Summer is the time when there’s nothing on TV but reality shows, and there are a few shows that we rarely miss. There’s “Top Chef.” There’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist” — sort of like “Top Chef,” but with art and artists instead of food and chefs. (That sounds like a terrible idea for a show, right?  That’s what we thought.   Insufferable, you’d think.  But we watched it — and it’s surprisingly good. And one of the artists on the show, Miles, is the real deal.)  There’s the terrible-but-we-watch-it-anyway “Design Star” on HGTV, a show that has nothing to do with design, but everything to do with asinine team challenges under ridiculous time constraints.  (Seriously, who designs a kitchen by committee, and executes the whole thing in 24 hours?  The more I think about “Design Star,” the more I hate it.  But still, we watch it.)

One of our favorite reality shows — and it runs year-around — is Chopped, on the Food Network.  (We also watch “Next Food Network Star,” even though the only “star” to ever come from any past season of that series is Guy Fieri, and the last thing anybody needs is another Guy Fieri.

Also, does Bobby Flay ever cook anymore if it’s not filmed?  I like Bobby Flay on TV, and the first couple of times I ate at Mesa Grill back in the late ’90s, I thought it was damn good, but in the years that followed, it was less polished with each visit.  (Maybe it’s good again; I haven’t been back for probably five years.)  But does Bobby still cook there?  He’s on TV All.  The.  Time.  Rumor has it that he lives in the building where we’re staying this summer, so I’m going to refrain from knocking him any further, in case he Googles himself, finds this entry, then sees me in the elevator.  Unlikely we’ll cross paths, though, because I think he spends most of his time in LA now, helping drunken damsels in distress.)

Sorry.  Back to Chopped.  If you haven’t seen this show, the basic idea is that there are four “up and coming” chefs from various restaurants, and they compete through three rounds of competition.  (The rounds are courses — the appetizer, main course, and dessert.)  For each course, there’s a “mystery basket” that has several ingredients that all have to be incorporated into that course.  For example, the appetizer basket might include gummi bears, fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and canned fish, and the chefs are judged on their ability to make a coherent dish that uses all of the items in the basket (and other ingredients from the on-set pantry), all within a set time limit of 20 or 30 minutes, depending on the course.

The poor judges have to then taste all of these dishes, and at the end of each round, one chef is eliminated — or, “chopped.”  The combination of three judges is different every week, but one of the judges who frequently appears on the show is Scott Conant.  My assumption was that if a professional chef was moonlighting as a judge on “Chopped,” they weren’t necessarily top-tier chefs.  I assumed this to be especially true if judging on “Chopped,” where he has to taste dishes containing lima beans and Snickers.  How good a chef could these guest judges really be?

If Scott Conant is any indication, they can be f-ing spectacular.  Until seeing him on Chopped, I hadn’t heard of him, but it turns out that his NYC restaurants are highly regarded (3-star reviews in the NY Times, one of the “Best New Restaurants in America” by Esquire magazine in 2008, etc.).  I foolishly thought he was just the guy on Chopped who never liked anybody else’s pasta.  Well, now we know better, thanks to a last-minute reservation at his restaurant Scarpetta in NY’s Meatpacking District (far west 14th Street).

Lots of restaurants bring bread to the table when you arrive.  Lots of places make the bread in-house.  But bread this good is almost unheard of as a freebie.  There were several kinds to choose from, but the show stopper was the warm bread stuffed with cheese and cured meats.  It was like a free sandwich as an appetizer — and it was damn good.

The bread basket comes with these condiments — butter blended with some sort of creamy cheese, an eggplant spread (I hate eggplant, so I didn’t pay much attention to that one), and a citrus-infused olive oil. The olive oil was some of the best I’ve tasted.

Appetizer time! AEJ started with the burrata — homemade fresh mozzarella with fresh tomatoes and mixed greens. It was bright and tasted like summer.  It’s tough to beat a real, farm-grown tomato in the middle of summer.

I had the equally stellar raw yellowtail with “Olio di Zenzero” and flaked sea salt. I loved it. I haven’t had yellowtail this tasty since Jinpachi.

Next: the pasta course!  AEJ ordered beet ravioli topped with crushed pistachio. The flavor was surprising (in a good way) because the ravioli looked like they were filled with a rare-cooked meat, but it was, most definitely, beets. Just perfect. I could eat at this place every day.

I ordered a special — the short rib ravioli with hazelnuts, brown butter, and horseradish. It was intensely rich — and, yum.

That should do it, right? An appetizer and a pasta — that should be plenty of food. Well, it was, but we’d ordered another course. (It’s a good thing I’m running a lot here, in addition to walking a few miles a day, or I’d be huge.) This is AEJ’s dish: the roasted chicken with parsnip puree, herbed spaetzle, fegato sauce, and vegetables. Chicken doesn’t get much better than it was here, with the rich sauce and perfectly-crisped skin.

I had the lardo-wrapped halibut with morels, asparagus, and roasted potatoes. “Lardo” is just what you’d think it is. I’ve had bacon-wrapped fish before, and it was terrible in the past, with the bacon and fish both ending up overcooked, dry, and tough. Somehow, this was just right. These vegetables, though — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — may have been the best thing of the evening, or at the very least, had the most concentrated flavor per bite. As a bonus, this is just about the prettiest food picture I’ve ever taken, so thank you for that, Scott Conant.  (A suggestion to anybody taking pictures of food in a restaurant: sit near natural light and never, never, never, ever, ever use a flash.  I’d asked to be seated against the window that evening, and we’re old, so we eat early, so the light was very good.)

At last, it was time for dessert. AEJ went with the surprising choice of ordering the olive oil cake with lemon ice cream and orange mascarpone cream. It was a bright and light way to end the meal.  Who knew that olive oil cake was a good idea?!  (AEJ, apparently.  Oh, and Scott Conant.)

I, on the other hand, ordered the not-so-light closer: banana budino with pecan gelato and oat tuile. Rich — but delicious. I never turn down a banana dessert, and heavy as this was, it was worth it.

Here is a shot of one of the caramelized bananas.

After dinner, I called for our car.

Okay, not really. We walked back to our apartment, via the Highline Park — a new park on the west side of Manhattan, built along the former elevated railroad tracks. The area had become overgrown with wildflowers, and when it was turned into a park, the landscape design was made to reflect that history. It’s a beautiful park, right in the middle of the city.

The flowers are pretty.

I can’t even imagine what this park has done to the real estate values of the neighboring buildings. Nobody wants to live pressed against a train track, but everybody wants to live overlooking a park.

It’s an awfully nice place for an evening walk.

It was another great night here in New York. I can’t recommend Scarpetta highly enough. (And I will never again negatively pre-judge a chef simply because I saw him first as a judge on a reality show.) Up next, tomorrow night — dinner at Eleven Madison Park. I hope my camera is welcome…

Just a few assorted pictures from the past few days…

On Thursday, we went to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store to pick up an iPhone 4. It was a hot day, and the line was huge (this must be the busiest Apple Store in the world), but the line moved quickly, and we were in and out in less than 90 minutes. (Compare that to my experience at The Domain Apple Store in Austin, where it took six hours to buy an iPad on launch day. I hate you, The Domain Apple Store.  You are truly the worst Apple Store in the world.  Fifth Avenue Apple Store?  I love you.)

I was not the only person there with a camera.

Jeez. See what I mean?

It was a fun morning — the way a big Apple launch should be. (The iPhone 4, by the way, is very slick.)

On Sunday, we ventured to Brooklyn to check out Brooklyn Heights and the Brooklyn Promenade. We had brunch at a place called Heights Cafe. I only had my wide-angle lens with me, and I’d never tried shooting food with it.  Looks kinda weird.  (Tasty brunch, though.)

Tonight, I went up to our building’s huge shared roof deck for the first time.  (It spans the entire building, which spans an entire city block.)  This is looking east.

The building is on 7th Avenue between 24th & 25th Streets. Here’s a shot looking up 7th Avenue.

Here’s the same direction an hour later.

And here’s a shot looking south towards the financial district.  The nearby buildings look small, but they’re not.  (I was up over 20 stories.)  I love being surrounded by buildings and lights as far as you can see.

Coming up later this week… A haircut on Thursday with my old stylist (need to get this hair fixed), a concert on Friday (a joint performance at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic and the West Point Band), and dinner at Eleven Madison Park on Saturday.

I love this city.

Our NYC foodie tour continued last night at WD-50, Wylie Dufresne‘s restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Dufresne is one of the big American “molecular gastronomy” chefs (along with Grant Achatz, chef at Alinea in Chicago — where I had the best meal ever).  Molecular gastronomy adds a scientific approach to the processes of cooking, leading to fun things like foods that are served as a liquid when they’d normally be a solid.  Or, something might look like bread, but actually be ice cream.  In my limited experience with this kind of food, it seems to be the most successful when the chef is not only creative, but has a sense of humor.  (There were courses at our dinner at Alinea that had us in tears we were laughing so hard.)  Molecular gastronomy is serious cooking, but it ain’t stuffy (and at WD-50, the dress is casual, which I appreciate — especially when it’s 85 degrees outside).

As we usually do, we started our evening with cocktails. AEJ’s, the pH (rose, lychee, and vodka), was interesting (it tasted like fruit punch), but mine, the Lupita, was bat-shit crazy — a surprising-with-each-sip take on a margarita, with yuzu (the delicious citrus I mentioned in my write-up of Morimoto the other day), tequila, green apple, and — seriously — green tabasco. This was one spicy pucker.

They also provided sesame flatbread, which was the freakishly flattest flatbread I’ve ever seen.

We ordered the tasting menu with wine & sake pairings. AEJ is allergic to shellfish, so the first course — normally a scallop dish — was substituted with this dish, featuring an incredible broth, dried seaweed, chickpea cubes (they felt like tofu but were made from chickpeas), and I-don’t-know-what-else.

Next up: one of WD-50’s most famous dishes, the “everything bagel with smoked salmon threads and crispy cream cheese.” This was a lot of fun. No idea how salmon was transformed into that crazy powder that you see under the “bagel,” and the bagel isn’t a bagel at all, but is actually ice cream.

This is foie gras, passionfruit, and Chinese celery. Somehow the fois gras was formed into a perfect circle that honestly resembled a Vienna sausage.

Where’s the passionfruit? Somehow, it was stuffed inside of that sausage-looking fois gras. I’m not normally so big on fois gras, nor passionfruit, but I learned last night that together, they’re amazing, with the intense richness of the fois gras cut by the bright passionfruit flavor.

This looks like a slab of butter, some sushi, a pickle, and some breadcrumbs. It’s actually scrambled egg ravioli, charred avocado, kindai kampachi, and potato crumbs.

This is another trademark Dufresne dish: cold fried chicken, buttermilk-ricotta, tabasco, and caviar. Think “fanciest-ever leftovers.”

This was another shellfish substitution. Normally, this course would be the sweet shrimp. This was perch with potatoes and curry sauce.

Here is the best course of the night: beef and bearnaise. Traditionally, the beef would be, well, beef, and the bearnaise is a broth. This flips it, with the normally solid beef becoming intense beef broth, and the bearnaise becoming solid, like a gnocchi. We wouldn’t change anything about this dish.

(I had the new iPhone 4 with me, and I wondered how it would do as a low-light food camera. Here’s what I captured with the iPhone. Not bad for as dim as it was in the room, but it can’t replace the normal camera setup.)

The final pre-dessert dish was the lamb loin with black garlic romesco, soybean, and pickled garlic chive. The lamb had a nice flavor, but it seemed to have been cooked sous vide and not seared after, resulting in an excessively chewy texture, not unlike lamb gum.

Did I mention that we had the wine/sake pairing? That results in a lot of, um, drinking. By the time dessert rolled around (which also included dessert wines), we were hammered.

The people at the next table may have been hammered, too. Broken wine glasses = now it’s a party.

Dessert time! First up: chewy lychee sorbet with pistachio, lemon, and celery. (The pistachios were underneath that perfect white foam.)

This is a hazelnut tart with coconut, chocolate, and chicory. Yum.

Caramelized brioche, apricot, buttercream, and lemon thyme. Nom.

And lastly, chocolate shortbread with milk ice cream inside, and… cocoa packets. Those things on the left look like little rubber packets, but they’re completely eatable — and delicious.

The meal took roughly four hours, and it was a blast. Flavor-wise, I think I enjoyed it more than AEJ, who thought the foie gras course was a little large, the dried seaweed was too fishy, the salmon powder was also too fishy, and there was too much caviar with the chicken dish. (She doesn’t like much in the way of fish. I didn’t have any complaint with any of the dishes except the texture of the lamb.) You figure, though, with twelve courses, not everything will be perfect, but even the occasional miss was entertaining. The vibe in the room is comfortable and relaxed, and not remotely stuffy. We got to see the kitchen after dinner, and we met Chef Dufresne, who was very pleasant, and he was awfully forgiving of my then-shitfaced self. (“I love you, man. You know that, right?”) I had a much better time at WD-50 than I’d had at Morimoto the night before. I don’t know that I’ll be back at WD-50 anytime soon (since half the fun of a meal like this is the surprise of each dish), but I’d recommend it to anybody who is looking for an entertaining and memorable four-hour dinner. Oh — and be sure to order the wine/sake pairing, ’cause… damn.