Ruth Tobias

Check this out.

Like all strokes of genius, P.B. Loco’s curried peanut butter seems at once brilliantly inventive & forehead-smackingly intuitive. Peanuts & curry go together like, well, peanuts & chocolate, peanuts & coconut, peanuts & chili, peanuts & just about everything. Peanuts & chicken. Maybe their next flavor should be chicken butter. I’d eat it.

Picked this up on my 3rd trip to Urban Pantry in less than 36 hours; the Director & I will be having our 2nd meal in as many nights composed entirely of UP cheese, sausage & crackers, the which I will be filling y’all in on right soon.

Ooh, Sushi Den, you make me so mad! Why you gotta be all luscious & kind one moment & such a raggedy drag the next? Why you gotta promise me seafood salad I’m picturing like so

& then give me this 1-shrimp, 2-tentacle-tip, 2-sad-krabstick crap? For 9 clams no less?

Why you gotta say you put fishcakes in my clear soup, when what’s clear is it contains jack?

Fishcake

Jack

At least the gooey, greasy gut-grenade that is dynamite (not to mix explosives metaphors, at the risk of blowing up the whole post) was dynamite.

Which is why I’ll keep crawling back, though you done me so wrong.

***UPDATE: Urban Pantry is now CLOSED.***

With a harbor on the Atlantic, a 300-year history of immigration & a monopoly on internationally renowned universities, Boston is naturally a global gourmet playground. Much as I looked forward to moving to Denver last year, I didn’t kid myself about the imminent restrictions on my shopping options, & I bid a fond adieu to the justly celebrated Formaggio Kitchen, the precious & quirky Wine Bottega, Russian deli Berezka, Harvard Square institution Cardullo’s, Asian chain Super 88 & all the other remarkable markets & boutiques I could spend hours upon hours in, checking out dried shark here & fig-leaf-wrapped buffalo whey there, artisanal bottles of mead here & macadamia oil there, big beautiful bunches of long beans here & chocolates coated in fairy dust with jellied fairy-heart centers & whatnot there.

But now that Alex Failmezger’s South Broadway gourmet shop Urban Pantry is finally open, I suddenly don’t feel quite so homesick (shopsick, rather).

First of all, it’s absolutely darling, airy & bright & lined with counters & shelves of bottles & bags & tins & bars & jars & packets that are a collective delight to behold as abstractions from a distance, never mind up close, when you can read the labels & revel in your concrete discoveries: Chardonnay-infused peanut brittle, hand-rolled couscous, chips & crisps from India & Asia, charcoal crackers, onion jam, world’s prettiest trail mix,

these things—which Failmezger says are “like rugelach but spicy” with chili, sesame seeds & fennel seeds—

this cheesecake in a jar!, which I can’t wait to spoon up making like Navin R. Johnson,

& so on & so forth. But perhaps best of all, she’s got a charcuterie & cheese case to rival any in town, including St. Kilian’s. In fact, hers wins, containing as it does big red hemispheres of the very mimolette whose local unavailability I bemoaned a while back, as well as robiola tre latte (si, non due ma tre: cow, sheep & goat), roqueforts boasting more bleu than blanc, 2 kinds of finocchino, wild boar sausage, jamón ibérico & much much more.

& that includes Vosges Mo’s Bacon Bar, there being no candy wackier or cooler on this earth.

So I’m thinking I’m in the right place at the right time.

this voodoo doll

this ring

this postcard from Naples

& this raw unfiltered coffee-flower honey made, I guess, by Chiapan rebels (honestly, where do they find the time?) & sold at St. Kickass Cheese Shop, which Hugh, the Wayne Coyne lookalike (except not, as far as I know, covered in blood) who owns the place, calls “smoky,” so I’ll concur:

Wow, I wish somebody’d told me my second home was so much swankier than my first one before I moved in. I didn’t know I had the funds to install a wall-to-wall wine rack, or employ a stonemason, or arrange low-slung couches & leather armchairs in my lounge in such offhand fashion. I didn’t know I had such fine taste.

Better yet, my good taste turns out not to be automatically synonymous with expensive taste. After 4 dishes & 4 drinks, the Director & I owed 40 bucks apiece. If I’d have known it would be so reasonable, I’d have eaten way more & wished I had two working mouths like that wacky Indian baby.

The menu falls into a category I love to pretend to hate but also to secretly love: upscale comfort food. Take this trout dip:

Served with herbed flatbread wedges & rye toasties, it was solid, chunky, more like a spread than a dip proper: think brick-type cream cheese suffused with the smoke of the flaked trout & tinged with the iron of torn spinach. Huh, brick, iron, smoke—sounds like we were eating a detail from an industrial landscape. In that case it tasted better than it sounds.

Or take our side of green-bean casserole. All too often, chefs’ ostensibly playful takes on white-trash cooking are just plain condescending, being no better but 10 times as expensive as the originals—you know, the whole “let’s serve tiny boudin noir with green-tomato chutney & call them ‘cocktail weiners with ketchup!’” or “let’s make our own English-rose-&-African-violet-infused jellybeans & then put them in little boxes which we’ll smear with sugar ‘thumbprints’ so it seems like they’ve been fished back out of the movie-theater garbage can by alley bums!” thing is so played out. But this, richly fresh with green beans & that funkiest of spoonable perfumes, cream of mushroom soup, is downright soulful.

Sprinkled with fried shallot rings, it does its part to right a wrong that contemporary kitchens have been perpetuating for all too long. My hat’s off, & it’s not even a Prada trucker cap.

What’s with the full-force gushing, the spit-mottled glottal-stop-&-go over Big Hoss? The pulled pork was so dry I thought I might have accidentally asked for pulled taffy. That’s what I got, the pork-taffy platter.

Good thing my friend MO was there to drown out all the ballyhoo, spewing spot-on censure: “It’s not smoky, it’s not succulent, there aren’t any flecks of spice, there’s not that much sauce,” she said, wondering exactly what the pitmaster’s sense of the difference between barbecuing meat and just, you know, cooking it all the way through was.
The “grilled Western veggies” mixed into the diced “campfire potatoes” were pretty much just onions & mushrooms; funny, because there’s another side dish called “onions & mushrooms,” which are caramelized & sauteed, respectively. Actually, fine & dandy—it’s all hash to me—but a little truth in advertising would have gone a longer way.
Ditto the “unlimited soup & salad bar.” What they mean, of course, is “all-you-can-eat soup & salad bar.” Those are 2 different things. Your bowl may be bottomless, but if all you’ve got to fill it with is some lettuce &, in MO’s words, 14 kinds of ranch dressing, your stomach’s bound to hit its limit pretty quick. (OK, to be truthful myself, there were maybe 4 or 5 vegetables.)
I know, I know, you don’t go to a smokehouse for salad. But considering my jerky & MO’s middling andouille, I’m not so inclined to go for ‘cue either. They do make some mean baked beans, though, & some good greasy doodles. They should call it the Mean Bean & Greasy Doodle House. Then I’d go there lots.

is that I was there with Jane & Shena, which meant I could pretend I was having lunch in the jungle. I swung a vine from Denver to the restaurant in Boulder in a loincloth & sneakers, yodeling “Ajiajiajiajiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”
On an Aji-calibrated scale from solid to middling rather than awesome to cruddy, the second-best thing was something I didn’t order: the chocolate flan, which we agreed seemed less like a custard than a mousse, both denser & more airy—it wasn’t at that in-between stage most custards occupy between the liquid & the solid state, the awkward young adult or maybe the Crispin Glover of desserts, sort of bouncing around from hard-to-identify flavor & texture to hard-to-identify flavor & texture. This, instead, was a swatch of dark-chocolate suede you could confidently purchase a whole bolt of to drape your tummy in & make it look so elegant.

The third- and fourth-best things I didn’t order either—in fact I didn’t even taste them, but I could tell just by looking: Jane’s ground-beef-stuffed & pomegranate-seed-sprinkled poblano with walnut sauce

& Shena’s torta piled with braised rib meat, cabbage, & fried potato strings, accompanied by sweet-potato fries:

Wait, somewhere better than the second-best thing was the thing about how Shena went to a poetry reading by a guy with Tourette’s. Suppose he were a master of, say, alliteration? How would you know?
I have to go think about that. To be continued…
***
The fifth-best thing, also known as the second-worst thing, was my posole: it seemed to me a bit thin, a bit soupy, for something that in my experience should be a chunky stew, hominy-heavy & liquid-light—never mind something that supposedly contained not only pork loin but also chorizo & smoked bacon, of which the latter alone really made its presence known:

The last-best thing was the calamari, which just couldn’t get it together. What did it want to be, fried or sauteed? A bar snack or a salad?

As with the seaweed salad I suffered at Aji’s sibling Leaf, the general effect was one of not only militant invasion by but mission creep on the part of the overpowering forces of mizuna. Even the pancetta took it lying down:

If that pancetta wasn’t raw & uncut, & I don’t at all mean like fine porn but exactly like sad cold pork product, instead of sliced up & pan-fried with the squid, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. & seeing how I was hanging out with the queens of the wild kingdom, how do you know I’m not?

For one thing, this fairly new, assez véritable-blu French bistro on 38th is totally reasonable; what with appetizers averaging $9.75 and entrees $18 (exactly—I used a calculator), no splurging’s necessary. For another, the cooking doesn’t quite warrant it; it’s solid, not bud-blowingly sumptuous. I wouldn’t say we indulged ourselves, I’d say we moderately enjoyed ourselves. Granted, Moderately Enjoy French Bistro doesn’t really have the same je ne sais quoi.

Then again, & for another, you don’t have to indulge yourself—they indulge you. The service here is so gregariously disarming as to cause inner turmoil by compelling you to even consider using the phrase “Old World charm.” Ick, now I have to go spit.

OK, I’m back. The same can be said for the ambiance, all subway-tile-style brickwork and sweetly amateur oil paintings and intricate stained-glass panes and brown satin bunting and the vague sense that it might once have been a shag-carpeted den wherein some English professor & his former-student wife’s faculty parties got a little out of hand.

You get the gist:

(That’s me at the edge. I know, it’s probably not how you imagined me at all. But I was born scribbled out and, at the time, there was nothing the doctors could do. Now, of course, medical science can work miracles with Photoshop.)

The shot was snapped by the indeterminately Euro bartender, Sabi (“like wasabi, but not so green”—whatever that means; we giggled anyway, smitten), who may or may not also have been the maître’d &/or owner. It was he who kept our wine glasses filled & brought us our hot, crusty rolls—hooray!—with cold pats of butter—aww. (They sure don’t make ‘em like that Schoolhouse Rock anymore, eh?) He delivered our pommes pailles–toupeed steak tartare, nicely accompanied by nifty little mounds of minced cornichon, caper & red onion as well as sea salt but ultimately disappointing, the beef sort of crumbly & also mumbly, as in bland—its flavor didn’t speak for itself:

Much better were the plats classiques. While the Director’s frites could have been crispier—as seems to have been the case all too often lately, the exceptions being those at Limón & Black Pearl—the steak au poivre vert itself was spot-on,

pretty in pink within &, without, smothered in a gently musty green-peppercorn sauce that, like the deeply, darkly Burgundied marinade of the coq au vin,

was so textbook it was in fact the Guide Culinaire, all dusty & warped in a box in an attic in a stone-built farmhouse in the Val de Loire. I don’t know that that elbow macaroni was so traditionnel, but it sure was cute with chunks of bacon & mushrooms & pearl onions so golden I thought they were chickpeas at first.

The likewise orthodox sweets—chocolate cake, apple tart & do I even need to say crème brûlée?—weren’t our thing, so we headed on home to “watch a movie,” which is our little secret code for “conk out slack-mouthed on the couch before the opening credits stop rolling.” Hooray!

As we gathered ourselves together, we overheard Sabi joke with the regulars seated next to us at the tiny marble-topped bar, “Where are you going to go that they’ll treat you better?” They didn’t really seem to have an answer to that.

I totally thought this place was gonna make me sick at first, showing as it does all the signs of hipness as defined by your average aging ad man in tasseled loafers with a constant shaving rash & a fetish for bare feet squishing raw hamburger. Which doesn’t mean he’d be wrong, by the way. One of the bartenders looked like he’d traveled through time to get to Tamayo from his synth gig with Animotion

and the other looked like she’d just popped in from the set of Rock of Love—all to her credit, actually, as I must say I’m a fan! That Bret Michaels is just a hoot with his 3-word vocabulary,* his multiple blepharoplasties & delusions of, oh, well, grandeur’s probably not the right word for it.

The bar was lined with guys just in from Olympia ordering margaritas “not too sweet—like me” and then repeating “not too sweet” in case Brandiii or Cloverleaf or whatever her name was didn’t get it & the wall behind it lined with a vivid inlaid mural which is mostly a little faux-primitive (but has nice touches like this).

But what emerged from the kitchen didn’t make me sick, and some of it made me all better. Let’s look back at the Harley Davidson Shifting Gears Moment, as they called the KO that led to Brian Stann’s upset in the WEC light-heavyweight title fight we were watching just now, making my brain do a 360 inside my cranium.

It wasn’t the guacamole & chips,

both of which were good & fresh but hardly superior to any of the other versions I’ve had lately, nor the ensalada mixta, though as a retort to the cliché that is the bistro salad with panko-crusted goat cheese, sundried cranberries, candied pecans & raspberry vinaigrette—Google it, I swear you’ll find a jillion—it was pretty snappy, graced as it was with a disk of masa-wrapped, beer-spiked Chimay cheese, plump cherries braised with ancho chiles & a vinaigrette that gained in aromatic complexity from serrano chiles and hoja santa, a sassafras-like Mexican herb that may or may not cause cancer, like everything else I ingest, touch, look at, smell, hear & am. Granted, it still contained candied pecans.

No, what cured me of the cancer I may or may not already have a recurrence of was this

for its medieval sexiness, whole chunks of flesh just slipping off, and for the richness of brussel sprouts cooked with prosciutto. & this mélange of grilled zucchini, eggplant, carrots, mushrooms & supposedly tomatoes, although I don’t remember them, set over a mound of ultra-fluffy mashed potatoes daubed with cream & green onion, in a citrus-adobo broth that may actually have both produced & contained copious drops of my own sweat &, best of all, under a melting dollop of butter just kissed, not even, air-kissed with truffle & habañero.

These dishes were on the winter menu; Blondie May told us the spring menu was about to debut. Next time I’ve got a tumor I guess we’ll have to check in & check it out.

*Nonetheless sufficient for BrainyQuote.com to list him as an eminently quotable authority figure.

***UPDATE: Mosaic is now CLOSED.***

Before we caught, in every (except the literal) sense, Dengue Fever at the hi-dive last night (if you’re unfamilliar, get familiar: the doll-like lead singer wears what our friend Keith pegged as a gently used prom dress & sings mostly in Cambodian; the guitarist channels some sort of Hasidic Castro; the bassist is a 7-foot-tall black bouncing ball of winningly awkward sexual exuberance; the keyboardist has some sort of Rob-Reiner-as-Meathead thing going on, and every number’s like a cross between a TV spy-show theme, a torch song you’d, if you were a GI in some wartime cabaret overseas, cry in your warm, watery beer over, & early-’80s ska), we drove out to Parker on something of an Open Table–generated whim to check out Mosaic.

To the extent that you can be ambivalent about your own whims, however, we were. Wherefore the dearth of press coverage, the wordlessness-of-mouth? Why stuck way out on the barren corner of a freeway exit in Parker in a squat building whose darkened exterior suggests some sort of industrial paint outlet? Is the guy in street clothes who left his cocktail at his seat at the bar to come greet us at the host stand a customer? Should the lounge be so aura-destroyingly fluorescent? Why is the dining room, much more handsomely if sci-fi-ly mood-lit by this Star Trekkian fireplace

(cf. )

& the fishtank behind it as utterly empty as it is ambitiously spacious? What’s with the spooky video loop of the tropical waterfall on the smattering of flatscreens? Why is this 14-year-old in a Nehru collar—actually, the question could end there—serving us an amuse bouche before we’ve even opened the wine list, & why is he calling it “honeydew, sundried tomato & corn ceviche with a wonton chip”? If it’s fishless, isn’t it just honeydew, sundried tomato & corn with a wonton chip?

But then we tasted it, each little chile-peppered cube producing a burst of juice (& hence a flood of fond memories of this gum—love that squirt!),

& our questions began to yield to answers, doubt to delight. Of the 5 dishes we sampled, 4 totally startled us with their gorgeously wrought complexity, which the menu descriptions rarely even came close to capturing.

This, for instance, is not lamb tempura. This is a lamb fritter, & no less fabulous for that,

thickly but crisply battered, cumin-scented & tamarind-glazed. Nor does “mascarpone & macadamia nut relish” begin to cover what lies beneath;

the smoky-bright, sweet-tart stuff contained dark & golden raisins & bits of orange & fresh cranberry too, here & there mingling with scant dollops of spicy mustard.

What the menu intriguingly calls “Balkan meat & potato stones” are basically croquettes, in themselves crackerjacks—beneath their outer shell the potatoes hot, soft & moist as if freshly whipped, with just a whiff of good old but ever-welcome truffle; the lamb & beef at the center ground to a near-paste that made me wish they made meat-flavored Crest—but especially fascinating for being smothered in a sesame oil–tinged, smoked Thai chili–corn sauce so deliciously elusive we could have sworn it was cheese-based, but no—& yet yes, in spirit, I believe it was:

By the way, those are also called “small plates.” Ditto this “sauteed feta,”

its texture somehow reminiscent of frittata, its saltiness mellowed not only by the cooking method but also by the brown-bread slices the squares sat atop, so thin & crisp they were really hot brown crackers, & of course by the drizzle of balsamic syrup, but at the same time echoed (the saltiness) in the daubs of what the menu lists as baby spinach, pine nuts, raisins & caperberries—which again, given the myriad facets of flavor those tiny baubles of condiment contained, I’m betting was indeed all in there, & possibly olives too, as they clearly evoked tapenade.

While I kept on going strong with a superb signature salad that was like nothing so much as smoked-fish gorp, the Director suffered the only blow of the evening, delivered heartily—the only thing delivered heartily—by what was supposed to be pan-seared salmon & scallops in a smoked onion broth with lobster, corn & potato hash & kiwi-watercress salad but seemed just mostly to be some fish in some liquid, all the rest melting away. Where everything else had been subtly layered & swirled, this was just muddied.

Still. I’d gladly wade through a little sludge to get to another meal as originally conceived, smartly executed &, get this!, fairly priced—the entrees hover around the $20 mark; wines rarely break $40—as this one.