Part 1: What Rankled

Stinking Bishop is a soft, creamy cheese from the U.K, made from the milk of Gloucester cattle:

It is also liquefied death in the nose. Old flyblown duck embryos. Warm hippo eye stuffed with fermented melon rind.

When I was six or seven, while walking to 7-11 to buy candy and Garbage Pail Kids, I decided to take a detour through a gravel ditch running parallel to a newly-built shopping center. Suddenly, before my nostrils had even registered what was happening, I reeled, and I saw at my feet, against the blinding-white sunstruck gravel stones, a pale, wet, hairless flesh-lump.

It was a baby bird. It had fallen from its nest and was boiling under the south Florida summer sun, eyes crammed with crawling things.

What I smelled at that moment — that’s basically what catching a waft of this cheese is like.

Odor aside (if one can, even intellectually, shift aside a sensation as brutish as this cheese’s funk), the taste actually offers layered savor: flan, nuttiness, traces of buttery caramel. My senses were confused trying to match up malevolent odor to nuanced taste. But since my senses like all that jostle, I was happy to be lost in the reek/flavor disconnect.

That pleasure didn’t last long though, as the nose coda hit about 5 seconds after the bite: coming back up through the palate and nostrils, haunting the mouth like a nightmare haunts a freshly awoken mind. It was at this point that the briefly-inviting flavor was totally ambushed by the reek. I put my knife down & left the rest of the wedge I had cut untouched: I’d been bested by the Bishop. My tongue hadn’t lolled in enough gutters to lap up & love curd like this.

I drank some water, I drank some lemonade. I ate some mustard on celery. I ate an orange. I bit into an orange peel.

Five more minutes passed. I glanced back at the Bishop. I got nervous. I fidgeted.

Then, automatically, as if in a trance, I reached over and ate the rest of the cheese in one bite.
   

Part 2: Why I Stay with Stink

What’s wrong with me? I wondered, as I sat there rolling creamy horror around in my mouth.

 (Read More . . .)

Basil, Balsamic vinegar, chocolate ganache.

Perhaps not flavors that you would think weep to share the same morsel.

But after my first bite of a Basil Balsamic Chocolate Truffle by emChocolatier, I couldn’t imagine anything tasting more harmonious, more singing with sympathy, than these ingredients bound and blended in a little dark bundle. Mouth-bliss.

Ellen Mirsky, owner of EMchocolatier, is clearly a gifted sweetster. She’s also quite seasoned: her website’s C.V. cites Todd English and Pichet Ong (whose P*ong is another study in whimsical and tantalizing flavor-play) as former employers. Her impressive past aside, what she’s doing in the present is wonderful: her artistry in this basil-balsamic truffle winningly showcases the power of spiking sweetness with savory elements. The result is a complex, transporting bouquet of a bite. The rest of her offerings — including chocolate bark, turtles and clusters — show the same adventurousness & spirit: sea salt, fennel and chili are among the flavors and ingredients that regularly show up in her confections.

It’s not often that chocolate makes me really slow down, focus on & wonder about what it is I’m experiencing. These truffles made it happen so often that I felt nearly guilt-ridden from the experience by the time the box was empty. Thank you emChocolatier.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

It broods in the glass, when I bring the lip of glass under my nose, warmth rises first, thick and sudden, then odor: musky blend of mustard, onion, damp root vegetables. This wine is an owl, old & noble, with ratfur stuck to its talons.

It fills the mouth aggressively, fruit-bitterly, with cherries, prunes, chili. Flakes of chocolate. It bristles & sulks all over the inside of your mouth.

This is a wine that works you into the soil, holds you there in the rooty rich damp, until you feel a hum and churn fill you, created by:

beetles,
bones,
gnarled roots,
flinty secret minerals waiting for light.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

2006 Domaine Bourillon Dorleans Vouvray

Peach held in the Pouch of
Mouth, a Ripe secret,
Like warm Gems palmed
in Pocket,

Fruit opening
as if by Molars’ edge
to sweet-sharp Bloom
in Throat

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

I’ve lived in Washington Heights for three years, and there are three restaurants that keep me consistently grateful for their existence: Park Terrace Bistro, Garden Cafe, and La Estufa. I’ll be reviewing them in ascending order of foodlust, La Estufa being somewhat slutted after, and Park Terrace being the most likely to reduce me to a grub-rutting fool. First up’s La Estufa.
   

         La Estufa Restaurant
   

I love La Estufa more and more with each visit. They serve healthy fare, loosely Italian-American, presented unassumingly, priced reasonably, and delivered with gracious & attentive service. It’s not often I feel this taken care of in New York during the course of a meal — & in a way that’s free from unctuousness, irony or uncomfortable fastidiousness.

La Estufa excels in simple grilled meat, fish & vegetable dishes, & has a solid wine list to pair these with. The restaurant doesn’t wow with innovative plating, striking flavor combinations, ambitious dish structures or arty ambience — and it absolutely doesn’t need to. Every dish I’ve had there has been tasteful, tasty, proportioned well, seasoned properly, fresh & wholesome (but not bland), & presented with sincere smiles & follow-up.

Food highlights include their bread (grainy & dense but moist & touched with what tastes like honey); their vegetables (zucchini and squash often accompany the meat entrees in a lightly oiled, garlicked, thin-sliced fan-spread); and their transcendent Pear Cabernet tart: silk-textured, simple & seductive.

My carps are minor: for starters, their brunch dishes I’ve found sparse — especially egregious was an over-priced & meager strawberry & apple fruit-dish. I also feel their dinner entrees could use a touch more creativity, daring, innovation — a signature dish here, a novel bit of flavor-alchemy there — something to set La Estufa apart in what’s increasingly becoming a competitive, Wahi+Inwood eating hub.

Still, with consistency, service & prices like these, I’m happy to keep coming back whether or not they change a thing. In an eating market like New York’s, cluttered with gimmick & forty dollar finery, graceful, honest basics like these stand out with very little need for improvement.
   

La Estufa
5035 Broadway (between 214th and 215th)
New York, NY 10034
La Estufa’s Website
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
   
Next up: Garden Cafe

“Dear Town,

We had our hopes for you.

Everywhere you were marked with stars and red ink. You were settling into late youth, like us, and we thought you might not mind our scuffed heels if we polished them first. You were our Special Occasion with your floating sterile fireplace and three story front door.

The boy’s soup was amazing; Vietnamese-style lobster bisque gussied up with western cream and ocean bits. I had vegetables pickled in rainwater which soaked my salad into wan watercolor.

Then the weird sea preparations: his stingray wing lopped off into pot pie crust and my bass draped over beans and fungi that slithered away under its muddled eyegreen sauce with every bite.

But dessert is where you lost us, despite your good wishes looped in chocolate letters on the rim of his plate. My little cake sat deflated on one side and deffered to the hard Chinese Checker sauce bumps to its left. His cherry crisp wasn’t and the fruit huddled outside its crepe.

Where was your joy, Town? I looked at your plump walls and thought about climbing them; I wondered if your spiky palm was real. But I didn’t think about you at all. And I wanted to.

Love,
M.”
   
   

Town Restaurant
at the Chambers Hotel
15 W 56th St
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 582-4445
Town’s Website