July 2019

Flood’s: The Art of the Meal– A Segue From Tuna Melts, Bagels and Lox to Seared Tongue and Clams and Mussels on Toast

July 20, 2019 / / Restaurants

You’ve got to be a brave chef to put tongue on the menu.  And it is offered here in flying colors.  Flood’s  chef/owner Greg Mitchell has proven his mettle in many ways, especially at the Palace Diner where he and co-owner and chef Chad Conley (of Rose Foods bagel-Jewish deli fame) have made tuna melts and flapjacks an art of the meal.

But at Flood’s, recently opened in the Francis Hotel as an independent restaurant (it has its own entrance apart from the hotel but no relationship to the functionality of the building as a 15-room inn), the tongue in question stands brazenly apart among less rarefied entrees.  Unless you consider chicken schnitzel rarefied.  That too is on the menu and is as large as the breast from a condor, covering a platter- size plate with no space to spare.

The main dining room with banquettes and booths and the ante room with several tables

More to the point, the menu is an odd compilation offering a list of dishes under the heading of Dinner such as cheese toast, salad, clam and mussel toast among the four lone entrée-style dishes –seared beef tongue, homemade pork sausage, whole roasted mackerel and chicken schnitzel.  These are served unadorned.  If you want a side, they’re separately listed: grilled summer squash, charred broccoli, marinated beans and fries.

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Strawberry Tart: Fresh Berries At Their Best

July 17, 2019 / / Baking & Desserts, Recipes, Uncategorized

A recipe in the New York Times Magazine last week (see link) featured a fresh strawberry pie recipe from famed cookbook author Dorie Greenspan.  It was a reminiscence of the best strawberry pie she had in Paris years ago.  She recreated it in her recipe.

It certainly sounded great.  But the more I studied the recipe before trying it myself, I had several issues with her method.  (Am I being presumptuous to question such a baking expert?).  What bothered me was the method employed in the dough recipe.  It called for processing it in the usual way in a food processor, giving it many pulses to nearly pulverize the flour, sugar and butter into a grainy mass.  The only liquid was one egg yolk beaten with a half-teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Impossible, I thought.  It will never come together.  I followed the recipe up until squeezing the dough gruel until it came together.  This would never happen. And if it did, I think I’d wind up with a dough terribly difficult to roll out, much less retain its shape after baking in the tart mold.  I thought it would fall apart when slicing it.

This pie won’t last long. You can’t stop slicing it!

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First Look: At Long Last, Monte’s Fine Foods Is Open to Serve Its Emblematic Roman-Style Pizza and Specialty Fare

July 13, 2019 / / Discoveries, Restaurants

Monte’s Fine Foods is open for business.  The preview on Thursday brought out an anticipatory  crowd for the soft opening.  Friday made the opening official, a welcome event for the owners who spent  the past year turning the old Angelone’s Pizza building in East Deering on Washington Avenue into a sparking citadel of true Roman-style pizza and  specialty Italian- and Mediterranean-fare.

The pizza ovens and kitchen at Monte’s

Chef Steve Quatrucci, co-owner  (with Neil Rouda) and pizza maven,  is the force behind Monte’s with a curriculum vitae in Portland’s food world that spans decades.  For instance, he founded The Back Bay Grill  in 1988; several years later he opened the inimitable West End Deli; he also revitalized the kitchen at Miss Portland Diner as its lead chef who established the menu as it is today (those southern biscuits were all his after I introduced Steve to the fineness of using soft-wheat southern flour for biscuits). He has also worked at food retailers and even for the City of Portland where he tried to revitalize the Riverside Golf Club and Grill owned by the city.  He created a remarkable menu for a clientele who preferred, however,  hot dogs, fries and beer.

Plenty of parking at Monte’s (Photo courtesy of Monte’s Fine Foods)

And most importantly the Quatrucci family has long held sway in Portland food circles among the Italian-American community.  Or as Quattrucci relates, “Memories from my childhood are filled with smells and scenes from busy kitchens and tables full of the most delicious food you can imagine.” To wit: Nana Q’s red sauce made by his grandmother is the sauce that will adorn all the pizzas and many prepared  dishes. It’s the same sauce that was served at the family’s Balboa Cafe circa 1930s on India Street.

A sample slice of anchovy pizza served on preview night

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Ultimate Asian in Portland: Authentic, Extraordinarily Exciting Flavors Define Sichuan Kitchen’s Incredible New Menu

July 6, 2019 / / Restaurants

Sichuan Kitchen eschews the high-style interiors of other highly regarded Asian restaurants in town such as Empire Chinese Kitchen, Miyake Restaurants and Bao Bao. Even with their exalted interiors, the latter also provide authentic Asian cooking. Whereas Sichuan Kitchen remains low key, even as a plain Jane dining abode without the hyperbolic elements that the others provide.  But once you dig in, that’s when it takes off—into thoroughly exotic territory with Sichuan spices, pickled vegetables and sauces   exceeding the umami norm.

This was one of my favorite dishes, sliced beef in chili sauce

When you walk into Sichuan Kitchen what you see is a randomly plain dining room, comfortable without making a statement and you notice that the diners at their tables are not there for the usual visual show of “dining out” but are instead deep into the food that they’re eating.  It’s not terribly noisy there because mouths are chewing rather than chatting smartly. It reminds me of New York’s new wave of Szechuan restaurants that populated the Upper West Side in the 1970s, surpassing the Cantonese meccas of the city’s Chinatown.  Chinese cooking was finally evolving then beyond the column menus of egg foo young and sweet and sour pork.  The cooking of China’s regional fare was making a big play then and we’ve never looked back except in backwaters like Portland where it took a few decades to get beyond chopped suey houses.

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Wednesday Food Features in Newspapers Are Still Strong Across the Country Except At Our Own Daily

July 3, 2019 / / Discoveries

Across the country Wednesday is food day at newspapers everywhere from small-town dailies to big-city publications. But in Portland, which is renowned as a foodie mecca in a state that is locavore heaven, the Portland Press Herald gives its hometown short shrift.  There is no Wednesday food anymore.  Instead, there’s’ this anemic section on Sundays.  That in itself was not a bad idea to reserve Sunday for a food section if it were a blockbuster instead of a thin section mostly devoted to wire copy.

Last week’s front page food features in four Northeastern dailies. Clockwise Left, Bangor Daily News, Portland Press Herald (The Wrap buried in the Business section), Boston Globe and the New York Times

Wednesday at the PPH gives one nod to food day: Veteran food pro Meredith Goad’s weekly column called “The Wrap,” which tells us about all the new goings on in the food world of Greater Portland.  It’s a great column. Word has it, though, that the paper’s staffers have voiced concern that the higher ups killed Wednesday Food.

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