Monthly Archives: February 2016

American, Burgers, Pub Food, Restaurant Reviews, Tribeca

Church Street Tavern

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I went to Church Street Tavern with my wife and the founder of The Dishelin Guide and the DishEnvy app to finally check out their acclaimed burgers. The talk is accurate. These burgers are fantastic! We tried two: The Wellington and the CST Burger.

Let’s start with The Wellington: the patty is topped with mushroom duxelles (french for chopped mushrooms, onions and shallots sauteed with butter and herbs), foie butter and a cheesy pastry crisp that mimics the puff pastry that typically surrounds a Beef Wellington dish.

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You can see it sticking out the side here like a piss-clam tail, or a limp geoduck phallus.

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I guess those words aren’t the best to use when describing delicious food, but that’s what comes to mind. Anyway, I was expecting the burger to be wrapped in the pastry, just like traditional Beef Wellington (pictured below), but that wasn’t the case.

The burger was good. It was cooked to a nice medium rare, and the toppings were delicious. The bun held up nicely, didn’t crumble and wasn’t too stiff.

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The better burger of the pair, however, was the namesake CST (Church Street Tavern) Burger, which was topped with bacon-onion jam, aged cheddar, and arugula.

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It was seved on the same toasted brioche bun, but this burger had a much better flavor to the meat, perhaps from better seasoning and searing. Cooked to a perfect, juicy medium rare, this burger really hit the spot. I’d definitely go back for another.

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The big surprise of the evening, though, was this amazing porchetta sandwich that we saw on the menu.

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It’s a nice, tender pork sandwich with sauteed spinach and melted Swiss cheese. There were even some crispy pork bits in there for texture. The spinach had a nice hit of garlic to it without having any chunks of the breath-killer hidden inside. And the Swiss was surprisingly tasty to me. I didn’t expect to like Swiss with Italian pork, but it worked. I highly recommend this sandwich.

The fries here are equally satisfying. They’re slightly more squat and thicker than most places, but they’re cooked perfectly and generously-yet-simply seasoned with salt and herbs.

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The bar here is pretty nice too, and at happy hour you can get $4 select beers. I had a Session lager:

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CHURCH STREET TAVERN
313 Church St.
New York, NY 10013

East Village, Restaurant Reviews, Thai

Zabb Elee

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This Thai joint serves up “isan” style Thai food, which is generally saltier, spicier and more pungent with ingredients like fish sauce than the typical sweet Thai places you see around town. They still serve up an amazing sweet Thai iced tea, though:

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This first plate is crispy beef with a tangy hot sauce. These were very similar to the dish I tried at Thai Select in Thai Town.

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The Tom Yum soup was very good. It had a great acid base from the tomatoes, and it was spicy. The mix of seafood was fish balls, shrimp and squid.

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Below was a crispy pork belly dish. This was heavily fish-sauced and spicy. It was really nice.

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This platter below contained various meats, like head cheese, crispy pork, pork rinds, noodles and cabbage.

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ZABB ELEE
75 2nd Ave.
New York, NY 10003

East Village, Japanese, Restaurant Reviews

Yakiniku West

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Japanese BBQ is some of the best shit around. Unlike Takashi in the west village, this joint offers all sorts of meats as well as fish. Takashi is just beef.

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That’s pretty commendable of Takashi, but every once in a while I hunger for some pork. Yakiniku West delivered in what was essentially a “Bang Bang” meal, as we had just finished eating Thai food an hour or two earlier.

So we began our meat fest by kicking off our shoes, popping them into some cubbies and drinking some nice sake.

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The starter plates came out. First was an agedashi tofu dish, and the next was a eggy pancake of sorts with seafood mixed in and topped with shredded bonito flakes. Both were good, but the pancake dish was top notch!

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This first platter of meat came out that had a few different kinds of beef, including tongue, as well as pork belly and duck.

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This shit cooked up nicely. Watch as it sizzles… “Tssssssss…”

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We couldn’t stop there, not on a “Bang Bang,” so we grabbed a plate of chicken gizzards, mixed beef intestines (liver, tripe, stomach) and some extra tongue. Everything was delicious!

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YAKINIKU WEST
218 E. 9th St.
New York, NY 10003

American, Brooklyn, Commentary, Product Reviews, Queens, Restaurant Reviews

Rockaway Brewery, Meat Hook & Stagg Jam & Marmalade

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I recently went to a release event for Rockaway Brewery’s newest beer, “Meat in the Middle,” with the man behind The Dishelin Guide.

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“Meat in the Middle” (4.8% abv) is a rauchbier that’s brewed with slow-smoked NY State barley. What makes it special and “meaty” is that it’s smoked with cherry wood at Brooklyn specialty butcher and sandwich shop, The Meat Hook.

The beer itself is pretty good. You get a hint of that smoke in there, with a malt-forward beer flavor. Very nice. I tried it in a flight of some other goodies. In this photo, it’s all the way on the left:

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The porters and dark beers here are really fantastic:

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After working up a little buzz, we hopped on one of the brewery tours and picked up some additional info about the brew process:

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By then we were hungry, so we ventured upstairs to try some of the sausages that The Meat Hook was selling.

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We tried both the Long Dong Bud and the Beet & Onion sausages.

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Check out the color on the Beet & Onion. Incredible! It was really nice, and topped with a kale kimchi type of slaw that really made the flavors pop.

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Long Dong Bud was topped with some shredded cheese, and a pineapple relish. It definitely had more of a traditional German type flavor profile, other than the relish.

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We were torn on which we liked best. I went one way (Long Dong Bud), and Jay went the other (Beet & Onion). In any event, if you can get over to The Meat Hook and try these, I highly recommend them.

Ben Turley, a butcher from The Meat Hook, gave us a demo of how he breaks down a “rear quarter” of a cow – a beef shank (a back leg).

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As he explained what he was doing, he trimmed off various specialty cuts within, like the oyster steak and merlot steak.

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Here’s a shot of the oyster steak:

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And some various other items like portions of the top round and eye of round.

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He parted out the femur bone, too.

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The coolest thing about this was that they were just slicing up parts of the lean beef sections and passing it around to eat raw, with just a little bit of salt on top. Awesome!

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One of the thicker cuts benefited from just a quick, hot sear:

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So this day was basically a dream come true. Good beer, Good food and a dead cow. And Ben basically has my dream job.

On my way out, I picked up a jar of this really crazy banana jam too, from Stagg Jam & Marmalade.

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They had a table set up where you could try all four of their jams on crackers. This bacon jam has a hint of citrus and vanilla that really explodes with flavor.

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ROCKAWAY BREWERY
46-01 5th St.
Long Island City, NY 11101

THE MEAT HOOK
100 Frost St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211