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“THE STRONG BUZZ July 23rd: News (Cote D'Or, Blue Seats, Centro Vinotecca), My Dinner at Soto”

Hello all and welcome to the July 23rd edition of THE STRONG BUZZ: The News (Cote D’Or, The Blue Seats, Centro Vinoteca), My Dinner at Soto.

THE NEWS

Cote D’Or
Cote D’Or, the latest from Simon Oren’s Tour De France Restaurant Group (Marseille, Nice Matin, Café D’Alsace) honors the cuisine of the gold coast of Burgundy—the cote d'or, where the region’s most prized grapes are grown. The restaurant, which is located in the former Brother’s BBQ space, is now barely recognizable. It’s pretty and airy, wrapped in 120 feet of tall French doors with earthy terracotta walls, blue tiles, and a circular wood bar at the entrance. Chef Philippe Roussel of Café D'Alsace is turning out a menu stocked with dishes deeply rooted in the hearty flavors of this region—Cassoulet of Snails, poached eggs in red wine with croutons, bacon, and frisee, bone marrow with grilled country bread, Boeuf Bourguignon, and Coq au Vin. Wine director Aviram Turgeman (who many of you may remember as the beer sommelier at Café D’Alsace) has curated a wine list that’s heavily Burgundian, with 40-50 bottles from the region. Cote d’Or will be open 7 days a week for lunch and dinner, late night and brunch. Cote d’Or is located at 225 Varick Street at Clarkson, 212-727-2775.

The Blue Seats
I’ve been lamenting to Craig lately that I need a sports bar with better food. I love our regular haunt, Professor Thom’s, but The Spotted Pig it’s not. I’ve started making subtle hints to Jim, one of the owners, to maybe hire a chef and upgrade some of the items on the menu (which, in their defense is good bar food, just not as good as it could be). He usually just smiles and nods and hands me another beer. (And sometimes a shot of Jaeger. Like I’m 22?) Craig doesn’t really care about the menu, and while he humors my ideas about how Thom’s could hire a chef, he’s not really swayed by my arguments. “Honey, I hate to tell you this,” he’ll say, “but men don’t really care about the food served in sports bars. We care about the game and the beer. The rest is just not really all that important.” I guess he’s got a point, but when I heard about The Blue Seats, I thought, now this could be my kind of sports bar.

It’s owned by Natasha Navidad, who turned the space previously occupied by Tenement into a sports bar that caters both to avid sports fans and those who crave better bar food. It’s a place where “guys could come watch the game and bring along their girlfriends who would equally enjoy the experience," she says. Eureka.

The Blue Seats, named for the seats where the loyalists sit at Madison Square Garden, is a spacious 2000-square feet and is filled with 72 (yes, 72) High Definition flat screens, and to relax in, a collection of luxurious leather banquets. While the menu is slightly more upscale than most sports bars—there’s a raw bar, fresh mozzarella tomato and basil ($10.95), double cut pork chops ($17.95), and scallops wrapped in bacon ($12.95), they’re keeping it real with Philly cheese steak sliders ($3 each), veal parmigiana heroes ($10.95), sausage and pepper sandwiches ($9.95), chicken wings in three styles ($9.95), and mac’ and cheese with bacon ($14.95). For Sunday games, the brunch menu features stuffed French toast topped with banana and walnuts and omelets of goat cheese and sun dried tomato ($9.95 each). If you want to host a playoff party or a reserve a night for March Madness, there are two private rooms the dug out area and the sky box along with the tunnel lined with booths.

As for whether I’ll spend much time at Blue Seats, I don’t think so. It sounds great, but I don’t think I could ever leave Thom’s. I guess I’m a loyalist of my own kind, and my blue seats are there. And anyway, they pour a good pint, and their pizzas are pretty good. The Blue Seats is located at 157 Ludlow Street, 212-614-1494, Reservations@theblueseats.com

Centro Vinoteca
With Gusto, Morandi, and now the long-awaited opening of Centro Vinoteca, the Italian trifecta of the West Village is now complete. The latest of the three comes to us from chef Anne Burrell and Gusto owners Sasha and Alexei Muniak, and is situated in a two-story 1920s building with black and white accents, French doors, an attention-grabbing three-tiered glass and steel chandelier, and a partially open kitchen.

Burrell, who has worked in New York at Savoy, Felidia and Italian Wine Merchants and has also cooked at restaurants in Liguria, Umbria and Tuscany, including the one-Michelin star La Bottega del’30, was originally pegged to be the chef of European Union. But when plans for that project were stalled this opportunity presented itself. How lucky for Sasha. Her menu sounds incredible. It starts out with finger foods and antipasti—arancini ($6), gorgonzola dip with grapes and walnuts ($5), and eggplant cakes with ricotta ($5) and moves onto pastas like pici pasta with sweet and spicy sausage ragu ($14), and secondi like seared red snapper with cauliflower ragu, olives, caperberries and parsley salad ($23), and brined heritage pork chop crusted with fennel pollen, with pancetta, Swiss chard, baby turnips and crispy bacon skin ($28).

The wine program, which is overseen by General Manager Denis Le Denn (Alain Ducasse, Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar), is exclusively Italian and features 25-30 wines by the quartino and 200 wines from the entire country. Centro Vinoteca is located at74 Seventh Avenue South (at Barrow Street), 212-367-7470.

THE STRONG BUZZ CLASSIFIEDS!

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MY DINNER AT SOTO
My phone was ringing. It was Stacey, and she was lost. “I’m on 6th Avenue, near West 4th, and I don’t see the restaurant,” she said. “Where is it?” “It’s there,” I said. “You must be standing right in front of it. But I’ll be there in a minute and we’ll find it together.” I hopped out of the cab and found Stacey standing two doors down from Soto, a signless, inconspicuous temple of sushi. “Here it is,” I said, pointing to the naked storefront behind her. She turned around and all of a sudden realized it had been right in front of her. “I can’t believe I was standing right next to it, I barely noticed it.” On a noisy, steamy, overdeveloped block of 6th Avenue, flanked by a WA-MA bank and Gray’s Papaya, Soto almost vanishes into the line of storefronts. But once you stop and look, you’ll see it emerge.

Its façade is a sheet of glass that’s backed by a cream-colored wall cut out with asymmetrical shapes that reveal a simple dining room and sushi bar. A hostess with a sharp black bob may be standing with her face centered in one of those shapes. She’s one of a team of beautiful Japanese women who will attend to you, quietly filling sake glasses, and shepherding plates of glossy, practically quivering fish to a row of closely spaced tables. You’ll walk inside and be seated at one of those tables. And then you will begin a journey of—to quote Will Ferrell being James Lipton—scrumptulescent sushi feasting. Indeed, despite the trouble you may have locating this place, I’d recommend you keep a keen eye out and immediately arrange for you, and anyone else who claims to love the Japanese way, to plant your bottoms in one of those seats at one of those tables, or even at the tall chairs at the sushi bar. You could sit Indian-style on the floor for all I care, just go. It’s an exquisite experience.

The chef of this accidental sushi hideaway is a fellow by the name of Sotohiro Kosugi. He is a small and thin man with a thick head of dark hair tucked under a soft white cap. While I wouldn’t throw him in a boxing ring against Rocky Balboa, he exudes a certain amount of physical strength from behind his sushi stage. You get the feeling he’d have no problem dropping and giving you a hundred push-ups after filleting a tuna in under a minute with one hand tied behind his back the entire time (pushups included). Next time, I’m sitting at the sushi bar and putting myself in his hands for the night. Kosugi is a third generation sushi chef who was a Food & Wine Best New Chef in 1997 and was the chef and owner of a spot in Atlanta of the same name. He shuttered his Atlanta restaurant last year and took his show up to the Big Top, New York City. Thank you Mr. Kosugi, from the bottom of my heart.

Stacey and I took a seat at one of the tables facing the sushi bar and looked at the menu, a simple bifold of flimsy copy paper printed daily with the chef’s menu. (The menu includes a page from the sushi bar, a selection from the kitchen and then a back page of sushi nigiri and omakase ($48/$58). Plates are priced in the $10-$28 range, all were large enough to share.) As Stacey looked over the sake list, I took in the room. It’s brightly lit with pinpoint lighting and there’s not much to distract you from your food. Designer Hiro Tsuruta (Chickalicious & Momofuku Noodle Bar) built a space as spare as they come, with floors, tables and chairs cut from glossy wood the color of creamery butter. Walls are stark white and one is hung cut with a large red rising sun in relief, which tends to make the wall look like a large Japanese Flag. But you won’t spend much time looking at the décor. Your gaze will go straight down, towards your plate.

Even something as simple and mundane as edamame—a gift from the chef—were exquisite. A half dozen cool pods are nestled one on top of the other in strict order, each one filled with fat sweet tender beans, seasoned with the complex flavor of the deep sea, not just a dose of salt. We started with the chu toro tartare ($24), a disc of finely diced lusciously fatty and tuna capped with a thin layer of avocado coulis, garnished with just a teaspoon of caviar and a delicate flurry of minced chives. The disc was served in the center of a pool of sesame ponzu, a fresh bright soy citrus sauce that cut the fat of the tuna and gave the dish the right amount of sharpness. Once I had a bite of the second course, a half dozen slices of pristine Atlantic salmon sashimi cured briefly in citrus and topped with a fluff of cilantro and scallion ($16), I decided it was the greatest sushi bar creation I’d ever had. Stacey and I were literally closing our eyes and moaning at this point, smiling at Mr. Kosugi after each bite. Poor man probably thought we were being obscene. We were just very happy customers.

The salmon citrus was my favorite dish; that was until I got to the next and the next. I was getting tired of listening to myself say, “Oh my god, this is so good. It’s amazing. It’s so good!” I mean couldn’t I get a bit more creative? I was really a broken record. The live Long Island fluke usuzukuri ($22) also left me in some transcendental state. The fish is not live, but according to our waitress, was quite recently living. (I’m sorry, fluke.) Kosugi slices the fish into translucent diamonds fanned out on the plate like a flower with each petal topped with a dot of yuzu zest, some sea salt and lime juice. The flavors are clean and precise and the dish is beautiful enough to warrant gallery space at the MOMA. We were both cursing that we hadn’t brought a camera to capture the images for later. I’d frame it and put it on my desk next to pictures of loved ones.

But there’s nothing that could prepare me for the likes of the minute-steamed tai ($16), a dish from the kitchen that must be experienced, preferably tonight if you can do so. It’s a quick steam of Japanese sea bream that’s barely cooked, topped with julienned young ginger drenched in ginger scallion oil. The texture of the fish is somewhere around that of sushi, but not quite. It’s slightly creamier and the ginger scallion oil and young ginger give the fish a really deep expression of flavor. It’s like fish that’s been through therapy. It’s very complex.

Scallop and fluke shiso agedashi ($12) is a fun little play on fried fish. There are two of each fish and they are individually wrapped in batter and deep fried into little shiso wrapped packages, served in a bowl of dashi broth that’s sweet, sour and salty all at once.

In case you were wondering, Soto also serves straight up sushi—long fin squid from Japan, trigger fish from Florida, seared red snapper from New Zealand ($5), Japanese Mackerel ($6), toro from Spain ($12), chu toro from Ecuador ($6), fresh water ($5) and sea eel ($6) and more. Rolls are simple one-ingredient creations, other than the one daily special, which Stacey and I shared for our last course—a spicy tuna roll diced up with Asian pear, cucumber, avocado, sesame and pine nuts with scallions, wrapped in thin, clingy layer of gauzy white kelp ($16). It was a snug and compact roll that offered great flavor and contrasting texture, and as a bonus could be eaten with ease in one bite. (It was not one of those gargantuan Godzilla-sized rolls that you can never seem to fit in your mouth in one bite so they end up a mess on your lap.)

I suppose Soto serves dessert but we weren’t interested in anything sweet. I wanted to let the savory tastes of the meal linger. Instead, we ordered another bottle of sake (a smaller one) and hung out for a while longer. As we finally readied to leave, a couple walked in, looking bewildered and very relieved. As I walked passed them at the sushi bar, I heard her say, “I can’t believe we walked right by this place.” I guess it’s true what they say. Sometimes you've gotta look hard to see what’s right in front of you.

Soto is located at 357 Sixth Ave., nr. Washington Pl.; 212-414-3088

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Posted: July 23, 2007

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