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Spaarndammerbuurt, November 23, 2018—

A WEEK OR TWO ago I dreamed I was eating dinner alone in a restaurant — really alone, sitting at a long refectory table in an otherwise empty restaurant. The waiter brought a delicious grilled quail. When I'd finished it, a pigeon. Then a poussin; then fried chicken; then roast capon.

Then pheasant. Then Guinea hen. And finally, roast goose. Oddly, there was no duck; thankfully, no ostrich. Each plate was perfect. I ate in complete silence. It was like a religious service.

Last night, our first in Amsterdam in a couple of years I think, we were at our favorite table, next to the kitchen door where we could engage with the cooks — except that we didn't: they were very busy indeed: Marius was full.

We began with baked pike — baked or poached, I'm not sure which, and the skin crisped — served with spinach, borlotti beans, and tomato. The contessa's dish had a langoustine-inflected sauce; I had to do with a simpler but very satisfying one.

Then pheasant! Sixty years ago and more this was not an unusual dish; the fields around us were loaded with pheasant. Since grapevines replaced cow-pastures, pheasant have been absent. It was the least familiar bird in that litany of poultry I had dreamed. But it's not unusual here in Netherlands.

This was roasted and served sliced, with sauerkraut, potato-and-apple puree, and chanterelles, with a fine reduction. Very dutch; very satisfying.

Dessert: Semolina pudding with poached pears in a light syrup, very simple, very refined.

Friendly, attentive, polished service. Clean, bright, snug dining room, filled with happy, enthusiastic diners. This is one of our very favorite places.

     🍷Mondeuse, Château Mérande, Le Comte Rouge (Savoie), 2015: deep but fruity, tobacco, delicious
•Marius, Barentszstraat 173, Amsterdam; 📞+31 20 422 78 80

Marius

Prinseneiland, October 27, 2017—

DINNER WITH FRIENDS — almost family, in fact — at our favorite Amsterdam restaurant, and not only because the chef-proprietor is an old friend. Almost family, in fact.

This is such a pleasant kwartier of old Amsterdam, the Westlijke eilanden, a group of small islands built up over a century ago — first as warehouses, then as low-income housing, now increasingly being turned into condominiums. The lighting, the architectuee, the openness to sky and water all contribute to a degree of serenity rare in contempor\ary cities. I love it here; I always feel at home.

Kees's restaurant is on the table d'hôte format: a four-course dinner for a set price, with minimal opportunity for substitutions. (Vitello tonnato and a grande bouillabaise are always at the ready, though.) Tonight I had poached hake with squid, olives, and what else I can't recall, followed by pieces of onglet, the lower back cut of beef, with mushrooms and potatoes. Delicious, both of them, as we knew they would be, and gezond — sound and healthful, a joy after a day or two of travelling.

Dinner: Kees's "Chocolate Nemesis," a deep, serious chocolate brownie-like dessert, and apple tart with raisins — the original "Dutch apple pie," but utterly superior to what I used to get at lunch counters in the States.

     🍷Vin blanc, Mas Saint Laurent (Langueoc), 2015 (a little flinty, crisp and flavorful); Cabernet sauvignon, France, delicious and serious, details not noted
•Marius, Barentszstraat 243, Amsterdam ; 📞+31 020 422 7880

☛RESTAURANTS VISITED, with information and rating: 2016      2015     2017

Weekend in Ashland

Ashland, Oregon, January 29, 2017—

TWENTY YEARS AGO we celebrated our fortieth anniversary, the Contessa and I, by getting all the family together for a weekend here. The highlight: dinner at one of the Five Restaurants, a concept I'll get to in a moment.

At the time there were fifteen of us in three generations. Since then another grandson has arrived, and three great-grandchildren. The cousins are spread far and wide and it's no longer really possible to get them all together. Tempus fugit, and ou sont les neiges.

But Friday night there were nine of us at table at a very favorite restaurant, that same one: all three kids and their mates, and that youngest grandson, still celebrating his fourteenth birthday, actually marked the day before.

Digression on The Five Restaurants

The Five Restaurants were assembled, in my mind, many many years ago: the irreducible Five, my favorite places for food, wine, company, conversation, and comfort. They were Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Il Vipore outside Lucca, Stephanie's in Melbourne, Obelisk in Washington D.C., and Placemarker.

I haven't been back to Washington in years and have no idea if Obelisk is still as good as it was, or even still in business. Il Vipore and Stephanie's are long since closed. Placemarker will never close, of course. The original idea was that it would be your favorite place, dear reader, or perhaps an emergency temporary top favorite of mine, embarrassingly forgotten about when the list was being considered.

Let's look back at favorite restaurants from the distant past. Troisgros and Pic in the French southeast. Au Pied du Fouet in Paris, and, why not, L'Ecurie, though it's a modest place. Giannino’s in Milan. Stephanie’s and Il Vipore joined the Mighty Five in that time, the 1980s. Then, in the 90s, we began traveling more. Het Pomphuis opened in Ede, Netherlands, and was an unquestionable Five, displacing Obelisk since work no longer took me go Washington. Alas Pomphuis lasted only a few years, but Marius in Amsterdam took its place in our hearts.

In those days I wrote letters to a few friends about our travels. The list grew to forty or fifty recipients, too many for the e-mail services I found in those days at provincial hotels or village libraries, and since I'd set up a website, I don't now recall just why, It occurred to me to post travel journals there. (You can still find some of them here, though I hope one day to make drastic revisions to that website.)

Later on, in March 2008, I began writing this blog with a post on anchovies. Slowly my thoughts about dining, including specifically about dining in restaurants, began to evolve differently. I'm sure many potential followers drop away because I neglect so many aspects of restaurant dining here: prices to begin with; ambience; service; menu and wine list — I'm interested in the food, its flavors and textures, the recipe as it connected to place or history or season; to an extent the hand that goes into executing the recipe. But the near-daily routine of adding usually short posts to this blog then eroded the writing, and Eating Every Day is more a personal eating-diary than any serious kind of food journalism.

Still, there are those Five Restaurants. How to approach them? Does the list change depending on where I am, so that in Rome, for example, or Stockholm, or Los Angeles, I'll be sure to find one? Perhaps. In a way.

Or is it a community of ideal restaurants we have known, which continue to represent a kind of standard by which new encounters can be measure, a community which can then expand on those lucky days that a new find measures up? In a way. Perhaps.

End of digression

THERE ARE FEW GREATER pleasures than basking in the company of progeny. My Companion and I sat centered at the kong table, our three adult children across from us, in-laws at our sides. We were at the same favorite restaurant, though in the meantime a new dining room had been attached to it; the same friends were our host and chef-hostess. We ordered from the menu, which features a table d'hôte but can also be ordered from à la carte; the wines were suggested by our host, who knows his wines, particularly French wines.

We ate by candlelight, which is not conducive to photography (though in general it flatters our faces), so you will find no photos here of our food — instead, I'll simply set the menu descriptions of my courses. We began off the menu, though, with amuses-bouches: mine a dolma filled with ricotta and, I think, pine nuts.

Champagne, Moutard-Diligent, Brut Rosé

Cuvaison, nv

Then, Grilled toast with hot green tomato jam, bufala mozzarella, and frontoio olive oil, and a broth bowl of broccolini radicchio cannellini beans kumquats and pickled red onions

Sancerre, La Côte des Monts Damnés, 2014: Sauvignon blanc as it evolved to be treated: clean, direct, complex, herbal, charming

"Beeler's" pork shoulder boned, stuffed, rolled, and slow roasted, with vegetables, black beans, and hominy in a spicy stew, and a tiny cabbage-carrot salad with cilantro, pumpkin seeds, radish, and green onions.

Cahors, Clos Triguedina, Jean-Luc Baldès, 2010: rich, mature, balanced, rather deep, rewarding

Bittersweet chocolate cake with chocolate, orange, and ají amarillo (moderately spicy) mousse layers, and vanilla bean/orange brandy ice cream

CS; son-in-law on his right photo: Ivo Shere (edited)

The chef, Charlene Rollins, is one of a few women I think of as masters (anciennement I might have written "mistresses")

of the braise: slow moist cooking of (usually) meat with (usually) many flavorings. Since I've been reminiscing, let me mention two others, to make a troika: Amaryll Schwertner of Boulette's Larder; Loretta Keller of Bizou (both restaurants in San Francisco, Bizou now alas closed)

Charlene's particular genius lies in combining a great many ingredients in these dishes — let's call them ragoûts; the French word derives from ragoûter, meaning: "to revive the taste") without the individual textures going mushy, and keeping the many tastes in balance. One of my stupid kitchen rules forbids more than five ingredients in any one dish: that rule never applies here.

Every course was delicious on its own terms, and combined effortlessly in a successful succession of courses — even the repetition of beans was pleasing, not dull. I won't try to investigate each course, but I can't help noting that the pork shoulder took me back to a meal very dimly remembered from April 1975, when I first tasted cocina yucateca at a restaurant called El Faisan, where pumpkin seeds, spices, and peppers combined in a way I'd never before experienced, in a cuisine that seemed more Indian (I mean the subcontinent) than "Mexican". (I suppose El Faisan was one of the original Five Restaurants.)

Let me mention, too, that dessert — also, now I think about it, vaguely Mexican; the combination of chocolate and pepper showed up in a mole at El Faisan. This was a very moist cake, almost a zuppa inglese; the cake and mousse were in perfectly calculated balance, the orange-flavor component negotiated the jump in textures and temperatures between cake and ice cream; the chocolate sauce literally grounded both to the plate. Charlene's cooking is nothing if not intelligent, as well as all its other virtues.

•New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro, 2210 South Pacific Highway, Talent, Oregon; +1 (541) 535-2779

☛RESTAURANTS VISITED, with information and rating:

2016      2015     2017

Return to Marius

 

Amsterdam, October 18, 2016—

AN EASY FLIGHT over the Alps brought us back to my favorite airport, Schiphol; a quick Dutch train took us to Zaandam for an afternoon with friends we hadn't seen for years; then Krijn drove us to Barentzstraat where we dined at our favorite Amsterdam restaurant with the chef's parents, with whom we'd just recently toured Liguria.

Marius: such a cozy dining room; such a pleasing, simple but inspired menu; such masterful technique in the kitchen. The only problem we had was entirely my fault: in the confusion of departure I forgot to bring along the menu.

The menu at Marius is a single sheet of paper announcing the antipasto (present when you're seated), three first courses (one of which, vitello tonnato, is always present), three second courses, or the Grande Bouillabaise (which, containing schaaldieren as the Dutch call crustacea, is off limits for me). 

(Schaaldieren: an interesting word. Dutch translates the English "shellfish" with its own word schaalvis, a cognate; schaaldieren then is literally "shellanimals" or perhaps "scaleanimals". I wish English would stop using the ambiguous word "shellfish," which too often applies to everything from periwinkles to lobsters.)

I started with a delicious serving of cod with artichokes, beets, and greens, in a fine olive-oil based salsa verde.

 From there, the échine and épaule du porc, varkenrug en -schouder I think: I'm not sure what pork spine would be in English. (The menu is entirely in Dutch, and in the chef's handwriting, making my visual memory even less reliable this morning.)

 

This came with a mix of corn kernels and small potato dice; apple may have been present; I was too busy talking and enjoying to take notes, and write this next morning. The pork was tender and succulent, and the bed of celery-root puree gave a fine textural contrast.

 

Dessert: hangop. Hangop is a kind of fresh cheese, an old Dutch farm wife product: you hang up a cloth bag filled with cream (or in this case cream and yoghurt blended, I think) over the sink for a day or so, and flavor the resulting product (the one in the bag, not the product that's dripped away) with raisins, little dice of candied fruit, perhaps citrus peel, and so forth. This is a delicious thing, very delicious. Of course Dutch dairy products are remarkable.

Roussette de Savoie, Altesse, vintage? (full-bodied yet light and fresh, delightful)

Pinot nero, Bottega Vinai (Trentino), 2014 (wonderful fruit, smooth and pleasant, almost rich)

 Marius, Barentszstraat 173, Amsterdam; ‭+31 20 422 78 80

Marius

 

Prinseneiland, Amsterdam, September 20, 2016— 

THIS WILL ALWAYS BE among one of my Big Five restaurants: any involving our friend Kees. And so it is almost always our first stop in this city: a modest, comfortable dining room on the Barentszstraat, out in the zeeheldersbuurt near the main railway station.

We'd breakfasted in the Reykjavik airport, on salmon and beer, and lunched on coffee and a raisin bun at Schiphol. By dinner time we needed a reset, and Marius was just the place.

We began with the house amuse-gueule, olives, salami, bread and olive oil — the salami a saucisson sec from Saumur, complex and sophisticated.

Next, the Contessa and I going mezzo-mezzo: skate with spinach sautéed in brown butter; squid, sliced into strips, with tomato and a marvelous Georgian-inspired "pesto" involving walnuts, raisins, and spices. 

Main course: for her, roast quail with duck liver; for me, braised beef with chanterelles, corn, and romanesco. The beef was from a retired dairy cow, summoning childhood memories from the farm; deeply flavored, sound and nourishing.

Wines: Greco di tufo, Calafe, 2009 (!); Fixin, Domaine Gérard Seguin "La Place", 2014 (very nice indeed)

Restaurant Marius, Barentszstraat 173

1013 NM Amsterdam; +31 20 422 78 80

Nothing fancy

Eastside Road, September 18, 2016—

THAT'S THE LAST time you'll see that dateline for a while: we'll perhaps fast tomorrow, either that or eat airplane food. And tonight we were simply catching up with leftovers — believe it or not, the last of the fusilli amatriciana, for me; but with a side course of Swiss chard. That's one of my very favorite vegetables, and it's always a regret, to me, that the Contessa is less fond of it than am I. I think it may have something to do with beet roots: she loves them; they are not at all to my personal taste. Swiss chard is pretty close to beet greens, and come to think of it I like beet greens, too, though not as much as chard. Perhaps who likes the leaf disdains the root, and vice versa.

In any case: Green salad afterward, and applesauce. See you at Marius…

☛RESTAURANTS VISITED, with information and rating:  2016   2015

How I Write Certain of My Blogs

Eastside Road, January 25, 2016—

BUT FIRST A QUICK report on the last two days. In the entire near-five-weeks in Scandinavia and Netherlands, in spite of the dining detailed on this site, we gained not an ounce, my companion and I, owing I suppose to our walking an average of four miles a day.

Last week, on the other hand, on a quick road trip to Los Angeles and Reno, I gained four pounds. We have not been fasting on Tuesdays as is our usual wont (nor will we tomorrow; that will have to be put off yet another day). Nor have we been walking, much.

So these last couple of days we've taken it easy. Saturday we had a delicious posole of sorts at home: hominy, made quite spicy. And yesterday we made due, after our usual weekday breakfast of cappuccinos and a slice of buttered toast, with the hash and eggs you see here, made with corned beef brisket and served with potatoes and kale, taken with a Bloody Mary at the club a friend belongs to.

---

BUT I WANT TO WRITE a response here to a thoughtful question/comment posted by a reader today:

As I think I've mentioned here before, I perceive a disconnect between the experiences you describe here at Chez Panisse--to which you have clear links--some family, some probably financial--and those you describe at other "eateries."

Chez Panisse is among the most ambitious of high end restaurants. There's really no way around admitting this, given its high prices, and the stream of books and "publicity" which emanate from the operation. It is routinely measured against the most ambitious restaurants locally, regionally and around the world. This means it is under constant scrutiny.

As one of its regular diners, you're in a position to engage in such comparisons.

In your "eating every day" blog, you focus attention not only on Chez Panisse, but you conduct an astonishing full-time survey of eateries both in the U.S. and abroad, though it doesn't seem systematic. It seems to be part of a campaign of constant (restless?) travel, taking notes, recording ingredients and accompanying wines. If this doesn't have an ulterior purpose, it must qualify as an obsession.

What often puzzles me, is that though you constantly return to Chez Panisse as a kind of measure of what you seek, you don't seem to sample the higher end competitors of your "harbor" operation. It may of course be that you do, but you don't talk about those instances. As nearly as I can tell--and I'm willing to be enlightened here--you spend most of your time at smaller, less pretentious places, whose lower prices and less ambitious goals allow for the occasional surprising experience; many of the qualities and characteristics of good dining are not about pretense and ambition, but about a love of ingredients and simplicity--the very qualities which Alice Waters and her staffs have striven to promote over the years.

Whether this disconnect is as apparent to others, as it is to me, I can't say. Since you almost never address the question here, I suppose for reasons related to privacy, it leaves the reader of your blog wondering what the underlying agenda of your campaign is--if indeed it does have one over-riding purpose. You have no obligation to address this question, if you choose, but it's one that--for me, at least--constantly hangs in the air. Your "100 plates" for instance--which I can't recall ever having seen printed out--might provide a canonical framework upon which your personal gastronomic philosophy could be displayed. Is there a tacit connection between the underlying rigor of Chez Panisse and the 100 plates?

All of which is offered in the spirit of innocent curiosity!

The comment was triggered by the recent post here on a couple of dinners at Chez Panisse, in the course of which I thought I made clear my connection to the restaurant.

It gives me an opportunity, in the first month of the new year, again to set out the nature — I won't say "assumptions," or "agenda" — of this blog.

Eating Every Day is basically an online log, written as a personal journal, noting nearly all our dining — snacks, breakfasts, and lunches generally excluded. It is, for me — (and it is for me) — a springboard for musing on cuisine, which I think a basic, perhaps the basic foundation of culture. If it is helpful to others, as a guide to eateries, and to dishes, that's fine; I won't say I don't also have that in mind.

But it is not meant to review eateries. I do write occasional reviews on Yelp, Trip Advisor, and the like; but I do that rarely. I am of course a critic, a retired music and art critic, and I took that profession fairly seriously. I always like to think of criticism as it is defined by Joseph Kerman: "the study of the meaning and the value of art works." (Joseph Kerman: Contemplating Music: challenges to musicology, Harvard University Press, 1986.) Notice he doesn't equate criticism with evaluation: rather, with the study of value.

I prefer to write, especially on this blog, positively, not negatively.

Now to some of the comment's points: We rarely dine in high-end restaurants, even those owned and operated by friends, even those you might call Chez Panisse spinoffs — owned and operated by people who've been Chez P mainstays, and gone on to their own restaurants. (There are many of these: off the top of my head, Quince in San Francisco; Pizzaiolo and Camino in Berkeley…)

I try always to identify such people — Kees at Worst and Marius in Amsterdam is an example — as friends, and the reader should infer that I will not publicly criticize a friend: if I write about him and his work, as I have in the case of Kees (sorry about that) and Sander, also in Amsterdam, it is because I have no fault to find, only enthusiasm, which I want to share.

I think the commenter is correct: there is no system to this survey at Eating Every Day; it is the result of an obsession with travel, with taking note (though too rarely with taking notes!), with recording experience.

We do in fact "spend most of [my] time at smaller, less pretentious places, whose lower prices and less ambitious goals allow for the occasional surprising experience; many of the qualities and characteristics of good dining are not about pretense and ambition, but about a love of ingredients and simplicity…“

And the idea of the Hundred Plates, like that of the Hundred Restaurants, is indeed directed to that principle.

Though I will note my distaste for the word "pretentious." It is not a synonym for "ambitious," and should not be so used. It's a very serious charge, though used casually and lightly.

And at some point in the future I'll try to prepare notes on other ambitious restaurants, and perhaps try to compare their costs. I note, though, that I never mention costs or prices here, for a few general reasons — which belong more to a discussion over at The Eastside View than here.

A final note: This blog receives few comments; I'm not sure why. I think I have never failed to clear them for posting. I have written 2,318 posts to the blog, beginning in March 2008. There have been 173,44 page views over those years. The blog has thirty "followers," whatever that means. As of this morning there had been 43 views today; there were 85 yesterday; over three thousand last month.

There have been 298 viewers in the United States, 22 in Germany, 19 in Russia, 17 in Netherlands, 12 in Italy, 9 in the UK, 8 in Spain, 7 in Poland, 6 in Ireland, 5 in Australia. I suspect most of these people are either friends, family, or colleagues in the restaurant business.

And very few of them, virtually none of them, leave comments. I'm used to this: as a journalist on a daily newspaper, over the course of fifteen years or so, I received only a handful of letters. People don't write, in general; only we obsessed do…

And I close with a quote I posted to Facebook yesterday, from the novel Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector:

(As for writing, a living dog is worth far more.)

☛Restaurants visited in the last year are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Worst

Hammarby, Stockholm, January 9, 2016—

I WRITE THIS in Stockholm, but much of my heart is still in Amsterdam, where yesterday noon we had our last Dutch meal for the time being at Worst.

I haven't given Worst credit here, partly because I rarely write about lunches: dinner has a way of shouldering other items aside. (I've been remiss, for example, at not mentioning bakeries, and cafés, and poffertjeskramen.)

Worst — the word is Dutch for "sausage," and was applied to this restaurant with a deliberate sense of humor, intending it to be the Worst restaurant in Amsterdam — Worst is the sidekick to Marius, the restaurant we've dined at twice in the last few days. The owner-chef was greatly influenced by Chez Panisse in Berkeley, where he worked a couple of years; Worst is in a sense to the Café Chez Panisse what Marius is to the downstairs restaurant.

But only in a sense, for Worst is not a café, or a bistro, or a brasserie; Worst is a wine bar. I'm never sure exactly what a wine bar is, for I never go to them. Wine to me is something to have with dinner (or, now and then, lunch); it's a food; and it's not to be sampled with three or four other wines, unless in fact a tasting is going on, which is a very different matter, having nothing to do with Eating.

One of the things that makes it a Wine Bar, I guess, is the seating: very casual, on stools, at tables big enough to require sitting with strangers when it's busy. Another is the menu, which is quite restricted and, I think, fairly unchanging. A third, of course, is the very extensive wine list.

But we've taken lunch here two or three times in the last few days, partly because it's close to our apartment, partly because we do love Kees, partly or mostly because it's really good.

Today I had baccalà. Steady readers know my fondness for salt cod. This was an excellent baccalà, with a beautiful smooth texture, a perfect balance of cod, potato, and cream (if I'm not mistaken), and it was piled to just the right thickness on its toasted bread.

The three pieces lay on a very nice piperade; I couldn't have made a better one. It was all so good it made me doubly, triply sad to be leaving Amsterdam once again.

Saumur Champigny, Château de Villeneuve, 2001: light but substantial and rewarding, fruity, still fresh

•Worst, Barentszstraat 171, Amsterdam; +31 20 625 6167
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Back to Marius

Prinseneiland, Amsterdam, January 6, 2016—

ONE WAY TO PARSE the world: there are Rembrandts, or Hemingways, or Beethovens, or Rodins; and then there are Vermeers, or Fitzgeralds, or Mozarts, or Degases. The restaurant Marius is, as can perhaps be guessed from the photo I took, a Vermeer. Light falls into the room from many sources, bringing physical details into clarity and order. Beautifully composed still lifes emerge: a row of bottles recalls Morandi, a pair of tureens on a shelf, Vermeer. The candle in its glass; the water carafe; the tall plain cylindrical vase with its tulips — the rhythm of orderly progression

Same goes for the menu, always handwritten, usually quickly; always describing a three- or four-course table d'hôte Marktmenu, with a few alternatives on the margin. Tonight,

voorgerecht: Gebakkren rode poon met prei, aardappel en lavassaus
tussengerecht: Zacht gegaarde koolvis met knolselderij dulse en speklookkingbouillon
hoofdgerecht: Gebraden varkensnek en gestoofde wang met kool, meiraap en grijze cantharellen
dessert: Gepocheerde kweepeer met pistache cake en vanille ijs

which I'll translate for you course by course.

My companions chose the voorgerecht to begin with — after the unlisted amuse-gueles of course. Rode poon (Chelidonichthys lucerna) is an Atlantic fish I'm unfamiliar with, a gurnard; it was poached, I'd say, and served with leek, potato, and lovage-flavored jus, and reportedly delicious.

I chose the tussengerecht ("between-course") for my first course. Koolvis (Pollachius virens) is pollock, itself a type of Atlantic cod. (Marius does not make a fetish of carefully distinguishing the various types of fish on its menu; this is simply expected by Dutch diners, who are after all descended from generations of fish-eaters, and like to know what's on the plate.) The fish was slowly cooked, as the menu describes, and served with celeriac and dulse — an edible red seaweed — cooked in a bacon broth.

Now it's no secret that Kees, the chef-owner of Marius, is an old friend, my "Dutch son" in fact, and he'd heard about our dinner New Year's Eve at the home of another chef friend. I'd described the liver-based broth Sander had cooked his mussels in, and the delighted cry Umami! that he'd greeted it with. I don't know if tonight's bacon-based broth on seaweed was a deliberate response or not; probably not — probably coincidental. They have similar tastes, but one's a Rembrandt, the other a Vermeer. One's a free-jazz improviser; the other's an elegant string quartet, part Haydn, part Webern.

But back to the menu: Our hoofdgerecht — chief course — was a delightful winter dish (and it has been cold here): roast pork neck with braised pork cheek, with cabbage, turnips and gray chanterelles. The two meats had been cooked separately, of course, each to exactly the right point. Ditto the vegetables, no one of which prevailed over others — each item in this ragout was as independent, but mindful of its place in the whole, as any bottle in a Morandi still life.

The vanilla ice cream was perfect. Lindsey said so, and she knows ice cream. The pistachio cake tasted exactly like hers, and that's high praise. It was a perfect meal.

Blanc sec: Mouthes Le Bihan, "la pic Colette" (Côtes de Duras, 2013: a delicious, complex, mouth-filling Sauvignon-Semillon blend that made me think of the Y Grec — dry Yquem — that we used to drink fifty years ago
Saumur Champigny, Château de Villeneuve, 2001: rich, deep, smooth, substantial, generous

•Marius, Barentszstraat 173, Amsterdam; 020 422 7880
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Marius

Prinseneiland, January 2, 2016—

I APOLOGIZE FOR THESE photos; most of all to the restaurant in which I took them. They do not do the presentation of the dishes justice.

We dined at a real favorite. Of course I'm biased: the owner-chef is my Dutch son, who can do no wrong in my book, certainly not in the kitchen. Here's what we had:

Geroosterde tonijn met spinachie, citroen wortel en venkel
Sautéed tuna with spinach, lemon, carrot, and fennel

Gebraden Barbarie eend
Sautéed Barbary duck

Gepocheerde kweepeer met vanilleijs en pistasche
Poached quince with vanilla ice cream and pistachios

Marius is a small restaurant, seating maybe thirty; the menu is small, the wine list extensive and well considered. The food is delicious. Did I mention the chef did two year-long stints at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley?

The tuna was cooked perfectly and was firm, fresh, and meaty. The duck was also cooked exactly au point and came with delicious cabbage. I don't know when I've had better ice cream, and the quince could have been poached by my own dining companion, so professional, flavorful, and perfectly textured it was.

It is one of the Five Restaurants.

Riesling: Dengler Seyler Heiligenberg (Pfalz), 2012: smooth, characteristic, beautiful color, fine finish;
Greco di Tufo, Calafé, 2009;
Cotes de Duras, Domaine Mouthes le Bihan "La Pie Colette," 2012: rich, solid, good finish

•Restaurant Marius, Barentszstraat 173, Amsterdam; 020 422 7880
☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants>

Christmas Dinner

Rien, Friesland, December 25, 2015—

WE DROVE UP to Friesland today to visit our Dutch son, or nephew, or very good friend Kees, who is a chef (Amsterdam: Marius; Worst) and a formidable cook.

As a chef of course he is interested in sources and methods, and today's dinner shows it. He'd found a capon somewhere — a delicious bird I haven't had in years; I'm not sure you can find them these days in the US. And he thought he'd try a simple way of cooking it in the admirable kitchen he's installed in his historical monument of a Frisian brick cottage.

He simply salted it and set it in a deep enamelled iron pot just big enough to hold it, and set that on the warming plate of his range. No liquids, no aromatics, just the bird and a ltitle salt. Before too long we heard the welcome sizzling, and then it was simply a matter of turning it every half-hour or so and waiting about four or five hours.

He'd also rustled up some Tarbais flageolets, those delicious white beans that seem to me to mediate between cannelini and Coronas. These gained a sprinkle of Moroccan spice and a very little tomato sauce.

Then there was a vegetable sauté: mushrooms, onions and garlic, turnips, and some kind of little cole sprout — a bit like kale, a bit like Brussels sprout or broccoli, but tiny, hardly bigger than a small caper.

The meal was marvelous. The capon was tender, clean, pure of flavor, not at all dry. The vegetables complemented it perfectly, and the beans, well, they were remarkable.

Dessert, yes, also rather improvised. A store-bought commercial pannetone, some pears Anneke had put up in syrup, a pile of whipped cream, a sugar wafer. I suppose it's a variation of zuppa inglese. Whatever: I'd gladly have had more…

Champagne, Barnaut, Grand Cru Grande Réserve, nv; Chassagne-Montrachet, Domaine Bachey-Legros, Vielles vignes, 2012; Fixin, La Place, Gérard Seguin, 2012; Barbaresco, Produttori di Barbaresco, 2010: a truly magnificent wine ending a parade of sound, rewarding, memorable bottles.

☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants

Marius

Linschotenstraat, Amsterdam, January 10, 2013—

SINCE WE WERE LAST here, last February, this favorite restaurant of our has changed quite a bit: it's bigger, with more tables; and the kitchen is bigger as well. And with the opening of Worst next door, the sausage restaurant I told you about yesterday, the proprietor Kees Elfring has stepped more often out of the kitchen, though he keeps a close eye on things. (In fact, I think the role of trainer-of-chefs is perhaps more significant in the long run than that of daily head chef, and I'm glad he devotes his energies to it.)

He did cook tonight's dinner, though, which we ate in such a daze of conversation, memory-sharing, fatigue, jet-lag and this damned cold that I can hardly reconstruct the meal for you. We began, as always, with olives and salume and a glass of Lillet, and then went on to our four-course table d'hote dinner.

I asked for a substitute for the langoustine on the first course, for I don't process such animals well. Too bad, as they were served raw, delightfully sweet little things I was told, fresh from the Dutch Waddensee off the Frisian coast. Instead I had vitello tonnato, a dish I particularly like, very nicely done.

Next came skate wing with squid ragout and vegetables, rich and delicate, with lots of lovely chanterelles; and then a very generous plate (see photo): slow-roasted pork shoulder, also with vegetables: cavolonero, Brussels sprouts, and mushrooms: for Kees prides himself on his savvy with groentjes, traditionally a staple of the Dutch table.

We skipped the cheese course, having lunched at home on bread and Gruyère, and went straight to a pear walnut cake, a fragrant and substantial dish lightened with house-made vanilla ice cream, as beautifully balanced a dessert as I've had in weeks, perhaps months.

Gewurtztraminer Riesling, Eisacktaler (Alto Adige), 2011: sound, a little reserved but generous, supple; Cotes du Rhone, Domaine Chapolon (Rochegud), 2009: very serious and deep, beautiful flavor

•Marius, Barentszstraat 173, Amsterdam; 020 422 7880
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Worst (Wijncafé)

Van Linschotenstraat, Amsterdam, January 9, 2013

OUR FIRST TWO MEALS have been in this new (to us) wijncafé, a place that offers fine espressos and carefully selected cider and beers but which is really all about an intelligent offering of wines and charcuterie, worst being Dutch for "sausage."

Disclosure: The owner-proprieter of Worst is our old friend and honorary kid-brother-or-nephew Kees Elfring, who did two stints on the line at Chez Panisse, and has since opened two of our favorite restaurants, the late lamented Het Pomphuis in Ede and the still very much alive Marius here in Amsterdam.

In fact, Worst and Marius are neighbors, and share the wine room you see in the photo above, and a good deal more, beginning with expertise.

We landed at Schiphol this morning, and by the time we'd bought a telephone SIM chip and taken the train into the city, and relaxed a bit over a pot of tea, it was time to settle our travel-jostled innards with a bit of something. That turned out to be a rosy, delicate, slightly loose finocchiona, I would say, with a chunk of delicious Gouda aged carefully in the authentic manner, without the tight-fitting plastic shirt the authorities now require in this microbe-obsessed country. Kees has found someone who actually drives well selected cheeses south a few kilometers to France, where it's still legal to prepare foodstuffs authentically; there he ages them, then carefully wraps them in the appointed new Dutch manner, in plastic, and takes them back to Netherlands — where, once you've bought one, you're perfectly free to remove the plastic and return the cheese to its rightful place.

The result is delicious and takes you back twenty years.

Dinner was a bit more ambitions. I had, well, let's see, five plates of charcuterie: Bresaola with grilled radiccho (a splendid combination); veal-cheek sausage with marrow and gremolata (deep and satisfying); partridge sausage with root vegetables; mild and delicate Dutch sausage with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut; and kummelcrostino with soft, excelent lardo, fennel, and shaved Parmesan cheese. The meats were clearly sound and authentic, carefully selected and lovingly served, and we came away pleased and rather excited about this newish venture by a familiar and utterly reliable (not to say gifted and committed) chef.

Rouge d'Oc, Terrà Lisa, 2009 (fruity and generous if a little light); Tempranillo, Gran Cerdo, 2010 (deep, rich, and fulfilled); Calvados, Henri de Querville. (At home, a drop of Fernet Branca.)

•Worst Wijncafé, Barentszstraat 171, Amsterdam; 020.6256167; 4pm-midnight Tuesday-Saturday, 10-10 Sunday

Country dinner

Puiflijk, February 25, 2011—

AFTER DINING AT MARIUS, dining at home chez des amis is no let-down, particularly when the friends are themselves from the culinary profession. We're in a village in the Betuwe, in central Netherlands, apple orchards and pastures around our friends' house, and we're joined by Yolanda and Krijn and their two charming little girls Jip and Co for an evening of conversation and badinage and then dinner:

Salad: lettuces, pear, pecans, good blue cheese

Duck legs sautéed, then braised in stock with little onions

Red cabbage and mashed potatoes with celery root

Cheeses

Apple-blackberry crumble

A civilized country dinner combining California and Dutch tastes, completely satisfying.

Rioja, Muga, 2007; Cabernet sauvignon "Santa Sarah" (Bulgaria), 2009

 

Marius again

Amsterdam, February 24, 2011—

CERTAINLY AMONG THE FIVE, and closing in its present incarnation in a couple of weeks: get here soon.

Or wait a bit, as it'll reopen before you know it, only a few doors down the street, a little bigger but with the same team turning out, I'm sure, the same great stuff. The table d'hôte, at €47 I believe, involves three savory courses and dessert: tonight

fish salad, deliciously lukewarm, with poached red mullet, lettuce, purslane, blood orange, and fennel
grilled snoekbaars (perch?) with tapenade and Romanesco
quail stuffed with an agrodolci involving almonds, raisins, and don't recall what (I'd been nearly thirty hours traveling)
many good cheeses
almond tarte

Saumur, Domaine des Guyons, 2010; Langhe, Tre Stelle, 2009 (very beautiful young wines, both of them); "Escapade," Pays d'Oc, 2009 (soft and rich)

• Marius, Barentszstr. 243, Amsterdam; tel. 020 422 7880
Kees Elfring, chef-proprietor, at Marius

Marius

Amsterdam, November 9, 2010—

A VERY INTERESTING DAY for eating, today; and one I cannot do justice to here, for a number of reasons. After a leisurely morning in Friesland we drove into Amsterdam with a favorite friend (one of many, I hasten to add), a chef. We followed him as he marketed for his restaurant's evening table d'hôte dinner: tomatoes, salad, fennel; apples, pumpkins, eggs; wild boar. All this at one of the great Amsterdam wholesale markets, like the old Les Halles in Paris, or any big-city terminal, though in buildings quite up-to-date in terms of technology and, certainly, cleanliness.

Produce from everywhere, of course: South America, Africa, the Near East, any number of European countries. Almonds from California, pistachios from Turkey. Nearly every crate and box had its sticker stating quite plainly the provenance.






I was particularly impressed with the wholesaler butcher, where I talked to the man in charge of game. No farmed game here, no red deer from Poland or wherever: "I don't deal in farmed game, because I'm afraid my men will accidentally mix them in with the wild; the wild game is our specialty."

Kees liked the looks of some wild boar, and added that to the lot he'd already picked up. We crammed everything into the back of his car and drove to his restaurant where we left him to plan and begin cooking dinner while we spent the shank of the afternoon at a museum downtown.






We returned at seven o'clock for

Albacore, seared but nearly raw, with spinach with lemon-flavored olive oil, tomato, avocado, and mint-oil
Poached halibut with fennel and fennel-sauce with estragon, salsify purée
Roast wild boar rack and stewed shoulder with potato-pumpkin purée, radicchio, and little Brussels sprouts
Applecake with house-made vanilla ice cream and caramel

Marius is one of my Five Restaurants. Very rare, this combination of taste, intelligence, awareness, skill, and hospitality. We were ten at table; we probably made too much noise; I certainly didn't give the dinner its due attention. But I enjoyed it immensely, as always here.

Collio, 2009; Collioure, Domaine de La Rectoire, 2004

Marius, Barentszstraat 243, Amsterdam; +31 [0]20 422 7880

Pop-up

Eastside Road, April 15, 2010—

LOOK UP "POP-UP restaurant" online using your favorite search engine, well, mine, anyway, and you'll start exploring some interesting territory. I think it's a very healthy development, a response to mindless bureaucratic administration of ultimately necessary regulation. It's a very complicated issue, and further evidence, as if it were needed, that ad hocity is the correct posture in an over-complicated, over-populated, over-urban society.

Anyhow: tonight we ate not too many miles from home in a barn at a table with a number of people we didn't quite know but might have. One, for example, was delighted to meet Lindsey: he'd treasured her book for years. Another is off next week to Amsterdam to eat at Marius. A third is somehow connected to a winery we visited a year or two ago near Ashland.

The kitchen was set up in a side alley of the barn, spotless stainless-steel and seriousness. These people absolutely know their business — but they're also proud and pleased with it.

All that was very nice: but best of all was the food. I began with Sopa de Raiz de Apio, celery-root soup with fava bean pesto. I nibbled at a friend's Ensalada de esparragos, warm asparagus salad with cara cara oranges and raw-milk feta; and then hr Pescado locale, pan-seared cod with piquillo peppes and safferon-flavored carrots.

Best of all, I feasted on Chicharron de pato, duck breast cooked almost as if it were in confit, with a masa polenta-like toast with crinkly chicharrones from the duck; it was a veritable Yucatanese cassoulet lacking the beans. An extraordinary dish, deep, rich, complex, but in perfect balance, and thoroughly healthful. Oh: pea and fava-tendril salad to garnish it.

Then, out into the night, chilly, darker than this twilight photo suggests, with a big Evening Star hanging just off a tiny paring of a crescent new moon. Magical.

Blanc d'Alsace, "Now & Zen," 2007; Pinot noir, Kenwood (Russian River Valley), 2007;
Syrah, Cowhorn (Applegate Valley, Oregon), 2006; Malbec, AR Guentota (Argentina), 2006

Back at Marius

Amsterdam, June 10, 2009—

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE for two restaurants to be so nearly opposite in so many ways, and so similar in others? I had nearly the identical succession of courses, composed of a nearly identical inventory of ingredients, last night at Salentein, tonight at Marius. In both cases the ingredients were pristine, the flavors forthcoming and untainted. The first explanation to come to mind is this: at Salentein the flavors are all there, and they say Come find us, come enjoy us. At Marius the flavors are all there, and they dash forward eagerly. In different political times I'd say Salentein's feminine, Marius is masculine. I like each.

This time there were eight of us at the long table, changing seats between courses to facilitate conversation. (Down at the other end of the table sat a couple of "strangers," not part of our party; but it turned out one of them looked familiar because she'd been at the frituur conference a couple of weeks ago.) The restaurant was pretty well full, as it has been since a very favorable review appeared last month in the New York Times. Once again, I ordered the daily market menu:

Olives and salami
Salad: red mullet on a bed of spinach, artichoke hearts, with a perfect small glazed carrot
Poached plaice on risotto with peas, asparagus, and leeks
Lamb breast and shoulder au jus, with potato, fava beans, and a stewed tomato
Cheeses
Pistachio polenta cake, vanilla ice cream, and lightly cooked cherries

As you may have noticed, comparing this with our dinner of May 20, the menu at Marius has quite a consistent concept. I could happily eat here three times a week, though, for the flavor and nutrient quality of the kitchen and the comfort of the dining room. The flavors are full and forward, like the enthusiastic conversation of a trusted old friend: but nothing else about Marius clamors for attention; your old friend doesn't seek to impress you with noisy rhetoric or expensive clothes.

Cava; Sauvignon (Touraine); rouge (Touraine) (both François Chidaine)

Marius, Barentszstraat 243 (wester eilands); tel. +31.(0)20.422.7880

Once more at Marius

Amsterdam, May 20—

IT IS ONE OF our favorite restaurants, and I think one of the best: Marius, a small, cozy restaurant seating perhaps thirty, rarely turning a table, with a single "market menu" and a couple of steady extras to choose from, and a knowing wine list. It doesn't hurt that its owner and chef is a dear friend: Kees Elfring, part of our Dutch family. I had the menu, of course:

olives and salami
salad: tuna, green and white beans, tomato, eggplant, squid
cod with green and white asparagus, morel beurre blanc
veal (rump, cheek, and kidney) au jus, jerusalem artichoke purée
cheeses
raspberry tart, vanilla ice cream

Cava; Sauvignon (Touraine); rouge (Touraine) (both François Chidaine); vins doux: Maury, Domaine Jorel (blanc); Musset Roullier (raisins confits) (blanc)

Marius, Barentszstraat 243 (wester eilands); tel. +31.(0)20.422.7880

Party time

Vietnamese beef salad (see June 11); bread and cheeses; deviled eggs (thanks to Margery); green salad; cherries; ice cream with blackberry sauce

NO PHOTO TODAY, because, well, I forgot. We had a patio party, with friends and family, in a sort of Father's-Day-Farewell-to-the-Travelers celebration. This blog may well be winding down. It's been updated daily since the beginning, last December 10; and we've eaten in motel rooms, at home, in fine restaurants, and a Toyota showroom. Tomorrow we'll be at Chez Panisse; Tuesday at home; Wednesday I'll have dinner on an airplane; Thursday at Marius in Amsterdam.

It's going to be hard to post to this blog in the next few weeks. I'll be traveling light, without a laptop, and my European cell phone doesn't do internet. There may be the occasional internet café for sporadic updates, but I'm not counting on it. I'll keep a journal, of course, and may make some use of it when I get home. We'll see how it goes.

Have a good summer, everyone; eat well and often!

Pinot grigio; Marqués de Cáceres rosé de Rioja; Prosecco