What this country needs is a good five hundred American affineurs!

Affi-whut?

Hey, I’m just back from France…where I am always gastronomically programmed to seek out three things that are absolutely unparalleled:

1) Oysters (the French obsession with these critters insures superiority all the way from oyster bed to oyster platter)

2) Les abats (offal, another item that needs cultists in a culture to survive)

3) Cheese, which in France is unequivocally the best

Obsession plays a huge role here, as well, in French Fromage World.

Now, I’m not saying we don’t have good cheese in America, both domestic and imported. And I’m not saying that the cheese chain in the U.S. isn’t better than ever, resulting in the best cheese selection I can remember in American shops and restaurants.

But dude…we still ain’t France! Not by a kilometre de campagne!

There are numerous reasons for this, but the key one has to do with the French concept of the affineur, or the “raiser” of the cheese…a concept in very short supply in the U.S.

In France, in the cheese world, les vedettes…the rock stars…are not usually the actual dairy farmers, and cheese producers…(though good French gourmands are aware of them, too).

No. The real stars are the ones who receive the cheese from producers, then hold it in their shops, downstairs in the cave, until the cheeses are just á point (perfectly ready to eat). The cheeses may hold in that window of perfection for as little as a day, sometimes a few days. A great affineur knows exactly when to sell it to you…will not sell it too early, will not sell it too late.

But there’s more than mere timing involved. A great affineur truly “raises” his or her cheeses as if they were children. Some days, if the cheeses are too moist, they must be dried with a towel; some days, if they’re too dry, they must be moistened. Most days they need to be turned, or shifted in the cellar; some of them need a wash on a regular basis with strong alcohol to develop a certain flavor in the rind. There is no specific list of what the affineur must do in his her or cave; are there any rules for parents? Affinage, and parenting, are creative activities!

I tapped into this all over again, a few weeks back in Paris, when a chef friend took me to her favorite affineur in that cheese-mad city:

Cantin, a tidy, super-aromatic cheese fantasy on the Rue du Champ de Mars, in the 7th, not far from a good open-air market, the brilliant bakery Poîlane, and La Tour Eiffel.

Cantin is owned by Marie-Anne Cantin, who truly is a rock star in Paris. Gourmands come from toutes les arrondissements to get a few quivering slices of this or that from Marie-Anne.

I was a little intimidated on approaching the shop, because the great one has a reputation for persnicketiness. On some days she’s fine, they say…but on some days you my get your hand metaphorically slapped with a cheese spatula. So, I just went about my business, looking at the marvelous orbs on display…

Mostly goat cheeses near the shop’s window

Magnificent hard cheeses in foreground, like Emmenthaler

Cantin is so powerful that she has her own Roquefort prepared for her by one of Roquefort’s few producers

I guess I did it all politely…because, suddenly…the apparition appeared, looking for cheese talk! And what a pleasure it was…

Marie-Anne Cantin, the Parisian cheese legend

A few hours later, I was enjoying a Cantin selection at the wonderful home-cookin’ bistro Reed, not far from the cheese shop:

An array of Cantin cheeses at Reed, including (at 10 o’clock) the greatest St. Felicien I have ever tasted

Here’s what I want you to do: ALLEZ-Y!!!!!! As soon as you can! Because this is not about Marie-Anne Cantin alone–this is about an epochal surge threatening to sweep away all that’s good about French cheese. As you can imagine, the bureaucrats in Brussels are eager to “regularize” European cheese, make it more industrial, take it increasingly out of the hands of such a one as Cantin. And they, the bureaucrats, have made progress in numerous food areas, wiping out the small businesses of many tiny artisans, such as charcutiers.

I hope the EU never wins this one. But in case a bad ending is in the offing…we know that people like Marie-Anne Cantin are at the heights of their powers right now. Visit them now. Support them now. Expose your kids to this culture…because they may not have the pleasure of doing the same for their kids!

The Goghstronome who got me cookin’

My week in Holland was a high…I haven’t even come down enough to tell you about it coherently. And yet, despite having just returned from there at 35,000 feet…my Tuesday story describing my recent gastronomic uppers is already due…today!

So here’s my plan…based on my great good fortune in attending THE re-opening of the mind-expanding Vincent Van Gogh museum…at the end of my trip, just the day before I left for New York…I’m going to post for you a Goghstronomic photo essay!

I had already been lucky, art-wise, in Amsterdam. The opulent Rijksmuseum, which holds the greatest Rembrandts, Vermeers, etc…had been closed for ten years of renovation…until two weeks before my arrival! I got a guided tour there on my first day ever in Holland, April 23, 2013…which left my oils oozing, my acrylics resinating, and my water colors dripping.

Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch, in the distance, at the end of a long gallery at the beautifully restored Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

But my chances for Van Gogh didn’t look so hot. Sure, there’s a small collection of Van Gogh at the Rijksmuseum on another floor…but I wanted the main course, the Van Gogh Museum itself…which, I was told, to my great consternation…was closed for repairs!

After a glorious five days of eating and drinking in Holland–you will see my big, in-detail report soon–I flew to Paris to track down some wine, and spend another glorious three days (details soon!)

Then, on Wednesday, May 1, I flew back to Amsterdam to do a little business in acquiring Cameroon peppercorns as a new product (more on THAT later!)…and to catch my flight to New York on Thursday, May 2.

So here’s the trippy high that descended on me as I returned to the Netherlands on the first day of May: on the jet, I read in the Dutch newspaper during the flight that the Van Gogh Museum was opening…TODAY!

OMG. My flight was due at 1PM, and the museum was closing its doors at 6. Surely, it’ll be chaos. Surely, I’ll somehow fail to make it.

But surely…somehow…it worked out!

I got there at 4:15…just as the line at the entrance was beginning to peter out. By 4:30 I was in…which gave me 90 glorious minutes of Van Gogh-inhaling before the 6PM close. In fact, I felt like I had the munchies. Because the crowd was thinning, I was able to walk right up to canvases both un-famous and famous…and, with my little camera, take a bite of them. I took few whole-canvas photos, but I had snacks all over the frames…which, in most cases, created whole new looks at the work of this amazing artist.

Here’s a bunch of Van Gogh bites…leading up to the series of paintings that were downright gastronomic! Come on…it was 6PM…I was getting hungry!

As every art historian knows, Van Gogh’s earthy work changed considerably after he did what I did…go to Paris! The color of the South began to bleed into his paintings…as did his new fixation with Japanese painting!

Here is a Japanese painting that he wanted to “copy”…

And here is his copy:

Here’s another Japanese painting he wanted to copy:

And here is his copy:

And here’s one more Van Gogh work in the “Japanese” style.

From there, the sky was the limit……

By this time, I was getting good and hungry…and not just for oreille panée! I started thinking about one of the best bites I’d had all week in Amsterdam: french fries, with mayo, from a little stand with a long line! And, of course, it was then that I discovered Vincent Van Goghstronome’s particular obsession with…potatoes!

He painted potato peelers. He painted potato farmers. He painted potatoes by themselves, just like these:

Most famously, he painted “The Potato Eaters,” finished in 1885–often considered his first great work. Here are two “bites” I took from it, followed by pretty much the whole canvas:

And that’s when the museum closed…just in time to get to my favorite french fries stand and devour another kind of masterpiece:

Straight away, I will post my report on my entire gastronomic odyssey in Holland…and will, of course, tell you exactly which french fries stand you MUST get to when you visit.

I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be closed for renovations.

It has been a dream, for years, to slap my name on a great tin of caviar. Well, I’m selling outstanding products now, as you know…including some of the world’s most food-loving Champagne…so why not endeavor to find its caviar soul-mate?

I endeavored. I found.

Let me ‘splain.

I think of every product I offer as a kind of revolution in itself…the product representing a new, better way of doing things in its world.

Here’s the existing problem with caviar: it’s all about trust. And the consumer’s not always in the best position to offer trust.

If you buy, say, Beluga caviar from some producer or other…you’re getting ripped off! Beluga caviar is illegal in the U.S. right now. That’s problem #1: the producer’s lying!

Next problem: the provenance of what you’re actually getting! If some producer tells me I’m getting Osetra, it may well be Osetra…but the producer may fail to tell me that it’s not Osetra from the Caspian Sea, but Osetra from, say, a new experimental farm in Israel. I know a famous caviar restaurant in New York City, Caviar Russe, that continually tries to obfuscate the source of its caviar. Now, what they offer may be good…but don’t you have a right, at these prices, to make an intelligent decision about your choice?

Lastly, even if you know EXACTLY what you’re getting…is it a great example?

One of the dirty little secrets of the caviar world is that sturgeon suppliers harvest many fish simultaneously, then pack the eggs of each fish into discrete tins, usually two kilos worth. So if an Italian Osetra producer is ready to ship its Osetra to a big distributor in the U.S., that U.S. distributor may receive twenty different tins of caviar, each tin packed with eggs from one fish only. The distributor in the U.S. needs to open those large tins and re-pack the caviar in smaller tins…but, along the way, the distributor is sampling the contents of each tin, determining which are the best tins. Because, believe it or not…twenty tins of caviar from the same source, and the same kind of fish…will taste completely like twenty different caviars!

These tins are all from the same producer, each tin with the eggs of one fish only…but every tin with the same kind of fish.

And now comes the Rosengarten plan. I have developed, over the last decade, a beautiful relationship with the Petrossians, the Armenian family who revolutioned caviar when they moved to Paris in the 1920s. Today, they are world leaders in quality…not to mention their uncontested leadership in developing new, non-Caspian Sea sources for great caviar (a necessity in today’s world).

I’m not sure why the caviar gods have smiled on me so benignly…but I now have an arrangement with Petrossian to sell Petrossian Caviar, A David Rosengarten Selection.

And here’s how it works.

Just before caviar-selling season (say, the holidays)…I don my lab coat, hair net, etc., walk into the inner sanctum of Petrossian World…and confront 20, or 30, or 40 two-kilo tins of caviar for tasting and analysis.

I did it just last month, as a kind of dry run. I was tasting with Alexandre Petrossian, the scion of the family, who lives in New York. We went through twenty tins (tough work!), all of them from the Sacramento Delta farm in California most famous for raising one of the great non-Caspian contenders, Transmontanus, or White Sturgeon. That’s exactly what we had, here, the yield of twenty different White Sturgeons. And we both decided that tin#7 was incontestably the best: the right amount of salt, the deepest, most complex flavors, the most obvious lack of flaws (like bitterness), the sexiest, velvetiest texture, the most right-on heir to Caspian glory.

Alex directed the bulk of this winning tin into his general marketing…but secured for me 12 two-ounce tins of it. Each tin has the glorious Petrossian iconography on it…as well as a sticker, saying “A David Rosengarten Selection.”

I’m showing these tins to friends right now as part of the dry run. But I will be back with Alex in July, tasting the caviars that both he and I will sell for the 2013 holiday season.

The implications are enormous: I will be your taster! I will be as close as you ever get to going into a caviar tasting and selecting EXACTLY what you like. To my knowledge, no one else is doing this, tin-by-tin…not even the big-name chefs who offer you “their” caviar! If you like my taste in caviar…you’re in! Trust ME…and the trust issue in buying caviar will finally be resolved!

To see a video of me tasting Petrossian caviar with Alexandre Petrossian, click here.

Roast duck at Yung Kee in Hong Kong

One thing you know for sure en route to Hong Kong: this city will have wall-to-wall hanging ducks, chickens, pigs, roast pork, all displayed in multitudinous carnivorous windows. The whole category is sometimes referred to as “Chinese BBQ” (even though the meaning is way different from the righteous thing we call BBQ in the American south)…and the Cantonese, who own Hong Kong gastronomically, are the masters of it.

Now, I am no stranger to “Chinese BBQ.” I’m a New Yorker, and for many decades I’ve trekked down to the Manhattan Chinatown around Mott St. to window-shop. And then window-eat. For those windows, in dozens of storefronts, hold all manner of cooked meats, ripe for slicing. You can usually eat them right there (over rice, if you like, for a cheap lunch)…or, in most shops, stacked atop a bowl of steaming noodle soup…or you can tote them home and mix them into whatever loftier presentation ideas you may have.

It’s exactly the same in Hong Kong…though the big question is…do you get an upgrade in quality?

Let’s start with the categories of meats themselves, no matter where they’re made and sold. My four long-time favorites in Chinese BBQ are:

1) ROAST PORK. This long strip, dyed reddish, has been the staple of Chinese-American restaurants since the 1940s. It’s a little sweet, garlicky, soy-y…and should be juicy-fatty as hell, sinfully porky. Usually cut into 1/4″ thick crosswise slices. Just as popular in Hong Kong as in New York.

2) ROAST PIG. Often next to the red loins of roast pork is the prepossessing sight of hanging half-pigs, the whole half-animal, bones intact, skin on–and what a skin! When done right, it is shattery-crispy, with white-grey meat below the skin that is moist and tender.

3) ROAST DUCK. For most, duck is the premier attraction of a “Chinese BBQ” window. Burnished ducks, hanging whole with heads and all, should provide crunchy skin and deeply, deeply ducky meat, usually with a scintilla of marinade based on five-spice-powder. NOTE: The duck is supposed to be taken down from the rack, and cleavered into thick slices, bone and all. Some Chinese restaurants in the U.S. assume that Americans want their duck “hot,” so the newly-cut bird goes into the microwave. Do not let this happen! The crisp texture turns to clammy texture! Whatever temp the duck is hanging at (usually room) is best!

4) SOY CHICKEN. Decidedly less spectacular looking, whole hanging chickens lightly burnished with soy (but less so than the ducks) can provide an unexpectedly delicious treat. The greatest virtues, when they appear, are a profound, old-fashioned taste of chicken, and a marvelously juicy-slidy texture (even the breast should be a velvety delight!). Soy’s a player, but chicken dominates.

In preparing my trip to Hong Kong in March, I knew that I could easily spend the whole week wandering from one cooked meat window to another. As you know, of course, that was out of the question…because I wanted to cover funky Hong Kong food in its diversity (this is the third report of six reports I’m posting). So the solution was this: ask my hosts to take me to the one roasted-meat restaurant that is arguably the town’s finest. They complied, and on a blissful Saturday afternoon in the old-fashioned district on Wellington Street, rife with old shops and sprawling open-air markets, I approached the solid, imposing entrance of a roast meat shop gone upscale, the proud and ornately decorated Yung Kee, usually filled at meal hours to its 650-seat capacity.

The formal entrance to Yung Kee

Inside the entrance, Confucius beams on the ducks

Outside the entrance, I beam on the ducks

Chinese diners arrive in the golden-dragon splendor of the second floor

Long story short: Yung Kee is a Hong Kong institution that should not be missed; in 2011, the German Míele Guide to the Best Restaurants in Asia named it #12. Well, that may be going a bit far…but if you are looking for one roast meat shop, as I was, this is arguably the place. The menu is long and, in addition to the headlining roast meats, there are all kinds of other treasures. Some of them are carnivorous:

The wonderful Chinese sausages and hams at Yung Kee

…others are Cantonese traditions, like the preserved duck egg, held for 30-32 days and served with ginger:

Preserved duck eggs at Yung Kee

There’s a wide array of seafood:

I loved this fried shrimp with a miniature crab on it

…and, in fact, crab roe is another one of the restaurant’s specialties…..

Lovely roe-filled dumplings at Yung Kee

But as we all know the proof’s in the pudding, or, in this case, the roasting.

Have I ever had better soy-sauce chicken? I think not. Along with depth and texture, there was amazing thick yellow fat inside that lubricated the whole affair. And the scallion-ginger-shallot dipping sauce was right on the flavor-boosting money.

The roast duck…

Whole roast duck, sliced, at Yung Kee

was excellent, though I have had crispier skins; this one was a little on the leather-y side. The very fatty-moist meat below was top-notch, however.

But better still was the suckling pig…..

Slices of suckling pig perched on slices of roast pork

This crispy-skinned miracle (it’s downright LOUD as you chew it) is easily the best Chinese whole pig I’ve ever had, worth alone the price of admission, slamming New York roast pig into submission. It was brought down to earth by the roast pork below it on the platter which, while pretty yummy in flavor, had an unattractive chewiness to it that is not typical of the greatest char siu.

If you’re not meated-out after all this…consider some of Yung Kee’s organ offerings, cooked very plainly in water/stock:

A delicious, slightly sculpted kidney half at Yung Kee

Some of the sweetest, most appealingly fragrant pork liver I’ve ever had

But don’t wander offal-ward if it’s not your bent! Stick with that suckling pig and that soya chicken…and Confucius will beam on you too!

Yung Kee
32-40 Wellington Street
Central
2522 1624 (tel)
www.yungkee.com.hk

Well, going to pots, actually.

At table, dropping a dumpling into a Cantonese hot pot

On my March trip to the great eating city of Hong Kong, one of the most delicious themes that emerged was restaurants devoted to different kinds of “pots”…

Hot pots and clay pots, to be precise.

Hot pots first. I have a pretty long familiarity with the Chinese hot pot concept. The origins actually stretch back 1,000 years to Mongolia, food historians tell us, with beef, mutton and horse in bite-size pieces being cooked last-minute in steaming pots. I don’t remember those! However, the concept was alive in New York, in the 1970s, with lots of adventurous food writers turning us on to the “Mongolian Hot Pot.” Say “hot pot” to a foodie in 1980, and the response would be “ah…Mongolian hot pot!” But Mongolia doesn’t dominate the hot pot imagination any longer.

The important thing about the “hot pot,” as it has evolved…is the communal nature of it; a group of diners (the more the merrier!), are served a steaming, low-sided tureen of broth, into which they dip a hopefully endless array of meats, fish, vegetables, etc. These are always served with a plethora of condiments (soy sauce, fish sauce, XO sauce, chili sauce, sesame oil, etc.) that you can mix in your own dipping bowl to make your personalized dipping sauce.

Cut to contemporary times…where China has evolved all kinds of regional hot pots! One of the most popular in China is the Chongquing hot pot, with a spicy broth. (We in the U.S. call it “Sichuan hot pot,” and it is the trendiest of all right now, often requiring food treks to Chinese neighborhoods in big American cities).

But there’s another biggie in China (I need to explore its presence in America!). To be frank…though I’ve been to Hong Kong five times…I didn’t know before that “Cantonese hot pot” was such a big deal in this part of China…or even that it existed!

What is it? According to what I tasted, it’s not terribly different from most other hot pots. Sources say that in Canton raw egg is sometimes included for dipping, though I didn’t see it. Sources also say that in Hong Kong it’s a huge social event…I did see that…but I’d be surprised if hot pot eating all over China did not include a significant social dimension!

What I saw especially, in Cantonese hot pot, in Hong Kong, was quality…big-city quality!

At the amazing Cantonese hot pot restaurant I went to in Hong Kong, Woo Cow Hot Pot, you were given a choice of possible broths as your base, many of them esoteric–some of them hot (as you’d have in Chongquing hot pot), some of them mild, as you’d expect in Canton (like the delicious preserved egg, water chestnut and coriander base at Woo Cow). All modern hot pot restaurants that I know feature a special divided pot that allows you to have one kind of broth base on the left, and another kind on the right…if you choose to.

Preserved egg, water chestnut and coriander base on the left, spicy beef base on the right at Woo Cow

My Hong Kong hosts took me to a street in Kowlon called Nam Kok Road…

The unglamorous but mightily gastronomic Nam Kok Road

…where hot pot shops abound, rubbing shoulders with Thai restaurants.

Tell your taxi driver: this is where you want to go for Cantonese hot pot

In about the middle of the street lies Woo Cow Hot Pot. In case the English sign isn’t up, ye shall know it by this logo:

The sign at Woo Cow Hot Pot

Socializing over hot pot at Woo Cow

It’s rather bright and modern, but don’t let that scare you. The food‘s the thing. I was overwhelmed by the number of possible meats, fish, veg, dumplings, etc. that you could order off the menu for dipping into the hot pot and subsequent quick cooking at the table.

Some of the dipster choices at Woo Cow Hot Pot

So I arranged a price with the owner (around $40 a person)…and just let him bring platter after platter until I died. I almost did. One very savvy hot pot person who accompanied me said “It always takes me a day of fasting to recover from a good hot pot!” The problem is compounded at a place like this, where everything is so outstanding that crying “uncle!” is simply not an option.

Most platters that you order for dipping/cooking come with multiple ingredients, side-by-side. One of our early platters sold me completely. It included an array of brilliant dim-sum-like items, including one of the restaurant’s rare forays into “modern-creative”–a ball of lightly cooked shrimp enclosing a heart of foie gras! It was off-the-charts delicious!

The opening salvo of dumplings, with the shrimp-and-foie-gras balls at 2-3 o’clock (they’re flecked with pinkish-red)

Two great dumplings after their baths in the hot pot

Next up: an array of incredible shellfish items for dipping, one-by one. As you can see, at Woo Cow they’re ready for tourists:

The delicious razor clams

The tourist part

Next came a more esoteric assortment of Hong-Kong-type food. On this plate, the shrimp-stuffed mushrooms were the hit.

Shrimp-stuffed mushrooms at 1-2 o’ clock

It’s organ time! Tripe, liver, and a few other unmentionables are unbelievably delicious in the spicy beef broth.

Organ recital in Hong Kong

Frankly, there were many more mouth explosions along the way. But the one platter you cannot leave out, if you go–and the reason for the restaurant’s name–is the raw sliced beef, numerous cuts, which you get to cook to your preferred degree of doneness (that’s about a 20-second dip for me!).

The vaunted beef cuts at Woo Cow Hot Pot

Not since sukiyaki in Tokyo have I had dippin’ beef this good. The marbling and tenderness are insane. The one on the north end of the photo literally melted in my mouth…metaphors stay home!

And…yes…it was not so easy to start eating again at lunch the next day.

But I did.

From hot pots…to clay pots!…another Hong Kong obsession.

I have always been a fan of what you might call “the Chinese casserole”…something braised in a clay pot, cooked longer than and differently from a stir-fry. The sex is in the cooking liquid, which usually becomes a kind of stew-y sauce. I always seek out dishes like these in New York’s Chinatowns…but I didn’t know that the “clay pot” restaurant was such a fixation in Hong Kong!

I was taken to a few clay-pot joints…and, far and away…my favorite was Kwan Kee, in the Western District of Hong Kong Island.

It is just about the most humble-looking restaurant you can imagine…

The unprepossessing exterior of Kwang Kee

…with the most humble-looking wood-burning stove carrying the pots…..

Stove at Kwan Kee, with the keeper of the flame

…but the place is jammed, day and night, inside and outside, mostly with local residents.

It hasn’t made the guide books, thank God.

Still, it was difficult to score a reservation. And, once we got there (four people pushed into a cramped table in the corner)…it was impossible to change tables!

Made no difference whatsoever. Kwan Kee became one of my top restaurant experiences of the week…because the food is so damned good!

Interestingly, at a clay-pot restaurant…there are two clay-pot categories. And then…there are lots of dishes to supplement the menu that are not cooked in clay pots!

The first clay-pot category is braised food, no rice in the pot. We had a sublime stew translated as Braised Chicken and Taro…

Braised Chicken and Taro in the claypot at Kwan Kee

…which featured juicy, tender chicken, and a rich creamy-dreamy sauce, oozing with the subtle taste of taro. My Cantonese ain’t great–but I stumbled my way through a few questions, and found out that milk and cornstarch are key players in the sauce.

Another delicious rice-less claypot was the Chinese Broccoli with Shrimp Paste…

Chinese Broccoli with Shrimp Paste in the claypot at Kwan Kee

As you can see from the freshness of the vegetables, this is not a long braise…but the cooking in the clay pot, presumably with a cover, builds up intensity of flavor.

(NOTE: Last week I covered the Michelin two-star restaurant Summer Palace, at the great Island Shangri-La hotel. In a completely different environment!…they too serve clay-pot dishes, though the clay pot is a tiny percentage of their menu offerings. Here’s a delicious one I had there:

Chicken in Clay Pot with Scallion and XO Sauce

The second category of clay-pot dishes in clay-pot restaurants, is clay pots with rice. Why would you want to compromise your top-layer proteins with an under-layer of rice? Because the rice is delicious…and adds great texture to the dish…especially the way the rice is done here…

The bottom of the rice exposed in a clay-pot-with-rice dish at Kwan Kee

This is nothing less than a socorrat, the great crusty bottom of a paella! Furthermore, when you look closely, you can see that the special rice they use has segmentation in it, making it look almost like something from the insect kingdom!

You get amazing chew from the “segmented” rice

But of course what’s on top of the rice is also important. We ordered kind of a Mixed Funk clay pot with rice, featuring preserved duck, salted fish, liver sausage…

Clay pot rice at Kwan Kee with assortment of preserved items

…and it was screamingly delicious. All the top flavors here were wild…especially the liver sausage, in the lower part of the photo, which had the most extraordinarily deep mix of saltiness, sweetness, organ flavor and something that almost seemed alcoholic.

As if all this clay-pottery were not enough…Kwan Kee serves a wide assortment of dishes that have nothing to do with pots! Here are two amazing stir-fries:

Typhoon Shelter-Style Fried Prawn

(obviously brimming with fried garlic)

and…

The best sweet-and-pungent meatballs you’ve ever had

(intriguingly, these were ordered by our Hong Kong guide, to our dismay…but they were delicious!)

And there are all kinds of other cooking techniques represented, such as…

The awesome Minced Pork with Salted Duck Egg

If you’re in Hong Kong…go to pot! Both Woo Cow Hot Pot and Kwan Kee are must-visits! But be sure to reserve…

Woo Cow Hot Pot
G/F, 36 Nam Kok Road, Kowloon City
2383 9863
www.woocowhotpot.com.hk

Kwan Kee
Shop No. 1, G/F., Wo Yick Mansion
263 Queen’s Road West, Sai Ying Pun
Hong Kong
2803 7209

Coming soon: the story of BBQ meats in Hong Kong!

London has my heart. It was the first European city I ever visited. I fell in love instantly, and I shall never fall out of love. (As Samuel Johnson said to Boswell in 1777: “when a man is tired of London…he is tired of life!”)

Of course, London and I have had our ups and downs. I’ve always devoured London theatre, never been disappointed…but, truth to tell (Samuel, don’t listen!), there were a few visits in the 1990s, and early aughts, when London seemed a little…well, dull. I’m thinking a lot had to do with where I was in London, exactly…because in those growth years parts of London started looking like A Big Booming City from Anywhere.

My recent weekend in London, however, starting with my stay on the edge of Mayfair, confirmed my suspicions: if you wander the London-y streets of London, you will give the old city your bleedin’ heart, every time.

Of course…a great hotel, and great food…help a lot! And don’t let anyone tell you differently: there’s plenty of both in Merrie Olde.

On this weekend in March, I chose to stay at one of my oldest, favest London hotels,The Dorchester, located on Park Lane, at the border of Mayfair, just across the street from a beautiful stretch of Hyde Park. Is there a place in London with more of the old-fashioned London feel?

Entrance to The Dorchester’s Promenade

Copious sprays of flowers in the lobby

Sitting area in The Promenade

Those wonderful (and veddy British!) Dorchester concierges

For starters, The Dorchester drips with history. It sits on an old, well-trafficked London site…once famous as a cynosure for public-attended hangings! The first large building was built on the site in 1751, later named Dorchester House…a grand house for 19th-century landed gentry to inhabit when they visited London from their country residences. (Intriguingly, the site was sold in 1929, the original building was demolished, re-erected in Scotland, then transported to an American buyer in Texas!)

The new owners of the London site in 1929 set out to build a “perfect”hotel on it. The Dorchester first opened its doors to a private luncheon on April 18, 1931…and then opened to the public two days later. Since then, it has been the storied home to many a grand event in English history. Queen Elizabeth (then Princess Elizabeth) and Prince Philip announced their engagement from here in 1947…and old Phil held his stag party at The Dorchester later that year! A little earlier, even the Yanks got in on the Dorchester action; the hotel had the reputation during World War II as the sturdiest building in London–impervious to air raids–and General Eisenhower set up his headquarters in the hotel (you can stay in the Eisenhower Suite today!)

After various updatings, refreshings and refurbishments, it is today the flagship hotel of The Dorchester Collection…a glittery international group which also owns the Meurice and the Plaza-Athenée in Paris, the Principe de Savoia in Milano, the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Bel-Air in Los Angeles, among a few other monuments.

But the cool thing is…from design to service, The Dorchester absolutely retains its English flavor. Eight of the suites right now come with butler service…just press the button on the phone, and yours will help you with anything you like! At the end of April, 2013, the popular butler concept will be expanded to 30 rooms.

The Dorchester is also home to five diverse restaurants, including Alain Ducasse’s London outpost (which has three stars from Michelin; among Ducasse’s dozens of restaurants, only this one, Ducasse’s Paris restaurant at the Plaza-Athenée, and his Monte Carlo base at the Louis XV have three stars from Michelin).

I wanted to eat my way around London on this weekend, so I didn’t get to indulge in the Dorchester dining spots…with the delicious exception of breakfast in the Promenade…which you can turn into a very British experience if you like!

The Promenade setting for breakfast at The Dorchester

At breakfast time, there’s a lovely if unsurprising set of breakfast items…but…I’d advise going for the specialties that are hard to find elsewhere! I loved the grilled lamb kidneys with fried eggs (God, I felt like Leopold Bloom sitting there!)…and one of my favorite bites of the weekend was the kipper.

The marvelous kipper for breakfast at The Dorchester

A kipper, of course, is a cured whole herring–that turns a little copper-colored during its curing. Therefore, it has been “coppered,” or, as it came to be known, “kippered.” One of these fish, today…is a “kipper!” You may have yours on The Promenade at either room temp or heated; I kipper-indulged on two successive days, and far preferred the room temp kipper (juicier, more tender).

I rarely do the following, but I’m now going to share with you the chronological flow of my next eats that weekend, just so you can imagine the gastronomic rhythm…

For starters, I went to Amaranto, the Italian restaurant at the neighboring Four Seasons Hotel, an eatery which had been recommended by a friend. I had the pleasure of spending some time with extremely affable head chef Davide Degiovanni, from Piemonte, who was kind enough to tour me around the wonderful facility. Don’t expect regional Italian cooking here….but do expect a very subtle, skillful rendering of what you might call “modern” Italian (I loved my black-truffle-filled dumplings in a buttery sauce best!) This is a great spot in a beautiful corner of London for a high-end business lunch. With a good Italian wine list, avoiding the too-obvious Italian vinosities!

Next up: how could I avoid a fish-and-chips shop in London? Did you know that I’m connected to an upscale, uber-healthy fish-and-chips restaurant in Reykjavik, Iceland? So it is my duty to visit other upscale versions ’round the globe. But London especially! Several recommendations led me to a cool place with an old “chippie” counter on one side of the establishment, and–through another entrance door–a “respectable” place to eat fish and chips, kind of a London trend.

The Sea Shell, in Lisson Grove, London

The quality was…good. A good find. But you gotta stick to the very, very basic. Usually at London chippies, I prefer all the kinds of fish they typically serve aside from the common cod.

The blackboard menu, on the “chippie” side of The Sea Shell

Skate, and plaice, are usually my faves. However, here…the cod was the big winner! Why? It was the thickest cut of all, which meant the oil had not reached inside to the snowy, sliding flesh. The skate and plaice were thinner slices of fish, and–much as I love oil!–these two other fish came off as greasy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

The skate wing

The whole plaice (with “mushy peas” in the background!)

The best of all, the cod…with chips

My second-favorite meal came next…a wonderful weekend dinner at the hottest brasserie-style restaurant in London, The Delaunay. Oddly enough, I think of this as the “Balthazar” of London…even though Balthazar itself opened there recently! I hear that Balthazar is doing well…but this place, The Delaunay, opened a year ago, has exactly the thrill in the air that Balthazar had in its early days in New York. And I love the food!

The Delaunay, right near the old Aldwych Theatre (where Willy the Shake and I spent some serious time together in my youth), is owned by the two lions of London restaurants today, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, who were described in the New York Times as “the wizards of neo-retro restaurants.” That perfectly describes the spectacular Delaunay…

Entering the dining room at The Delaunay

…where moneyed Londoners across several generations come to eat the air, premise-crammed…you can feel the excitement…along with some of the best brasserie food in London.

King and Corbin are the owners of The Ivy, long the toniest spot in London’s West End (the theatre district). In 2003, they opened the hugely succesful Wolseley, on Piccadilly, with a new flavor for the big, boisterous, NY-London-Paris brasserie: the culinary ideas of Central Europe. The Wolseley has now spawned the Delaunay, which happily goes even Hapsburg-ier.

This is a brasserie, right? So there have to be oysters! But why do people overlook Britain as one of the world’s greatest oyster sources? I threw back a dozen Carlingford Lough Rock oysters, from Northern Ireland, which were filled with the watermelon-rind flavors of crassostrea gigas. The house offered a carafe of 2011 Muscadet from Quilla, which was spot-on as oyster wine. And….my favorite part, for the English-ness of it all…they serve a platter of crust-trimmed, already-buttered bread on the side!

Buttered bread with oysters

But the real fun begins with the sections of the menu that are topped with German words. There’s a section of schnitzels…which is a spiritual relative of sushi, in that a perfect piece seems so simple…but a lot of work goes into that simplicity. And perfect is not something oft found outside Vienna. If you have one in the style of Vienna, which means plain, just a perfectly crumbed and fried veal cutlet…it’s a Wiener Schnitzel (Vienna Schnitzel). The Delaunay also offers a Cordon Bleu Schnitzel (with ham and cheese, natch), and…my fave!…a Schnitzel a la Holstein!

Schnitzel a la Holstein at The Delaunay

This dish is one of the great triumphs of old-fashioned German cuisine: a fried veal cutlet garnished with a runny fried egg, capers and anchovies. You rarely see it anymore! But The Delaunay’s may be the best I’ve ever had. Perfect thickness of the veal, perfect golden-crunchy exterior. Garnishes predictably delicious. And…a thin splatter of veal jus all around puts this cutlet over the border into juicy/irresistible country.

As good as the schnitzels are, the sausage category marked “Wieners” may be even better! It is kinda funny, of course, to refer to sausages as “Wieners” when authentic Austrian Wiener Schnitzel, fried veal cutlet, is close at hand. In Wien (Vienna), they don’t call a sausage a “wiener.” But most of the world does, and so do they at The Delaunay. Don’t fret over the linguistics; instead, sample as many sausages as you can (you get two kinds for only about 9 pounds (that’s just 14 bucks!) Beef frankfurter, bockwurst, thuringer, nurnberger, käsekrainer (the famous Austrian cheese dog), berner wurstel, and New York hot dog–they’re all fab, real-tasting, texture-laden! My favorite was the porky berner wurstel, wrapped in…guess what?…bacon. All wieners are served with delicious mustardy potato salad, onions caramelized to dark-brown perfection, and accurately thin-cut, fluffy-light sauerkraut.

You can see the wiener wrapped with bacon (what’s left of it) on the left

I’m recommending The Delaunay powerfully to anyone visiting London right now. Listen…if you dig Hogarthian scenes painted in the tones of the 21st century…ya just can’t miss here. Javol, guv’nor!

Lastly…Indian food!

On my first visit to London, 44 years ago, I was taken to an Indian restaurant on New Year’s Eve. My excuse for jumping in the fountain at Trafalgar Square that night was that I was burning up from the vindaloo!

But…it changed my life. I’d never had food this hot before. I’d never had Indian food before. A star entered the firmament and, five trips to India later, it still lights my way.

So, I’ve always been emotional about Indian food in London. I’ve also been cautious. Clearly, this is THE Indian-restaurant city of the Western World…on volume alone. Just as I grew up in the suburbs of New York with a Chinese restaurant on every corner, so did my counterparts in Hampstead grow up with an Indian restaurant on every corner. Recently, in a national English poll, chicken tikka masala triumphed as England’s favorite dish!…above fish & chips and the rest!

Yada yada. So why have I often found nothing truly different in London’s Indians from New York’s Indians–except the excess of them? The funkies of Brick Lane are like the funkies of Sixth St. in NYC. Mid-range are good (Bombay Brasserie, Red Fort)….but not too far above our mid-ranges. I went to the opening of the fanciest place, Tamarind, about 15 years ago…and it struck me as Indian fusion does everywhere. “Interesting! Where’s my keema paratha and my toovar dhal?”

Now you’re ready to know the surprise I did. Various opinionators whom I asked about local Indian food were telling me I had to go to the fancy Benares, in Mayfair. No, no, no I resisted. I wanted tradition and funk. No no no, they returned. Just try Benares.

I did. And…

I have no doubt that this is the greatest fancy Indian restaurant with creative food I’ve ever been to. I know nothing in New York–or India!–that can match this for quality. On my next trip to London I will return immediately, maybe twice!

The entrance is not inspiring…a soulless lobby, next to a fancy car dealership, headed by a long, dispiriting, monochromatic staircase. Colors do not run wild in the interior design, either…nor windows…

The main dining room at Benares, just before the lunch rush

But Holy Vishnu…is all that white-and-black filled with riots of color once the plates start coming out!!!

The giveaway starter of glorious mini-pappadums with (left to right) pineapple chutney, tomato/curry leaf chutney, apple/ginger chutney

The food story starts here with Executive Chef Atul Kochhar…

Celebrity Indian chef Atul Kochhar

…who once worked at local rival Tamarind. Intriguingly, the two most exalted high-end Indian restaurants in London are right near each other, in Mayfair (and both a ten-minute walk from the Dorechester). There are two Michelin one-stars in London…and these are them!

But Atul was restless, and, about ten years ago, left Tamarind to set up Tamarind’s rival, Benares, with more of the Kochhar imprimatur on it. Today, for him, it’s all cookbooks, TV, rock star status…..and pride of place, I’d say, in London’s Michelin Indian star-wars.

I haven’t visited Tamarind in 15 years, but I hear that it has settled into a very authentic version of northern Moghul cooking, before that cooking got transformed by Anglo influences. I want to try that!!!

So comparisons, right now, are odious. But I can tell you that the explosiveness of the flavors at Benares, combined with the elegance of the cooking, and the attention paid to textures, blew me back. Only later did I notice something of a conceptual pattern, which local critics have confirmed in print: Tamarind may be pre-Anglo, but Benares is decidedly post-Anglo!–paying respect, in their very Indian food, to some of the staples of British dining. Is it a concept gone awry? Absolutely not! It is a concept gone a-right! Brilliant…and brilliantly delicious!

Exhibit A: the Lamb Livers and Kidney Masala Pie, with Minted Kachumber Salsa. Not knowing what to expect, I lit up when I saw a round mini-casserole that was basically an Indian-style shepherd’s pie. But the lamb and kidney flavors, while referring to steak and kidney, brought the creation into a funky world of flavor that seemed about 6,000 miles from London. And it has been a long time since I’ve had any Indian stew as skillfully spice-infused as this.

Another killer was Wild Fish Kebab from the Catch of the Day (a mild reference to England’s seafood shops), Chili Mayonnaise and Pickles.

Fish kebabs in the foreground, Lamb ‘Livers and Kidney’ Masala Pie at upper right, a wild array of salads (some with squid, some with lamb), chutneys, sambals and bhel puris all around the main courses

I was also enamored of a great vegetarian biryani in the style of Lucknow–absolutely elevated by the inclusion of chewy, satisfying jackfruit, and more-than-the-usual masala/fried onion taste. Another big winner was Roasted Organic Chicken Supreme, Bok Choy ‘Saag-Aloo,’ Lentil Sauce.

Organic chicken breast at Benares

I don’t usually order chicken breast. And a plating like this in an Indian restaurant ain’t what I’m looking for. OK…cancel all that noise! The components of this dish were so marvelously intense in Indian flavor, almost more than any chicken tandoori I’ve ever had. And the texture of that breast! I’m sure they employed the soaking-in-cream method–making it a kind of “Chicken Malai”–and transforming an English breast into one of the most succulent, running-with-juice chicken breasts I’ve ever tasted.

So there you have it. Stay in love with life. Go visit Samuel Johnson. And immerse yourself in modern Brittania at any of these restaurants…but, whatever you do…do not miss the last two!!!

Lead photo courtesy of Bigstock

There is NOOOO doubt whatsoever, not a shred: my favorite white wine grape in the world is Riesling. Furthermore, my favorite white wine in the world is dry Riesling, preferably from Germany. Dry Riesling! Dry Riesling!

And thereby hangs an American tragedy…

For we Yanks…going back to our experience with the cheap German imports that flooded our market post-World-War-II…have typically sneered at the concept of Riesling.

“Riesling?” they’d say, if you proposed a glass. “Ya mean like Liebfraumilch and Blue Nun? YUCK!”

And the Yanks were responding, properly, to the insipid, mass-market lightly sweet wines that the Germans were sending us in bulk in order to boost their post-war economy.

The timing was awful; the Germans were staking this sugary claim just as Americans were starting to get serious about wine, in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. We got serious about Chardonnay, above all…about Sauvignon Blanc…even about the wines made in Soave, Italy……but we steadfastly did not get serious about Riesling!

Little did we all realize that in the preceding century, the nineteenth…..dry German wines were riding high across the world. You can check the catalogue of the great London wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd from the 1890s……dry Rheingau from Germany was selling at a higher price than France’s Corton-Charlemagne, or Montrachet…the two most expensive Chardonnays in the world! The vineyards of Germany had a supreme reputation…though the Germans never chose to promote great single vineyards as much as the French did.

The other mistake the Germans made was having a poor 20th century in general. We often speak of the various nightmares of the two wars….but, a few rungs down the ladder of concerns, the century for the Germans was a marketing nightmare as well. And the post-war resuscitation of Germany’s reputation as a place of fineness, of cultural achievement (the land of Brahms, Goethe, Schiller, Kant)…..was not helped one iota by the marketing of cheap sweet wine.

Then the world changed, though most American wine-drinkers still don’t know it. The Germans…let’s say the 1980s was the key period…started getting real serious again about making outstanding dry wine from Riesling. The key word on labels was “trocken,” which means dry; if you saw, and if you see, “trocken” on a label, it means the wine inside the bottle is dry. You can bank on this.

The “trocken” boom, unfortunately, didn’t get off to the greatest re-start in the 1980s. Many German winemakers went full-on in this boom, converting all the sugar in their grape must to alcohol before they figured out how to make a balanced dry white wine in Germany. Within a few years, though, they did figure it out…and were making beautiful trockens.

It was the Germans themselves who were thrilled the most. They took to the new generation of dry Rieslings like nobody’s business. If you saw two businessmen having lunch and drinking wine at a restaurant in Frankfurt–they were undoubtedly drinking DRY Riesling. To this day, about 80% of the Riesling consumed in Germany is bone-dry…and the rest consumed in Germany, sweet though it may be, is very sweet, super-expensive, concentrated, fabulous dessert wine, certainly among the world’s greatest. There is almost no consumption in Germany of the mass-market, lightly sweet wines that Americans associate with Germany!

I visited Germany on a wine writers’ trip in the mid-1980s…and freaked the hell out! Already tired of Chardonnay (with its heaviness, its high-alcohol, its frequent oak), I was treated, at fine German restaurants, to tall, cold wine glasses containing miraculous, graceful wines as dry, as pure, as complex as any white wines I’d ever had. There were a number of varietals represented, but the most spectacular one, over and over again, was Riesling. And….it was so widely flexible with food, so contributory to great dining.

At about that time, American sommeliers began to catch on as well. The growth over the last 25 years has been nothing short of amazing! Great guys like restaurateur/sommelier Paul Grieco have been beating the drum for decades…and, today, dry Riesling is among the very hottest wines for sommeliers across the country.

There are many dry Rieslings in Germany, from many sub-regions and, of course, from many different producers. But here are eight things that I love about dry German Riesling in general, eight things that make this my favorite dry white wine in the world:

1) ELEGANCE
This is kind of a composite quality, and difficult to pin down. All of the words in this section are essentially metaphors. But if you know what I mean by the “heaviness” of Chardonnay, its galumphin’, in-your-face quality–you might be able to imagine its opposite. Dry Rieslings have “cut,” they have a kind of crystalline quality, a quality that my importer buddy Terry Thiese describes as “filigree.” They are light and refreshing, while simultaneously important and deep. There is nothing in the world of wine quite like the “breed” of a great Riesling.

2) LOW ALCOHOL
The northern climate of German (i.e. less sunshine) yields, on average, the lowest-alcohol wines in the world. There’s many a good German Riesling with a little sweetness that registers at 9 to 10% alcohol! This helps to make them so light and appealing. The drier German Rieslings weight in at a little more alcohol…11%, 12%, 13%…but it’s very rare to find the number that’s so common in California Chardonnay…a whopping 14% alcohol and above. Among the many charms of dry German Riesling is that it doesn’t rattle your brains, and does let you drive home!

3) ACIDITY
Oh yeah! Probably the single component that most makes Riesling sing is its electric acidity! In places like California, they add acid to wine to make it a little livelier on the palate. Not so in Germany…where the natural zingy acidity harmonizes perfectly, naturally with a wine‘s other aspects. The result for the drinker? A freshness unique in all the world…and the ability, like lemon juice, to cut through a million foods (smoked salmon, picnic meats, creamy fish dishes, cooked pork, and on and on and on.)

4)MINERALS
One of Riesling’s greatest attributes, to me, is the stony-minerally scent and flavor it so often carries. My wise-ass response to the white wine we Americans usually drink has oft been quoted: “If I want fruit, I’ll drink grape juice!” It has long been the other aspects of wine that form the basis of my vinous love affair. When a wine starts speaking rocks, earth, underground…that’s when I get interested! And Riesling speaks this language eloquently!

5) THE FRUIT THERE IS
Well, grapes are fruit…so every wine has to have some. And, frankly, when Riesling (usually in youth) shows its fruit…I like it! Despite my anti-fruit prejudice! The thing is…the typical young white wines, non-Riesling….exude this non-gastronomic kind of fruit that turns me off. It’s something like hyper-active pears and apples, bumped up by a little bubble gum. Of course I know that white Burgundy can be a lot more interesting than that–but it’s usually not the fruit that makes it so. In Riesling, when the pure fruit is reigning in youth…that fruit, often suggestive of flowers, peaches, nectarines, apricots…meshes with the brilliant acidity to form something truly mouthwatering. And fascinating. And gastronomic.

6) AGING
And now we’ve reached the best of all…well, almost. I LOVE the way German Riesling smells and tastes when it reaches 5-10 years old! And then…those bewitching aromas and flavors of age can continue to develop another 20 or 30 years…or more! Of which aromas do I speak? There are many, of course, in a complex, high-quality aged Riesling…but the most famous one is what the Brits call…”petrol!” That’s right…as Riesling ages, it begins to take on this hyper-minerality that is reminiscent of…petroleum. It is a unique thrill–an acquired taste for some, but a wonder first-time out for many. To me, it is one of the greatest, most gastronomic wine aromas in the world.

7) TRANSPARENCY
Now that we’ve discussed all the kinds of aromas and flavors that Riesling can yield…please recognize that as a kind of lagniappe from the wine gods…there is no grape in the world that translates its immediate environment into in-the-glass flavors and essences as felicitously as Riesling does! Wine people often froth on about “terroir”–a complicated French term, that refers to many aspects of a wine‘s environment. But if you focus on what the soil contributes to a wine–no grape sucks up the essence of the specific soil as readily as Riesling. This is a bonus thrill for the knowledgeable: “check out the taste of Bernkasteler Doktor in that wine!” “look how Kallstadter Saumagen is expressed in that wine!” “Donnhoff always nails Norheimer Dellchen as he does in this wine!” And on and on.

8) FOOD-MATCHING
Lastly, the greatest good of Riesling. For me, wine is for food; a wine may be great, but if it doesn’t taste delicious with food, I have no interest in it. One of the reasons that sommeliers are going crazy with Riesling these days…is that they find it to be an all-purpose food-lover…or, as wine-writing legend Hugh Johnson once said to me about the matching abilities of German Riesling…”it’s the banker!” It cuts through heavy foods (like a big pork roast with sauerkraut). It complements light foods (like salads). It goes in a million different directions ingredient-wise…and cuisine-wise! Brilliant with French food, American food, Italian food…Riesling is also highly sympathetic with Asian foods of all kinds, and with spicy food in general. Save that Gewurztraminer for the gastronomic freak show…and break out the Riesling instead!

As you may have noticed, I’ve begun to import wine. I’ve already begun with the wonderful dry German Rieslings of Philipp Kuhn…but in the near future there’ll be scores more dry Rieslings…they will be the heart of my portfolio!

Philipp Kuhn

My mission is to bring in all kinds of wines that are easy, and elegant, and simultaneously complex…but they must be brilliant with food. And…I want them to be for everybody, at reasonable prices. Taking my advice on these wines is NOT like reading the Wine Spectator and getting their “definitive” ratings…which have no consistency, and which have nothing to do with the dinner table. Once you have come to know my palate, you may decide it’s not for you. No prob! But I suspect you’ll see the method in my madness, and, if you’re a true gastronome, it will become your madness too. A Rosengarten wine–which carries the sticker “A David Rosengarten Wine for Food–will NEVER fall outside of my aesthetic! I will scour the world for these food-loving wines…and will hope to stem the world domination of Chardonnay and Cabernet!

I have ten categories of wine in my portfolio. Here’s a glimpse:

David Rosengarten‘s Ten Wine Categories: The REAL Categories Every Wine-Lover Needs in His or Her Life!

(I estimate that 95% of the wine in wine shops falls outside of these categories!)

*Round, gentle, complex, affordable aged reds

*Dry, sleek, racy whites (for oysters, etc.)

*Dry Riesling, Chenin Blanc, and a few others, young and old (the best white-wine category for food-matching)

*Young, bouncy, juicy reds (other wines of the world in the sappy Beaujolais mode)

*Complex aged whites with tolerable wood (excellent cream sauce wines)

*Elegant mainstream reds…..that’s mainstream but ELEGANT!

*Complex toasty-yeasty Champagne (or Champagne ringers)

*Crisp, clean, non-fruity sparkling wine

*Meaningful rosés, light on their feet but…bursting with fruit, or smoldering with almost-red-wine interest

*Complex, luscious, affordable dessert wines

Photos courtesy of the following, in order of appearance:
Homepage photo: www.summerofriesling.com; Post photos: www.newyork.metromix.com, Photograph by Clive Rutland from Colbury and Ashurst Theatrical Society’s production of Robin Hood and the Singing Nun, www.winebeing.com, www.blog.friendseat.com, www.themanfrommoselriver.com, Bigstock, Bigstock

The electricity of Hong Kong, from a red-sail junk at dusk

I had the great good fortune in March of touring Hong Kong for almost a week, led by people who really know the city—and, most importantly, people who were entirely willing to believe me when I said I wanted to eat like a Cantonese person! Usually, my hosts anywhere will say “yes” to the local question—and then proceed to serve me the things they think “Americans” will like. Not these Hong Kong guys! I was bobbing in a tide of snakes, and innards, and dried seafood, and rice gruels…all of the “real people” food that makes dining in this city such a gustatory, unmatchable thrill!

In fact, if I were you, I would probably move myself into Hong Kong planning gear right now. I don’t think tradition will ever go away in Hong Kong…but my sense is that it gets a little harder all the time to find it. Simple Cantonese restaurants are becoming fancier Cantonese restaurants; mom-and-pop Chinese “diners” are closing, much like the bouchons in Lyon, so that the urban planners may put up new 80-story apartment buildings (lower in Lyon!); the wine culture is taking hold, and many new restaurants are bending their food to match the wine influx; and ethnic food, once rare in Hong Kong, is definitely moving in at a rapid pace (at first it was things like fancy Italian restaurants, now it’s street food too):

Visible on the street in one of Hong Kong’s most traditional neighborhoods for Cantonese food

Nevertheless, if you know what you’re doing…holy Confucius can you have a week of Cantonese feasting here (oh, Hong Kong does a great job of representing many other regional Chinese cuisines too, but its soul is Cantonese…so I choose to stick with that).

In five more segments over the next month or two, I’m going to show you five vital Cantonese themes of Hong Kong dining…the themes to live by…hoping powerfully, of course, that you’ll take my lead and start thinking about a Hong Kong visit in 2013 or 2014.

Here’s a photo montage of some of the treats I’ll be covering in the upcoming Hong Kong stories:

Goose

It’s going away due to environmental concerns…but not that much!

Tortoise jelly…so good for your skin!

Hong-Kong style shrimp with an insane amount of fried garlic

Bottom of clay pot rice casserole, with incredible detail

Exquisite just-out-of water fish in nearby fishing village Tai-o

Amazing Cantonese hot pot joint

“Big bun” at my favorite dim sum shop

Killer preserved egg, served with ginger

The best bowl of noodles, wonton and meats…ever???

Now if you do go, you’re gonna need a hotel or two, for sure…and, Hong Kong is brilliant on that front as well!

Hong Kong has many parts, but central to the geographic dichotomy is this: old Kowloon (and its subsidiary neighborhoods) stands on the north side of the grand Hong Kong Harbour; Hong Kong Island, epicenter of the financial boom, stands on the south side of the Harbour (A ferry from one side to the other takes no more than five minutes).

Courtesy of www.fnetravel.com

During my trip, I split the difference. I started on the Kowloon side, at Hong Kong’s newest luxury hotel, the Hong Kong Ritz-Carlton. And though I love Ritz-Carltons all around the world…really and truly there has never been a Ritz-Carlton like this one. The main Ritz-Carlton company, headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, has partnered with Sun Hung Kai Properties in Hong Kong, a titanic developer; together they have built (and it just opened two years ago) not only the tallest building in Hong Kong…but the tallest hotel in the world!

The Ritz-Carlton at sunset, taken from the Hong Kong Island side of the harbour

Hong Kong for decades has made even New Yorkers crane their necks to take in the altitudinal attitude, but that mostly took place on Hong Kong Island. The headline: as of March 2011 Kowloon’s Ritz-Carlton is cranier than anything on the other side! Most of the building is a ritzy office building…but the hotel occupies floors 102 to 118, including 312 guest rooms. My vertiginous room was on the 117th floor…gasp!…with a gorgeous view of the big boys back on the Hong Kong Island side.

From my 117th-floor room at the Ritz-Carlton, my view at 8AM of the buildings that line the north shore of Hong Kong Island…including the now SECOND tallest building in Hong Kong, the International Finance Centre to the left (IFC II is all of 88 stories high.)

And it’s gorgeous. I loved the combination of traditional Chinese and modern comfort in my room. In fact, I was freaked upon entering, after my 25-hour journey, to see the array of electronic options set among the warm bamboo. But guess what: I conquered every single one of them on first shot (a rare feat for me!). The intuitiveness built into this design is unique among well-equipped hotels!

Then there’s the Wander Factor: one beautiful hallway with one room after another. I also toured the five main restaurants, and kept finding extraordinary combinations of old motifs (particularly Chinese lamps), and modern dining/conference needs and sensibilities.

MY GALLERY OF RESTAURANT SHOTS IN THE RITZ-CARLTON, HONG KONG

I am equally enthusiastic about the hotels of the Hong Kong Island side. You don’t, of course, have the views of Hong Kong Island’s buildings….but you do feel smack dab middle in the fierce financial capital that is Modern Hong Kong. Think of staying on this side, in the area called Central, as akin to a stay on Madison Ave./Fifth Ave. in New York City.

I’m in love with a number of these Hong Kong Island hotels, like the Mandarin Oriental. But on my first visit to Hong Kong 20 years ago, I stayed at the Island Shangri-La…which didn’t come far from matching its paradisaical name. It was my out-of-the-gate fave…so I’ve been eager to see how it has stood up over two decades…

Beautifully!

The only comment one might make is simply a note on changing styles. The atrium was all the rage in hotel design in March 1991, when the Island Shangri-La opened…and I can guarantee you that this was one of the most gorgeous atriums ever constructed. Today, the first-time visitor, walking past the dazzling splendor of the main lobby…

The main lobby

…may feel a bit of retro-shock when grabbing an elevator in the atrium. Fight it, say I…for this is still the most beautiful atrium I know of, ordained as it is with a breathtaking, 16-story Chinese landscape painting, set up in 250 panels of Chinese silk. The painting tells the story of China…in harmonious colors…and immediately grabs your focus from the atrium around it. I truly went to my elevator every day with excitement about another “viewing.”

The Island Shangri-La’s 16-story Chinese silk landscape painting

The rooms are similarly spectacular, simultaneously Hong Kong and global, always tended by a sincere, earnest, gracious, polished staff (one night, after most store hours, a captain drove me around Hong Kong in a house car in search of a prescription I needed!).

Many of the rooms take in either the Harbour side, or the verdant back mountains of the Hong Kong Island shore which lead up to the spectacular Victoria Peak. I made the smart play: my room on the 47th had a big dose of Victoria Peak, and one glass wall exposing the Harbour as well.

From my room at the Island Shangri-La, on the Victoria Peak side

Now, coming back to the gastronomic thread: You will find, in great hotels like the Island-Shangri-La, fancy Cantonese restaurants that soar way beyond street food, way beyond the focus of my gastro-study in March. Should the intrepid Funk-Seeker be tempted? Well, geez…when they invite me to one of these…can I say no? And I’m glad I didn’t…

This week, we’ll walk a bit on the glam side, before I settle down to my beloved funk over the next five postings. I think it’s instructive for you to see the differences.

The Summer Palace at the Island Shangri-La has two stars from Michelin, deservedly so. It is a beautiful restaurant, with its central conceit of a “summer palace”…

The “summer palace” at the Summer Palace restaurant

…replete with gorgeous china, cutlery, linens and truly soulful but accomplished service.

If you go…and I urge you to do so…you will find flavors and textures not so far from the Cantonese flavors and textures all over town. The difference is that these flavors are toned down somewhat: not so salty, not so fishy, not so oily…not as challenging for Americans, OR for the well-off Hong Kong locals who want to dine in a healthier, more elegant manner.

We started with the Crispy Ox-Brisket…and LOVED it!…one of the best BBQ dishes of the week (many ducks, pigs, geese and pigeons lay ahead!)…crunchy, juicy, melting, deeply flavored, all the good things simultaneously.

Meltingly tender Crispy Ox-Brisket

A great follow-up—and a classic example of this restaurant’s style—is the Bean Curd Sheets with Bamboo Pith and Black Beans…a good indication that funky ingredients can also inhabit the two-stars. I’m a lover of the dried bean curd that’s turned into thin, resilient sheets, AND of the fuzzy part of the bamboo shoot known as the pith. On my trip, of course, I hit tons of good textures out there in wild Hong Kong…but the hi-falutin’ delicacy and refinement of this textural bonanza had a lot to do with two-star reaching, I suspect. And that, of course, includes the plate arrangement.

Bean Curd Sheets with Bamboo Pith and Black Beans

Perhaps my favorite savory dish at Summer Palace was a simple thing, but brimming with luxury. The “real” Hong Kong is obsessed with dried seafood, all kinds of dried seafood—and some of it, like the much-loved dried scallops, or “conpoy,” can be quite expensive (if you get the good stuff). So the Summer Palace chef grabbed some high-quality conpoy, shredded it finely, and tossed it with an ultra-fresh bush of pea shoots.

Shredded conpoy with pea shoots

To gild the lily, he folded into it one of those dark-brown, goopy-but-complex, almost gelatinous, umami-rich, lip-sticking sauces that the Cantonese so love to pair with expensive ingredients. Some might taste this dish and find it of low-level intensity. But if you’re reading the Cantonese cues right, you’re saying…”THIS is luxury!”

You would expect a two-star to be elevated at dessert time, no? So I must confess that the knock-out dessert of the week came my way at Summer Palace…and, though I might have seen variations of it in lesser restaurants, I don’t think any place but a luxury restaurant could pull this one off with such élan.

The dish is in that spectrum of fruity and/or custardy Chinese desserts that trap little chewy pearls inside. In the U.S., direct from Taiwan and its bubble teas, we are most used to seeing tapioca play the role of the pearls. But there’s also a big sago contingent; sago are pearls formed from a powdery starch gathered from the trunks of sago palms. This combination at Summer Palace was insanely delicious: a velvety mango custard, chewy sago pearls, and several types of fruit, including the exotic grapefruit variant pomelo.

Sago pearls with mango custard and pomelo at the Summer Palace

Okay, just to give you the FULL story…I couldn’t resist ducking into another two-star restaurant on my trip, Celebrity…one that is also in a hotel (most of the multi-stars are in hotels), one that is very buzzy right now. There are twelve Michelin two-star restaurants in Hong Kong, seven of them Cantonese. From what I heard, and could tell…this one may be the most Cantonese of them all.

AND with luxury standards…though standards not nearly as lofty as those of the Summer Palace…just as standards of Celebrity’s Hotel Lan Kwai Fong fall short of hotel standards at the splendiferous Island Shangri-La.

The small, slightly high-tech dining room of Celebrity

But the real story here is the Chef, Cheng Kam Fu. Born not far from Hong Kong, Fu spent many years working for the late Hong Kong tycoon Lim Por-yen, before he started rising in the Hong Kong restaurant ranks. Today, he is one of Hong Kong’s culinary rock stars.

Cheng Kam Fu

Here’s what I loved about his food: its cleanness and simplicity. The flavors are unmistakably Cantonese, but brought to a different level of elegance…usually not through adding to, but, instead, through stripping down.

His array of first courses, at my dinner, included the best Dry-Fried String Beans I’ve ever had, with the classic inclusion of minced pork; a simple touch put Fu’s on top—the use of wider beans.

The array of starters at Celebrity

I loved Fu’s use of dried seafood…from the brilliant dried oyster in lettuce leaf…

Dried oyster in lettuce leaf

…to his wonderfully austere Dried Scallop Soup.

Conpoy soup

In both cases, the central ingredient is the star performer…and the chef is delighted to give center stage in the way that only a great chef can.

Next up in my meal was Fu’s most famous creation, something he started making twenty years ago: chicken wings stuffed with bird’s nest. The latter super-expensive ingredient usually floats in a bowl of soup, of course—making for what everyone agrees is one bland dish. But Fu, now oft-copied, uses the oddly-textured bird’s nest as a filling for fried chicken wings—which gives the bird’s nest strands a flavor to play against, and creates a unique, delightful texture at the center of a chicken wing.

How the chicken wings are presented

A chicken wing turned over to display its enclosed filling

After the first delicious bite

Next up, it was dried seafood again—a lot of it!—as Fu presented Braised Assorted Superior Dried Seafood.

Dried seafood

This particular plate involved dried abalone, dried sea cucumber, and dried shark’s fin…all served in the sexy-deep, goopy sauce that the Cantonese love so much with their luxury products.

The last big thrill of the meal was Fu’s Baby Pigeon—as crisp, deep, and delicious as any Chinese Roast Duck I’ve ever had.

Baby pigeon

You can see it all in these photos—the simplicity, the fundamentalism. What you cannot see is the depth of flavor in each of these fabulous dishes—a two-star turn on Cantonese food, to be sure, but more intensely flavored than the gentle Summer Palace turn.

Coming Up Soon:
Down and Dirty with Hong Kong’s Hot Pots and Clay Pots

Meadowood

I recently spent a thoroughly beguiling three nights at The Meadowood Resort on the Silverado Trail in Napa Valley; really and truly, if you’re planning a Napa fantasy, you should most definitely book one of their mountainside cottages as your accommodation. The luxury, the pampering, the comfort…not to mention the fact that you feel so strongly that you are in a rural place. That you are in Napa Valley.

If you go, though, you’ll be luckier than I…for The Meadowood’s great restaurant, one of only two 3-star Michelin restaurants in Napa Valley (you KNOW the other), was recently closed for two months for renovation…of course, during my stay! But I’ve eaten there several times before (heavenly)…and, during this recent stay in February, I did get to chat with The Restaurant’s brilliant chef, one of California’s great culinary stars, Christopher Kostow.

Chef Christopher Kostow

After seeing the extensive gardens at The Meadowood, I was most interested in discussing with Christopher a subject very much on my mind lately: will locavore endure?

My own observation first: I’m not sure that the country’s hottest, hippest food trend—restaurants using ingredients that are local—is going to always have the weight it has right now. I don’t think it’ll ever die…I just think that there’s a locavore backlash right now among many chefs, and that “locavore” is going to get taken down a peg or two, or three.

Why? Lots of chefs feel handcuffed by the locavore creed. If you work in Miami and you want to cook with foie gras…whatcha gonna do? If you work in Cleveland, and the greatest fish is available to you only by airlift…whatcha gonna do? If you work in North Dakota and you need some brilliant fresh herbs in winter…whatcha gonna do?

But these examples are not minor exceptions to the rule. Many chefs are looking to the airplanes, and FedEx, for most of what they’re using.

Consider another major new star on the American culinary scene, Cesar Ramirez at Brooklyn Fare in (guess where!), another glittering recent addition to Michelin’s three-star pantheon.

When you go to Brooklyn Fare, your dinner is 25 or so small courses selected by Ramirez. No one has ever been able to exactly characterize what he does…other than “make incredibly delicious food!”…but more than anything else his vision involves a heavy Japanese aesthetic. And the execution of this aesthetic includes the air freight, constantly, of top-quality fish from Japan. In the same vein, you will find delicious fresh cheeses from Italy on your plate—also flown in, because they’re the best examples in the world.

Ramirez is part of that revisionist group of chefs who wants to work with the best possible ingredients, no matter where they’re from.

So…how does Kostow of Meadowood view all this?

For starters…Kostow sees himself as working very much in a very specific place. Ramirez of Brooklyn Fare could probably move to Kansas City tomorrow, and his restaurant wouldn’t change that much. Everything about Meadowood, however, and Kostow’s work there, screams Napa Valley.

During the two-month closing, Kostow said, “our kitchen staff took lots of local trips together. We went to purveyors. We went to wine producers. We visited local historical societies, to get a better perspective on who we are.” Meadowood’s restaurant was locavore before, but it’s even more deeply locavore now.

“Locavore,” said Kostow “…depends on where you are. If I were cooking in a restaurant in New York City, I would not set up a rooftop garden. But when you’re in an agricultural place…of course you should emphasize the local products!”

“Fortunately,” he went on, “we’re in a very happy position: we do not have to choose between local and good, as many chefs do!”

“For restaurants like ours,” said Kostow, who worked extensively in France before burgeoning in California, “the new luxury is not lobster and foie gras, like it used to be. I handled many expensive ingredients in France, which sometimes came out of the freezer and were not all they were cracked up to be. Our ‘luxury’ has a better quality aura: we spend the money on running the garden, which is a much more precise guarantee of quality. We’re not interested in ‘name’ luxury ingredients on the menu. A restaurant’s own agriculture is the true luxury in 2013.”

Meadowood Garden

Though I’m all for anti-locavore pushback when it makes sense (as in Brooklyn)…I’m also all for a locavore like Kostow! I can hardly wait to get back to Meadowood and take the measure of The Restaurant’s enhanced locavorism!

And what else will be greeting me when I return? Here’s a piece of a recent press release, tracking the changes. Please note the number of times the concept of “local” is invoked!

On the inspiration behind the recent additions, Restaurant Director Nathaniel Dorn says, “The projects we completed during the last couple of months were primarily designed to enhance our guests’ comfort, enjoyment and sense of discovery. We delved deeper into our relationships with a few of our existing artisans and craftsmen and forged several exciting new partnerships as well.”

The new entry and expanded bar area, designed by noted architect Howard Backen, features a twenty-foot beamed ceiling, fieldstone walls, two fireplaces, large windows and a polished concrete-and-wood floor. Craftsman Michael Capp worked with Dorn to execute his designs for new dining tables for both The Restaurant dining room and the bar. The table tops are crafted of limestone while the bases feature cast iron steel and 100-year-old wood salvaged from a bridge in British Columbia. Suspended custom ceramic tiles by local artist Richard Carter add warmth and texture to the room and are positioned to add interest to the overhead space. Fabric colors feature shades of gray and subtle pin striping in keeping with the accents in the dining room.

In addition to the beautiful new space with seating for 18, guests will also find snacks from Chef Christopher Kostow and The Restaurant at Meadowood culinary team offered at $20 per person. The bar will be open Monday through Saturday evenings from 5:00 p.m. to midnight with wines available by the glass or bottle and an array of traditional and signature cocktails.

Another new culinary debut occurs at the actual bar itself, where guests will now be able to enjoy a three-course menu each evening priced at $90 per person. The menu will change nightly and guests are encouraged to call ahead to reserve space as seats at the bar are limited. “This new three-course menu was largely inspired by the members of our local community who enjoy coming into The Restaurant mid-week,” says Dorn. “We have a good many vintners, for example, who’ve told us they’d like to come into The Restaurant at the end of the day for a lighter meal and some good conversation. So, we’ve created that opportunity for them.”

The new private dining room was created in response to the growing number of larger parties inquiring about dining in The Restaurant. “Increasingly,” says Dorn, “we have guests who want to hold special celebrations in The Restaurant. This space, which overlooks a small, private garden, will be perfect for gatherings of friends or family members celebrating special occasions. It’s also ideal for members of our local vintner community wishing to host private dinners featuring their wines alongside Christopher’s menus.”

Finally, in the dining room, wine enthusiasts are likely to delight in the new Thomas Warner-designed wine cellar. Crafted entirely of rich walnut the cellar fills the space of the original four-seat private dining room. Says Dorn, “We’re excited to have our extensive wine collection located in the dining room where it will be close at hand for both our staff and our guests.”

For more information on The Restaurant at Meadowood or to reserve a table, visit www.therestaurantatmeadowood.com. To reserve seating at the bar or to inquire about the private dining room, call 707-967-1205.

All photos courtesy of Meadowood

My Surprising Week in America’s Most Famous Wine Region

About a week ago, I attended the annual Wine Writers’ Symposium, based at the splendid Meadowood Resort on Silverado Trail. Increasingly, the Symposium has also shared facilities with the CIA, just across the valley floor in St. Helena.

The symposium attendees, outside the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena

Now, as you may already know…..Napa Valley wine, at its most scale-tipping typical…..is not exactly my cup of tea. So I didn’t go into this thing expecting any wine revelations. I also thought I knew what to expect Symposium-wise, having spoken there four years ago.

But lots of things rocked my world during this most enjoyable visit.

Here are the five most interesting and relatable things I took away from my week in Napa Valley:

A) THE FOCUS ON MONEY AT THE WINE WRITERS’ SYMPOSIUM

Of course 60 wine writers at a conference are going to talk wine, wine, wine. But this year I also noted the number of panels, and the amount of buzz among the wine geeks, devoted to the business of our business.

On one central day, the morning began with a panel called Where Is the Money?, which included a kind of poll, conducted by electronic means, assessing the real financial life of wine writers. The results were shocking…..with most wine writers confessing that wine writing doesn’t bring in more than $10,000 a year in income. So the focus shifted, in the next panel, to The Wine Writer as Entrepreneur: How to Leverage Your Story and Your Brand.

I was on the latter panel—my favorite panel of the week—along with Karen MacNeil (of Wine Bible fame), Linda Murphy (of Jancisrobinson.com), and moderator Alder Yarrow (of Vinography.com, Alder’s highly visible blog).

At the heart of our discussion was a question of ethics: essentially, should a wine writer remain relatively passive, weakly surfing the ebbing tide of economic possibility……or, should a wine writer build his or her own brand, even crossing the line into…..gasp…..entrepreneurship!

You probably know how I feel. As long as a writer retains his or her integrity, anything is possible. I’m importing wines now! But I would never use the journalism part of what I do to give those wines an advantage by damning competitors. It’s unthinkable! Yes, I’m importing Michel Gonet Champagne….but every story I write for the rest of my life about Krug, or Charles Heidsieck, or Pierre Peters, or whatever….will include exactly what I think about those wines!

The controversy echoed throughout the conference. It was cool.

NOTE: for a short video look at the Symposium, click here:

B) THE PROMISE OF 2011 CHARDONNAY

A Chardonnay lover I ain’t. All that butter, vanilla, tropical fruit, alcohol….the stuff that gets some wine drinkers excited….gets me completely turned off, leaves me longing for a really tingly dry German Riesling at 11.5% alcohol and a citrus grove of acid.

And so…..one of my most surprising wine reactions of the week…..was discovering that I’m digging the Napa Valley Chardonnays of 2011!

Now, I don’t want to take this too far. These are still not among my favorite white wines in the world. But in a blind tasting of Chardonnays in which a dozen different Napa wineries presented three Chardonnays each—the 2009, the 2010, the 2011—in every trio I found the 2011 to be the most appealing by far. And that’s from me, a lover of wines with age.

The set-up for the Chardonnay tasting

The Chardonnay tasting

Here’s a summary of the vintage from California’s Wine Institute:

2011 California Harvest Report

SAN FRANCISCO — The 2011 California winegrape harvest was lighter and later than normal with flavors developing at lower sugar levels, giving winemakers the opportunity to make flavorful, elegant wines. A wet winter and spring delayed bloom and hindered fruit set, resulting in shatter in some regions, which decreased the overall crop load. A generally cool summer prolonged the growing season and harvest started very late in most areas. Early autumn rains prompted growers and wineries to pick many varieties at lower Brix. “We walked blocks carefully early on and started picking when fruit reached an early ripeness, which we felt was the correct expression of this vintage,” said Michael Silacci, Winemaker at Opus One in Napa Valley. “We are really excited about this year’s vintage.”

And this is exactly what I found in this group of Chardonnays. I would never consider ordering a 2009 Napa Chardonnay in a restaurant—just the opposite kind of vintage, a hot and ripe one—but I’ve now got my eyes out for 2011.

Some of my favorites in the blind tasting came from Hudson Vineyards (fruit from Carneros), Merryvale Vineyards (also Carneros fruit), and Pine Ridge Vineyards (Carneros again!)

Come to think of it, the advice is: look for Carneros 2011!

C) THE EXTRAORDINARY WINES OF REYNOLDS FAMILY WINERY

The odds against finding a new-to-me winery in Napa that totally knocks me out? 1000 to one, perhaps?

It happened last week anyway, big-time.

At the Symposium, we did another blind tasting of wines in vintage trios—this time, the Cabernet Sauvignons of 2008, 2009, 2010.

The Cabernet tasting

What can I say? It was a typical Napa Cab tasting for me—hot, dark wines, some quite bitter, most very tannic—the organizers even supplied toothbrushes and toothpaste upon exit, I kid you not!

However, winery #5 was different. I tasted the 2008, 2009, and 2010, and my heart leapt. I tasted other wines, then came back again. Still leaping. Tasteful wine writer buddies with purple teeth at the event were buzzing: “did you taste #5?”

When I saw the ID key after the tasting, I realized that for me, a new star had swum into my wine cosmos.

Reynolds Family Winery.

Never even heard of it before. But, beyond doubt, they make my favorite Cabernet in the Napa Valley today (at least among the ones I know about)!

Steve Reynolds was a dentist with a serious love for wine (a love that had been stimulated by some teen-age years in Europe, going to vineyards with his Dad). In 1994, after years of dreaming about it, Reynolds and family took the plunge: they purchased a 100-year-old chicken ranch on the Silverado Trail, and Dr. Reynolds traded teeth for nails…..building everything on this property from fences to the tasting room. Oh yeah….they also planted ten acres of Cabernet Sauvignon in 1996, and produced their first wine in 1999.

Here’s the thing about Reynolds Family reds: they are much, much more elegant than most of the competition—but still retaining the best of Napa Valley lusciousness. I always think that California winemakers could make more balanced, harmonious wines, if they wanted to (I think of the lovely Victor Hugo winery in Paso Robles)…..but winemakers usually don’t want to, preferring to bank on the high Parker points of wines that “hurt” (I swear a winemaker in California once said to me “Dave, I know a wine is good when it hurts!!!”).

The wine that hurt so little—and was absolutely world-class wonderful, at the same time!—was the 2008 Reynolds Family Winery Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, Stags Leap District.

Now, Reynolds makes other wines as well, not all of them designated “Stags Leap District.” So back in New York, I called them up—discovering, happily, “the Cabernet  you liked was Steven Spurrier’s favorite winery of the tasting, too”—and asked for a broad sampling of the Reynolds wines. Tasting ensued…..along with quality confirmation!

So here are my sober, sit-down, focused notes on the best wine of my week in Napa:

2008 Reynolds Family Winery Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, Stags Leap District.

Medium-deep garnet ruby, full to edge. Gorgeous plummy, berry-like nose, deep fruit, touch of rhubarb, celery seed, and Bordeaux earthy exotica, something like cheese rind. It makes me fantasize about some mid-Atlantic metaphoric island, looking both east and west. The kind of plush fruit that Napa Valley is known for—but in this case it’s dry-tasting fruit, not sweet-tasting fruit. Simultaneously, the wine has the type of exquisite balance that seems like great Bordeaux, maybe Right Bank. Gorgeous, subtle, haunting echoes of rose and incense gather in the finish, which is surprisingly soft and bouncy. This is what I’d want Napa Valley Cabernet to be, but so rarely find!

This baby costs just under a hundred dollars…..seriously worth it, to me, and seriously more lovely than famous Napa wines that cost five times as much.

At home, I also tasted these winning wines from Reynolds:

2009 Pinot Noir, Los Carneros

Medium garnet, not light, not dark. Closed nose. Nice berry fruit, only moderately ripe. Hints of cranberry, but little oak or spice happening right now (though a few minutes breathing brings out a little tootsie roll). Sweet attack, then even throughout most of the palate, though it finishes a little hot. Lots of promise, I think, because the structure is fine for New World Pinot….just kinda dumb at the moment.

2008 Merlot, Stags Leap District

Silky-looking slightly lightened garnet. Lovely fruit on nose, well-behaved, slightly Bordeaux-like berries. Crushed velvet feel on palate, tremendously bright fruit, refreshing through to finish (which is a little short). My second favorite, after the Stags Leap Cabernet.

My second favorite wine from Reynolds Family Winery

2008 Cabernet Sauvignon, Estate Select

Quite dark garnet with hints of black. A little more in the ripe, hot, licorice-y direction…but only by comparison. A little hot and chunky on entry, with extremely subtle hints of Port-like ripeness. Glides across the finish-line like all Reynolds reds, with good acid and non-abrasive tannin….though this one has more tannin than the other wines.

2008 Persistence, Napa Valley

Lovely mid-garnet, ruby at rim, maybe a touch of onion skin lying ahead. Quieter than the others, but vague hints of spice and chocolate on nose. About as elegant as a big Bordeaux blend (that, creatively, includes Syrah!) can get. It’s for those who prize richness and power….but even such a wimp as I can enjoy the balance-of-power crafting in this wine.

D) THE BEAUTY OF CAIN VINEYARD AND WINERY

The tasting room at Cain Vineyard and Winery

Well, sure….a wine writer visiting Napa Valley has to make a few winery visits, no? I chose to go way the hell up on Spring Mountain, on the west side of the valley high above St. Helena, to visit a winery whose wines I’ve always liked. AND I heard the place is drop-dead gorgeous!

It is.

If you’re planning a Napa Valley visit, I would advise you to contact Cain, make an appointment (no drop-ins allowed), get a map sent to you, turn your GPS off as you ascend (because the winding curves on the way up confuse the hell out of your little device), and anticipate one of the prettiest hours you can spend in Napa.

The heart and soul of this winery is a gorgeous hillside on Spring Mountain, 550 acres of it, first purchased by Cain’s founders in 1980. They started planting vines in 1981, calling it the Cain Mountain Vineyard—a dramatic “bundt pan,” surrounding the ultra-dramatic rock called “La Piedra”—and, today, produce just a few different labels (the winery’s capacity is 25,000 cases per vintage), some from Cain Mountain Vineyard fruit, some from grapes purchased elsewhere.

Looking out at the vineyard from the winery….with La Piedra visible on the upper left

In the vineyard…..standing behind La Piedra

The most prestigious wine from this winery is called Cain Five, named for the five “Bordeaux” varieties that are blended to make it. All of the fruit comes from the famous hillside vineyard. I like it—because I find it a little more elegant than most Napa Valley top-of-the-pay-scale biggies.

But I reserve my special love for the inexpensive wine labeled “Cain Cuvée”—made from a little mountain fruit, but mostly from grapes grown elsewhere. Intriguingly, they make this wine every TWO vintages—so it is a carefully controlled blend (like Brut Champagne), not a single-vintage wine. To me, they continually hit the mark: lush but elegant Napa Valley red wine, bright and perky, terrific with a wide variety of foods. For every bottling, they include the same rows of wine, from the same growers.

The current release, specified “NV9″ on the bottle, was just released in February, and is 57% 2009 fruit, 43% 2008 fruit, with a majority of Merlot in it (53%).

So…..I’m recommending the wine, for sure….but super-recommending a trip up Spring Mountain!

E) SMITH-MADRONE SHINES AT WINE DINNER AT “PRESS”

One of the great dinner events of the Napa week was an event at Press, the upscale steakhouse owned by Lesley Rudd—who also owns the great gourmet-shop chain Dean & DeLuca, which happens to have a branch right next door to Press, just a bit south of St. Helena on Route 29. I’d been to Press before, and liked it greatly…but it was even better with all the thrill of a winemaker’s dinner in the middle of the winemakers’ region.

Waiters preparing for the crush at Press

You know the scene: local winemakers grab bottles of every this and that, many of them aged, before lugging them over to a big dinner with lots of round tables where lucky guests dive into the bottles at will. Usually there’s a set menu created by the chef, sometimes with a theme: on this night, we had a dozen courses with our Napa Valley wine that included all things porcine.

The top of the piggy menu

The wines flowed, of course….and, to be frank, though much flowed through me, not much thrilled me. Sorry to be such a Napa Scrooge! But when it’s good, it’s good. One of the sub-plots of the evening for me was an aged magnum of Mayacamas Chardonnay, really at point and yummy. Shouldn’t have been a big surprise….Mayacamas is one of the few wineries I rely on for aged Cabernet.

The lovely 1998 Chardonnay in magnum from Mayacamas

Best of all, however, was a bottle of Cab from a winery I thought I’d understood….Smith-Madrone…..also on Spring Mountain. The 2007 Cook’s Flat Reserve on my table—next to a sea of bottles from bigger-name wineries—knocked me out with its balance, and, particularly, its Bordeaux-ness. American winemakers are usually allergic to “green”—that herbal-veggie aroma so intrinsic to Cabernet, so common in France, so disgraced in California. Parker finds “green” to be a flaw—so 99% of American winemakers let their grapes get way too ripe, lest a little “green” creep into the wine (in America, it’s not easy being green!). Bleh. I like “green” in Cabernet, as long as it doesn’t dominate. This 2007, for me, had the perfect reminder of Cabernet’s true nature.

So, back in New York, I once again played the phone-call card to the winery….receiving by post, almost instantly, a lovely “library” set of Smith-Madrone wines. They make whites as well at Smith-Madrone, which I will taste in the future….but yesterday I put the Smith-Madrone reds into my Reynolds tasting and…..though nothing can measure up to the majesty of the 2008 Reynolds Family Winery Cabernet from Stag’s Leap….these were damned good wines too, atypical Napa Valley wines, right in my style.

The true knock-out was the 2000 Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley.

It is a silky-looking garnet, medium, with touch of lightening at edge. A little jam on the nose, but a hint of white truffle as well…a Napa Cab developing like a European wine! Even shows a bit of horse sweat (call it Brett, but I call it luscious!) Definite bell pepper character on palate, even Chinon-like…though the funk continues too at a very low level, with a whisper of smokiness. Great, lifting acid, and well-behaved finish. Compact, complex, delish.

Here are my notes on the other reds tasted in New York, all of which I also recommend:

1995 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley

Medium garnet, faintest touch of onion skin at rim. Very Bordeaux-like herby nose, with a little jammy depth. Extremely Bordeaux-like on palate, with a kind of space between the Napa-esque concentrations of fruit that allows the wine to breathe.

2001 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley

Slightly more advanced in color than the 2000, not quite as purply. Garrigue-like wild herbs on the nose, without as much fruit as the 2000. A little more disjunct than the 2000, with hints of volatile acidity, plus a little extra heat, bitterness and tannin. But perfect with the right foods, like grill meats.

2007 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, Spring Mountain District

Medium purply-garnet, but not super youthful or strong looking. Pure fruit on nose, perfect degree of ripeness. Gorgeous mixture of Cabernet green and plummy fruit on the palate. Touch of licorice. Slightly aggressive tannins, but I think they will melt away….and I think the tertiary flavors will develop beautifully in this wine.

So the big take-away is: if you seek, seek, seek in Napa Valley….ye shall find! But, unless ye are part of the big-bomb crowd……ye must be one careful, specific seeker!

COMING UP NEXT WEEK: