THE GURGLING COD

Sifton Soundtracks: Aquavit, b/w The Cardigans, "Iron Man"

Sifton, again so soon. Sifton takes one of Aquavit's previous three stars and puts it in his pocket, leaving it with two. Aquavit shares a homeland with this summer's bisexual hacker It Girl, and rest assured, Sifton cannot resist going there in the lede:

IT has been a Swedish summer here in New York. There seem to be Stieg Larsson novels on every fourth lap on the D train choogling over the Manhattan Bridge, on every third iPad glowing in the dark of the jitney driving east on the Long Island Expressway toward Montauk.

And:

Up front is a bistro serving fairly traditional Swedish food: meatballs and gravlax. In back, past a long bar, is a formal dining room. It is comfortable if slightly shopworn back there, a company boardroom and meeting space, replete with chic wooden plates and scarred wooden floors. Mikael Blomkvist, the hero of the Larsson novels, might arrive at any moment to blow smoke in the face of a criminal plutocrat.

You have to feel bad for the Swedes, who will have to wait a while until something displaces these books as the primary referent for folks elsewhere -- it's kind of like if you are from Chicago and you travel in Europe, people used to assume your two next door neighbors were Al Capone and Michael Jordan.

It could be worse, for the review and the restaurant -- there are no gags about torturing fish as if they were hapless victims of Avocat Bjurgmann, for instance, but Sifton does make it clear why he is turning down the rheostat:

Aquavit’s dining room can be somewhat lonely these days, only a little more than half full at peak hours. There is a sour scent to some of the passageways, the sort that flowers cannot battle.

So, a song from Swedes about a fellow a little past his prime seems like just the thing. Play us off, The Cardigans:

Sifton Soundtracks: Ma Peche, b/w The Tin Men, "So Uptown"

Anchower, I know. Unforgivably late to the party on this one -- blame Hughesnet.com, the worst ISP in the world, and a superabundance of stuff in real life. I was really looking forward to this one -- Sifton's first foray into the Chang Empire, and I had a song picked out in advance, and even bugged the Timelords to go ahead and review it. And then I had not the song, and the worst ISP in the world, and cousins and meals to cook and stones to drag around and a <strike>perfect storm</strike> exciting new challenges with the day job. More frustrating, the cinetrix and I dined at Ma Peche the Saturday before the review dropped, of which more later.

Sifton likes it. The dos seems about fair -- Sifton, et al, got a lot deeper into the menu than we could in one visit, and it's probably laudable that Sifton resisted the temptation to rave or pan.

The thesis of Sifton's review is that Ma Peche is the BMW 735i of the Chang Empire -- a little bigger and more comfortable than downtown's 2002 -- the analogy breaks down here, in that there is no automobile where you have to sit on a stool to drive it. 

Sifton is busy enough with the food that he does not need to amuse himself with Siftonian excesses, except possibly here:  

Accordingly, in line with a bistro, you may order from a raw bar — another first for Mr. Chang — offering oysters and clams, shrimp and Alaskan king crab, with a calamansi mayonnaise and a mignonette with a Thai basil bang. There is local fluke tossed with herbs and pickled pineapple, silky and difficult not to bolt. There is a flavorful squid as well, like a Vietnamese green-papaya salad born of the sea, cool and fragrant, chili hot. It is best to experience all these piled together onto a huge plateau fruits de mer, as if at some some imaginary Balthazar in Da Nang.

Yes, the imaginary Balthazar across the street from the imaginary MOMA store in Da Nang. Anyway, the song for you as you reread last week's review is "So Uptown" from the Tin Men, who are worthy of your attention regardless. 

 Tin Men, "So Uptown"

Sifton Soundtracks: Kenmare, b/w The Specials, Nite Club

Sifton won't dance,

In a club like this,

All the girls are sluts*

And the overpriced cocktails taste just like piss.

It's a huevo de gallina for Kenmare from Sifton. The Cod's visit there was pleasanter than Sifton's but it was very quiet when I was in. Given that the concept seemed to be simple things done fussily, I can easily imagine that The Chicken or the fries could fall off steeply in a busier kitchen.  The sceneyness of the scene does allow Sifton to unleash his Walter Mitty fantasy that he lives in Brooklyn and is named Jonathan, or at least is a Holden Caulfield manque, all growed up:

The dining room is pretty enough, dark and cool, with white marble tables and a vaguely Mediterranean feel enhanced by big sprays of flowers. It is crowded nightly, first with dinner parties that seem pulled from rejected “Sex and the City” scripts and then with a late, late, late show of models and people with incredible collections of music and sneakers and phone numbers, accompanied by the people who went to college with them who now work on Wall Street.

Yeah. Even when Sifton tries to talk about the food, he gets distracted by the room:

Even more appropriate to the crowd and the space, and what look like the restaurant’s best overall seller after the sliders, are French fries. They are served under a thick ooze of Cheddar and salty, wan giblet gravy. You can pick at these for a long time, drinking prosecco and doing red-carpet analysis of this one’s tight dress or that one’s unfortunate hair, laughing gaily until someone remembers how great it was to smoke, and the whole conversation goes nostalgic and sullen.

If I were part of Team Kenmare, I would probably be muttering something about how there are plenty of restaurants for older and less attractive people, and Sifton's indictment does carry a hint of outsiderishness:

Not that many people are actually eating, though. There are enough pretty young things and the people who chase them at Kenmare to recall Bret Easton Ellis novels, Scissor Sisters songs and the whole first season of HBO’s “How to Make it in America.” The incessant rumbling of the nearby Lexington Avenue subway vibrates up into a table-hoppy, air-kissing, haven’t-seen-you-since-Quogue bubble of nighttime excitement.

http://events.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/dining/reviews/07rest.html?ref=dining&pagewanted=all

Kenmare makes it easy for Sifton; Sifton makes it easy for the Cod:

*Used here in the connotation of "attractive women to whom you appear to be invisible."

Sifton Soundtracks: Anisa b/w, um, Suzane Vega, I guess.

It may be because for the first time in the storied history of Sifton Soundtracks that The Cod has a song ready to go for a review that has not yet appeared that this week's review is so uninspiring. One imagines that Sifton will opine on Ma Peche soon, but until then, Annisa keeps its two stars. The review itself is fairly straightforward, save for a couple of spots that read like nonqualifiers in a Sifton parody contest:

The ambitions of the kitchen are as quiet as they were a decade ago, but no smaller for the time elapsed since Ms. Lo first introduced us to them. There are the requisite Asian influences, as well as African ones, none of them overwhelming in taste or technique. Ms. Lo is not by any means a flashy chef. She does not stalk the dining room in gleaming whites, glad-handing patrons and accepting praise. She simply stays in the kitchen and works, cooking as the Puget Sound novelist David Guterson writes: precisely, with earth in closest proximity to sea. 

and

And fluke with caviar and beets brought the same happy laughter you hear drifting out of car windows at beach-town sunsets: the salty pop of the fish eggs set softly against the sweet, fresh flesh of the fish, with a snap of beet sugar to tie it all together.

David Guterson? Beats me. 

In all, it sounds like a nice place to have a meal someone else is paying for. Adult, sincere, with vestigial bohemian influences, or at least a GV address. Call it Suzanne Vega, readers' choice. Perhaps we can all be more inspired next week.

Sifton Soundtracks: Takaski, b/w Shonen Knife, "Making Plans for Bison"

Sifton goes offbeat, meaty and Asian, laying a one spot on Takashi, a Korean style Japanese BBQ place. It reads like a better review than the star indicates, and Sfton waxes rather lyrical at times:

Cubed raw liver comes to the table as well, a chilled, lumpy stew dressed with salt and sesame oil. It tastes of lightning storms on the high plains, of fear and magnificence combined. It is faintly metallic, rich with blood.

Is it The Cormac McCarthy Steak House? No, it's Takahi. And the graf qoted above is the last of three opening the review that do nothing but list items of food, in what reads like a deliberate reversal of his usual inclination to moonlight as 21st Century Edith Wharton.  (He does end the review with a throwaway George V. Higgins reset, FWIW.) Meaty, offbeat and Asian seemed like a tough combo, until I remembered about Shonen Knife. 

Sifton Soundtracks: The Cod gets Iced.

The crescendo of indifference attending the Cod's Sifton Soundtracks project only affirms a sense that Sam Sifton, the subject of Sifton Soundtracks, sees the Cod as an adversary to match wits with, laying clever traps and misleading clues in an effort to distract this blog from the locating the correct song for each review. This week, Sifton's tactics reach a new low. In deucing Torrisi, Sifton constructs the entire review around Billy Joel's image and lyrics, Sifton effectively ices Sifton Soundtracks, compelling the Gurgling Cod to take a knee and chug a bottle full of swill.*

Fine. 

*Billy Joel is terrible. Billy Joel has never not been terrible, and only the happy circumstance of his status as the Lynrd Skynrd of tristate hausfraus has kept him from starvation. 

Sifton Soundtracks: ABC Kitchen b/w The Very Best, "The Warm Heart of Africa," Architecture in Helsinki Remix

All JGV does is open good restaurants, evidently. All Sifton does is review them. This week, it's ABC Kitchen, and another deuce. Sifton seems to admire the place, but has a hard time really enjoying it. What with it being in ABC Carpet and Home, it has a bit of a casual sensibility by JGV standards, but for folks where a dinner plan that begins with "let's just..." can end w/ three figure per person check total. What with ABC Carpet and Home evidently what would happen if Moby took over Anthropologie and made the housewares a little less like they were for furnishing a brothel in The Quiet American, the place is, like, ecological:

Ingredients for the cooking, as a position paper on the back of the chic cardboard menu declares, are “consciously sourced.” The breadbaskets were “handcrafted by the indigenous Mapuche people of Patagonia.”

1: "Consciously sourced" suggests that other chefs at other restaurants source their ingredients unconsciously - raising the possibility, just maybe, of Peter Hoffman huffs ether before jumping on his lowrider bike and heading over to the Greenmarket, and is as likely as not to come home with nothing but daikon to put on the menu. 

2: "Handcrafted by the indigenous Mapuche people of Patagonia"? Fuck me with a jaggedy piece of a Putumayo CD. This sounds like somehing a horny sophomore might use to lure you into the hammock he got last summer before he roofies you. And if the eco includes sustainability, and there's a focus on foods from "up and down the East coast," there are folks a lot closer who can handcraft circles around these Patagonian, basketwise. 

And yeah, the food sounds nice, but not terribly interesting. The vibe Sifton conveys of in Manhattan but of the Hamptons sounds nice for folks who can afford to be homesick for the Hamptons, but a bit much for the rest of us.

With twin themes of earnestness and privilege emerging as the salient aspects of this review, the compass points in the direction of Vampire Weekend. More still, the collaboration of VW front guy Ezra Koenig with The Very Best. (btw, I liked The Very Best when it was a Radioclit+EsauMwamwaya mixtape, but the album sounds a bit like Graceland for the PBR n singlespeed crowd.) But! There is good news -- there is a remix of this song by Architecture in Helsinki, which takes EK out of the mix and replaces it w/ a horn track that sounds like they hired cartoon robot walrus session muscians. Get it here. Via here.

Sifton Soundtracks: Prime Meats b/w LCD Soundsystem, "New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down/Empire State of Mind

Sifton makes it easy this week. Dropping a deuce on Brooklyn hotspot Prime Meats, Sifton skews away from a notion of restaurant reviewing as service journalism, and towards a notion of the restaurant critic as some sort of 2k10 Edith Wharton on deadline. But it's la vie boheme our hero aspires to, or at least the kind of vie boheme that can swing $100/head for dinner:

"Streetlight reflects off Prime Meats’ shiny black exterior. The aesthetics are magnetic: Dutch paint, rubbed wood, old mirrors, brick, warm light out of the past. The man on the door smiles down from his perch, takes names and cellphone numbers, tells people he’ll call when their tables are ready. Maybe 90 minutes? A couple of hours? If only they lived on Clinton Street! They’d be eating right now. People want in to this restaurant so bad!"

The food sounds good, what with the oysters and lardons, and bartenders with Talmudic knowledge of bitters, but Prime Meats also sounds like a pain in the ass. No reservations, and cash-only. This detail preoccupies Sifton for much of the review, in the manner of a hack sports columnist stretching for 500 words on a subject like Jason Varitek's socks, or the folly of NYC hosting the Super Bowl:

"But forget to line your pockets in the manner of a Biggie Smalls* impersonator and you’re going to need to leave your guests before the end of it all, and walk to a bodega A.T.M. to rustle up enough cash to pay your bill. This is a grim feeling for a grown person to experience, right up there with walking around all day with a large knot of $20 bills in your pocket only because you’re going to dinner someplace that doesn’t take credit cards."**

In short, Sifton loves Prime Meats, but it's bringing him down. At least enough to choose the recent live version of "NY, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down" with "Empire State of Mind" interpolated, through the good offices of The Awl.***

*The link to Biggie Smalls is in the online version of the piece -- perhaps the NYT is heeding the aforementioned complaints that Sifton makes references in his column that are confusing for the denizens of Chowyelpistan.

**I would be interested how the tips work out w/ the cash only policy. Do folks round up, or do they eat their way to higher than expected check totals, and then skulk away from Prime Meats having left 12% on the table?

***The concert video, itself, also suggests what is awesome and not awesome about NYC -- you an see LCD Soundsystem live, but the room is full of yahoos singing along.

Sifton Soundtracks: Mia Dona b/w The Members, "The Sound of the Suburbs"

It's a huevo de gallina for Mia Dona. Sifton appears to be saving his A game for loftier fare. It's disappointing. Based on complaints in Chowyelpistan that nobody reading the NYT food section should be expected to know who Liev Schreiber* is, I had the exciting idea of annotating his next review as a public service. But, jeebs, Sifton gets about as deep as a kiddie pool this time out. Counting Crows? Even the Applebee's reviewing Silent Majority knows who they are. But it does sound like the kind of place that's hard to get excited about, and is on Sifton's radar primarily because of the place it used to be before Psilakis left. So, like kudos for getting through the writeup without mentioning Olive Garden.  But Sifton does get to remind you where he grinds:

And so here is the new, chef-less iteration of Mia Dona: exactly the sort of decent, middlebrow, red-sauce Italian restaurant you’d relish if you found it in a town near the town where you grew up in the suburbs of New York. Within the five boroughs of New York City, we call that sort of restaurant satisfactory.

The enthusiasm Sifton brings to having NYC as his beat in nearly every review is infectious, mostly. It's as if he spend his formative years chained by the ankle to the steam table at a Ponderosa, and is happy to be eating better than that.

But the review is criminally thin on soundtrack inspiration. With its invocation of the red sauce places of yore, Sifton dares you to go with "Scenes from  an Italian Restaurant," but the Cod is congenitally allergic to Billy Joel, who is the Lynyrd Skynyrd of Tri-State fifty-something hausfrauen. Thus a song to play off Mia Dona, back to where it belongs, which is to say not in New York Fucking City, where solid Italian food is not good enough.

 

*I can think of at least two folks who would be happy to tell you that Schreiber is to sex what the stickle is to the pickle.

Sifton Soundtracks: Fatty 'Que b/w Sleigh Bells, "Crown on the Ground"

Building on the return below 14th, Sifton  hops on the L train and lands in Williamsburg, winding up at a place that:

"looks like a biker bar for the kind of bikers who don’t ride Harleys in leathers and boots, but stripped-down Schwinns in boat shoes and skinny jeans."

In a perfect world, Carles would have ghosted this review,* but no such luck. We are at The Fatty 'Que, the Brooklyn outpost of Zakary Pelaccio’s Fatty Crab empire. The 'Que has a distinctly less Kissingery vibe than many of Sifton's recent stops:

The entrance sits low and dingy below the sidewalk, next to some stained traffic cones. It’s dark and shouty inside, with spartan dining rooms spread out over three small floors. These are all faintly scented with oak smoke, and packed with people in beards or vintage dresses, everyone talking loudly over tiny tables that are not quite sticky, peering at menus in the low light, ripping into their meals.

Luckily, the food is pretty good if pricey, or "incredibly good," according to Sifton:

The food is incredibly good. Fatty ’Cue is a restaurant worth traveling to visit. To expand on the playbook of awesome, Malaysian-ish cooking on display at the Fatty Crab restaurants in Manhattan, Mr. Pelaccio’s Fatty Crew — with Corwin Kave as executive chef and Andrew Pressler as chef de cuisine — has added to their roster Robbie Richter, the Queens-born pitmaster who helped start Hill Country in 2007. Fatty ’Cue offers smoked crabs and smoked lamb ribs, coriander-dusted bacon and pieces of pig. You can eat smoky noodle soups and pickled chilies. There is brisket and bao.

I have not been to the Fatty 'Cue, but based on my limited experience w/ ZP's Fatty Crab, I'd be more interested to see him move in a less sticky, rather than more sticky direction. My meal there was like the first Go! Team record -- fun for a little while, but wearying over time. Sifton seems to enjoy the food a good bit, but this kind of food in this kind of atmosphere seems like it might get to be too much of a good thing quickly.

It will be interesting to see what the 718 cheer squads have to say about this review, in that it seems slightly patronizing towards both ZP and the borough -- the last sentence before he drops the uno is "It is difficult not to sound like Mrs. Cleaver saying so, but can you imagine what this young man could do if he straightened up his room."  Hard not to feel like Sifton is suggesting that Brooklyn is Manhattan's playroom.

The question of the soundtrack is tricky. In making it easier, than, say, The Mark, Sifton makes it harder. Items like "Chinatown white-bread toast slathered in fat rendered from every animal in the kitchen: pork mixed with beef mixed with duck mixed with lamb. Master fat: schmaltz for the deeply Reform," tempt one towards the obvious toast w/ an Animal Collective of fat, but resist. Something kinda sticky, catchy, but ultimately grating? Heroes du jour Sleigh Bells fit the bill, as Maura explains over to the Awl:

*Those keen for HRO parody will be well served here.