Gramercy Tavern
Address: 42 East 20th St, New York
Telephone: 001 212 477 0777
Rating: 16.5/20
Open: Lunch, Mon-Fri, 11.30am-2.30pm; dinner, all week, Mon-Sun, 5.30-10.30pm (11pm, Sat & Sun).
Equinox
Address: 818 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington DC
Telephone: 001 202 331 8118
Rating: 17/20
Open: Lunch, Mon-Fri, 11.30am-2pm; dinner, all week, 5.30- 10pm (10.30, Fri & Sat).
Rowley Leigh, a man whose prose once graced these pages and who knows about such things, said that if we ate nowhere else in New York we should get a table at the Gramercy Tavern. However, getting a table at the Gramercy Tavern is easier said than done.
If you wonder at the vigorous trade done by restaurants in London - well, decent ones, anyway - it seems positively slack compared with those in New York. New Yorkers live in restaurants. That said, however, the Gramercy Tavern operates a first come, first served policy on Saturday mornings, and so we piled in at 12.15pm to put the Leigh theory to the test, just before orderly queues started forming.
And, as in so many areas, his taste proved impeccable. The Gramercy Tavern is a class act. The mood is stately. The service is smooth. The martinis are classic and the food is very good - from the rabbit rillette with tapenade, fennel, caper sprouts and onion focaccia, to the chilled pea soup with couscous and mint; and the grilled baby octopus with shaved fennel, lemon and sweet onion caponata to the salmon with asparagus, salsify and gremolata; and the fresh bacon with spätzle, fiddlehead ferns and pickled ramps to the chicken with spring vegetables, mushrooms and red wine. Actually, after that, it was to the cherry financier with port sauce, aged balsamic vinegar and cherry and black pepper ice cream, but seeing as I was the only one in the party to be party to a pudding, I think we should leave it as it was.
The food was firmly Eurocentric. Our dishes had contributions from Sicilian, mainland Italian, Spanish, Belgian and Austrian kitchens, but the roots of the food are firmly settled deep in the rich humus of French bourgeois cooking. There were minor infelicities - the tapenade flattened the delicate, delicious rillette, for example - but for the most part the dishes were exemplary: handsome, balanced, thoughtful and tasty. The couscous used to thicken the pea soup, say, was a canny idea. Each element in the salmon dish was clearly defined and harmonious. The fresh bacon, which is no more or less than belly pork, was as unctuous and mouth-filling as you could wish, the richness cut by a hint of bitterness from the fiddlehead ferns, which lay coiled like boiled caterpillars among the spätzle, and by the pickled ramps. And finally, the slow, latent heat of black pepper emerging from the cold of the ice cream is a trick that never fails to please me.
The prices are a bit sharper than at Barbuto, which I reviewed last week - first courses run between $8.50 and $12, main courses between $14 and $23. The wine list is short but sharp, but best of all is a really fine beer list. The Gramercy Tavern is that kind of place: classy in all its parts.
And it wasn't the only class act that we came across in our rapid US gastro-tour. Should you find yourself chained to the railings outside the White House in Washington for any reason, take a break from protesting and pop around the corner to Equinox, where you will find power brokers in their shirt sleeves trading policy information over the dandy food of Todd Gray.
It isn't dandy in the sense of posturing or any posing puffery like that. It is cooking that celebrates the produce from the small, artisanal farmers and growers round and about - soft-shelled crab from Virginia, La Belle Farm asparagus, etc. The beef came from one farmer in Pennsylvania, the lamb from another. The yellowfin tuna was fished out of Orgen Inlet and the greens were from Rappahannock.
There is no doubt that these raw materials are very fine indeed. The beef had levels of flavour-enriching fat that I haven't seen in Britain for years, and fresh, fruity green and yellow beans came with it. Gray's instinct with these ingredients is to let their gleaming qualities shine through, as was amply evident from the two beautiful, impeccable amuse bouches - a tiny fresh crab salad on a crisp tuile and a breast of quail with an intensely flavoured jus balanced by a quenelle of scrambled quails' eggs.
In the dishes proper, there were several inspired combinations - Cavaillon and water melon with the soft-shelled crab, for example, and cream of morelles with the asparagus, which matched two levels of earthy flavours like Don and Phil Everly.
On the whole, I think the food was rather richer than we are used to. The saucing tended to be copious and plush, and occasionally the multiple layers of flavour obscured each other, but there was no disguising the intrinsic beauty of the food, and the generosity and skill in the kitchen. Prices represented a sharp upward hike from NYC - at dinner, $11 to $18 for first courses and $31 to $34 for main courses - although lunch is lighter, in every sense of the word.
