lsanderson | Food Wednesday @ the NY Times: Hint -- Michelin

Is New York Worth a Trip? Oui
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

IT may have been only one more review among many, but when Michelin announced its first ratings for restaurants in New York City yesterday morning, superstar chefs and proprietors reacted with joyous tears, resignation and, in some cases, dismay.

Four restaurants - Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin and Per Se - received the top ranking, three stars. But Daniel, long considered to be in the very top rank of New York's restaurants, had to settle for two, along with Masa, Bouley and Danube.

And in some of the more surprising rankings, the Spotted Pig, a no-frills Greenwich Village pub with an idiosyncratic menu, got a star, putting it up with restaurants like Babbo and Gramercy Tavern, while respected restaurants like Chanterelle, Felidia, the Four Seasons and Union Square Cafe got no stars. Scott Conant, one of the city's most admired young chefs, failed to win a star for either of his restaurants, L'Impero and Alto.

Michelin's red-covered guides have been the standard for dining in Europe since the company first published ratings of restaurants in France in 1923. But in a city more attuned to the consumer-generated rankings of the Zagat Survey and weekly reviews in newspapers and magazines, it remains to be seen what impact the Michelin ratings will have, beyond the prestige they confer.

Michelin rated 507 New York restaurants in all five boroughs for the 2006 New York guide, which will go on sale Friday for $16.95. Two Brooklyn restaurants, the 118-year-old Peter Luger steakhouse and Saul, a cozy contemporary American spot on the Smith Street strip in Boerum Hill, were the only restaurants outside Manhattan to win stars. Thirty-seven other places received stars, making New York second only to Paris, which has 72 starred restaurants, including 10 with three stars. London has 34 restaurants with stars, including one, Gordon Ramsay, with three.

An Old-Fashioned American Standby, Fish Sauce and All
By JOAN NATHAN

IN my youth, chicken was simple. Usually, it was served on Friday night. Bought whole or cut up to order by local butchers, it was either roasted; baked with a cornflake coating; served cacciatore or à la king; or, as a real treat, Southern-fried. For guests, my mother might prepare chicken with curry, that exotic spice. And on Sunday night there was chicken chop suey at a Chinese restaurant.

Chicken remains the great international comfort food. But as the new world of flavor has evolved over the last 40 years, the simple chicken may have changed more than anything else on the American dinner table.

There's now an infinite variety of recipes, thanks to immigration and ambitious chefs, and an increasing diversity of chicken itself, thanks to innovative farmers.

Recipe: East Asian Chicken Curry
Recipe: Preserved Lemons
Recipe: Roast Chicken With Preserved Lemon

Festival of Lights, Parade of Sweets
By JULIA MOSKIN

NEW YORKERS have learned to tread fearlessly in the world of real Indian food. They know pakoras from samosas and dabble in idlis and utthappams. But a confusing cloud often looms over the end of those meals: the sweet, colorful, mysteriously milky world of Indian desserts.

"I get so sad reading reviews of Indian restaurants; they always end, 'As usual, the desserts were nothing to write home about,' or worse," says Maya Kaimal, the author of two Indian cookbooks and a frequent visitor to the state of Kerala in southern India. "But what you have to understand is that although Indians adore sweets, there is really no such thing as dessert there."

Indian sweets, called mithai, are a thing apart, served alone or with a cup of chai for an afternoon or late-night snack that is both stimulating and soothing. Although they are made from simple ingredients, like butter, milk, nuts and spices, they take wild forms and colors, like pumpkin-orange jalebi filled with sugar syrup and hot-pink Twinkie-shaped chumchums, a specialty of West Bengal, the capital of Indian confectionery.

Recipe: Coconut Burfi

Chopping and Mincing From Soup to Dessert
By DANA BOWEN

TO the chagrin of a great many chefs, nicknames acquired in restaurant kitchens are difficult to shake.

"They still call me Señorita Salsa," said Dona Abramson, the chef of the Bright Food Shop, wincing as she chopped vegetables in her restaurant's galley kitchen. Her sobriquet took root in 1983 at one of her earlier cooking gigs. "At the end of the shift we'd make a list of what we had left over, and somehow I got delegated as the person who always made the salsa."

The name stuck, and so did her knack for composing chunky symphonies of far-flung flavors. "It was the beginning of American cuisine with eclectic, international influences," she recalled. It was also good practice for the Mexican-Asian fusion menu she introduced years later at Bright Food, her chummy coffee shop in Chelsea with its flickering neon sign.

"You won't find these in Mexico," she said of her crop of late-harvest salsas, which sat in bowls with nary a tortilla chip in sight. A cook from Puebla, Mexico, walked past, shook his head and declared them salads.

Recipe: Winter Squash Salsa With Piloncillo Syrup
Recipe: Chipotle Beet Orange Salsa
Recipe: Tamarind Apple Poblano Salsa
Recipe: Roasted Pear-Tomatillo Salsa

A Fast, Versatile Italian Import
By MARK BITTMAN

TO the list of imported dishes that are easier to make than we Americans have been led to believe, you can add polenta.

The luxuriously creamy, pale yellow cornmeal mush probably originated in this hemisphere, but it is most closely associated with Italy; there is a version traditional to Romania as well.

When polenta first began to appear in cookbooks and in upscale Italian restaurants here about 30 years ago, we were told that to prevent the cornmeal from forming lumps as it cooked, the cook had to stand by, stirring constantly for a half-hour or longer.

Visions of Mama somebody-or-other danced through our heads as we wasted time preparing a porridge that is not much more difficult to make than oatmeal.

Recipe: Polenta Without Fear

In One Day, Fire Lays Waste to a Piece of Bottled History
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

VALLEJO, Calif., Oct. 28 - Harvest is the season of anticipation in Napa Valley, and it has been especially so this fall, with cool temperatures and a luxuriantly long time on the vine eliciting promises of unusual rapture in the bottle.

So there was a Dickensian sense of contrast when word spread that a fire here in a wine storage warehouse on Oct. 12 had in eight hours destroyed up to $100 million worth of wine. The fire, later declared an arson by federal investigators, affected nearly 100 wineries, including some of the valley's most celebrated.

"I alternate between hope and despair," Julie A. Johnson, the owner of the boutique winery Tres Sabores in Rutherford, said from the warehouse, where she was trying to salvage the remains of her acclaimed inventory, her fingers stained cabernet purple from crushing grapes.

Ms. Johnson lost most of the wine she has spent seven years developing, some 2,400 cases, including nearly all of her 2003 vintage. "This is our livelihood," she said. "It's shocking to think this might be arson from one of our own."

Where the Rhone Bends to the West
By ERIC ASIMOV

BACK in the late 1980's, when California was otherwise settling into a two-tone cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay funk, a small group of winemakers were bucking the trend. They sought inspiration not from Bordeaux and Burgundy, as so many others had, but from the intense, spicy wines of the Rhone Valley, the home of Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Although the winemakers were collectively called the Rhone Rangers, they didn't necessarily work together or with specific goals in mind. What linked them was a love of the Rhone wines and the suspicion that the California climate and soil, or at least the areas where they were working, had more in common with the Rhone Valley than with Pauillac or Pommard. Among these early experimentalists were producers like Joseph Phelps, Bonny Doon, Edmunds St. John and Qupé.

It's too simple, of course, to lump all Rhone wines together. Among Rhone reds, the wines of the northern Rhone, like Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie, are made almost entirely of the syrah grape. On the other hand, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, from the southern Rhone, and Côtes-du-Rhônes are blended wines. More than a dozen grapes can legally be included in the Châteauneuf mix, but the most important are grenache, mourvèdre and syrah.

The American producers were drawn to both Rhone styles, but perhaps inevitably syrah has become the big hit among Rhone-style wines, and not necessarily because the grape makes better wines. As John Alban of Alban Vineyards, now probably the most influential of the American Rhone producers, told me in August, Americans understand single-grape wines better than blends, given their recent history of buying cabernet, merlot and chardonnay. So Mr. Alban, for one, chooses not to make a Châteauneuf-style blend. His syrahs, incidentally, are superb.

But what about those who, marketers be damned, did travel the Châteauneuf road? The Dining section's wine panel recently tasted 25 California red wines blended in the style of the southern Rhone, and we found a collection of wines that, despite their Old World models, were decidedly New World in flavor and texture.

What to Do With a Wine of Many Flavors? Add Another Flavor
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

TOO bad the season for black truffles is still a month or two away. I would love to use them in a dish to complement the California Rhone blends. The first whiff of several of the wines suggested fresh black truffles to me.

Spices were at work, and earth, tar, licorice, dried figs, blackberries, cedar, brambles and herbs.

Some of the aromas were pervasive, reflecting elements that also emerged in the mouth, giving the best of these wines a food-friendly complexity.

The dish that I had first planned was a simple chicken liver and tomato sauté to dress fresh pappardelle. But as I tasted the sauce midway into the preparation, I decided to take it in a slightly different direction with a seasoning that offered a touch of anise flavor