Chow Down Grill - Surfside

[sorry, this restaurant has closed; but check out Josh's Deli, at the same spot with the same owner, which I've reviewed here]

I paid my first visit to Chow Down Grill the first week that they opened, about a month ago. This is often a somewhat dicey proposition, even more so for a place that is as unabashedly D.I.Y. as Chow Down Grill. And sure enough, the A/C wasn't working, they'd just gotten their license and hadn't stocked up on beer yet - but the food showed real promise. I went back recently to try it again. The good news is that the A/C is cranking, the beer is well-stocked and cold, and the food delivers on that promise, providing some interesting and well-executed spins on old-school Chinese classics (with some occasional straying into Vietnamese territory).

The chef behind Chow Down is Joshua Marcus, who spent some time in a number of Miami kitchens before venturing out on his own. His resumé includes China Grill, BLT Steak, Timo, and the now defunct North One 10, and it seems he's picked up some tricks at each of them. But Chow Down Grill does not aspire to be like those places, and instead sets out to adapt and update Chinese-American dishes with fresh ingredients and some modern twists in a budget-friendly format. The menu he's put together is fairly short but sweet: a selection of about a half-dozen dumplings for starters; a salad, a couple soups; a choice of a few banh mi style sandwiches; entrées with a choice of protein combined with a choice from about a half-dozen different sauce/vegetable pairings; and fried rice or noodle sides to round out your meal.

Those dumplings are a great place to start. Shaped like oversized potstickers, they come four to an order ($6), and the couple we've sampled were unorthodox but good. A striking black wrapper, colored with squid ink, surrounded a finely diced shrimp filling brightened up with fennel and corn, while a minced chicken dumpling came wrapped in a vibrant basil-green skin. Equally satisfying were the wontons, slightly smaller and more delicate, which came with a peanut sauce that carried a nice undercurrent of spice.^[*] I'm not big on salads, but I still found myself picking repeatedly at Mrs. F's "Chow Down Chop" ($8 + $3 to add chicken, shrimp or beef). It's a spin on the iconic Wolfgang Puck Chinese Chicken Salad, with a mix of fresh, perky Napa cabbage, onion, corn, cucumber, carrot, radish,cilantro and slices of mango, all dressed in a brightly flavored chile lime vinaigrette.

It was a bit of a mystery to me why the sandwiches are not called what they clearly are: banh mi, the classic Vietnamese sandwich. Chef Marcus explained: his girlfriend is Vietnamese, and won't let him call them "banh mi" because they're not sufficiently authentic. (This also explains why the "House Special Noodle Soup" is not called "pho"). Whatever it's called, the 24-hour braised beef ($8.50), meltingly tender like a pot roast, makes for a great sandwich. A pâté aioli is an inspired way to combine a couple of the traditional banh mi components and adds even more richness, offset by the fresh flavors of the pickled carrot, cucumber, radish, jalapeño, onion and cilantro.

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Sanibel - Captiva Restaurant Rundown (Part 1) - The Mad Hatter, Key Lime Bistro

We took a little expedition over the July 4 holiday weekend^[1] to Captiva Island on the west coast of Florida. I grew up in South Florida, but have never spent much time exploring the west coast of the state. Just a few hours' drive provided a welcome change of scenery and atmosphere, with even the intermittent rains bringing with them the benefit of some cooler weather. As for the food? Well, we'll get to that.

Sanibel and Captiva Islands have an entertaining history: originally home to Calusa Indians, they were discovered by Ponce de Leon while searching for the Fountain of Youth, then later become a haven for pirates, including one Jose Gaspar, who supposedly held female prisoners captive on the "Isle de las Captivas" for ransom. In this century, the islands have been a vacation retreat for the rich and famous, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and more recently, the artist Robert Rauschenberg.^[2] Though Sanibel and Captiva offer many reasonably budget-friendly vacationing options, Captiva clearly also retains its standing as a destination for the über-wealthy, with a string of dozens of mansions right on top of the Gulf of Mexico (or, for the mere ultra-wealthy, on the east side of the island overlooking Pine Island Sound). It's the kind of place where the word "compound" doesn't seem out of place, where vacation homes costing millions of dollars bear goofy names like "Captured" or "Orange-u-Glad."^[3]

Aside from being a haven for pirates and plutocrats, Sanibel and Captiva are also a natural haven, with major portions of the islands preserved as wildlife sanctuary. Although the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has had an economic impact on the area, with tourists avoiding the area out of fear of the oil hitting Florida's coast, the good news is that Sanibel and Captiva have not seen any environmental impact. For better or worse, if you didn't read the news you could easily be completely oblivious to the havoc and devastation that have already occurred only hundreds of miles away. We spent one morning kayaking in the mangroves and saw more than a half dozen osprey, herons, egrets, and even a couple of roseate spoonbills.

Anyway, this isn't a travelogue, it's a food blog. I've been reading the English food critic Jay Rayner's book "The Man Who Ate the World," and one of the lessons he draws in it from dining around the globe is that great food is often wasted on those who can afford it. If it's any consolation, it appears the converse is also true: the rich also apparently pay lots of money for very mediocre food as well. It wasn't all bad, but it sure wasn't easy finding a good meal either. In the hope of helping others navigate this culinary minefield, or perhaps get some advice for how we could have done so better ourselves, here is our rundown, in two parts:

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Josh's Big Fat Free Wedding

A couple days ago I started writing a post which led off with the following line: "Not to go all Ozersky on you, but I just ate a couple free meals from a chef who I idolize and now I'm going to tell you how great there were." Then I realized: (1) such an admission might compromise my credibility with readers; and (2) some of you who do not compulsively follow the national culinary interwebs might not even know what I was talking about. Plus, Blogger was refusing to load the photos from my freebie meals.

So first, a recap, though the story has been covered extensively and others have had many smart things to say about it already. Josh Ozersky, a/k/a "Mr. Cutlets," is presently the master of ceremonies of Ozersky.TV and a regular food writer for Time.com, and formerly the online food editor for New York Magazine, editor of Grubstreet NY and Citisearch NY, grand poobah of The Feedbag, and restaurant critic for Newsday. A couple weeks ago, he penned a piece in Time.com entitled "Great Wedding Food: Tips from a Newly Married Critic."

The premise of the article was more than a little goofy: catered food sucks, so instead, why not have some of the top restaurant chefs in your city provide the food for your wedding? Ozersky proceeded to describe how, instead of having a caterer for his recent wedding, he somehow managed to convince several of the top chefs in New York City to each cook something after he "cherry-picked my favorite dishes from half a dozen restaurants": mezes and hummus from Orhan Yegen of Sip Sak; salad from Ed Schoenfeld of Red Farm, bread from Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery, lasagna from Michael White of Alto, Marea and Convivio, moussaka from Michael Psilakis of Kefi, smoked tofu from Doug and Laura Keiles of Ribs Within, steak and scallops from Ed Brown of Ed's Chowder House, wedding cake from Heather Bertinetti, pastry chef for Michael White.

Broad generalizations such as "most caterers aren't really good cooks" infuriated people who make a living in the catering business (plus just seemed stupid and ill-informed, if for no other reason than that many restaurant chefs, even very highly regarded ones, also run catering operations); while precious statements like "There are restaurants all around New York City that are objects of my special passion - why wouldn't I want their best stuff at my wedding?" and advice like "Forget the caterer! Plug directly into the source of your hometown's culinary delights, and happiness, enduring and radiant, will immediately follow" sounded distinctly like a 21st century version of "Let them eat cake." The notion that any shmoo could somehow command a half-dozen of the city's top chefs to cook up a little something for 200 people at their wedding just seemed a bit ridiculous.

The story prompted Robert Sietsema of the Village Voice to raise some pointed questions in "An Open Letter to Josh Ozersky": who paid for all this bounty? Why was there no disclosure of that information? If it was free, would chefs really provide such things gratis with no expectation at all of anything in return? And do the circumstances call into question the credibility of Ozersky's over-the-top praise for the food, to say nothing of his general advice on wedding food?

It didn't surprise anyone in the know that Ozersky, a notorious freeloader and hobnobber with celebrity chefs, didn't pay for any of the food (On the other hand, readers of Time.com with a more casual interest in food would have had absolutely no reason to harbor such suspicions). In fact, he didn't even pay for the venue, the Rooftop Bar atop the Empire Hotel, which was provided for free by Jeffrey Chodorow - the restaurateur behind places including Ed's Chowder House and Red Farm (a restaurant that has not yet opened from which Ozersky somehow managed to "cherry-pick" a "favorite dish"). When New York Times' Diner's Journal picked up the story, they estimated that the cost of such an event would range between $200 to $500 per person.

Ozersky and Time.com issued a "clarification," prompted, according to Ozersky, by the notion that Sietsema's open letter "makes me look unethical rather than dumb." In it, he attempted to explain that some his closest friends are chefs and "when they asked me what I wanted for a wedding present, instead of a crystal decanter that I would never look at, I told them to just cook some lasagna or bake a few loaves of bread that I could share with other friends." (I will not bother dissecting the preposterousness of that statement, as it's been very effectively done already by New York Journal in "Josh Ozersky Still Doesn't Get It"). After a "mea culpa" for not being "more explicit about the fact that I did not pay for any of their delicious contributions" (yes, saying nothing at all leaves plenty of room to be "more explicit"), Ozersky attempted a bit of defense, noting that "I am not an anonymous critic and I don't review restaurants for TIME (or anyone else)" (never mind the "Tips from a Newly Married Critic" headline). To the New York Times, he protested that "Bob makes it sound like a sinister plot to extort lasagna."

Suffice to say that "unethical" and "dumb" are hardly mutually exclusive.

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