Wednesday Food News: Early Edition

Today the Times’s Keith Dixon, a self-described “clumsy, overambitious cook,” offers tips for cooking dinner in a crowded city apartment made even more cramped by a newborn baby. Dixon has adapted his cooking technique to accommodate a light-sleeping baby who, awakened by a clattering spatula, derails dinner plans as he and his wife “labor to get her back to sleep.” So he’s evolved into a “Silent Chef” with “ninja stealth” and suggests, among other things, avoiding meats that tend to smoke the place up, trading metal utensils for plastic, and using the stove’s exhaust fan as “a makeshift white-noise machine.”

For anyone who thought the Times’s wine expert, Eric Asimov, was just another stuffy oenophile, prepare to be rocked: Asimov goes totally “crazy” and rebels hardcore against the conventional wisdom that oysters are not to be paired with red wine. He says it’s a rule just waiting to be broken, so he just straight-up shatters it, “dragging along a friend to Balthazar” (must be rough palling around with this guy) where he “lets it fly” with two dozen oysters and four reds. The verdict: light reds like some Pinot Noirs do indeed pair well with oysters, and the “briniest oyster, a Stingray from the Chesapeake, was great with a 2004 Arbois trousseau from Jacques Puffeney, a wild red with a kind of funky animal quality.”

But if you want to roll like Asimov at the excellent Shaffer City Oyster Bar & Grill, you’ll have to wait until next week, when it reopens after renovations. Elsewhere, the Times’s Peter Meehan reviews World of Taste Seafood Deli/Vietnamese Food in the Bronx, which Gothamist’s intrepid Joe DiStefano liked enough last September. Meehan seems to concur that while it’s not worth a pilgrimage, “it is a must for anyone looking for a cheap, filling and delicious option in this corner of the Bronx.” Frank Bruni gives the “igloo chic” Bar Blanc a sturdy two stars, calling it inconsistent and precious but "terrificly successful" with dishes like the red snapper fillet with shiso, dashi, ginger, and hon shimeji mushrooms.

Photo: yerffej9.