Author: Chef Mateo

Just a man in pursuit of all things delicious. Eat and Drink life!

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Drinking Eating Experiences Food The Chef Travel Wine

Puerto Rico Eats

Puerto Rico Eats

Any time I vacation in El Caribe, I get very excited for obvious reasons.  I spent summers in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico as a child and teenager, and hold onto fond memories of food and fun in the sun.  It has been over ten years since I’ve revisited, partly because of life changes and other travel destinations, and partly because I’m concerned over the modernization of islands which are pristine in my memory, a time with few cars and no fast food franchises.  But, alas, even third world Caribbean islands have caught up in this internet age, and finding the petals that were once flowers has proven elusive, given the over development of resort tourism.

Tired of the extended NYC winter, I booked a great deal to San Juan, PR in the Condado area of Santurce.  Tropical breezes met fickle weather, but for the most part sunny and temps in the 80’s.  It only occurred to me that I needed research on where to eat and drink, and that not much has been written about PR outside of Frommer’s and Trip Advisor.

My encounters in PR dining was very mixed, with lots of tourist traps, high end criolla cuisine and in betweens, topped off by a diamond in the rough.  Criolla refers to a style of cuisine prominent on most Caribbean islands, a marriage of European technique and local ingredients and native cooking, and is unique to each island but universal in approach.

In this respect Puerto Rico, Dom. Republic, and Cuba serve very similar tasting food, with slight nuances and touches.  Tropical fruits, fried foods, rice and beans, and fresh fish, stewed and grilled meats are core ingredients, adapted pasta dishes and the like are add-ons from Euro-recipes.

On Ashford Avenue, I ate small meals at La Hacienda, a PR-Mex place which has basic fare from both sides, cheap drinks, and a resounding view to the ocean.  Some highlights of the menu are flautas, mole and chimichangas as well as fried pork chunks and fried snapper fish.

There is hotel eating which can be perilous.  I had some decent small plates at Pikayo in the Conrad Plaza Hotel.  There were some proper cocktails had and a credible wine list, albeit curious one.  To watch the NCAA b-ball finals, I had some forgettable pizza at Mike’s, where I’m sure the product is tailored towards Latin flavor profiles.

Also near the hotel is a resto called Ropa Vieja, which served a proper plate of mofongo with shredded beef.   I would return for that one dish alone.   We consumed an obscure bottle of Yunquera Albillo 2009, a delicious bottle and a bargain at $28 USD.  I say USD because at lunch at El Jibbarito in old San Juan, a couple of tourists asked the waitress if the resto accepted USD or would they have to convert to pesos.  God Bless U.S. geography lessons. The food was fair at El Jib, but not worth a special trip.

In Old San Juan, there are lots of restos spending way too much on tourist décor and palates, overpriced with very fruit juicy sangria and wine lists heavy on Californian wine.  If I want 15% in my wine, I’ll stick to rum and coke.  Most of the wine lists seemed synchronized by the same importer, and the prices varied wildly.

A more successful visit was made to La Bombonera, which reminds of the typical luncheonette in the Bronx and El Barrio in NYC.  Cuban sandwiches and strong coffees.  La Mallorca, the specialty of the house is divine.  This is a must have sugar attack.

Academically speaking I was very interested in the Spanish restaurants, which are well known in PR.  I was very disappointed in many ways.  First, the wine lists seemed the same.  Second, the dishes were all familiar, but poorly executed.  The jamon guy should have been taken out and….   The paella looked terrible, again perhaps a modification for the local tourists, and key ingredients were left out of classics as interpretations of the chef.  At Picoteo, at least there was 5 star Mahou beer in a beautiful setting.  At Compostela Santiago, some wines on the list were a steal, such as a “94 Pesquera for $125.  The Pulpo ala Gallega was served without potatoes, but the octopus was tender and juicy.  The arroz a banda was an imposter, and the cochinillo, priced at $45.,  came two portions sizes too small with no sides.  The only salvaging part of the meal was a great bottle of Sameira from the Ribeiro and a standby from Ribeira Sacra, Vina Caneiro.

After a nice conversation with the Maitre d’Hotel, whose brother is the chef at Macondo on Houston, he tipped me off to a place off the beaten path in the Plaza de Mercado in Santurce.  The neighborhood houses a small plaza with fruit and vegetable vendors and lots of local makeshift bars with outdoor seating serving cold Medalla beer, rum, and fritura (fried foods).  After several attempts at local GPS (asking around), I came up to a house off to the side with no sign.  This was the house (resto) of Jose Enrique, chef and proprietor.  Once through the front porch and door is a scene, one that instinctually I know is the “promised island”.  A non-descript room with a bar, bustling with people in the know, speaking Spanish and having long lunches full of tropical drinks and colorful plates.  Eureaka!  Save that there were no available seats in the dining room and a 1.5 hour wait.  But in the patio…I was afeared there was no AC, but this patio was adorned with ceiling fans, wooden benches and salsa over the speakers.  All that was missing was a hammock.

Fresh juices with or without rum to start, followed by sangria and a good short wine list.  Who is going back to work after this outing?  Amelia brought over a handwritten menu on dry erase board with apps for the day.  Every one seemed tantalizing.  Homemade longaniza, empanadas with tiny fish, crab salad filled arepita cups, smoked, fried pork chunks, head cheese, langoustines, scallops, tomato and eggplant salad, salmon fritters.  A meal could be constructed from these.  My partner and I could only eat five.  Then the main course billboard comprised of whatever was caught or from local farms, skirt steak, mahi mahi, sea bream, tuna, yellow snapper, filet mignon empanizada, and so on.  Just what was available for the day Amelia assured us.  The meal was brilliant, just what the essence of criolla cuisine is:  not a fancification of home cooked dishes, just home cooked dishes using the freshest and best of the island.  Twists on classics such as mofongo and mamposteao, playful deconstruction of a dessert classic like temblake.   This meal stacks up against any of the fine meals from my recent memory of the big five (Italian, French, Spanish,  Japanese, & New American). Convivial atmosphere, feeling at home, great staff and a desire to return for my next meal.

Amelia tells me there are many regulars, and no reservations, which can prove difficult in terms of planning a time for a visit.  I suggest to come when you please and have a few beers at any of the next door bars while you wait.  It’s worth the trip.

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Drinking Eating Experiences The Chef

The Rooster Crows

Last week I had the opportunity to try The Red Rooster in Harlem.  My former City College theatre director David Willinger was putting on a production of Twelfth Night, adding incentive.  In my last blog I posed some questions which have always interested me in terms of dining out.  That’s why Sam Sifton’s review tantalized me so.  Where is this magic utopian restaurant where all shades, ages, and sexes attend?

I have to admit it is true.  I arrived shortly after 11 am, and by noon the seats filled.  They came, from all walks of life, although the majority of the patrons were white.  The staff seemed ethnically diverse, but alas the manager was not.

Red Rooster is a beautiful restaurant.  It is the kind of place every neighborhood should have, well designed, with an ample bar room, a dining area, an open kitchen and aesthetically pleasing design.  Add a top celebrity chef and you have a home run, a grand slam even.  It just so happens that this is the first of its kind in Harlem, a neighborhood long suffering since its glory days of yesteryear.  The food ranges from good to quite good.  The cocktails a bit on the sweet side.  There is something for every one on the menu, but no single menu item that must be ordered every visit.

Perhaps the phenomena that is Red Rooster is the location, the cardinal rule of real estate.  With Harlem becoming such an ethnically diverse hodgepodge over the last twenty years, Red Rooster makes perfect sense, appealing to the sensibility of most every demographic, delivering on what matters most: comfort food and drink, and comfortable environs.  While there is no Danny Meyer level of hospitality, my server was smiling, knowledgeable and pleasant.  I was impressed.

Red Rooster is a pioneer to this end, and a necessary one, not just a model for Harlem, but one for the restaurant landscape of an entire city.  Personally I can’t wait to have one in my nabe (UWS).

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Drinking Eating Experiences Food The Chef

Red Rooster Race

Ethnic diversity in an Obama age is a subject that has not been a hot topic partly because the Obama phenomen is still ongoing.  What I mean to say is that because of a President, the first of its kind, who is Black or African American, racial tensions and divides are supposed to magically disappear in the United States.  If a Black man can be President, the scale of racial inequality has been tipped.

In the realm of food and wine this is a touchy subject.  What studies have been done as to chefs of color?  How about owners?  Does the data mirror that of the NFL?  A league full of players of color, but not so in ownership and head coaching jobs.  I still remember being awed by Doug Williams winning the Super Bowl for the Washington Redskins way back when.  Times are changing, I thought.

Yesterday when I read Sam Sifton’s review in the New York Times, I had immediate reactions and feelings.  I wanted to go to see what he was observing.  An ethnically diverse restaurant in Manhattan?  Oh, it’s in Harlem.  I forgot about the gentrification of Harlem.

At this point, the word gentrification has either turned you off, or stirred some curiosity.  I will elaborate my position by first qualifying my credentials in terms of experience.  I graduated from the City College of New York in the early nineties.  I also earned my M.S. in Special Education there.  I also taught for many years in East Harlem.  I know the neighborhoods. Tons of empty brown and townhouse shells were going for cheap, and many white families bought into the renovations because the prices were much cheaper than downtown.  Add to that the amount of subsidized housing that many white New York families had the cultural capital to apply and land, and there is a veritable shift or movement in the demographic.

Except that I lived in West Harlem for three years since 2005.  Restaurants did not open up.  I felt the least safe compared to any neighborhood in the city minus Bushwick and Hunt’s Point.  The noise levels were ear splitting, and gun shot discharges could be heard in the distance during the summer as if it were the fourth of July.  Gangs of unsupervised teenagers roamed the streets, and even I knew where to buy drugs.  And the trash, boy did I get into melees just asking anyone to pick up their own trash.  If you don’t believe me (I have since moved downtown), walk into a precinct and check the police blotter.  I tried all the staples, Sylvia’s, Lenox Lounge, etc., as well as the African restos, but was largely unimpressed.

By contrast, East Harlem diversified differently, slowly and more effectively.  However, the food scene there is not thriving either.  The mentality of close knit working class families is to stay and cook at home.  The proliferation of fast food  joints caters to the poor underclass.  Nothing new here.  If you are looking for a good restaurant in East Harlem, hop on the six train and head way downtown.

Then, slowly during the past decade some places popped up in West Harlem.  Cocktail bars too.  The crowd at Café Society is diverse.  Same goes for the wine bar Nectar next to the wine shop.  Is it better than other wine bars? Probably not, but it’s in Harlem and it’ll do for progress.  Cocktails are a tad too sweet at 67 Orange.

Here comes what many have been waiting for.  A pioneer chef of color to open a real restaurant where people have to travel uptown for!  Mr. Sifton writes with pleasant surprise,

“The scene was unusual, notable, a view of a city many believe in and few ever see, at least in the presence of Caesar salads and steak frites. New Yorkers are accustomed to diversity on sidewalks and subways, in jury pools and in line at the bank. But in our restaurants, as in our churches and nightclubs, life is often more monochromatic.”

Monochromatic, indeed.  It is a running sarcastic joke among my friends that when I enter a restaurant I always notice how many patrons of color are in the establishment.  When I don’t see any, I say to myself or out loud, “ A lot of brothers and sisters here.”

“Not so at Red Rooster Harlem, which the chef Marcus Samuelsson opened in December. The racial and ethnic variety in the vast bar and loft-like dining room are virtually unrivaled. The restaurant may not be the best to open in New York City this year (though the food is good). But it will surely be counted as among the most important. It is that rarest of cultural enterprises, one that supports not just the idea or promise of diversity, but diversity itself.”

It is indeed rare.  As a restaurant owner myself, I can easily state as fact the number of African Americans who come to my place number less than 1% of my total clientele.  What does this mean?

I am of very mixed descent, as I suspect most New Yorkers are.  My mother is Haitian and my father is Dominican.  My grandfathers hail from Cuba and France, and one of my grandmothers is Lebanese/Palestinian.  Why can’t I have a place of ethnic and racial diversity?  Latinos come in, and so do peoples from Asia and India, Americans all.

One of the questions is why?  Why don’t more African Americans go out to places “foodies” frequent?  Do they love food and wine any less?  Is there no tradition of going out to eat? Are they made to feel unwelcome even in an Obama age?  I always contend they have to be eating somewhere.  But where?

I can count on one finger the amount of Black or Latino sommeliers I know.  Mexicans and Ecuadorians in the kitchen, you bet.  Owners, executive or celebrity chefs?  Please.

Maybe situating the place in Harlem is the trick.  Draw everyone to a location that demands ethnic diversity, as Harlem has done throughout its long illustrious history and the height of gentrification.

“The glory of the Red Rooster is that everyone really is there, actually making the scene: black and white, Asian and Latino, straight and gay, young and old.

This fact marks a real stride forward for Harlem, and for New York beyond it. Here at last are the faces of the city we live in, sitting together in a large restaurant serving top-quality food and wine. Have we really never seen this before? It is Mr. Samuelsson’s triumph that we need to ask. “

Triumph indeed, but let’s not forget that Merkato 55 failed.  It is the same chef, but by putting fried chicken (my fav), and oxtails on the menu, will that be enough to survive?  I often thought about opening a place in Harlem, especially when I lived there, but I was uneasy about who would come.  By that I mean, would I have been able to fill the seats?  Now that I am in the East Village, competition competes for seats.  “If you build it, they will come,” one of my favorite lines from Field of Dreams.  I just hope the Red Rooster brings many other places like it, and becomes the model for downtown too.

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Drinking Eating Experiences Food The Chef Travel Wine

Paris – Shop – Sleep – Eat

One way to beat the brutal New York winter storms is to leave, to a warmer climate preferably.  El Caribe would have been toasty, but I got a nice hook-up in Paris, what with a standby ticket and a friend’s flat in Asnieres sur Seine.  I scheduled my time between bistros, hot chocolate, tea, and pastries, and filled in the blanks with lots of window shopping, being as how the SOLDES signs were everywhere (Mid Jan thru early Feb is a huge sales period in Paris).  Luckily for me I didn’t fit into any of those designer mark downs, but I made up for it in eating and drinking.  As it turned out the weather was a balmy 40 to 50 degrees with mixed clouds for the majority of the stay.

It is good advice to get recommendations wherever you travel, but especially so in Paris, with three brasseries on every street, the perils are many.  I visited a couple of places Anthony Bourdain featured on his show No Reservations: Paris, got some solid advice from El Capitan, and filled in the rest from a very useful guide authored by my friend Michel Abood of Vinotas Selections.

Here is a list of the bistros which ranged from very good to outstanding:

Le Severo

Le Temps au Temps

Le Villaret

L’Ourcine

Frenchie

Le Comptoir

L’Ecallier du Bistrot

Bistrot Paul Bert

In addition there were the wine bars:

Baron Rouge

Juveniles

Willi’s Wine Bar

Avant Comptoir

It is hard adjusting to the NY state of mind, especially with all this ice, but I’m hoping the groundhog is right this time.  Fuller reviews and my recs to follow soon.

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The Chef

“A” hAppy new yeAr?

The New Year’s celebration for me has always been a bittersweet one.  I am  a proponent of the cycles of life based on one’s own birthday.  That’s why I celebrate birthdays to the fullest, a new outlook on the year beginning from that point.  To pick January 1st and celebrate the date as important?  Well, let’s just say I’m glad for those who want to celebrate it and will gladly play along.

This particular holiday brought about anxiety for me because I had, yet again, another appointment at the DOH on Monday, January 3rd.  What a way to start off the New Year!  I was ready for the worst, based on my previous encounters and fines ($3000.00 and counting), even though I had good defenses for the majority of the violations, and had corrected what was asked of me.

This time around I had an afternoon appointment for which I showed up fifteen minutes early for.  The room seemed half empty, as opposed to the madhouse it normally is, with owners complaining and overworked, understaffed workers moving at a frenetic pace.  Maybe the lack of attendance was due to the proximity to the first.  Perhaps owners postponed their appointments to avoid the inevitable, too early in 2011. Fines.

I kept a calm attitude, reading about Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris and listening to Nina Simone on the IPod.  Before I got in a groove, my name was called by a judge (only a 1.5 hour wait), and I knew from first glance that this woman was gentle and fair, unlike my previous experiences, when I could tell I was doomed from the start.

I was ready to say my peace when she turned on that tape recorder the DOH uses to CYA.  But the judge smiled and was ready to address the first violation when I switched my strategy.  I decided to ask her several questions regarding my inspections and the rules for visits, and she happily whipped out documentation and answered my questions to the best of her ability.  Her patience really shone through, and I believed that I might actually get a fair shake.

We went through each violation and got stuck on one violation which turns out does not count towards points against me.  The particular issue is over the bread I receive from Tomcat bakery for the restaurant.  As per DOH regulation, nutritional information must accompany products that may be made with trans fats from outside sources.  No points, but a violation and a sure fine.  The judge offered me the opportunity to bring this info the next time around so the violation could be dismissed.  I agreed and we adjourned.  I suddenly realized that when I returned I would sit in front of a different judge, and I almost leaped out of my seat.  Whoa!  No way, I said, let’s finish this process now.  In my mind, under no circumstances did I want to roll the dice with a different judge at a later date.

We finished, having spent over half an hour in session, and I took my seat awaiting the certain bad news.  After 20 minutes of nail biting, my name was called.  The room was emptying out.  I was charged $475.00 for two violations in total.   Compared to the past, this was a steal, perhaps a sign of things to come for 2011. As I made the line to pay, the clerk said, here’s your “A”, and handed me a card with the large all important letter.   I looked at it and felt relief, and then nothing.  Someone congratulated me and I replied that I had paid for it, like everyone else.

I have had a couple of days to reflect on the entire journey to this “A” rating.  I have many opinions and feel mystified by the whole process, but the important points still ring loudly in my head.  The system is designed so that owners are basically in the dark about compliance and are set up to pay large fines to feed this form of stealth tax.  No one without a law degree could possibly read the code and interpret it.  It must be streamlined into a viable general checklist to follow fairly.  If violations are genuinely corrected, why must the owners still pay fines?  The judging system is set up so that the continuity of fairness varies from judge to judge.  A panel would be better served in the name of fairness.

Ultimately, the system needs to be changed so that the DOH and owners work collaboratively to maintain clean and safe environments for the public.

A seminar and certificate on a “checklist” of what owners need to comply with before opening should be offered.  This is different than the food protection certificate.  For example, if I were instructed that if I buy bread from some place else, the nutritional info needs to be included and displayed for the public.

A checklist should be created for owners and inspectors that can be used for keeping the establishments to code.

If violations are assessed and the owner can show correction, no fines should be assessed.  This can be verified by inspector visit using the checklist.

One judge is not enough for fair assessment.  Three should be used.

All of these moves would help to show faith in small business economy and keep the integrity of New York in tact.

I would like to thank all who have supported me throughout my upcoming three years of operation, and a special thanks to those who contacted and helped me personally in relation to solving my problems with the DOH.

A prosperous and healthy New Year for all.

Chef Mateo