Just a few food-related items from the past few weeks…

Rog and Lisa’s wedding celebration at Kellari’s Parea featured two extremely memorable bites. The lamb spare ribs were well seasoned and nearly falling off the bone; absolutely delicious. I could have eaten the whole chafing dish but I was good and saved some for the other guests. Then the dessert platter featured these little balls of fried dough, moist with some kind of fragrant syrup. They were so amazing I even caught the pretty young hostess grabbing one when she thought no one was looking.

Had a decent meal at Cuba. Loved the mojitos with a stick of sugar cane instead of a straw. The ceviche was just ok. The roasted pig was satisfying, but the skirt steak was definitely best in show. Worth going back on the strength of their mojitos and skirt steak alone.

Had some so-so tapas at Meson Sevilla in the theater district. The pulpo was satisfactory, the mini Spanish sausages were tasty if not a little overwhelmed with pimenton, the chicken liver was overcooked to the point of being completely dry, and the cigalas looked great but were a little lackluster in flavor. Loved their sangria though.

Speaking of drinks, Kat managed to score us reservations at Milk & Honey for Twoin’s birthday and the drinks are as superb as advertised. Every detail well thought out and executed with great ingredients. The freshest of garnishes like cucumber and mint or the extremely addictive candied ginger really take their drinks to another stratosphere.

Ate at Sushi Yasuda again and it is still consistently the best straight up sushi in Manhattan. The carafes of sake are way too tiny, but the quality and variety of the fish Yasuda serves is the best of the best. On this visit we were treated to some fried eel backbone, delightfully crunchy with big umami flavor, I think it would be the ultimate junk food to have while watching tv.

Had another steak au poivre at Old Homestead at The Borgata. For the first time ever, both Twoin and I had to send ours back because they slightly overcooked it to medium instead of medium rare. That’s the first bit of inconsistency I’ve ever observed at that restaurant. But in the end I still very much enjoyed the meal. The “crispy hash browns” are served up as a six inch fried wheel of potatoey goodness. Very well seasoned with salt and rosemary and an absolutely perfect match with the two bottles of Ramey Claret we ordered.

Made another visit to Hiura, the sublime sushi restaurant in Fort Lee. I really, really love introducing others to all my favorite things and Kat had never been to Hiura so on our way back from A.C. we made the spontaneous decision to go there for dinner. What a birthday weekend for Twoin- Yasuda, Milk & Honey, Borgata/Old Homestead and Hiura for the grand finale! And what a finale it was. The quality of the fish was every bit as good as at Yasuda, but the service from Hiura himself made it an even better overall experience. The BYOB policy helps too. In addition to the sushi omakase, we also had the uni tempura- sea urchin wrapped in shiso leaf, tempura battered and deep fried. Even if you’ve never tasted it, I’m sure you can guess how delicious that combination would be. But the real highlight for me was the fresh abalone Hiura gave me, served in its shell, the last one he had in his sushi case that evening. It was so briny, sweet and plump it was a mouthful of the best oceany flavor you can imagine. He was incredibly busy working the sushi bar because one of his refrigerators had broken so his son who normally works alongside him had to instead play the part of runner, bringing ingredients up from the basement as needed. Yet as backed up as he was with orders and doing three things at once, he stopped to give me that last abalone, seemingly just for the heck of it. What an awesome sushi chef. Based upon that particular variety of abalone, which I’ve had several times before at Hajime, and the fact that he said “nobody else has this kind of toro”, I suspected I knew who his supplier was. So on the way out, I asked him “do you buy any of your fish from Ishida-san?” and he said “yes, ALL of this is from Ishida”. Dang. That’s why everything was so amazing. Not surprisingly, Ishida is also the guy that Yasuda credits as being his fish provider. Ishida gets the best of the best, and when you taste it, you know. And the fact that Hiura uses him exclusively, not just for two or three types of fish, is really saying something about his fanatical level of pride in the quality of what he serves to his customers. Hiura is a kindly older gentleman who sort of looks like a Japanese Patrick Stewart (that’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard for you trekkies out there) and after an omakase with such personable service, Kat was absolutely smitten by him. So Ricky, who was away in Myrtle Beach for a bachelor party/golf weekend, came home to find his wife is now in love with a sushi chef in Fort Lee. Sorry Rick!

There was one other arbitrary thing I remember from that night. As I mentioned, Hiura is a BYOB restaurant and so we always bring a couple bottles of sake when we eat there. Apparently not everybody does that. At one point some people came in, sat at the other end of the sushi bar, reached into a brown paper bag and pulled out a bottle of… Johnny Walker Black (??!!). What’s that all about?