Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Last weekend, Jess and I took a ride up to Tarrytown for a belated birthday lunch at the famed Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant. The trip from NYC takes about 60-90 minutes (subway > metro north > cab) but as you'll read it's well worth it.

The grounds at Stone Barns, a non-profit farm, are beautiful, especially in the fall with the foliage in full force. You're free to walk around the farm at your own leisure and we took advantage of this by spotting some cows, sheep, turkeys, and our favorite, pigs!

As soon as you enter the dining room in the restaurant, you know you're in for a special dining experience. The service is the best of the best... it feels like the ratio of wait staff to diner is 3:1. Plus, everyone is dressed up and the restaurant is decorated in a classy, cozy, fall-tastic manner.

There are no menus at Blue Hill. Guests select how many courses they want and tell the waiter about any allergies they have.  No matter what dishes they're serving the day you go, they are using fresh ingredients from their farm, with the goal being to highlight the food and flavors of the surrounding Hudson Valley.

They start you off with a handful of pre-appetizer bites including a shot of Blue Hill V9, potato & leek chips, as well as a pancetta skewer. The shot of V9 immediately brings a smile to your face when you realize the freshness of the veggies you're drinking. The whimsical presentation of the chips illustrates how much fun they are having in the kitchen with these ingredients.

Our first course was a beet salad. The beets were served alongside fresh yogurt and greens. It will come as no surprise that the beets were bursting with flavor and we polished off every bite on our plates.

Course number two was a vegetable soup, but this wasn't just any veggie soup. This soup was topped with a fried egg that oozed yolk as soon as you dipped into it. We weren't quite sure how they were able to bread the egg, hard boil it, and still serve it with a running yolk, but we'll let that remain a secret. All we know is that they hit us with another course that showcased fresh and delicious vegetables with a serious twist.

I believe it was at this time in the meal when they came out with the best bread we've ever sampled. Crunchy on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside, baked with onions mixed in, and served alongside creamy butter. Good god this was unbelievable!

Course three was grilled pork that left a little to be desired. While the curried grains served alongside the dish and the flavors of the pork were both great, we felt that the pork was a bit too fatty for our liking.  It didn't 'wow' us the same way the previous courses had.

They ended on a high note with course #4... an apple strudel with lemon ice cream. It had just the right amount of sweetness and texture, and left us with a big smile on our faces.

After a 2+ hour dining experience, our meal at Blue Hill had come to end. We both loved the meal and the experience of Stone Barns and were hopeful that we'd find our way back here in the near future.

Big Apple BBQ Block Party

This past weekend was the Big Apple BBQ Block Party in Madison Square Park, bringing the best BBQ from cities around the country to NYC. Boy were we excited!  We headed over with some friends on Sunday to sample all the pig we could get our hands on. 

Yes, that's a full pig in between those smokers. No, this is not uncommon at the BBQ Block Party.  Yes, your clothes stink of BBQ after you leave.

After taking a lap around the perimeter & taking in all of the free sights & smells, we found our first little piggy... a pulled pork shoulder sandwich with a side of coleslaw from Ubon's (out of Yazoo City, MS).  I thought it was delicous but not nearly as delicious as Eric thought.  I must say that the pork did have great flavor and their bbq sauce really added to the sandwich...throw some coleslaw into the mix & you got yourself a damn good sandwich.

Looking back, we probably could have shared one sandwich, but who knew what was going to come next?

Next up was homemade smoked sausage with pimento cheese & saltines from Jim 'N Nicks BBQ (Birmingham, AL). All 4 of us agreed that this was up there with the best sausage we've ever sampled. It had the perfect amount of heat & an abundance of flavor in every bite! We also came to a consensus on the sides... meh!

Lastly, we finished off the day with baby back ribs & beans from Pappy's Smokehouse (St. Louis, MO). While waiting in the 30 minute line, we didn't know that we had saved the best for last.  These were finger-licking good and if we ever make our way down to St. Louis, we will be visiting Pappy's once again!

If you dine on swine, and live in or around the city, then this is a festival that's not to be missed. We're already looking forward to next year!

More info can be found at http://www.bigapplebbq.org/

The Spotted Pig

We headed down to The Spotted Pig at 6:30 on a Saturday evening expecting to get seated between 7:30 & 8. The host gave us a 1-hour wait time, so we strolled upstairs to the bar for a cocktail or two before getting seated. Before the Devils on Horseback were even delivered to us, we were seated! Turns out 1 hour was only 15 minutes.. score!

Their martini was served purple w/ kalamata olives, and the Old Speckled Hen beer (an amber) was roughly 20-24 ounces... a great deal (or at least as good of a deal as you can expect from The Spotted Pig).
The Devils on Horseback was mentioned on Food Network's "Best Thing I Ever Ate" and it's certainly the best bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with almonds that I've ever had the luxury of eating ;-) While it might be tough to screw this up, it's also not easy to blow away all previous renditions of this dish. They did! The bacon was cooked perfectly with no chewy fat, and the rest of it just melted in your mouth. It didn't hurt that I'm a date-lover. Five of these for $7 is a great way to start you off.
Next came the ricotta gnudi, which our helpful waiter told us was their specialty. He wasn't lying. It's 8 balls of ricotta cheese served in a brown butter & sage mixture... Once again, it's hard to mess this combo up. Nonetheless, it was nailed, and is a great appetizer for a table of 4, or in this case a table of 2. What can we say? We felt like splurging!

I read a bunch of reviews raving about the chicken liver toast, so I figured that would be a harmless "bar snack" to throw on the table... We were expecting a few crackers with a modest helping of liver... WRONG! It's a very healthy heaping of chicken liver piled on top of a large, crunchy piece of bread. It was quite good, but a bit over the top after already having two apps. Plus, we wanted to save some room for the stars of the show... the entrees: After the older woman next to us described the above pork dish as "orgasmic," I couldn't not order it. And, as the saying goes, "When in Rome..." Turns out, she was spot on! It was a large portion of super flavorful, tender, lean pork under some roasted shallots & scallions. I'm not a pork guy at all, but this dish might have converted me. An intense amount of flavor filled my mouth with every bite & I never wanted the dish to end. I was a happy camper:
Jess agreed with my assessment as she never turned down an offer to have a bite.

Jess went a bit lighter with her entree & ordered the sea bass with fennel & salsa verde. The bass was cooked perfectly as the crispy skin had a great crunch to it, and the rest of the fish was nice & flakey. This dish also had tons of flavor from the salsa verde. It came with a salad on the side in a lemon-y vinaigrette.
The side dish of roasted onions & sage pesto looked too good on paper not to order... I'm glad we did cause it looked good on the plate, and tasted even better in our mouths! A must-get if you like roasted onions & pesto.

As you can tell, we would whole-heartedly recommend The Spotted Pig to anyone looking for an over-the-top delicious meal. Don't expect to go there and leave feeling healthy about what you ate, but if you can forget about that for one night you'd be hard-pressed to find a better meal.