Review of Prune (NYC)

Have you read Blood, Bones & Butter? It is a superlative memoir written by Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune, a New York City restaurant that just celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. B,B & B was masterfully crafted, a result of or perhaps the natural entrée into the MFA in Creative Writing that Hamilton received before becoming a chef. It's the kind of book I couldn't put down and also one that has stuck with me since. In fact, the longer I've thought about and processed Hamilton's words, the more I've gleaned and learned from them. Though Hamilton didn't attend culinary school, she opened Prune in 1999 and was awarded the James Beard Best Chef NYC award in 2011. In 2012, Blood, Bones & Butter won a James Beard award for Writing and Literature.

It goes without saying that Gabrielle Hamilton is a multi-talented woman.

As such, when I saw that she will be in DC presenting her new book, the Prune cookbook, over dinner at a nearby restaurant later this month, I eagerly wrote a friend, whose husband was as wowed by B, B & B as was I, to see if they wanted to get tickets and join T and me for the evening. Long story short, the four of us had tickets within five minutes, are looking forward to the 20 November event with much anticipation and I knew I simply had to make to Prune, finally.

Lucky me, we were, as you know, heading to NYC last weekend. Sunday morning was free, and I was as keen on seeing my dear pal Shawn (the one I took to Ghibellina last month and the one who urged me to start this blog) as I was intent on eating brunch at Prune. He's always game for anything, as is Tom, so we met on the curb out front the tiny restaurant just after it opened at 10am.

Prune is way downtown on East 1st, just north of Houston, and if you weren't looking for its magenta awning which overhangs tall, plate glass windows that allow passersby to peer into the tiny interior, you might very well miss it. I don't think Prune can seat more than twenty-five guests, and the nook of a kitchen is the sort only non-New Yorkers might wonder about, but the cramped style works in this cozy place: you're all in the experience together.

Diners and wait staff dance an intimate samba, as some devour what others deliver. A hot-pink-shirted woman with a fifties pinup coif deftly delivered a full round of drinks and dishes to our table-for-two made table-for-three. Here is T's Monte Cristo, the small bowl of currant jelly just holding onto the lip of the plate. His orange juice nestles snugly between his and Shawn's waters, Shawn's coffee and other usual suspects so often on restaurant tables. My ovoid platter of Huevos Rancheros slides neatly at a forty-five-degree angle between my own juice, the Prune (a mix of juices that does not include prune), and Shawn's Soft Scramble with Rosti. The waitress suggests he jettison his coffee cup saucer, and then the table looks as if it were made just to hold all of our dishes and the occasional elbow.

Tom wishes his warm, meaty sandwich  had been left to chart only a savory course; in this vein, he wipes all powdered sugar off the buttery bread and refuses the addition of currant jelly. I eat that from a spoon. Shawn eats his perfectly cooked eggs first, with bites of English muffin, but not its rims, here and there. The rosti will have to wait, which was a wise decision because although it glistened with an entrancing golden hue, it wanted desperately for salt, the one usual suspect missing from our table's fauna.

My huevos were terrific- the chile sauce was smoky and complex, the perfect accompaniment to beans, avocado, chips and eggs. I was full afterwards but not so stuffed that I couldn't later make room for a slice of New York cheesecake, which I bought for and ate on the train home.

At Prune I felt happy. I felt like a neighborhood regular even though I'm obviously not. The food wasn't perfect or even that memorable really. But I'd return in a heartbeat just to feel in that mix again. A blip of a moment in time in a microcosmic speck of New York. It's not every restaurant that can draw people in like that. That's what made Prune special to me and likely part of what has made it special to so many others over the past fifteen years.

My farro salad on apuginthekitchen and KCTS' cookbook

Y'all, my friend Suzanne has a really fun thing going on on her blog, apuginthekitchen (look in my blogroll). She asks her readers to submit a favorite recipe and then enters them all into a randomizer and cooks whatever pops out. She has been enjoying some pretty fabulous stuff as of late and last week, my Farro with Beets, Feta and Pecans popped out of her hat. I'm so touched by her write-up about it which you should go read here, not least because she also made pumpkin ice cream! Thank you Suzanne! The farro recipe was also recently accepted into the KCTS 9 COOKS: Pasta, Rice & Grains cookbook which is being printed now.

Marta review, NYC

More ridiculousness

People, things got funnier yesterday. After the last-minute babysitting cancelation which prompted a rush delivery of the children to their grandfather, named “Topta” by Jack when he was a wee tot, and a race down to Union Station, we boarded the slowest train east of the Mississippi.

Yes it was a Regional rather than an Acela, but it was not hard to see why Amtrak is often decried as less than its European kin. I daresay Amtrak is one version back in the evolutionary chain, missing a critical gene know as Infrastructure Funding. Our car was hot as Hades and the bathroom was unusable unless your sense of smell has long since abandoned your olfactory system. The sticky floors, the blue swirl in the toilet’s bowl ever-attempting to remedy the ambient odors, the dripping faucet of non-potable water. I always wonder about non-potable hand-washing water. Isn’t that vaguely oxymoronic? Why do I want to wash my hands in water I cannot drink?

It’s all too bad, really, because I love riding the train and think it is an excellent form of transportation that could be so much more than it currently is. Fortunately, we weren’t in a rush except if you count my heart-pounding desire to get there. There. NYC. The source of a vibrancy I struggle to find elsewhere and was keen on tapping into yesterday at the start of our too-brief but lucky getaway.

Marta

Ultimately, we crawled into Penn Station, only a slight improvement of the train’s bathroom, and walked over to E. 29th Street to make our reservation at Marta. It’s in the lobby of the Martha Washington Hotel, and the restaurant design is, overall, a great combination of hopping, warm and chicly simple. The main light fixtures were the only miss, awkwardly 80s bar lights hanging jauntily from the ceiling some attempt at Calder Cubism.

But the black tile wood ovens, the wooden tables, what looked to be mercury glass panels lining the balcony of the upstairs dining area, the very Danny Meyer vases of greenery and the hipster-chic “uniforms” worn by the staff all coalesced into a spot that you felt happy to be sitting in and in no hurry to leave.

I ordered a glass of Greco, a white from Calabria, and Tom and I chose the octopus, sunchoke, orange and Castelfranco salad and two pizzas: the Salsiccia–sausage, red sauce, crimini mushrooms- and the Cavolini –Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, pickled chili, grana. I’m certain you realize that the former was T’s choice and the latter, mine.

Marta makes Roman-style pizzas, and true to form, our pizza crusts were cracker-thin. If you wait more than a minute to eat the first slice, you’ll never sample the crusts fleeting suppleness, so you need to know that going in. Most of your pizza will need to be enjoyed as if you are eating toppings on paper-thin yet strong foundation. It’s going to crunch and crackle and snap and flake. My strategy was to fold each slice in half, quickly and confidently, so as to keep as much filling in contact with crust as possible.

It pains me to say this because I think Danny Meyer is a genius gift to the restaurant world, but I was completely underwhelmed by the pizzas. The octopus salad was nice but not terribly memorable, and the pizzas were lovely to look at. But, I thought the sauce on Tom’s was too sweet, and my pizza overall just didn’t do it for me.

Two slices in, I discovered a piece of hard plastic, like that from a plastic tub, under my pie. This deflated me a bit further, and though our waitress could not have been more apologetic and gracious, I ate my new pizza more out of rueful hunger than any real desire to be ingesting it.

Nonetheless, my NY high outweighed the rogue plastic and disappointing meal, and we took a cab to our regular hotel, eager to check in and rest for a bit before getting dressed for the night. Tom gave our name, and I happened to glance at the woman pulling up our reservation; she looked increasingly confused, and because our name is often misunderstood, Tom spelled it out slowly. No dice.

We don't have a reservation?

Y’all, we had never actually made the reservation, the hotel did not have any rooms for us and so we decamped to the lobby to search for another home. We ended up on the eighth floor of the Sheraton Tribeca, a rather downtrodden place on one of the many ugly blocks of Canal Street.

Hysterically, when we pulled up in front, Tom said, “Em, LOOK! Right next door is the falafel joint you drunkenly insisted we take you to after Emily’s wedding several years ago.” Let me tell you that my memory of that joint is far shinier and cleaner than it is in the flesh. Sad muffins sit in bins by the floor, the fruit for smoothies is haphazardly smashed against the front window, and the salad bar looks to be in a perpetual state of wilt. That said, I really did need, want and eat the falafel sandwich the amused and lovely owner of this spot, Tribeca Bagel, made for me one fall night, so I bought a hot tea, just for old time’s sake.

Because we are obsessed, we watched a House of Cards and then got ready for the wedding reception which was in Brooklyn. Forty-five minutes later, we arrived in Brooklyn, having taken the slowest possible tour of Canal Street in the history of New York->Brooklyn trips. It never gets prettier, people. Ever. It is seedy and littered and glows with fluorescent bulbs that seem to be both hopeful and desperate. One after another shop sells the exact mix of perfumes, sunglasses, bags and keychains. The boarded up facades around and above them beckon mysteriously in Chinese and English, pictures and words offering gold, reflexology, insurance and pedicures. And still the vibrancy emanates, the hard scrabble, moneyed and lack of, fast-paced negotiation that is life in NY. And I love it.

Once at the party, I hugged my dear friend of twenty years with love and congratulations. I wished his beautiful wife well, saw another college friend it’s possible I’ve not seen since she graduated a year ahead of me, met some cool new people and finally headed back to the eighth floor where we fell fast asleep.