Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Peter Hoffman’s favorite color is green

October 31

Oh how I like new friends. Obviously old friends are great — you fit one another, understand each other’s patterns, operate in well-worn grooves of each other’s consciousnesses. But new friends have to stand out more or we wouldn’t bother to make them, or at least I wouldn’t. They have to break new ground, operate in different areas of interest, and so naturally they stimulate different parts of my brain. That’s fun.
My latest new friend is the fascinating and beautiful musician Kenyon Phillips, whom you might remember I met in the lobby of minor (but very nice) rock star Peter Yanowitz’s apartment, bonding over notional danger.
I’d hang out with Kenyon more, but most of my socializing goes on at restaurants, and Kenyon’s a vegetarian. I want anyone eating with me to appreciate a restaurant for all it’s worth, so for Kenyon, it must be strong in things without meat.
Peter Hoffman’s new restaurant, Back Forty, is all about using top-notch local stuff. Peter, who’s also the chef-owner of Savoy, is a former president of the Chefs Collaborative, which has the mission of supporting sustainable food, so he’d better be using top-notch local stuff, including good produce.
Kenyon and I spoke of many things over dinner, including the fact that he recently heard from Peter the minor (but very nice) rock star, who told him that he and his girlfriend Lisa Davies just got married. So, congratulations to them.
We also talked about family, and I mentioned that my eight-year-old nephew Harrison Thorn is intrigued by the fact that I know some of the Food Network stars. He tried to assess how well I knew them by approaching it from an eight-year-old’s perspective. He asked if I knew Bobby Flay’s favorite color, which to me was a brilliant question asked by the sort of shrewd journalist who knows that sometimes to get to the heart of a story you have to nibble at the edges.
“How well do you know Bobby Flay?” is easy to wiggle around. “Do you know his favorite color?” That’s a yes-or-no question. There’s no escape, and for an eight-year-old it tells you a lot, because of course eight-year-olds know their good friends’ favorite colors. If you don’t know their favorite color, then really, how good a friend could you be?
I told Harrison that grown-ups don’t actually talk much about favorite colors, but that if we did, I still wouldn’t know Bobby Flay’s.
So Kenyon and I wondered what Peter Hoffman’s favorite color was. Kenyon’s had always been blue on some level, but he wondered what that meant, since he pretty much only wears black, white and grey.
Mine is cobalt blue, although I rarely wear it (it’s a bit much) and have little of it in my life.
Peter Hoffman was wearing autumn colors — soothing greens and browns, maybe a bit of grey, including a thick cardigan sweater. Kenyon thought maybe his favorite color would be heather.
He came over to chat with us and to express pleasure at our dessert choices of seasonal pie and donuts. He said he almost named Savoy “Pie” because he loves it so much and insists that it will be on Back Forty’s menu every night. And he bought a doughnut machine for the restaurant because it seemed like the right thing to do.
I was going to ask him his favorite color but Kenyon beat me to it.
“The first thing that came to mind was green,” he said, reflecting on his reaction to the question just one second after Kenyon had asked it.
So there you have it.

What Kenyon and I ate:
Tempura battered delicata squash with smoked paprika mayo
Shaved fennel and pumpkin salad with lemon turmeric vinaigrette
Beluga lentils with tarragon mustard dressing
Green wheat with mint and yogurt sauce
Cauliflower gratin with aged Gruyère, leeks and toasted breadcrumbs
Apple pie with vanilla ice cream
Doughnuts

What I ate but Kenyon didn’t:
Fingerling potatoes with lardo (lardo is rendered, usually seasoned, pork fat)
Whole grilled Catskill trout with cilantro salsa verde

I also drank a Concord Fizz (rum, grapes, lemon and soda) and The Back Forty (George Dickel Tennessee whisky, maple and lemon).

Mangosteens in New York?

October 31

My search for mangosteens in Chinatown proved fruitless (sorry), but I got there at around 7pm and most of the fruit stalls had shut down. I also realized that living in New York, where even in the farmers markets apples are available year-round (I hate that!), had stunted my awareness of seasonality. Mangosteens are hot-season fruit. Mangosteens in the United States are likely from Thailand, since we signed an agreement with them last year to get the ball rolling in importing them (and mangoes, pineapples, lychees, longans and rambutans). But first protocols had to be set up to make sure they were being imported pesticide free.
The hot season in most of Thailand (not in the south, where the monsoon winds are different) is March to May, so how could we have mangosteens in late October.
But the next day my colleague Sonya Moore said she found mangosteens in Chinatown and speculated that they had been frozen, although they tasted all right. I'm skeptical about mangosteens handling being frozen, but there are some really excellent flash-freezing techniques out there, so maybe it could work.
Anyway, I walked from Chinatown to Barfry, Josh DeChellis's new tempura joint, for a party that Starchefs was throwing to promote its new book.
I ended up chatting for awhile with Zarela Martinez, who is likely the most mature chef to be represented in the new book.
“Most of the chefs here are 25 years old,” she observed, pointing out that just because her restaurant just turned 20 doesn’t mean it’s not innovative.
“I’m always doing something new,” she said, and told me that her current obsession is her new web site, which is enjoying robust traffic.
She introdoced me to Larry Sloman, who was leaving the next day for Los Angeles to talk to Mike Tyson about writing his biography (he thinks Tyson was totally railroaded in the rape case).
After two rum punches and a toro taco, I left Barfry and headed to Midtown, where I met my paleontologist friend Birdman at Shelly’s Tradizionale, formerly Shelly’s Prime Steak.
That’s unusual these days, isn’t it? Changing a steakhouse to anything else.
But Shelly’s Tradizionale is an Italian fish restaurant and was having a special red-wine-with-fish dinner, although being classy, they started us off with a glass of Prosecco.

Here’s what else we ate and drank:
Poached flounder, roasted apple, hazlenut & walnut sauce, fig balsamic
fried littleneck clams with lemon aïoli
Manila clams, potato carpaccio, zucchini and radicchio
"Tagliatina di tonno” — Thinly sliced, seared Pacific yellowfin tuna with farro-orange-arugula salad.
2005 St. Michael Eppan Pinot Nero (Alto Adige)

Shelly’s risotto di mare
Non-vintage Lini Lambrusco (Emilia-Romagna)

Filleted whole Mediterranean sea bass roasted with potatoes, sea salt and olive oil
1996 Borgogna Barolo (Piemonte)

Kona kampachi with Sicilian globe eggplant, roasted peppers and olive salmoriglio
2004 Sandro Fay Valtellina Rosso (Lombardia)

Honeycrisp apple crostata
2006 Tintero Moscato d’Asti (Piemonte — and white, of course, but honeycrisp apples are not fish

Sorbetto al Cioccolato Alberti
2001 Antonelli Sagrantino di Montefalco Passito