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FORK PLAY June 19, 2009
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Bucket List. DBGB. Locanda Verde. Sao Paulo. Eating Like a Native.
Dear Friends and Family,
I want to steal a fabulous idea from Aspen Magazine's just published summer issue. It's their Bucket List, "87 Local Treats to Eat before You Die (or your cardiologist  catches on)." The very thought of a New York Menu Bucket List makes me feverish with desire. Where to start? New York is soooo rich. I could begin with the "egg" and egg sandwiches at Jean-George and, of course, his sea urchin on black bread with jalapeño and yuzu. Pan-fried rice cake with duck egg and sausage at Pho Sure. Uni panini with mustard oil at El Quinto Pino. Eric Ripert's escolar confit. The coffee caramel sundae at DBGB. Crusty mac n' cheese baked onto the iron skillet at The Smith. A rare strip steak and the skyscraper chocolate cake at Strip House. How can I settle on just one burger? Must I? Before I get too lost in reverie... I'd like to know what's on your Bucket List. Email me and we'll put together a guide to sheer pleasure.
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Daniel Does the Bowery
It's already standing room only with the usual foodie  first nighters in full swarm at DBGB, Daniel's new sausage, beer and burger joint. It's still a work in progress but of course you want to snag a table. Click here to know what you should order. Should you join the crush at Robert De Niro's Locanda Verde? Definitely. And get the whipped fresh ricotta for the table. Read why by clicking here. The high risk culinary world of restaurant owners and historians has sent Bill Grimes back to rewrite with his upcoming ode to the way New York eats, Appetite City, due this fall. Want to read more? Click here.
 And if you are curious about the golden days of Gray Kunz, you'll want to read an October 28, 1991 review I just posted in Vintage: The Gray Eminence.
Where would you send a savvy client who wants the best Italian food New York offers? See Ask Gael by clicking here. Are you watching me on Bravo's new series, "Top Chef Masters"? Wylie Dufresne put together a new-world chicken and egg this week for the creators and writers of "Lost", major "Top Chef" fans. Catch a rerun and be sure to watch next Wednesday at 10 p.m. when four star chefs have to turn odd animal parts into street food and persuade passersby to eat it. Winner picks up $10,000 for his or her charity.
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Tweets from São Paulo
If you happen to be following my tweets - compulsive as I am, it seems I have become an obsessed tweeter or am I a hopeless twit? I count my new followers every day,  measuring how I'm only 817,814 behind Martha. Join me at twitter.com/gaelgreene if you care. Anyway, you might know that the Road Food Warrior and I are just back from a bustling food and wine festival in São Paulo, "Paladar: Cozinha do Brasil," produced by the newspaper Estado's food department and the local Grand Hyatt. Think star chefs doing food demos, wine tastings, champions of local products, chefs discovering neglected regional cooking, lectures on fruits not even Brazilians know, book signings, chef-endorsed cookware peddling... Sound familiar? Yes, exactly like our own wine and food extravaganzas, seriously ambitious and full of Brasil (sic) pride. The city is under a siege of foodism. Affluent locals checked into the Hyatt for total immersion in the three-day weekend of excess - one way to avoid the horrendous traffic jams.
Alas, as the population was soaring to 18 million, the city didn't plan enough subway lines, so people sit in their cars. One woman showed us the book she was reading at  the wheel as her car inched along to pick us up for lunch. Great people. Cosmopolitan. Not much history (Brazil is young like America) but "100 years of Carmen Miranda" was playing downtown. It was wonderful to be somewhere recession-free. (Banks regulated years ago couldn't buy our poisonous deals). The downside - I didn't see anything on sale.
Quite frankly, I am not sending you to Sao Paulo - it is not Venice or Paris or even Chicago or Buenos Aires - though the festival is remarkable. Feijoada in one dining room, Bahia dishes in another, Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian meats glazing on the outdoor grill. The Hyatt's soaring lobby is elegant, the service impeccable. I loved the soap menu in the bathroom, the brooding, deeply serious coffee, All-Bran and the small quiche of the day every morning at breakfast. We met live wire journalists - hip and instantly intimate. They fed us exotic fruits and Mortadella sandwiches in the market, led us through little Japan, followed by a visit to a shopping mall for the town's best ice cream, leapt up to join the dancers on a wild night of samba, and made me a local media star with my face in a floppy chartreuse sun hat on the front page of Paladar.
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Eating Like the Natives
Sao Paulo families come to Figueira Rubiyat (Rua Haddock Lobo, 1738 55-11-3087-1399) on Sunday so that's  where our hosts took us for Sunday lunch on a terrace that surrounds an enormous 100 year-old fig tree. (Wednesdays and Saturdays, Figueira does traditional feijoada.) In the few minutes it took to cover the table with what the menu calls "Temptations," 10 varieties of homemade bread, the obligatory cheese rolls, crisps and sticks with a selection of appetizers ($10), I am already woozy on three sips of a passion fruit caipirinha. Then one of our hosts offers a taste of his made with sake, cucumber and lime, deceptively innocent and fresh. I switch. Beef from the owner's farm is the theme here. The featured "Queen," 650 grams of rumpsteak, meaty, tender and rare, with puffed-up soufflé potatoes, is better than any steak I'd tasted in Argentina, enough for four of us to share. The wood-burning oven also does magic with Tambaqui rib, a native river fish, and butterflied octopus. At the end, I need some lemon sorbet, not the vast, near-obscene dessert buffet in a back room, but of course, work work work. I am a slave to my job.
Sao Paulians eat pizza Sunday night we are told. That's how we get to a table in the enclosed garden room at the original Braz Moema (55-11-5561.0905), locals' choice for  best in town, surrounded by families and, across the way, lovers kissing. We have the Braz pie with zucchini and the calabresa with spicy sausage and slivers of raw onion - bubbling blistered crust, kept warm under a tin cover (never saw that anywhere before), not the best, but world class. Pao de calabresa, dough rolled with sausage inside, big as a breadbox, is completely superfluous but pretty fabulous and I'm eating it too.
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Alex Atala is the town's ultimate star, worshipped for elevating local products with his artistry and sophistication at D.O.M. (Rua Barão de Capanema, 549; 55-11-3088-0761). Atala recently disavowed truffles and foie gras as alien intruders. He knows he's feeding a critic and emerges, with each of eight courses in a lingering $140 chef's tasting, to remove his glasses, smile unassumingly and explain. Most of it is dazzling, especially a green tomato gel with Peruvian corn, Brazilian aromatics and one tongue-numbing pepper, and the luscious oysters in a brioche crust with marinated tapioca. His finale, "everything children hate," as he put it with a smile - Jack Daniel's sorbet, curry, chocolate, salt, arugula and pepper - set me tofantasizing how wonderful he must be in bed.
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Two rival journalists, friends from college, insist we make a pilgrimage to Mocotó (Avenue Ns. Senhora do Loreto, 1100, Vila Medeiros 55-11-2951-3056), where a  young culinary rock star named Rodrigo Oliveira draws lines down the block evenings and weekends cooking traditional food from the northwest in his father's simple joint that also boasts more than a 100 different cachaças. It's two hour's round trip, but yes, worth it for the earthy marrow and fava soup alone. I loved the soufflé-like puff of cheese studded with sausage, sensational goat stew and a hill of exotic fruit sorbet.
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 If Mocoto is the hash house of lunch, brand new Kaa (Avenue Presidente Juscelino Kubitschk 279; 55-11- 3045 04355), lush with 7000 tropical plants and a retractable glass ceiling, is the gorgeous new "uptown" canteen. Power-lunchers and tall women in minis and stilettos with hardware-draped totes keep tables turning for ex-Hyatt chef Pascal Valero's sophisticated global cooking. Best today is a lively salmon tartare with fresh herbs and crème fraîche, the heart of palm Carpaccio with shrimp and trails of port wine reduction, and a brace of quails plumped to bursting with wonderfully savory cous cous.
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Photos of Jean Georges caviar on egg toast, DBGB desserts, Locanda Verde ricotta and sliders, the Banco do Juca vender with melon-like crua, the waiter at Figueira, the pizza at Braz, Mocoto's charismatic chef, and the long, leafy room at Kaa may not be used without permission from Steven Richter.
Gael in hat is by Giovanna Tucci.
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Fork Play copyright Gael Greene 2009.
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