New in NYC (When here?)
There is always something new happening in New York when it comes to food. New restaurants, concepts and new or newly executed dishes. In an overview in New York Magazine, potato- and crispy-bits-obsessed Marjan Ippel came across her dream dish. And then some… The age-old question: when will they come here?
Yukon Golds
It sounds like a baseball team languishing somewhere at the bottom of the league. But it is a large potato. And, more importantly, the name of my dream dish. Made from wafer-thin potato slices, layered on top of one another like puff pastry and confited in lard (!). The whole thing is compressed even further under the pressure of heavy pans, then eventually cut into square cubes and fried in – yes indeed – lard. The result: crispy like chips and creamy inside like mashed potatoes. You get four of these Rubik’s Cube-like cubes in a serving at the new White Gold Butchers restaurant from New York’s top meat chef April Bloomfield, author of, among other books, A girl and her pig and more recently A girl and her greens,.
White Gold Butchers, 375 Amsterdam Ave., at 78th St.
Kejriwal
Toast has been a thing on the menus of major American cities for years. Foodies are willing to pay a lot of money for it. Browning a slice of bread until crisp is a true Zen art for certain chefs. Here too, what we rather disrespectfully call a toasted sandwich is very much on the rise. But there is always a bigger boss. Such as Floyd Cardoz’s egg kejriwal.
Hidden beneath the cheddar and green chile chutney is a fried egg on brioche toast.
Kejriwal, to begin with, is an Indian snack in which an egg is hidden. It was invented in Mumbai in the 1960s by egg fan Devi Prasad Kejriwal, who was not allowed to indulge his love of eggs in the Indian vegetarian community. So he asked the cook at his business club to secretly hide an egg under a layer of cheese on his sandwich. Then more and more people started ordering ‘what Kejriwal had ordered’. In the version by Mumbai-born Cardoz, it becomes almost obscene: Beneath a thick layer of melted cheddar drizzled with green-chile chutney lies a fried egg on a lightly toasted piece of brioche.
Paowalla, 195 Spring St., at Sullivan St.
Cruller
The name of this classic is said to originate from Dutch. Specifically, from the verb ‘krullen’, meaning ‘to curl’. That is also what the original looks like: a rectangular piece of dough ingeniously curled inward. Sometimes it looks more like churros. So far, old news. But then there is Daniel Alvarez of the excellent daytime café Daily Provisions: He makes what is known as a French Cruller, a doughnut-like ring made from twisted dough. In Alvarez’s case, it is choux pastry prepared with extra egg, meringue, honey and butter, creamy like custard. The outside, made quite dark by the honey, is crisp instead. Alvarez’s cruller is finished with cinnamon sugar or coated with a maple glaze that reduces Krispy Kreme’s the original glaze to sugar syrup. More or less.
Daily Provisions, 103 E. 19th St., nr. Park Ave. S.
Image French Cruller: Liz Clayman
