always our emphasis has been to augment and elevate the expression of terroir arising from the meticulous viticulture and low yields of our chosen vineyards."
     Ad copy like this is the wine world's equivalent of dot-com-era blather about "integrating synergy solutions" and "harnessing collaborative web-readiness." Which is to say, windy, meaningless nonsense. It distinguishes Seven Hills from... well, nobody. No winery would ever admit, "We buy leftover grapes from anywhere and try to make up for it in the lab."
     In any case, if I were jonesing for an Oregon Pinot Gris, I'd probably stick with the one from Adelsheim. But the Seven Hills Pinot Gris is tasty and works well with food. I'd give it a 12.5 or 13 out of 20.

Matching wine with music. At a tasting last summer...

Matching wine with music. At a tasting last summer, Steph paired Eliot and Laura's rosés with Roxy Music to great effect. Beyond that, though, you read a lot about matching wine and food, but not so much about matching wine with music.
Fortunately, Mike at Sub Rosa sends along this item on the nexus between music and winemaking -- a nexus that seems to consist of jam bands. I can't quite get into that, but I do like his list of songs that go with Champagne cocktails. (Click on any of his links to listen to the songs in QuickTime.) Mostly it's the kind of stuff you hear in twenty-dollar-martini bars, but it'd work well with leaner reds, too.
Personally, I like the idea of drinking a tight, focused but quirky wine -- say, a Lemberger from Washington state -- while listening to chilly Eurotrash trip-hop remixes. But for some reason, the occasion never arises.

WINE BLOGGING WEDNESDAY #9: TICKLED PINK. A site c...

WINE BLOGGING WEDNESDAY #9: TICKLED PINK. A site called Becks & Posh is asking people to sample rosés. Fortunately, it's prime season in New Orleans for a cool, dry, pink wine. Once the daily high temps head up into the 80s, even those of us who prefer reds to whites are looking for something with a little less weight.
     I've got a pretty specific idea of what a rosé ought to be like, and the 2002 Tablas Creek Vineyard Paso Robles Rosé, about $20, isn't too far off. It's 57% Mourvèdre, 29% Grenache and 14% Counoise, and its color -- deep ruby red with a bit of caramel mixed in -- is almost as dark as some (red) Beaujolais I've seen.
     In the nose I got a bit of strawberry and a lot of some other berry -- marionberry, maybe. Also a fresh, spicy note. First I thought menthol, then I thought cloves, then fresh sage. This wine also has a decent body. It's try, and it leaves a nice, lasting tingle in the back of your mouth. It's fruity but not cloyingly so, and there's a mild but zesty undertone. (Black pepper?) I pretty much dug this wine and would give it, say, 15 on a scale of 20.
     For what it's worth, I also built a meal around it. I cooked some thick pork chops on a skillet, and then made a sauce with a poblano pepper, fresh sage from the backyard, shallots, mushrooms and some of the Tablas Creek rosé. (We had a bunch of produce that I needed to use up.) I'd roasted some asparagus, too, and also served a salsa cruda made of mango, avocado, grape tomatoes and Vidalia onions as sort of a fruit/vegetable side.
     This made for a busy plate. Note to self: Leave out the mushrooms next time. But the Tablas Creek pulled the whole meal together, because it's a great choice for early summer.

RESTAURANT ADVENTURES IN MIAMI... When my sister a...

RESTAURANT ADVENTURES IN MIAMI... When my sister and I met up in South Beach a few weeks back, I was looking forward to checking out the restaurant scene. "Floribbean" was all the rage the last time I visited that part of Florida; maybe that fad was too twee to last, but you could do a lot worse if you like flavorful but healthy food.
In the end, none of the restaurants we tried gave us the full mango-salsa treatment. But we did eat at a terrific place called Wish, which served one of the best meals I've had in a long time. My starter was a crab napoleon; the crabmeat came between layers of fried won ton and avocado with a guava-habanero sauce on it. My entree was a piece of snapper with grilled shrimp, jasmine rice, Chinese sausage and a "Vietnamese tea foam." Wasn't sure what to expect of the foam, which turned out to be an unobtrusively tasty little accent. I forget what Kim got, but we matched it all with the 2004 Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc.
The restaurant itself is beautiful; it's located in a hotel called The Hotel (try Googling that), with an interior designed by Todd Oldham. We got there way early and sat outside, next to a fountain. The great atmosphere and ethereal food made up for the culinary debacle we'd endured the night before. For more on that, read the next couple of posts below.

...AND MISADVENTURES... If it weren't for Wish, I ...

...AND MISADVENTURES... If it weren't for Wish, I would have left South Beach disappointed. Even places with decent reputations had clueless, indifferent service.
Because lots of tourists visit from countries where tipping is unusual, restaurants across the city routinely add a 15- to 17-percent gratuity to on every bill. So to the extent that waiters and waitresses look after you at all, they do so only up to the point when it's clear you're not planning to order anything else. Then they disappear until you hunt them down. And when the check comes, they hover over you until you pay. ("Are you ready?" "Um, no. And could you give me some space?")
I'm not sure why this is. Maybe they're trying to prevent you from leaving without paying. But you were planning a chew-and-screw, wouldn't you skip out during the half hour when your server is nowhere to be found?

...AND THE MOST TRAGIC RESTAURANT EVER. Or at leas...

...AND THE MOST TRAGIC RESTAURANT EVER. Or at least in the tiny part of South Beach my sister and I visited. It's located on Washington Avenue -- a couple of blocks off Ocean Drive outside the main tourist zone. It wasn't in any of the guidebooks, but it was crowded, and we figured we'd give it a try one Monday night. The name's not important. (Though I'm happy to disclose to anyone who's interested.) The point is that we should have heeded the warning signs:
     1. Freaky waiters and waitresses. After we sat down, three members of the waitstaff walked by us and made eye contact. After 15 minutes, one of the people who'd looked at us came up and said he hadn't noticed us until then.
     2. Deceptive menu. The menu posted outside of the restaurant -- a common practice there -- showed classic Italian entrees for reasonable prices. But when we looked at the appetizers were outrageous. Ever paid $8ish for a spinach salad in a place where a veal entree is $15? Me either.
     3. An absurd wine list. If an Italian restaurant has an all-Italian wine list, that's not surprising. But you should worry if six of eight wines on the menu are from the same obscure winery in the region outside Venice (just as you would if a restaurant only featured wines from, say, Pennsylvania); and seven of them are billed as "Merlot," "Cabernet Sauvignon," "Sauvignon Blanc" and other non-Italian varieties; and the only Italian wine is a "Chianti"; and if all the wines cost about the same amount (in this case, $8ish a glass or $28 a bottle).
     Now, I've been to holes in the wall that have decent food but meager wine offerings. Kim and I didn't want to be the kind of people who make tracks because of an effed-up wine list. At the same time, my favorite advice columnist often talks about a book called The Gift of Fear; the author's basic schtick is that we all have an intuition about dangerous situations, and he suggests that we ought to listen to it. Well, at this particular restaurant in Miami, I began to wonder about the Gift of Snobbery.
     4. Bad wine. Despite the weird list, each of us ordered a glass of wine. It was abysmal. But it was hard to send back. The wine probably wasn't corked; it just sucked.
     5. Garlic powder. And then the "bread" came. This consisted of flavorless rolls -- like frozen rolls from Sam's Club but not as good -- seasoned with iodized table salt and garlic powder. I'm not sure I've been to an Italian restaurant in a major American metro area that still uses garlic powder conspicuously. At this point, we'd ordered entrees but were trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves.
     6. Bizarro antipasto. Who knew someone could screw up a Caprese salad? But the basil was fetid, the tomatoes were flavorless, and the fresh mozzarella was dry. (And again with the table salt!) This was when we realized it wasn't going to get better.
     Now, I've never walked out on a movie. I sat through "Death to Smoochy" and even "Battlefield Earth." But we hunted down our waitress, pretended to have received an urgent cell phone call and cancelled our entrees (not without some resistance from the waitress). We ended up taking out from a nearby pizzeria and washing it down with wine we bought at a liquor store. And we learned a valuable lesson: Don't go out of your way to be a snob, but when you see a crazy wine list, believe your own gift of fear.