Results tagged “allegretti”

This week Frank Bruni reviews Market Table (pictured), the market-and-dining venue that now only focuses on dining from chef Mikey Price (who is a principal owner along with Joey Campanaro of Little Owl). And Bruni is taken by its "warm," "soothing," "humble," "unambiguous," and "generous" cooking, attitude and style and gives it two stars. He delights in discovering how "There’s bacon with the skate wing and bacon with the brussels sprouts and pancetta with pork loin: pig upon pig."

Of course, the big thing on everyone's minds this morning is Frank Bruni's review of Bobo, a Greenwich Village restaurant as maligned for its food as it is adored for its ambiance. Well, after a long night of suspense and speculation, Bruni has made his announcement: one star, and considerable praise for Patrick Connolly, the restaurant's third chef in a year. "In fact a few of his dishes — his appetizers, at least — manage to steal attention from the votive candles lining the dark, narrow staircase up to the main dining room and that room’s droopy lighting fixtures, which bring to mind gargantuan glass jellyfish." But when a waiter upsells Bruni into a $115 Burgundy, he finds himself "wishing that Bobo was a little less bourgeois and a little more bohemian."

Alain Allegretti is the 39 year-old chef-owner of Allegretti, awarded two stars by the New York Times last week. From Nice, and specializing in Niçois food, he's put squarely in the company of other French chefs in NY. Allegretti, who worked for Alain Chapel and Alain Ducasse in France, is representative of a kind of culinary old guard: a strange realm of butchers and cooks all named Alain. In the classic brigade style kitchen, apprentice cooks are sent from station to station within a restaurant's kitchen. Often, as part of their training program, they're sent to work at a far-flung Michelin-starred restaurant in the mountains where all the bars close early. This was Alain Allegretti's experience. And now he works on 22nd Street.

This week Frank Bruni at the Times bestows two glittering stars on Allegretti, where one of his dining companions swoons for the fish soup, sounding like an absolutely insufferable food snob: "'It tastes exactly the way it should," she said, rushing the words out as soon as the soup was down. She wanted the rest of us to know. She wanted to crow. She wanted to be done with talking and get back to the soup. She was even making those mm-mm noises...What she meant, as I learned when she passed the soup to me, was that it tasted of Mediterranean waters — scorpion fish, rouget — and of Mediterranean sunshine, the tomato flavor robust and true...Watching and nodding as I myself made joyful sense of it, she said, 'Are we in the south of France or what?' Actually, we were in Chelsea, though it was easy to be confused."