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02/08/2005 Archived Entry: "Two great restaurants"

When it comes to food, I hate the concept of “best.” I understand best in sports and gaming, where someone wins a competition. But the arts are not about competition, and cuisine is not about competition. Even restaurants are not about competition. They are about pleasure, enjoyment, relaxation, and at their best they reveal things about life and nature and culture. (Naturally, they are about business, too.)

I am asked all the time: What is the best restaurant in New York. Where’s the best bowl of pasta? What’s the best pizza, hamburger, steakhouse. What is the best cheese?

That last is the most ridiculous, of course. So I will pick on it as an example. There are thousands of types of cheese made all over the world, each one an expression of its ecology (the grass, the cows, the air, the microorganisms in the environment in which it is made and aged), the men who make it, and the culture from which it comes. It is hard to fathom all the different factors that go into the final product called cheese. Who would dare to say one is the best? An idiot.

Why can’t we simply appreciate what we have for what it is? Maybe it isn’t the ultimate expression of spaghetti with eggplant, just to use an off-the-wall example, but it may be very delicious spaghetti with eggplant. Do you get what I mean?

Then, of course, what is best to me may not be best to you. I am reading up on Athens, because I will be going there for the first time this May – at the end of the Crystal Serenity cruise that I am hosting – and I bought a book called Top 10 Athens. It lists what are supposedly the 10 best this, that and the other thing – from the best ruins (there’s a ridiculous category for you) to the best hotels. Under Top 10 restaurants, however, I find that the number one restaurant serves a dessert of “lotus filled with mandarin sorbet on a bed of banana-pineapple puree with candied olives, vanilla-scented olive oil and sauce of basil, saffron and curry.” This may well be the top restaurant in Athens according the editors of this book, but I’m not eating there.

Here’s another example: I was in Crotone, a port town in Calabria, and for dinner I went to what two guidebooks ranked as the best restaurant in Crotone. I knew I didn’t want to eat here as soon as I walked in – the Louis XVI armchairs were my clue – but it had taken us so long to find the place, and it came so highly recommended, and it was so late, my friends and I decided to put our first impression aside and take a table. Wrong!

Without going into the details, Da Ercole was the worst restaurant experience of my trip, maybe of several trips. I don’t usually get tripped up so easily. Furniture is generally a good indication of what the food will be like. The worst thing about Da Ercole, besides our barely acceptable fish dishes, was that the owner-chef insisted that we try some of his special antipasti even though we insisted that we didn’t want any antipasti. We wanted to go straight to the primo course – some pasta. We finally gave in to him, just to be polite because he was insisting so earnestly, telling us he just wanted us to taste something he was very proud of. Then, when I got the bill, I was shocked to find that he charged us $40 for it.

All that said, I had the best lunch the other day. I stopped in at the Pearl Oyster Bar during a round of errands downtown. It is at 18 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village, pretty much just off Sixth Avenue. The Pearl Oyster Bar has been around for a number of years now, and its chef-owner, Rebecca Charles, has always maintained the highest standards. Her lobster roll is famous – just the classic New England hot dog bun filled with lobster salad, but all as perfect as can be. Her New England clam chowder should be a model for everyone. And I had fried oysters, which any fan of fried oysters will tell you can be truly dreadful if not done well. I had them spilling out of a hot dog bun – an “oyster roll.” I didn’t count (I should have) but there were at least a dozen, all crisp and crunchy outside, all fresh and oyster squishy inside, and with chef Charles’ own chunky tartar sauce. With shoestring potatoes, it was a bargain at $15.

People complain that Pearl Oyster is hard to get into and cramped, but at lunch you can usually waltz right in. True, at least half of the seating (22 stools) is at counters, but there are at least that many seats in the adjacent dining room with tables and chairs. If you’ve never been, put the Pearl Oyster Bar on your list.

Best? There’s a new restaurant at 520 Columbus Avenue, at 85th Street. It’s called Nonna, which means grandma in Italian, and it is serving delicious southern Italian/ Italian-American food in a room that looks like it has been there forever. That’s to say it has been designed to look a little decrepit, but delightfully so I think. Anyway, on Sundays they have the best deal: $19 a person ($11 for children 11 or under) brings you a largish rice ball each (arancino), a Caesar salad served family style on a big platter, a first course of exceptionally well-cooked eggplant involtini – in this case lightly battered eggplant slices rolled around a ricotta filling – and what southern Italian grandma’s make on Sunday, their Sunday “gravy,” known as ragu in Italy, the long-cooked sauce of tomatoes flavored with meat.

At Nonna, each person gets his own bowl of dressed rigatoni, but the sauce and its meats come on a family-sized platter. There’s truly succulent bracciole, good meatballs, and Italian sausage that have blessedly not been fully cooked in the sauce, but grilled separately then simmered briefly in the sauce. I loved it all. Indeed, my friends said it tasted like my own home cooking and, as you probably know, I like my own cooking best. This is not even to mention dessert, which are sensational freshly fried zeppole with a bit of almond paste in them and a dish of honey to dip them in. Not on the set $19 menu, but not to be missed (maybe on another night when you will have more room), is Nonna’s gigantic tiramisu, enough for two or more, served in a huge stemmed glass dessert bowl. Also for dessert, don’t miss the watermelon sorbet made on the premises.

Besides the best Sunday deal in Manhattan, Nonna has great prices on wine, too. You can drink very well for under $30 a bottle, which is getting mighty difficult these days.