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

Tumis Ayam Kecap Air Kelapa

Bahan - bahan :

• 1 ekor ayam
• Air kelapa dari 1 butir kelapa
• 3 siung bawang putih iris tipis
• 1 cm jahe iris tipis
• 1 buah bawang bombay iris tipis
• 1/4 cup gula jawa (yg telah diparut)
• 2 sdm kecap
• garam secukupnya

Cooking directions :

1. Tumis bawang putih, bawang bombay dan jahe hingga harum
2. Masukkan gula jawa, kecap dan ayam sambil dibalik-balik hingga ayam berubah warna
3. Tuang air kelapa dan beri garam, diamkan hingga ayam empuk dan air tinggal sedikit
4. Sajikan

Mangosteens in New York!

October 29

I had a very interesting lunch at Café Nougatine — the more casual café in the anteroom of Jean-Georges — hosted by International Enterprise Singapore, whose job is to promote growth of Singaporean companies overseas.
They invited some very smart people to pick their brains about how to promote Singaporean food in the United States: Wendy Chan from Definity Marketing, who seemed to know a lot about retail — particularly supermarkets; Matthew Conway of Roland, an import company, who seemed quite plugged in to how to develop products for both retail and foodservice channels; Jeremiah Schnee of consulting firm Biscotti, Toback, RFR & Company, who knew all sorts of back-channel things about working with different distributors and retailers; and Lynn Teo of Apex-Pal, a Singaporean restaurant company looking to open a Singaporean-based kaiten sushi chain called Sakae Sushi in the US. Fun group. I learned a lot — among them that Singapore mai fun, a popular noodle dish in New York, doesn’t exist in Singapore.
“It’s like chop suey,” said Ted Tan, the deputy chief CEO of IES, who was in town with a couple of other colleagues, who also have the surname Tan. I’m investigating whether that’s a coincidence or not.
But what was of most interest to me was the fact that mangosteens are now available in Chinatown. If you live in New York and that doesn’t sound important to you, then it’s because you have never had a good mangosteen, which until recently weren’t being imported into the United States.
Fruit flavors are notoriously hard to describe. Generally one ends up comparing them to other fruits, and in this case I’d probably say it tastes like sweet cherry mixed with strawberry and Thompson seedless grapes. But that’s completely wrong. You’re just going to have to go and try one yourself, even though they’re like $9 a pound (I haven’t been to Chinatown to confirm any of this, so I can’t say for sure). The best way to open them is probably to remove the flower scars at the bottom of the fruit, stick your thumbs in the resulting hole and pull apart. Inside you'll see a burgundy-colored rind that is inedibly bitter. Avoid it; it tastes bad and stains like, well, just like you’d expect deep-burgundy colored fruit to stain. At the center will be segments of milky white fruit. One segment will probably be larger than the others and will have a seed in the middle that you don’t want to bite into. But definitely eat the fruit around it It should be quite sweet but also have a bright acidity, too.
I think I’ll try to go to Chinatown now.

What I ate:

Red oak lettuce, Brussels sprouts, bacon, lemon garlic dressing
Butter poached chicken breast, chipotle potatoes, Granny Smith apple, Niçoise olives
Gingerbread cake with walnut ice cream and roasted pears

Bar Boulud

October 29

Even at a construction site, Daniel Boulud knows how to throw a party. Or maybe it’s his publicist, Georgette Farkas (of the Alexander's Farkases) who knows. Hard to say.
At any rate, Gilles Verot, an award winning French charcutier whose honors include being declared France’s headcheese champion in 1997, has been hired as a consultant for Bar Boulud, Daniel’s latest venture which he hopes to open either in early December or early January. So for now pretty much the only distinguishing feature is an arched ceiling. The rest of it is pretty much open to the imagination (they had brought in a coat rack for party guests, though, a most welcome addition).
Monsieur Verot was in town to see how his protégé, Sylvain Casdon, who will be responsible for Bar Boulud's many pâtés and other charcuterie, was making out. Of course for him to do that, M. Casdon had to make a bunch of charcuterie, and someone had to eat it, so Georgette invited the food and wine media to check out the place.
She got a good turnout. Nilou Motamed of Travel + Leisure, who never comes to anything anymore (“I’m either editing or on TV,” she said, in a nice way), was there. So were New York magazine’s Gael Greene and GQ’s Adam Rapaport, and people from Food Arts and Wine Spectator and the Zagat Survey, and, well, me, of course, but I’ll go to anything. Good crowd. I caught up with my friend Robert Pincus and met his new daughter Lila and ate a bunch of different kinds of pâté and cheese while drinking obscure wines.
Bar Boulud is going to be a charcuterie, bistro and wine bar with a healthy cheese selection, too. The focus of the wines will be Burgundy and Rhone, since Daniel is from Lyon, plus wines using grapes from those regions (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Syrah, Grenache, Marsanne, Viognier etc.). Other relatively obscure wines will be available, too.
The property has a massive basement, which will have three party rooms, a wine cellar and a gigantic kitchen (mammoth by New York restaurant standards).
Upstairs will have a 30-foot long bar and charcuterie case, banquettes and, in the back, a communal-dining table at which wine tastings also will be held.