Best Food Writing 2013 (17 page)

Mr. Nasworthy was dismissed a few weeks later and is now the chef de cuisine at Picholine. Mr. Varda praised his talent but said, “his culinary philosophy did not agree with ours.”

Evidently not. The four of us at the table that night had talked about the food on the way home.

 

 

T
AKAYA OR
L
EAVE
Y
A:
D
IDN'T
N
EW
A
SIAN
G
ET
O
LD
, L
IKE
, T
EN
Y
EARS
A
GO
?

By Ian Froeb

From
Riverfront Times

Before becoming dining critic for the daily
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
in June 2013, Ian Froeb reviewed and blogged about St. Louis restaurants for the weekly
Riverfront Times
for six years—long enough to refine the inevitably necessary craft of how to write a negative review.

T
he calamari looked innocuous enough when our server brought the appetizer: familiarly curled squid rings breaded and fried to a light golden brown, with aioli for dipping. My wife ate a few. I ate a few. We looked at each other.

“Where's the squid?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said and took a close look at one of the rings. It looked like fried calamari, but beneath the fried breading, there seemed to be nothing but . . . more fried breading. “I don't even know how this is scientifically possible.”

“It's like it's there. But it's not.”

Schrödinger's calamari.

I scraped as much breading as I could from another piece of squid. There was something underneath, after all: a spindly, off-white ring of squid, utterly desiccated. I snapped it in half with my fingers. It went
crunch.
I summoned our server. She examined the evidence. She made a face. The face looked like this: o_0. She said she'd tell the kitchen about the calamari. In the meantime, did we want a replacement order?

We did not.

The spirit of scientific inquiry notwithstanding, it is with some regret that I report that the calamari was the second-worst dish we had at dinner that evening at Takaya New Asian.

Takaya New Asian opened in January as part of the new Mercantile Exchange development downtown. Owners Eric and Jenny Heckman also operate Tani Sushi Bistro in Clayton, a restaurant I liked when I reviewed it in 2008 and to which I've returned several times since, and happily. Yet Takaya is such a spectacular failure that, as Pitchfork once memorably claimed about a new Weezer album, you have to consider whether the older work is as good as you remember.

The problems are apparent as soon as you walk in the door. The blissed-out faux-Portishead lounge music like the soundtrack to a soft-core flick on Cinemax. The open fireplace in the center of the dining room. The cushy booths big enough to hold an entire bachelorette party and the bride-to-be's inflatable replica of Jon Hamm's penis.

Is it 1997? No. Did the hostess, having run out of menus on one of our visits, ask us to share a single copy? She did. Does the menu feature Asian-fusion cuisine? You bet your bulgogi sliders it does.

Those sliders, selected from among the menu's list of appetizers and small plates, were one of the more successful dishes I encountered at Takaya. An order brings three (two, at lunch) miniature sandwiches with marinated steak on brioche buns. The meat was tender and flavorful, gently sweet, though the bread could have been fresher. Another appetizer, Korean-style grilled short ribs, featured a similar marinade—sugar and soy sauce, with hints of garlic—but tougher meat.

Grilled hamachi jaw is a “signature” appetizer. (The menu uses the term frequently—and spells it correctly, unlike “makerel” and “massago.”) I thought it logical to try a signature appetizer. Our server took my order. She returned a few minutes later: the kitchen didn't have any grilled hamachi jaw that evening.

Another “signature” appetizer is mozzarella tempura—a fancy term for fried cheese sticks. These are crunchy and gooey but maybe not as salty as you want from fried cheese and, oh, God, I'm critiquing cheese sticks at an upscale downtown restaurant.

There's a sushi selection, which features nigiri sushi, sashimi and the over-the-top Americanized rolls for which Tani is known, such as the “Oh My God” roll, which arrives at your table completely engulfed in flames. At Tani the delicate knifework and no-nonsense presentation of the nigiri sushi impressed me. Here, ragged slabs of fish sat atop rice swabbed with too much wasabi paste. A piece of “makerel” was weirdly juicy, as if plucked from a bin of brine.

Dinner entrées include “specialty” sushi presentations, as well as more conventional—and certainly not “New Asian,” however you choose to define that nebulous phrase—dishes, such as teriyaki (your choice of chicken or beef). Among the sushi entrées is “hamachi carpaccio.” This, the menu boasts, isn't merely another “signature” dish, but Takaya's absolutely
most
outstanding, must-try dish. I thought it logical to try an absolutely
most
outstanding, must-try dish. Our server took my order. She returned a few minutes later: the kitchen didn't have any “hamachi carpaccio” that evening.

In its place our server directed me to a similar preparation with very thin slices of raw tuna and equally thin slices of avocado fanned around a plate. The tuna and avocado sat in an iridescent puddle of various sauces—soy, ponzu, something vaguely chile-mayonnaiseesque (it was difficult to tell)—that looked like an oil slick and tasted like tuna water.

The worst thing we ate on the night of Schrödinger's calamari was pan-seared sea bass in a garlic-miso sauce. A large hunk of fish sat atop a mound of rice, with a few paltry asparagus stalks doing garnish duty. The fish was inexplicably, mouth-hauntingly bitter—until I turned it over to reveal a crust of diced garlic that had been burnt black.

At least I found an explanation for the sea bass. I still can't figure out the squid. Admittedly, that's not entirely Takaya's fault. On a recent episode of the public-radio Zeitgeist prodder
This American Life,
a reporter obsessively bird-dogged a rumor that (once, maybe) a pork processor somewhere had packaged pig rectums (or, as they're called in the industry, “bung”) as “imitation calamari.” When the investigation proved fruitless, the reporter resorted to a blind taste test in which he pitted fried calamari against fried bung. One of the two participants preferred the bung.

I was not one of the tasters, and I'm pretty damn sure I've never
eaten pig-butt rings à la calamari, but I suspect that in a blind tasting I'd have chosen ‘em over the deep-fried squid I ate at Takaya.

I should mention that our server did delete the calamari from the bill. That kind gesture, however, barely dented the total tab: $90, for a dinner for two. Unless you're content with a minimalist selection of nigiri, a meal at Takaya will cost you. Maybe there was a time in St. Louis when merely opening a sleek new restaurant aping a played-out culinary trend was enough to serve as one of the cornerstones of splashy new downtown development.

In 2013, though, it comes off as a load of horse—well, you know. Rhymes with bung.

 

 

I A
TE
M
Y
F
IRST
M
CRIB, AND
I R
EGRET
I
T

By Katharine Shilcutt

From
Houston Press

In a boom city like Houston, fine dining can be
so
beside the point. All the better for an iconoclastic voice like Katherine Shilcutt, who began at the alt weekly
Houston Press
as a blogger and kept that brash style throughout three years of
Press
restaurant reviews. She is now features editor at the monthly
Houstonia
magazine.

I
made it through 32 years without tasting a McRib. Over three decades spent tasting and eating all other manner of offensive foods—yet a McRib had never passed my lips, until last Thursday. I can't say I regret my meal. It goes deeper than that: a sense that I gave in, sheeplike, to a national phenomenon whose promises—no matter how meager—were always going to fall short of my expectations.

I knew I wouldn't like or even understand the McRib, and was content to go the rest of my life without tasting one. Fast food and I have a strained relationship as it is except for a few soft spots: McDonald's coffee, Whataburger taquitos, Jack in the Box tacos at 1 a.m.

I respect—perhaps even admire—the technology and ingenuity involved in creating an identical meal across thousands of different chain restaurants 365 days a year, 24 hours a day in many cases . . . but the product is rarely something I'm interested in consuming. And those same massive food systems that are, in part, responsible for creating clone versions of Big Macs or Whoppers every single day are also responsible for the woeful industrialization of our agricultural
systems and farms. Those fast food chains are, in part, responsible for our nation's deepening battle against obesity, hypertension, diabetes and a whole host of other health issues.

And, quite frankly, the McRib always looked simply disgusting, like a flattened condom stuffed with Ol' Roy-brand cat food and slathered with untrustworthy sauce between two buns that looked like the plastic set that came with my children's grocery store set when I was six years old.

To a Texan, the concept of barbecued pork is reserved for a handful of items: pork butts and ribs, both left on the smoker for hours and neither coated in sticky-sweet sauce. We don't do pulled pork sandwiches here, either, so the idea of a pork sandwich—pulled or not—doesn't appeal to me either . . . especially one from McDonald's.

But I let curiosity get the better of me last week when I logged onto Facebook one morning.

“I would like to see you write a complete review on the McRib,” read a request on my wall from frequent commenter Fatty FatBastard. “And it should be the cover story.”

“I would like Tard the Grumpy Cat to come and live with me,” was my hasty reply. (Luckily Fatty is battle-hardened by all the years spend in the EOW comments section.) “You can't always get what you want.” Besides, I argued, I'd never had one before.

Fatty persisted. “See? Then it would be a completely unbiased review.”

Less than 24 hours later, I was hitting my third McDonald's of the afternoon and cursing Fatty's real name as I searched desperately for one that still had the damn sandwich in stock. Each one I approached beckoned with a sign heralding the glories of the limited-time McRib, yet a closer look at the signs revealed tiny stickers saying simply: “Sold out.”

Along with a keen sense of irritation, my curiosity was growing still stronger. If the stupid sandwiches are sold out everywhere, they must be at least decent—right? People couldn't be buying out the sandwiches if they tasted like Ol' Roy.

Finally, I found myself in the drive-thru lane of the McDonald's on North Main, where a cheerful-sounding Hispanic woman was imploring me through the speaker to add another McRib to my order for only $1.

You have enough McRibs here to tack them on like apple pies?
I wanted to yell back at her.
Send them to the other McDonald's so people don't have to waste $20 worth of gas driving around town like pork-crazed assholes trying to find them!