Best New Restaurants 2007
The top places to eat right now By James Chatto
Image credit: Jim Norton
This year’s awards are for restaurants born in 2006—an exceptional vintage, I’d say. The top 10 are already child stars; the next 10, while not quite so precocious, are still well worth a visit. Most of the 20 formed their menus from many small dishes, which outraged some of their more conventional or impatient customers but suited me fine. I’d always rather taste 10 things than three, especially now that rich meats are back on the menu. For the Year of the Dog was also the year of the pig—fat, tasty Berkshire and Berkshire-cross swine, Serrano hams, sweet milk-fed porcelaits and farm-raised not-so-wild boars. Sous-vide cooking was suddenly something to boast about, and peachy, aromatic viognier emerged as the city’s most fashionable white varietal. Bright and brief as a comet, French onion soup reappeared in a number of celebrated venues, then vanished again for another generation. While hip fusion cooks played Name That Chili, the hard-core chefs entered the charcuterie stakes, vying to see who had the knobbliest salami and who could smoke, cure or otherwise chasten the most esoteric body part. Retro but so à la mode, slow but sophisticated, simultaneously frugal and decadent, cutting-edge cold cuts oozing umami helped make Cava my number one.
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Very recently I was treated to dinner at Tony De Luca's new restaurant at the Oban Inn. It was a birthday celebration. The evening could not have been more disappointing. Unlike Mr. Chatto's experience our service was horrendous. We never received wine that was ordered and our meal was ok at best. We had the unfortunate experience of having breakfast there as well. We discovered "hair" baked in our food, and again the service was horrible. To top it off we were then asked to pay $44.00 for 3 meals-we never ate! Not one word of apology was expressed by the staff, in fact they were quite rude. I would suggest Mr. Chatto might want to make another appearance at the restaurant, I suspect his review would not be as glowing.
June 22, 2007 | by hbh