best thing i ate last week - tendon and conch at Alter / Contra dinner

The list of NYC restaurants I want to try runs deep, but Contra is one place in particular that is pretty high up on that list. The accessibly priced 6-course, $65 tasting menus put out by young chefs Jeremiah Stone and Fabian Von Hauske are, by many people's estimation, not just one of the best deals in town, but one of the best meals in town without qualification.

So I was thrilled to hear that one of my favorite local restaurants, Brad Kilgore's Alter, was bringing the Contra guys to Miami to do a collaborative dinner. It all happened last Tuesday, as the chefs alternated rounds for nine courses. It was a great night with some really outstanding food.

Dish of the night? For me, it was this combination of beef tendon and conch in a pool of creamy, nutty sauce, given funky depth by XO sauce and bitter contrast with sprigs of radicchio tardivo. It was a great, unexpected combination of flavors, but even more so was all about the unusual, exciting textures of the components: the gelatinous tendon, the spingy conch, the subtle crunch of the radicchio, the creamy sauce.

Other standouts: the sweet raw shrimp with onions and burnt cream (the burnt cream almost like a savory dulce de leche, with the richness of miso); the chawanmushi with crispy artichoke, venus clams and truffle (maybe a soft egg v.2.0?).

This is, I hope, the first of several collaborative dinners Alter will be hosting; it was an auspicious start.

(You can see all my pictures from the dinner in this Contra @ Alter flickr set).

best thing i ate last week (jan 11-17) - short rib carpaccio at Kris Wessel gastroPod brunch

Only a week behind now! It's been mostly home cooking since returning from our winter break Southern expedition, but a Kris Wessel sighting was enough to get me to venture out. Wessel, chef of the much-missed Red Light on Biscayne Boulevard (who then passed through Florida Cookery and Oolite), surfaced to do a brunch with Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog of the gastroPod. Fortunately the rains let up and the winds calmed down enough for them to serve up five courses the Sunday before last.

It was all good and tough to pick a favorite, but the standout for me may have been the short rib "carpaccio" – thinly sliced boneless short rib cooked at low temp to bring it up to medium rare and melt all the connective tissue, brushed with warmed beef fat, and plated with slivers of fresh and dried pears, nutty asiago cheese and a drizzle of olive oil. Also in the running: Kris' eggs creole with tropical BBQ goat, and Jeremiah's chilaquiles spiked with gochujang and sprinkled with crumbled chevre.

(You can see all the pictures in this Kris Wessel gastroPod brunch flickr set).

Maybe the best news is that Wessel is close to getting back in the game in Miami – be looking for more details soon on a "southern tropical" BBQ spot in Little Haiti.

best thing i ate last week (jan 4-10): seafood plateau at Le Zoo

I'm still playing catch-up on "best thing i ate last week" but there's only two weeks to go. After our week-long Southern expedition (here's a report on Memphis; similar travelogues for Nashville and Louisville hopefully coming soon), I figured we'd be eating a lot of home cooking. I was right, but not entirely. Within a week, we were ready for someone else to cook for us.

Miami has recently seen a mini-wave of new French bistro / brasserie type places. I've not tried them all, but I've been to several, and found them mostly underwhelming or worse. Le Zoo, Stephen Starr's new place in Bal Harbour Shops (in the cursed spot across from the thoroughly mediocre but ever-popular Carpaccio that has previously been home to La Goulue and Elia before that), seems to be getting it right.

We didn't sample much, but what we did try was quite good. The standout was this seafood platter; a "petit plateau" came with a half-dozen oysters from east and west coasts, four littleneck clams, four sweet scallops in their shells with a dusting of espelette pepper, about a dozen little Mediterranean mussels, a cluster of cold poached shrimp, half a lobster, and both king crab and snow crab. Everything was perky and fresh, and for $75, seemed like a relative bargain as such things go.

Runner-up; a vitello tonnato from the same meal, with properly rosy, thin-sliced veal, a mayo properly redolent and funky with anchovy, and a scatter of cherry tomatoes, capers and celery leaves.