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Eat This Immediately
Few images are more landlubbery than a sky-high stack of Farmer John hay bales, but chef Andy Kitko at Oyster House (1516 Sansom St.) has developed a way to work the grazing fodder onto his nearly-all-seafood menu. Kikto, who first worked with hay in a kitchen context at NYC's Café Boulud, pops the tops of briny oysters (Cape May Salts lately) and tops them with squiggles of compound butter flavored with shallots and Herbes de Provence. He then tosses a handful of hay directly onto a hot grill, nestles the shucked oysters right on top of the pile and domes the whole thing, letting the hay smoke permeate the unassuming bivalves for 3 to 4 minutes. When they're done, they've got a hell of a lot going on — slippery, herbaceous bite from the butter, sure, but a funky, earthy smoke far different from what you get from burning wood is what's most prevalent. How does Kitko describe this flavor? "Barnyard — in a good way," he laughs. Eat these immediately!
Photo: Drew Lazor
A lone pint of groundcherries hung forlornly by the register at the Fair Food Farmstand (Reading Terminal Market, 12th and Arch) on Monday like a bumped passenger on an overbooked flight. They needed to get home, and I was glad to give them a ride. Home was my stomach.
From the esoteric beet-soda and grapefruit-sherbet cocktails and punches to the exotic Euro beers, there is an unholy amount of delectable things to drink at Farmer's Cabinet (1113 Walnut St.). It's unfair, really; they should serve a spare liver in lieu of bread. You'll have to wait a few weeks for my Official City Paper Review® — they have a new chef in Jason Goodman — but there's no harm in sharing now the golden glory of Birra del Borgo's Genziana. DL has lauded the Italian brewery's gentian-root ale in NFTWs past, and rightly so. At the Cabinet, the cascade of beer sparkled as a strappy-suspendered bartender poured it into a voluptuous Del Borgo goblet trapped its intense herbal, floral aroma. It's crisp as a just-picked apple, the gentian root bringing the refreshing bitterness but not the bite. Drink this immediately!
Photo: Drew Lazor
One of the reasons I love Michael Spector's Delicatessen (703 Chestnut St.) is because it's a Jewish deli that caters to humans. Instead of terrifying 60-pound pastrami monsters that cost $37 and produce enough leftovers to feed every every member of the Pennsylvania National Guard, they put up sandwiches that are both navigable and generously sized — and they charge normal-person prices for them. But Deli chef Ali Waks' many clever kitchen diversions are just as big a draw for me. Not sure how the bubbies of the world feel about her pumpkin kugel, but I'm a definite fan. Her fall-friendly take on the timeless Jewish pudding has all the requisite trappings — tender egg noodles, fatty cottage/cream cheese filling, crunchy baked brown sugar roof. But then she gourds us with a swirl of pumpkin purée flavored with jaggery (a concentrated sugar cane used frequently in Indian cuisine), orange zest and Art in the Age's SNAP liqueur, Waks' go-to replacement for vanilla. It's $4 for a piece the size of a car battery or $2 for a piece the size of a Power Wheels battery. Eat this immediately!
Photo: Drew Lazor
This should probably be classified as cruel considering Zeppoli (618 Collings Ave., Collingswood, N.J.) is closed on Tuesdays, but Joey Baldino's tagliatelli al limone is straight unfair. (Our critic Adam Erace agrees, too.) "The tag is so simple," says the chef, a humble phrase oft spoken by people who are way better at cooking than you and me. After hand-crafting his tagliatelle with durum flour and egg, the South Philly native and newly minted restaurant owner works up an easy sauce with extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, lemon (both zest and juice), pasta water and a bit of butter. He tops his noodles with fresh oregano and ample gratings of burnt-sienna bottarga (cured roe pouch), which play briny back-and-forth with the citrus-blessed dressing in an invigorating game of fork-twirling pasta ping-pong.
Baldino offers this and all his pastas in half portions to save his diners room for mains and desserts, but this is one plate I could easily demolish at full strength and still roll into entrées feeling like a spectacular human being. Eat this immediately!
Photo: James Narog
I think it was Tom Colicchio, on an episode of Top Chef, who once said it’s very difficult to make a great salad. Even inherently flavorful greens like spicy arugula and buttery bibb are still just roughage, and they need fruit, nuts, vegetables, vinaigrettes and proteins to make them enticing enough to eat. Therein lies the danger: Since salads are blank slates, they're so easy to under- or over-dress with toppings.
The best ones, the ones Tommy C. is talking about, are like the strawberry-Gorgonzola setup at Fuel (191 E. Passyunk Ave.). The featured ingredients (fresh sliced strawberries and hunks of the funky Italian mountain blue) are right there in the name, with chopped tomatoes, thin-sliced red onions and candied pecans playing the supporting case over a bed of tender baby spinach. Chef/owner Rocco Cima blends up a berry vinaigrette that's just viscous enough to stick to the leaves. This salad's got crunch, it's got bright, balanced sweetness and tang. Plus, it eats like something much more satisfying than a salad and will only cost you 325 calories. Eat this immediately!
Photo: Adam Erace
Lindsey Love, the baker who runs Coco Love Homemade, has earned plenty of local daps for her whoopie pies, but it's her chocolate chip crisp — a chocolate chip cookie of the thin, crunchy-edged and chewy-centered persuasion — that has us ETI-ing all over the place. Love, a cookie obsessive since her high school days in Baltimore, uses organic whipped sweet cream butter and organic whole-wheat flour, both sourced through Lancaster Farm Fresh, to create these discus-like wonders. And the secret ingredient here hits the exacta of textural appeal and legit health benefits — Love cuts her dough with whole ground flaxseed meal, which grants her cookies a nutty bite while imbuing hedonist snackers with Omega 3 fatty acids and dietary fiber.
Right now you can get Coco Love cookies at Brew (1900 S. 15th St.) and Shot Tower (542 Christian St.), and Love tells us to be on the lookout for a few signature brownie varieties to hit the shelves sooner rather than later. For now, though — eat this immediately!
Photo: Drew Lazor
"Why wouldn't you?" replied Matt Savastano, the new chef at The Happy Rooster (116 S. 16th St.), when asked why he chose to cook his pork shoulder in straight-up duck fat. "The slow cooking makes the shoulder more tender. And let's face it — anything cooked in duck fat is going to be really good."
Let it be known that Team Meal Ticket fully supports the Jewish deli-fication of absolutely anything and everything — they're a dying breed, as we're told, so any dill-pickled ingratiation into other cooking traditions is appreciated. But that's a tertiary-at-best reason to get down on the new pastrami fried chicken at Supper (926 South St.). Primary reason? IT IS FRIED CHICKEN WHICH IS DELICIOUS PREPARED IN THE STYLE OF PASTRAMI WHICH IS ALSO DELICIOUS. What a g-ddamn good idea.
Most of us know that sushi is defined not by the use of uncooked seafood but by the presence of vinegared rice. Sliced raw fish sans rice is called sashimi; rolled up with rice and bound it's maki; draped over a rice clump it's nigiri; we could go on and on till Thursday so we'll stop. Typically it's a wise idea to stay within the bounds of accepted sushi definition, lest you end up eating something ridiculous dressed with glowstick-and-Goldschläger sauce or whatever — but sometimes you find yourself wanting sashimi and maki in one bite. (Just us?) At the risk of angering the Japanese Sushi Traditionalist Gestapo so much that they bum-rush Philly on a fact-finding mission, let us introduce you to the oxymoronic Sashimi Roll at Vic Sushi (2035 Sansom St.) Quite simply, it's shards of fresh sashimi, plus avocado, rolled up over shredded daikon radish (usually just a sad garnish) instead of rice. That's it. If you're feeling hungry and contrarian, eat this immediately.
Photos: Drew Lazor
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