Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Casa Mono and other new venues
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
CThis is not one of my takeout restaurant reviews, far from it. We have been fascinated by the new inhabitant of the restaurant corner at 17th and Irving Place, Casa Mono, with its open door-windows and jammed small black tables topped by giant wine goblets. Filled with young chattering people at all hours of the evening, it was always too crowded to visit. The Convention week gave us a chance to try it out.
Casa Mono, a 40-seat restaurant, serves wine and small Spanish dishes, unusual for the Union Square location. Celebrity chef Mario Batali and his partner Joseph Bastianich of Greenwich Village Italian food renown (Babbo, Lupa. Esca, Otto) have entered a new realm of ethnicity, and it works. Although the suggested meal style - to order half a dozen or more of the tiny plates par couple and trade bites - appears upscale for the ordinary diner, with appetizers and vegetable dishes under $10 and seafood/ meat items under $16, you do not really need a bank loan to dine.
Our meal started with a service of cold tap water, the goblets found in a shelf under the tabletop Soon appeared a plate of small semolina-wheat baguettes, called epi-rolls, from Tom Cat, an inventive Long Island City bakery, and another, of three kinds of olives in extra virgin oil, fat green Gordales, little brown Arbequinas and green Manzanillas. Dipping the bread while waiting for the main course satisfied the early hunger pangs. The food side of the menu featured unusual items - pulpo (baby octopus), sepia (large calamari or cuttlefish), cockles (small mussels, just like in the song), chitirones (baby squid), as well as tripe, coxcombs, sweetbreads and conventional lamb and chicken and strip steak preparations, many of them made ala plancha, seared on a smoky hot plate. These are small dishes, individually served, as contrasted to tapas, bite-size creations on a common platter. Modest of appetite after the baguette feast, we shared a fried anchovy appetizer, a baby octopus entrée and, as vegetable, asparagus a la plancha. The latter came with a piquant-sweet lemony mayonnaise dressing.
The octopus main course, also a la plancha, was a crunchy dish, amplified by a crisp vegetable side, raw fennel, a surprise taste, reminding of seviche with fennel, once tasted under the Yucatan moon. But I digress. The overall impression of the dinner was simplicity, and pure foods well prepared, a style once much favored by the Culinary Institute of America; if the combination was unusual, so much the better. In my bachelor days I too favored unusual combinations, perhaps excessively, using sherry as my regular shock additive, viz. Dinty Moore Stew con Amontillado. No mas, amigos.
The wine list, some 200 varieties, was approached cautiously. The arrangement is by region, within the Blanco and Tinto (red) categories, plus a few Rosado and Cava (sparkling) selections, starting with $25 bottles in each group. Not much Rioja. For the taster, a Cuarto de Vino, actually 1/3 of a bottle or 8 ½ ounces (the term really describes a quarter of a liter) at $11 to $25, gives you an opportunity to experiment with the varieties on hand. We tried El Regajal 2002, a blend of Cabernet, Syrah, Merlot and Tempranillo (recent modern favorite grape), pleasant, at $14, which disappeared in the bottom of our 12 -oz tulip glasses; but that was good, we could twirl the wine to oxidize the product and get the best of the flavor. I learned that from a Portuguese wine expert, former Gramercy Park neighbor, Jean Anderson, a food wizard and author of some 20 books, now in retirement in NC. Muito obrigado, Jean!
Casa Mono has a companion venue next door, Bar Jamon, a wine bar.
**
The Cellar, another new watering place in the 14th Street desert, welcomes poets. Would you like to read your works (five-min max), or listen to others, in a small, friendly, non-battling environment? The Saturn Poetry Series, a nine-year old group, meets every Monday, 7-10PM, at the Cellar, a three-months old bar, 1325 East 14th Street, south of 2nd Ave. The poets' previous venues were the Nightingale, on 2nd Ave nearby, and the Revival, on 15th Street. The leaders are Su Polo and David Elsasser. Thus from Peter Cholnik, the "Poet of the Road," while I was inquiring about the new bar, doing research on behalf of my T&V's takeout reastaurant data base.
Looking at the Cellar's music schedule, one of their groups, Smashing Time, offers the best of post-Punk, Psychedelic, Krautrock, New Wave Progroc and Soul, slightly recherché for anybody whose pop music dates back to Bill Haley, the King and the Beatles' decades. Time marches on.
**
Wally Dobelis and the staff of T&V offer their Rosh Hashanah greetings to our readers.
CThis is not one of my takeout restaurant reviews, far from it. We have been fascinated by the new inhabitant of the restaurant corner at 17th and Irving Place, Casa Mono, with its open door-windows and jammed small black tables topped by giant wine goblets. Filled with young chattering people at all hours of the evening, it was always too crowded to visit. The Convention week gave us a chance to try it out.
Casa Mono, a 40-seat restaurant, serves wine and small Spanish dishes, unusual for the Union Square location. Celebrity chef Mario Batali and his partner Joseph Bastianich of Greenwich Village Italian food renown (Babbo, Lupa. Esca, Otto) have entered a new realm of ethnicity, and it works. Although the suggested meal style - to order half a dozen or more of the tiny plates par couple and trade bites - appears upscale for the ordinary diner, with appetizers and vegetable dishes under $10 and seafood/ meat items under $16, you do not really need a bank loan to dine.
Our meal started with a service of cold tap water, the goblets found in a shelf under the tabletop Soon appeared a plate of small semolina-wheat baguettes, called epi-rolls, from Tom Cat, an inventive Long Island City bakery, and another, of three kinds of olives in extra virgin oil, fat green Gordales, little brown Arbequinas and green Manzanillas. Dipping the bread while waiting for the main course satisfied the early hunger pangs. The food side of the menu featured unusual items - pulpo (baby octopus), sepia (large calamari or cuttlefish), cockles (small mussels, just like in the song), chitirones (baby squid), as well as tripe, coxcombs, sweetbreads and conventional lamb and chicken and strip steak preparations, many of them made ala plancha, seared on a smoky hot plate. These are small dishes, individually served, as contrasted to tapas, bite-size creations on a common platter. Modest of appetite after the baguette feast, we shared a fried anchovy appetizer, a baby octopus entrée and, as vegetable, asparagus a la plancha. The latter came with a piquant-sweet lemony mayonnaise dressing.
The octopus main course, also a la plancha, was a crunchy dish, amplified by a crisp vegetable side, raw fennel, a surprise taste, reminding of seviche with fennel, once tasted under the Yucatan moon. But I digress. The overall impression of the dinner was simplicity, and pure foods well prepared, a style once much favored by the Culinary Institute of America; if the combination was unusual, so much the better. In my bachelor days I too favored unusual combinations, perhaps excessively, using sherry as my regular shock additive, viz. Dinty Moore Stew con Amontillado. No mas, amigos.
The wine list, some 200 varieties, was approached cautiously. The arrangement is by region, within the Blanco and Tinto (red) categories, plus a few Rosado and Cava (sparkling) selections, starting with $25 bottles in each group. Not much Rioja. For the taster, a Cuarto de Vino, actually 1/3 of a bottle or 8 ½ ounces (the term really describes a quarter of a liter) at $11 to $25, gives you an opportunity to experiment with the varieties on hand. We tried El Regajal 2002, a blend of Cabernet, Syrah, Merlot and Tempranillo (recent modern favorite grape), pleasant, at $14, which disappeared in the bottom of our 12 -oz tulip glasses; but that was good, we could twirl the wine to oxidize the product and get the best of the flavor. I learned that from a Portuguese wine expert, former Gramercy Park neighbor, Jean Anderson, a food wizard and author of some 20 books, now in retirement in NC. Muito obrigado, Jean!
Casa Mono has a companion venue next door, Bar Jamon, a wine bar.
**
The Cellar, another new watering place in the 14th Street desert, welcomes poets. Would you like to read your works (five-min max), or listen to others, in a small, friendly, non-battling environment? The Saturn Poetry Series, a nine-year old group, meets every Monday, 7-10PM, at the Cellar, a three-months old bar, 1325 East 14th Street, south of 2nd Ave. The poets' previous venues were the Nightingale, on 2nd Ave nearby, and the Revival, on 15th Street. The leaders are Su Polo and David Elsasser. Thus from Peter Cholnik, the "Poet of the Road," while I was inquiring about the new bar, doing research on behalf of my T&V's takeout reastaurant data base.
Looking at the Cellar's music schedule, one of their groups, Smashing Time, offers the best of post-Punk, Psychedelic, Krautrock, New Wave Progroc and Soul, slightly recherché for anybody whose pop music dates back to Bill Haley, the King and the Beatles' decades. Time marches on.
**
Wally Dobelis and the staff of T&V offer their Rosh Hashanah greetings to our readers.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 2:37 PM 
