Two Tasting Menus, Upstate, Downstate

I’ll let you in on a secret, I’m scared of tasting menus. I love a leisurely two or even three-hour dinner, but things can get out of hand. A decade or two ago, I was asked to eat at the famed Alinea in Chicago. It was good. A piece of bacon on a trapeze, a pillow which exuded mace when you stuck your face (hey, that rhymes!) into it. (Or so I think I remember.) But it lasted for hours, if not days. People kept bailing out, claiming their babysitter was going home, or they had to walk the dachshund, or their venereal disease was acting up. As a visitor, I couldn’t even come up with an excuse. The food was delicious but thirty courses in, I just wanted to die. Now I’ve written before about my beloved Passerine, the Indian place on 20th with a great tasting menu that hits all the right notes without killing the diner with too much food. Now, there are two more places I wanna talk about, one, Tivoli General, Upstate and the other, Yamada (ranked #2 on the Times 100 list), in the city. Let us commence with the food.

Tivoli General is just what it claims to be, a sweet little grocery store in the Bard-afflicted hamlet of Tivoli. During lunch, they have some insane sandwiches of the mortadella and prosciutto vintages, but once every while they throw a dinner to end all dinners for probably about a dozen lucky diners. For the one I had in early July (just in time for my birthday) they had a visiting Polish chef and the result was Eastern European madness. Now pictured above, I’m drinking a martini, which, you may know, is my favorite drink, but look at what’s on top, a delicious and decidedly non-Polish gilda with olive and anchovy. I’m in the mood already.

What’s inside that delicious little bundle, is a delicious thing of herbed butter for the sourdough.

And above is my favorite of the dishes, a kugel with creme fraiche and smoked trout. Now this to me is absolutely the right size for a 5-dish tasting menu. It’s a secondary dish that points to gastronomic lift-off. Any larger and it’s a Spanish tortilla. Any smaller and it’s a tease. And the trout is so upstate-y fresh.

O-ho, now we’re going full Easter Europe. If the Kugel wasn’t Ashkenazi enough for you, we’ve got the Chlodnik, a cold Polish soup which along with borscht is part of the beetroot fraternity. Remember it’s early July and the temp is 95 or so. Every bite of this is pure pleasure.

And now we go a little insane. For the main course, there’s coffee ribs, red slaw, and, wait for the Eastern European bit, beetroot ketchup. This is the sweetest piece of meat I’ve ever tasted and it was almost a substitute and the coffee part was just the right kick in the pants.

Finally, as it was cherry season Upstate and cherries are the favored fruit of Eastern Europe and its many brandies, some poached cherries with malden salt and olive oil.

Now this was absolutely brilliantly paced (and matched with wines) dinner that left everyone so happy we didn’t know what to do with ourselves after. The kids among us had to pass on Fortune’s Ice Cream across the street, the best ice cream in NY State, that’s how stuffed they were. I went home and cried into Bernie’s sweet chocolaty fur. Cried out of happiness.

A week later, I journeyed downstate because my film and TV manager Dan Halstead was in town, and Dan is a very good eater. We headed to Yamada where the chef Isao Yamada is a master of kaiseki cuisine. Now like everyone else I had kaiseki in Tokyo and, just as with Alinea, I thought it went on way too long. At one point I considered feigning diarrhea and running away (the Japanese word for diarrhea is “Geri” so I would have a ready excuse; I AM diarrhea), but had to hew to the politeness expected of me.

Chef Yamada, on the other hand, did me right. For one thing he is possibly shorter than me, an attribute I admire and one that sets me at ease. You don’t need to be a giraffe to make great seasonal kaiseki.