Hatin' the Waitin'

Monday night I make plans to eat with two friends. C calls asking me where I want to go. I hate this question. Naturally, I always have some vague idea but prefer to have another party to blame if the food is bloody awful. Ha. She wants to go to Freeman's but knows that B and I have been craving lobster rolls recently. "Freeman's?!" I question her. Does anybody really think the food is good there? She explains that she never liked the food until her last visit where she had a delicious salad and fish dish. Toss a coin, I say. Heads we go to Freeman's, tails is Pearl.

Heads. My stomach growls.

I arrive at the appointed time and put my name on the list. The host tells me the wait will be an hour and a half. I refrain from rolling my eyes in outrage. I go stand in the alley and wait for my friends. All the ladies in what must be the trend-of-the-moment-once-again plaid flannel shirts and their dandy counterparts are smoking. I hope I don't have to kill the wait-time in this ashtray.

Friends arrive. I tell them it'll be an hour and a half. Group huddle time. The unanimous decision is to take a cab over to Pearl. Hooray.

We wait for less than half an hour to be seated at Pearl. I stupidly scarf down too many steamers and leave my delicious lobster roll half uneaten. But Pearl is reliably good and I'm happy we ended up there.

Why are there so many suckas in NYC? I hate that in a town with so many great restaurants that end up shuttering, there are places like this that I'm sure serve a purpose if you are that enviable combination of cool and beautiful and need to be surrounded by similar folks. As for me, I'd much rather eat good food. Okay okay, maybe the food at Freeman's has improved and is perfectly decent now, but I've given it enough chances and would rather not wait 90 minutes to give it another.

the folly of falai

yes, the new darling(s) of clinton street on the lower east side have problems yet, despite the pedigree of Iacopo Falai, former pastry chef at Le Cirque 2000. Falai the restaurant proper sits catty-corner to the more casual Falai Panetteria and getting 8:15 reservations on a thursday night at falai proper meant we were gonna be dining in high-style, as opposed to the BYOB cafe feel of the panetteria. I won't get into how much I enjoyed our meal of perfectly cooked gnudi, truffled pasta with spring vegetables, a vegetable plate unlike any I've ever had, the best grilled octopus I have ever had, potato-crusted sea bass, some deliciously oozy appetizers, and a great set of desserts, but instead, focus on only on their horrible bread.

each table came with a cute lil' bread menu (kinko's copied and trimmed) with a description of the breads that we'd be having during our meal. not content with a simple bread basket assortment on each table, the servers instead came around periodically with large trays of mini-breads, and we would have one or two at a time, our choice. if a fresh pan was coming out of the oven then I guess everyone in the restaurant would get one, e.g., a full tray of foccacine. this never happened, because we didn't have any fresh bread, and it makes me wonder where exactly do they bake these stale, room-temp balls of dough? it couldn't be from right there in the oven because they all tasted like day-old bread, the kind that sells in big bags at the end of the day for half-price, if this was a chinese bakery.

+ foccacine (mini foccacia, greasy and hard, no crunch, nothing good)
+ plain baguette (none of us had it, looked bad)
+ black cabbage bread (hard roll filled with cooked cabbage, reminds me of a spinach roll at a typical pizzeria)
+ rosemary and raisin bread (tasted like jamaican hard-dough bread but dark, with a couple raisins)
+ onion loaf with fennel (a hard little twist, au bon pain could do better)

so how does a restaurant that prides itself on the baking pedigree of its chef/owner send out tray after tray of these inedibles, night after night? we stepped across to the panetteria afterwards to check out the goods there, and although it all looked better (decadent croissants, pastries and donuts) all the product was stacked on top of one another in the glass cases, as if it they were bins of bagels, instead of arrayed across trays. the grease marked all over the glass, and either heat lamps or just very hot lights made the pastries look congealed and greasy. we did split a custard-filled donut on the street, and it was pretty bananas, but, not so great.

anyway, work on your bread man! it sucked! it takes away from the rest of the meal!