Friday night I went with Dawg and Twoin to check out Goblin Market, the fairly new restaurant where Vicky High Life works one night a week . She told me the food is really good there and I trust her taste (in food anyway, hahaha). She wasn’t working Friday though cause she took the night off to go work a Halloween party at the Locke Inn in Brooklyn, but I decided we should go check out the menu anyway. It’s a fairly smallish and dimly lit restaurant with a good beer list, a wine list with many bargains and a compact menu with a nice selection of ambitious but not overly showy dishes. The miso hangar steak app was fantasticly well seasoned and cooked perfectly medium rare. The mussels were of the stock variety, a buttery white wine broth with diced tomatoes over top. Solid but not extraordinary. The curried sea scallops were a little mild on the curry, but the quality of the scallops themselves more than made up for it. They were huge, sweet and of the firm non-stringy texture that day boat scallops should have. Their crab cakes were heavily seasoned gems, but had more of the shreds of crabmeat rather than the nice chunks I like to see in my crab cakes. The biggest winner of all though, surprisingly, were the french fries. For thin cut fries with no tricks or gimmicks, these were the best I’ve ever tasted. Totally blew Les Halles’ fries out of the water. They were so good we had them while we were ordering, had a side with Dawg’s entree, and then ordered more after we had finished our entrees. They were perfectly crisp with a tender potatoey center, not too undercooked nor over browned. And since we tried them at three different points in our meal, I can be reasonably sure we weren’t just lucky to have gotten a good batch. No, these guys know how to make fries. Goblin Market would be worth a return visit just to have the fries alone.
More culinary treats the next afternoon as I headed to Hajime for my usual omakase. This weekend, Sam had gotten some red clam from Japan which I had never tried before. These were so sweet, clean and delicate, just the perfect clam for sashimi. He also served abalone from Oregon, both as sashimi as well as lightly cooked in sake in his magic toaster oven. The sashimi version had a nice crisp crunch to the bite, but the cooked version really brought out the flavor that abalone is known for. Awesome. He also had the fresh salmon roe which he’s been able to get more frequently from our friend Dan at Alaskan Feast. Love the stuff; so much lighter and cleaner tasting than the ikura you get anywhere else. It’s almost like a different food product altoghether. So good.
Saturday night a bunch of us went to a party at a giant one bedroom loft on Bowery. The guy that lives there was awesome enough to open this party to all his friends and let them invite whomever they wanted too. Over 430 people responded to the evite, and there was an open bar the whole night with good liquor. They never ran out of anything as far as I could see, not ice, cups, mixers, and definitely not booze. Incredible. The time flew by until we were all starving at 4am (really 3am since we turned the clocks back this weekend) so we walked a few blocks over to NY Noodle Town and chowed down. Was a pretty amusing sight as all of us were still in full costume. Particularly funny was while we were waiting for a table it was so cramped in there that Twoin inserted himself into a chair at a table where this other couple was being seated. Everybody was drunk and chill so the couple was perfectly cool with it, but of course Dawg had to inject some humor into the situation by telling the waiter to bring another tea cup to their table so Twoin could have some tea with them “So it won’t be so awkward”. Hahahaha.
Sunday I woke up just in time to catch the last of the NFL pregame shows as I tried to figure out what I wanted to eat. Then I remembered my concierge told me on Saturday that a package had come for me so I went down to fetch it. I thought it was the new knife block and other miscellaneous stuff Ihad just ordered from Cooking.com, but it turned out it was a little something that Sophia sent me out of the blue for no particular reason. Thanks Sophia! It was a little bottle of truffled red sauce. Basically a thick tomato sauce rich with black truffle essence. I boiled up some rotini, scooped out a few tablespoons of the sauce and then went to town on it. It was exactly what I wanted. Truffle pasta; not your usual hangover food, unless you’re me. 🙂
By the time the 4p games were over, Law Dog had easily smoked my fantasy football team because Peyton Manning hit Reggie Wayne for 3 touchdowns and Law Dog has both of them. Dammit, I do *not* like 6’5″ 230lb QB’s with laser rocket arms, not when they are playing against me. The upside was that I no longer cared to see the evening games so I could go to Hajime and get some more of that Japanese red clam and the fresh ikura. In addition, he put a twist on his toro tartare by serving scoops of them on Japanese seeweed crackers. I was also starting to get the sniffles, so Sam finished my meal with a kind of two stage soup he makes for me whenever I feel under the weather. It starts with a light seafood broth with some napa cabbage, shitake mushrooms, fish cake, tofu, hunks of striped bass and garnished with some yuzu zest. After I finish the bulk of that, he takes the remaining broth back to the kitchen, adds some eel, egg, squid, more shrooms and some rice. It is such a comfort dish, warming, filling, and just makes you feel great.
Feeling all warm and toasty from the rice soup, I went home and stayed up until 2:30am to watch the last three episodes of Attic Cat which I now own on DVD. This was a cute little K-drama, but I felt like it could have and should have had a much bigger emotional payoff in the end. But then again, the ending certainly matched the overall mood of the entire drama- light and sweet, not too heavily dramatic or overblown. The plain Jane (or plain Jung-Eun as it were) female lead character had really grown on me through the 16 episodes and even befire they made an effort to make her look good at the end of the series, I found myself thinking her awkward toothy expressions were actually really cute. I must say too, that the theme song is really, really catchy. Probably my favorite tune right now. I think I listened to it maybe 10 times in succession on my train ride home on Friday. In any event I’ve now finished watching Attic Cat, and it was a sweet, light-hearted capper to a fun weekend and has put me in a positive frame of mind to start the week.