October 2015 | QANTAS 163 Quisine
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Page 170 The best BYO restaurants Page 176 Neil Perry bangs the Drum Page 178 Mornington Peninsula’s glory Counter meal: Spanish tapas bar El Colmado at Gotham West Market Quisine. Page 164 Bite me They’re food courts – but not as you know them. Gotham West is just one of the mega-markets transforming New York’s dining scene. Sam Polcer Sam October 2015 | QANTAS 163 Quisine. NEW Yorkers love to feel like Heaving with gourmet they have options. One kind COUNTER fare curated from around of peanut butter is fne but 15 the globe, NYC’s upscale varieties is better, particularly gastro-emporiums are if you can grind the nuts from redefning the humble scratch and add organic oil CULTURE food court – they’re fown in from Argentina. The typically un-American simple act of making small daily but so very New York. choices is, in New York, elevated to obsession. New Yorkers are STORY BY LANCE RICHARDSON the CEOs of their own lives. PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAM POLCER This fxation on variety, on endless possibilities at every single moment, is behind a trend that has swept the city over the past few years: food courts. Not the plastic shopping-mall kind, flled with Starbucks and sad- looking Chinese bufets but food courts – like art galleries – that compress an entire galaxy of culinary pleasures into a single, exquisitely detailed space. The trend started in 2010 with the opening of Eataly, a high-end emporium dedicated to all things Italian. It received an infusion of hipster credibility with the launch of Brooklyn’s Smorgasburg, an outdoor market where everything is artisan and lovingly crafted. Many of the food courts that have opened since manage a mix of these two extremes – they are fnely curated but somehow spontaneous, ofering diferent cuisines and jumbles of communal seating. Visiting them is to catch a glimpse of the city in miniature. There are many such establishments in New York already – Berg’n in Brooklyn, Gotham West Market in Hell’s Kitchen, Gansevoort Market in the Meatpacking District, City Kitchen in Times Square and Riis Park Beach Bazaar on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. More locations are slated to open, including one curated by American chef Anthony Bourdain. In other words, there are many choices ofering many ever-expanding choices. No wonder New Yorkers are excited. Here’s a guide to fve good places to start. Bunk’r brings the flavours of Vietnamese street food to Brooklyn in Berg’n’s industrial-chic “beer hall” 164 QANTAS | October 2015 Berg’n keeps it fresh and healthy with Middle Eastern dips and pickles, bánh-mÌ-style hot dogs and Asian salads (left) the East River in Williamsburg. Four food options line the Berg’n, tucked away beside an wall: barbecue, shawarma, old red-brick Heinz factory, is a Vietnamese and Asia Dog, BERG’N permanent but minimalist afair which infuses the all-American with long communal tables hot dog with the favours of 899 Bergen Street, Brooklyn arranged before a Western-style bánh mì and house-made bergn.com bar ofering dozens of drafts, kimchi. Everything on ofer NO NEW York City food cans and bottles with names is delicious and scrupulously experience would be complete such as Victory Summer Love healthy, much of it flled with without a foray into Brooklyn. and North Coast Old Rasputin. kale. When asked how the Berg’n, in the vibrant Crown Mostly, this is a space iced tea with cardamom and Heights neighbourhood, designed for serious night rosewater is sweetened, for is a brand-new “beer hall” crowds; it heaves from happy example, the server at Samesa designed by the people behind hour onwards. But lunch is good assures a patron that “it’s only Smorgasburg, the weekly hipster for a quieter retreat as the many honey” and a modest amount at food bazaar that sees dozens freelance creatives hunkered that: “We try to make things as of temporary stalls erected by over laptops will attest. non-American as possible here.” October 2015 | QANTAS 165 Quisine. GOTHAM WEST MARKET a TV by the ramen bar while 600 11th Avenue PR executives work the photo gothamwestmarket.com booth next to Choza Taqueria, WHERE exactly is Gotham West a taco shop that also opens for Market? It depends on who you breakfast (try the tamales and ask. Long-time New Yorkers poached eggs). Ben Gilreath, will tell you it’s in an industrial a local investment banker, says backwater, otherwise known the ambience is “mesmerising as 11th Avenue, west of Times – part Disney, part Lawrence Square. Property developers will of Arabia”. When asked to tell you it’s in boomtown: just elaborate, he orders another look at those glittering high-rises glass of Rioja from the tapas springing up on every block, bar and waves his arm around flled with young professionals. as though it’s perfectly obvious. But Gotham West Market is The lighting is low and the best understood as a ready-made music is loud. The best favour community hangout. Its chic at Ample Hills Creamery, a polished-concrete cavern ofers Brooklyn-based company that people who have chosen to live draws its name from a poem by in the sky a place to unwind. Walt Whitman, is The Munchies: There’s a café at the end pretzel-infused ice-cream with peddling Blue Bottle Cofee and Ritz crackers, M&M’s and Kettle long communal tables stacked potato chips. It could be a motto: with Scrabble and Pictionary. why choose one thing when you Lawyers watch football on can have it all? EATALY it remains the most celebrated 200 Fifth Avenue emporium in the city: 4600 eataly.com square metres of delicious “IT WAS a hotel then a bank,” edibles, from Caprese salad to says a white-aproned worker, giant wheels of Parmigiano. describing the ornate building Eataly is part supermarket on the western side of Madison and part food court. Its aisles Square Park. “Right before this ofer enough variety for an it was a toy store – from toys entire grocery run – and around to Italian food!” When Eataly, them diferent dining stations the brainchild of businessman dedicated to thin-crust pizza, Oscar Farinetti, opened in 2010, vegetarian cuisine or espresso. the queues stretched around the Businessmen on power lunches block for weeks. Five years on brush shoulders with old dames lugging shopping bags in La Eataly’s cured meats and cheese Piazza, the central hall. Tourists counter (top); dining, Italian style wander past egg bucatini while trying not to drool. Others line up for Baci di Dama, hazelnut cookies sandwiched together with chocolate. The selection here is so overwhelming, it’s not unusual to hear people asking staf for recommendations like a plea for help. Pointing to the Carne del Giorno bar, one attendant advises “the prime rib panino” (peppery, delectable). Prices can be steep but it’s a testament to Eataly’s charms that you barely even notice. This is what grocery shopping should be like. Gotham West Market houses 10 vendors within one communal space October 2015 | QANTAS 167 Quisine. GANSEVOORT MARKET food vans. Some of the oferings French affair: Le District’s sweet 52 Gansevoort Street are faddish; tiger-nut horchata and savoury crêpe station gansmarket.com is “like almond milk but a root AT THE turn of last century, vegetable”, explains one server. the cobblestoned Gansevoort But the selection is varied At Le District, nothing is out Street was home to an open-air enough to satisfy even the of place. Madeleines are farmers’ market that one most discerning palate. individually wrapped; apple magazine described in 1888 as Also, it’s hard to beat galettes are faky perfection; the “pandemonium”. Things today Gansevoort Market for sheer chocolate mousse bar opens at are a little more subdued in the convenience. The High Line precisely four o’clock. There are Meatpacking District: instead of is just down the block, along better cheese shops in the city frozen turkeys and slaughtered with the new and unmissable (Murray’s foremost among them) calves, you’ll fnd Diane von Whitney Museum of American but it’s doubtful that a better Furstenberg and Helmut Lang. Art, now one of New York’s Napoleon (mille-feuille) could be But the market – or a modern loveliest attractions. found anywhere on the continent. version of it, bufed and Plenty of seating in the sanitised – is now reimagined LE DISTRICT modernist dining room makes as an international bazaar. this an ideal lunch spot in Lower Gansevoort Market occupies Brookfield Place, Manhattan, a neighbourhood a warehouse space of exposed 225 Liberty Street not known for its food. On-site ledistrict.com brick walls, artfully weathered, FLIGHT PATH restaurant Beaubourg ofers with a seating area arranged AFTER walking through the croque-monsieur and moules- around a skylight and several doors of Le District, it takes frites (mussels in a white wine gnarled trees. Wooden tables JFK mere seconds to understand broth served with French fries). press up against stalls selling that it’s French. There’s the But another option, popular Thai food, meatballs, sushi music, for starters – an insistent among the regulars, is “grab- and Cornish pasties. There Qantas flies to New York soundtrack of singers such as and-go” casse-croûte, or snacks. are outposts of several notable from Brisbane, Sydney Camille. Then there are the Fill a picnic basket with pâté New York businesses, including and Melbourne, with food-station names – Rotisserie, and baguettes then head out the Champion – a terrifc cofee connections from Charcuterie, Poissonnerie – door to the edge of the Hudson roaster based out of Brooklyn other Australian cities.