Manhattan – Memphis Flyer

Recently, I spent almost a week eating and drinking my way across the island of Manhattan. I justified it all by saying that: 1) I’m on vacation, and 2) all this walking will balance out the extreme intake of calories in the form of food and wine.

Upon arriving in Manhattan, it was 102 degrees. I thought, my God, Memphis has followed me! Regardless of the heat, when in Manhattan I walk or take the subway, so my companion and I just dealt with it.

One of the first places we happened upon was Morrell (One Rockefeller Plaza, morrellwine.com), a side-by-side wine shop and wine bar. The retail shop was very tiny but in a cozy, comfortable way with a vast array of wines that rarely, if ever, make it to Memphis. The wine director helped me find my way around the store and pointed out wines that I have been curious about for some time. Fellow wine lovers will recognize the names: Soter, Saint-Cosme, Hirsch, and so on.

After walking out with my purchases, we went next door to the wine bar to cool off with a couple glasses of dry rosé and a plate of charcuterie consisting of paté, cornichons, Dijon mustard, duck and pork rillettes, and brie. It was the perfect pit stop to refuel so that we could continue walking around in the sticky heat of the city.

Dinner on the first night was at Perilla (9 Jones St., perillanyc.com). Being fans of the reality show Top Chef, we had to see what season one’s winner, Harold Dieterle, was up to. The restaurant is tucked into a quiet side street in Greenwich Village. We stopped in a bit earlier than our reservation to have a drink at the bar and survey the scene. The menu is small but absolutely delicious. We had the cheeks of the day (that evening they were halibut), spicy duck meatballs with raw quail egg, ravioli with fiddlehead ferns and truffle butter, and seared duck breast with farro and honeycomb.

What better way to get a feel for a region than through what its soil can produce? There are wonderful farmer’s markets all over Manhattan. One of the best for fresh local produce, dairy, and people-watching is the Union Square greenmarket (E. 17th St. at Broadway). I passed a memorable salumi stand selling handmade pork products that had the most amusing sign I’ve ever seen (pictured below). Union Square’s greenmarket is a mélange of produce stands, but the most interesting part of the greenmarket is the multitude of ethnicities that are selling and buying products.

After seeing a performance of Hamlet in Central Park one evening, we left hungry. We made our way down to the East Village and to the Spotted Pig (314 W. 11th St., thespottedpig.com), Chef April Bloomfield’s version of a British gastropub. The restaurant is tiny — tables very close to one another, exposed brick, and a central bar that looks straight out of one of Memphis’ very own dives. The food doesn’t match the surroundings at all. I love it when what you see is not what you get. I ordered a glass of Pol Roger Champagne, the smoked haddock chowder, and spinach and ricotta gnudi. Gnudi are basically ravioli without the pasta wrapper — a dumpling of the delicious ravioli innards. It was amazing to see how bar food could be elevated to another level while still satisfying in that post-imbibing way.

Lunch is the perfect time to dine at a celebrity chef’s restaurant. The prices are lower but the food is still exceptional. Jean-Georges (1 Central Park West, jean-georges.com) is one of the most revered restaurants in New York, if not the entire country. Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten has gone on to open up restaurants all over the globe, so we weren’t so foolish as to think he was actually in the kitchen. No matter.

We’d initially made reservations for the casual dining room called Nougatine but upon arrival asked the host if we could switch to the formal room. They were booked up but made room for us without a second thought. The lunch menu is priced at $28 per person with a choice of two plates from the lengthy list. Each additional plate is $12. Not bad for a world-famous restaurant. One of the best dishes I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating is prepared here. It was a sort of foie gras brûlée. Foie gras was folded with wild strawberries, sitting atop a housemade brioche, and topped with a sugar and spice mixture that was torched to a golden crust and drizzled with 25-year-old balsamic vinegar.

You can’t go back after eating this dish. Food just isn’t the same. I feel like an addict “chasing the dragon,” trying to re-create the feeling of that dining experience. I guess I’ll have to wait until my next trip to Manhattan.

As a proud Son of the South, I have been totally obsessed and worried sick over the past few years that we here in America might get attacked by some Islamo-Fascist crazed terrorist madman flying an airplane into a building and causing it to burst into flames. I should have known all along; I should have been worried about those damn Yankees! Okay, okay. Bad joke. And not even original. Stolen from a twisted friend. But sometimes you have to make light of something that absolutely leaves you incredulous. When New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle smashed his plane into a condo building in Manhattan last week, it was a sad event, especially for his family and the family of the flight instructor in the plane with him, Tyler Stanger. Not to mention the person’s condo into which it slammed — Kathleen Coronna — who had already had a bad enough time of it when the giant Cat in the Hat balloon fell on her head during a Macy’s parade and caused her to spend a month in a coma. It was strange, to say the least. But it wasn’t nearly as strange as the fact that Lidle, or anyone else for that matter, would be flying up the East River around Manhattan at a low altitude. Maybe I am slow on the uptake, and maybe this question has been answered in the national media and I just missed it, but what in the hell is going on here? On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan were hit by commercial airlines and demolished. According to almost anyone you ask, that event “changed America forever.” It was the darkest day in our history. It changed the way we live our lives. We went to war — albeit against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks — and are still there and may never get out. It has caused the deaths of more than 2,700 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them women and children. Because of the commercial airliner attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the hysteria that followed and the ongoing life-or-death struggle against terrorism that permeates every breath our commander in chief takes, the United States has reacted in a way that has put its international reputation in serious jeopardy, and we here in the States are supposed to be living our lives in fear, fear, fear, and more fear of attacks on “Amurkan soil.” Hell, you can barely get on a flight now with a tube of toothpaste because it might be used as a bomb. You have to stand there in front of stone-faced security people and sample your own baby’s formula before taking it on a plane because you might be able to make it explode with your cell phone. And the majority of the lemmings flying think this is fine. It makes us safer. But until Lidle crashed his private plane into the building on 72nd Street in Manhattan last week, pilots flying private planes in and around Manhattan didn’t have to check in with air-traffic controllers before they hit the building-crowded skies? DID NOT HAVE TO CHECK IN WITH AIR-TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS BEFORE FLYING AN AIRCRAFT AT A LOW ALTITUDE IN MANHATTAN? Are you kidding me? Can this be for real? Doesn’t a substantial portion of the income tax I pay every year go toward homeland security? Is it somewhere in a vault collecting dust? I want my tax money back. I read one joker’s response to the question of how safe it is to let these planes just fly around, and his idea was that since the planes didn’t contain substantial amounts of fuel and it would be hard to coordinate detonating a bomb upon impact of a building, it wasn’t such a big threat. Hard to detonate a bomb upon impact of a building? Didn’t someone orchestrate a plan for four planes to get hijacked at once on 9/11 and hit both World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and most likely would have hit another major site if the passengers hadn’t brought it down in a field in Pennsylvania? I would think if one had the will to put a bomb on a small plane and fly it into another building in Manhattan, that person might be able to figure out how to detonate the bomb at the right time. I bet Osama bin Laden is kicked back in a cave somewhere laughing like crazy at us, thinking that he doesn’t even need to plan any more attacks because we are stupid enough to do it ourselves. I really don’t understand this at all. Was this some perk of living the life of the rich and famous? If you are rich enough to have your own plane, you can just do whatever you like? Help me here. Who in the hell is on first base?