Belly, belly good

One thing about New York that is instantly evid­ent in com­par­ison to the mid-west­ern towns we’ve been passing through is the qual­ity of the food, although we did have one excel­lent example of unusu­ally good road food in a little town called Le Claire on the Iowa side of the Mis­sis­sippi. That was still effect­ively New York food, though, as the chef was a New Yorker who had, like us, stopped in Le Claire and seen that it was a lovely little town. He decided to stay and build a res­taur­ant called Faith­ful Pilot, though, with superb duck (usu­ally with black­berry pepper sauce but served with peach sauce for me because of the gluten issue), amaz­ing mush­room spring rolls with soy ginger reduc­tion, accord­ing to Doug, and deli­cious flour­less chocol­ate cake.

In New York itself, we’ve had a great dinner with my cous­ins, Vanessa and David and Dav­id’s part­ner Rachel at Thai Market on Ams­ter­dam near 107th Street, where the fish was incred­ible (car­a­mel­ized tam­ar­ind sauce with sweet chilli), the crab fried rice was just right and the tapioca pearls with coconut milk were del­ic­ate and subtle. The con­ver­sa­tion there was also great, catch­ing up with my cous­ins I haven’t seen for more than a year, hear­ing about their adven­tures in the New York film industry – Vanes­sa’s been work­ing with star­lets on Japan­ese tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials and is in charge of shut­ting down high­ways for heli­copter shots for another one soon, David is in the pro­cess of find­ing satel­lite Inter­net for an entire news­room that will be camped out in some ware­house some­where for a spe­cial event. We gave them the presents we bought in Peru and they were well received. David and Rachel are also Burn­ers so there was some talk about Paul Addis and vari­ous other burner things, and dis­cus­sions of good vodka bars.

Then yes­ter­day, Doug and I had break­fast at Café Mogador down the road from where we’re stay­ing with Matt in the East Vil­lage. Moroc­can poached eggs with a spicy tomato sauce and fried pota­toes done per­fectly. Another spiced dip­ping sauce for Doug’s pita bread; I just put it on my eggs. Matched per­fectly with sweet Moroc­can mint tea.

And for dinner, I asked Matt to find the gluten-free pizza place I’d heard about. It’s called Risot­teria and it’s on Bleecker near 7th Ave. It was unbe­liev­ably good. The gluten-free bread­sticks were soft and fluffy and you would­n’t know they wer­en’t reg­u­lar bread. The pizzas we had were roas­ted garlic prawns and gruyà¨re and the second was moz­zarella, por­to­bello mush­rooms and truffle oil. The crust was a little thin but held together and the top­pings were superb. The lemon cheese­cake and chocol­ate brownie were also great. We forgot to buy the packet mixes they sell so I guess we’ll just have to go back (chocol­ate cup­cake mix!).