Spring in New York, Time to Explore Lower Manhattan and Eat at the Food Courts in Brookfield Place

Friends in New York talked about the weather all winter. Between ice, snow, rain and cold temperatures, the last winter was memorable for being unpleasant.

Now, temperatures have risen and cold weather is a distant memory. Flowers are blooming. The grass in Central Park is green. God's in Heaven and all's right with the world. This week New York is actually warmer than Los Angeles!

On a recent trip to the city, we enjoyed the good weather. We walked miles around the city each day. Thanks to the health app on the iPhone 6 I can track how many miles I walked. One day that was almost 8 miles. So much fun.

I visited with friends and took foodie-tours in different parts of town. I stopped at the Met (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) to check out the amazing art in the special exhibit of Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky.

I cooked a couple of meals for our friends, shopping at the Fairway Market on the upper west side (Broadway and 74th Street) and had a day revisiting favorite restaurants around the city like the Vietnamese Nha Trang One Restaurant (87 Baxter Street, NYC 10013, 212/233-5948)  in Chinatown to have the salt and pepper shrimp and to eat at a new restaurant, Mission Cantina (172 Orchard St., New York, NY 10002, 212/254-2233) south of Houston on the Lower East Side.

I had walked past the restaurant several times without investigating, assuming it was just another wanna-be New York City Mexican restaurant. A good friend showed me the error of my ways. The wildly colorful, very small Mission Cantina is a very interesting mash up of a restaurant.
When I visited Vietnamese dishes were served for breakfast and Mexican-ish dishes during lunch and dinner.  We had Mexican-style dishes for lunch. They were unlike anything I had eaten in LA. The flavors were jazz-riffs rather than representations of traditional Mexican dishes like mole.

In the morning, I loved the Vietnamese duck and scallion congee topped with a fried egg and served with an enormous shrimp baguette with deep fried whole peanuts and mashed garlic. So good. What an amazing way to begin the day. Updating this post a year later, I am sad to report that as of this writing the Vietnamese breakfast is no longer being served. Hopefully that will change because it was really delicious. Stay tuned!

I spent most of one day with another friend in Lower Manhattan at Ground Zero where most of the public areas are open. One Trade Center dominates lower Manhattan as did the Twin Towers it replaced. At the 9/11 Memorial, cascading water disappears into a dark cavern, the perimeter above is inscribed with the names of those who died.

People take selfies against the memorial and bend backwards to frame a shot of One Trade Center to include the very top.

Construction continues on the east side of the area but the area to the west is now open to the Hudson. On the ground floor of Brookfield Place (before 9/11, the World Financial Center) a broad patio faces the water. Two food courts inside look out into a large atrium.

Le District opened in the spring. Wanting to be a French version of Mario Batali's Eataly, the shops in Le District offer a variety of specialty products that will stimulate a Parisian sense memory.

Affordably priced, inside the market you can buy cookies, crepes, strong freshly brewed coffee, sandwiches on crusty rolls, rotisserie chickens, croissants, cheeses, charcuterie and fresh meat, fish and poultry.

Hudson Eats on the second floor is a large food court. Light pours in through tall windows facing the river and a patio planted with trees. While downstairs focuses on the French experience, upstairs you can range the world in search of culinary treats, including pizza, hamburgers, Thai dishes, sandwiches, baked goods, sushi, barbecue, Mexican food and freshly made salads.

With so many choices, a good friend was my guide. We chose Texas style fatty brisket with cole slaw,  cucumber pickles and baked beans from the Mighty Quinn and an order of pork and chive dumplings from Northern Tiger.

They were as different as dishes could be. They were both delicious. Each in its own way, perfectly prepared. Moist where moist was needed. Crisp where crisp was wanted.

Hudson Eats is definitely worth a stop when you are near the 9/11 Memorial or visiting Wall Street.

The Discrete Charm of Cooking: Julie & Julia

There are a handful of films that celebrate the pleasure of cooking: Big Night, Eat Drink Man Woman, Babette's Feast, and Like Water for Chocolate.

Add Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia to the list.

Meryl Streep owns the best parts of the film. In her portrayal, Julia Child has a goofy, good-natured flamboyance as she shambles around Paris first eating and then cooking classic French dishes.

In his comic masterpiece, The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoise, Luis Bunuel refuses to let his characters eat a delicious-looking roast chicken. While Bunuel wanted to torture his bourgeois for their vices and indulgences, Nora Ephron celebrates people who enjoy eating and cooking. For Julie and Julia, two very different women in very different times, cooking changed their lives.

Julia Child became the teacher extraordinaire for a generation who wanted to master the Art of French Cooking. Her book became a standard along with The Joy of Cooking. Her PBS show, The French Chef, ran for ten years and made complex French techniques seem positively fun.

As her blog, book, and the movie make clear, Julie Powell was living an unglamorous life in a very small apartment when she stumbled on an idea that would make her famous. Blogs were becoming popular and Julie needed a project that would put shape to her life. Putting 2 and 2 together, she came up with the inspired idea of cooking every recipe in volume one of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year.

Blogging allowed an internet audience to follow her daily diary entries as she struggled to learn French kitchen techniques so she could master classics like boeuf bougoignon which is featured prominently in the film. Unedited and spontaneous, the blog struck a cord and her online audience made her famous.

Amy Adams brings real charm to the character of the blogging-novice cook, but Julie's cooking always seems a means not an end. Cooking everything in Julia's book is a project. Mastering boef bougoignon is a task. What she cooks is enjoyed by her husband and their friends but only in the scene where Julie tastes a poached egg for the first time do you see her really enjoy eating.

Julia's part of the movie, mostly her days in Paris when her husband, Paul, was stationed in the American embassy, is culled from her posthumously published memoir My Life in France. In the book and the film, she talks about her love for classic French cooking and Paul.

For a foodie, watching Julia eat her way through the best of French cooking is sheer pleasure. And for someone who likes to cook--that would be me--I was deeply moved by the way Nora Ephron, herself a dedicated cook, lavishes attention on the details of cooking.

Sofitel in London and Chef Albert Roux

A major figure in the world of English cuisine, Chef Albert Roux created two signature restaurants for Sofitel at their London St. James and Heathrow hotels. A chef of incredible energy--witness his involvement in many restaurant ventures--he is also a man of exceedingly good humor.

We were enjoying lunch at his Brasserie Roux at the London St. James Sofitel and I had the opportunity to be introduced to him. He was sharing with a friend a samplings of his cheese and dessert service. I explained that I was writing about the Sofitel for Peter Greenberg and that I also had a food web site and enjoyed cooking. He patted my stomach and said that I still had some way to go. I didn't know if he meant that as a cook or as an eater-of-fine food. (I don't remember having a slight paunch when I left LA three days ago.)

Chef Roux's attention to detail has influenced many of the chefs who have worked with him, including his talented brother and son, Michael.

What I found so enjoyable about the meals we had at the Brasserie Roux and the night before at Heathrow, was his light touch. Freshness is all important in his cuisine. The preparation, presentation, and saucing of each dish is designed to pull the best from all the ingredients.

As a signature feature of the lunch service a 4 course meal is offered at all the Sofitel Hotels. Chef Roux's take on the meal is a French riff on the Japanese bento box. 4 plates share a tray offering an appetizer, 2 entrees, and a dessert. Our lunch had a perfect balance of rich (Ballottine of foie gras), spare (Scallops, pea puree), comforting (Guinea fowl with mushrooms and tarragon sauce), and sweet (Lemon tart). Just as the 4 dishes counterpointed each other, so the flavors within each dish were perfectly balanced.

The savory tarragon sauce with chanterelle mushrooms drifted down over the chicken breast and shared the bottom of the plate with a helping of mashed potatoes and sauteed savoy cabbage. After the fullness of the appetizer and entrees, the lemon tart finished the meal on the perfect note.