My fantasy meal from 2007

The food blog which has inspired me the most is chuckeats.com. Its pursuit of the finest cuisine, its knowledgeable descriptions and its superb photography are delicious. At CountryEpicure we tend to be less exacting, more wide-ranging and more personal. Chuck has finished up this year on his blog with his Perfect Meal for 2007, fantasizing a sublime menu composed of dishes he ate in 2007. He is encouraging other bloggers to do the same and send them on to him.

Esca, NY

Esca is a focused restaurant. If you do not want fish or seafood cooked in an Italian style, go somewhere else. Even the wine list is all Italian. Linda and I went for lunch on Saturday, December 22, 2007, as Esca’s location at 43^rd Street and Ninth Avenue is convenient to the theater district.

Rosanjin, NY 2

Our Kaiseki meal at Rosanjin last March was memorable in several ways:
1. The quality of the ingredients, many of them unfamiliar to us, and their excellent preparation;
2. The artistic presentation and the lovely serving dishes;
3. The gracious welcome from Mr. Park and the time he spent explaining things to us;
4. The interesting blogpost I was able to do afterwards, my first really good one.

When Linda and I returned to Rosanjin on December 20, 2007, Mr. Park greeted us warmly and thanked us for the blog posting. 

Oceana, NY

Margaret invited Marilee, Linda and me to Town Hall on West 43^rd  Street for the live broadcast of The Prairie Home Companion on Saturday evening, December 16, 2007.

Menu for Hope

Menu for Hope is an annual fundraising event inititated by the excellent Chez Pim food blog, five years ago, in the wake of the devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia, in order to help support the UN World Food Program. It is now supported by many food and restaurant bloggers. This year, the funds raised will be earmarked for the school lunch program in Lesotho.

Telepan, NY

Bill Telepan, a chef with an established New York reputation, created a lot of interest when he opened this restaurant two years ago near Lincoln Center. The critics have been nice to Telepan, but have been optimistic about its potential more than its reality. Linda and I went for the first time on December 12, 2007.

Café Boulud, NY 2

John and Françoise asked us to dinner at Café Boulud December 11, 2007. Since our last visit, there have been two new chefs, a favorable review in The New York Times, a renewal of its Michelin star and inclusion in the top 25 in NY for food in Zagat’s.

Hibiscus

29 Maddox Street, 020 7629 2999; www.hibiscusrestaurant.co.uk

(November 20, 2007) On a recent trip to the London Apple Store on Regent Street, we had noticed this restaurant and then read a rave review of it in “Time Out” so we knew our instincts were right. It is a small, calm oasis in a street busy with restaurants.

The Forge

14 Garrick Street, 020 7379 1432;
www.theforgerestaurant.co.uk

(November 21, 2007) We were wandering near the West End with no restaurant in mind, but definitely hungry. One restaurant after another that we passed seemed either too touristy or not interesting enough.

Patara

3-7 Maddox Street, 020 7499 6008
(November 10, 2007)

This is one of four upscale Thai restaurants by the same name in London.

Le Caprice

Arlington Street, 020 7629 2239

(November 25, 2007) On this rather dreary Sunday, we planned to have a very late lunch near our Quintess apartment at 5 St. James’s  St. There are lots of nice restaurants in the neighborhood, but seemingly none of them open on Sunday.

Shun Lee West

Good Chinese food is hard to find in New York outside of Chinatown. Every now and then a fancy restaurant opens claiming that they are going to get it right, but they never do.

JoJo

Jean-Georges Vongerichten was one of the first big celebrity chefs. He now has fifteen restaurants scattered about. The most ambitious is Jean-Georges in New York, which gets the top rating in both Zagats and Michelin, although we didn’t like it the one time we went a few years ago. His original restaurant is JoJo on East 64^th Street in a converted brownstone townhouse. It has a Michelin star and a good Zagats rating.  Linda and I went for dinner with George and Julie on November 27, 2007.