May 21, 2013 NYC, Metropolitan Museum, Colbert Report and Ouest Restaurant

May 21, 2013  NYC, Metropolitan Museum, Colbert Report and Ouest Restaurant

We awakened at 4:45 a.m., got dressed and took a taxi to Midway Airport with a driver who was listening to NPR, which was cool because he turned up the sound so we could listen also.

We arrived In NYC at 10:30 and took a taxi to the Marcel Hotel at 201 E. 24^th.  We called Luke and he suggested we meet at the Met.  After dropping our bags and changing shirts we took the subway to the Metropolitan  Museum.   We had not eaten, so we started with salads at the Peabody cafeteria next to the New American Wing, which we walked through after lunch.  The newly installed monumental Emanuel Luetze's “Washington Crossing the Delaware” in its newly reconstructed frame was incredible.  I got to see some of my favorites and they were all there, several Winslow Homer paintings of waves crashing onto rocks where you can see light through the waves and his very famous water color of sharks circling a disabled boat "Gulf Stream", Bingham’s “Fur Traders floating on the Missouri”  Eakins’s Man in a Single Scull” and Bierstadt’s “Rocky Mountains”.  Then I wanted to go see the Hudson River School collection which was nearby. After a few George Kensett’s, Heade’s, and Fitz Hugh Lane’s, we were ready to move on.  Suzette wanted to see the installation in the roof garden so we walked back across the museum and went up to the fifth floor roof garden, which was nice.  The roof top installation was interesting but not great, mostly splattered red paint on which lotus flowers had been painted by the artist.  So we then walked down to the second floor to see the installation that Luke wanted to see,” Chaos to Couture, the Punk Movement”.   Based on the evidence provided in the show the Punk movement was very much about both music and clothes.  It started out in England as a fashion statement and seems to have been very much about fashion ever since.   In fact as we walked back to the hotel from the subway going home I saw a woman in torn cutoffs, a roughly sewn shirt, purple hair, with tattoos, so people still dress in the punk style.  

After the Punk show, we all wanted to see the Paul Klee Exhibit “From Representation to Abstraction”, which was in the American Contemporary area.   After making our way through a room of Clifford Stills, past Chuck Closes and an Ellsworth Kelly and two rooms of Josef Albers’ Homages to the Square , we made it to a small room filled with one long row of watercolors by Paul Klee.  They were all small, no more than 8” by 11” but exquisite.  We started at the end around 1930 and went back to the beginning in 1914.  In the beginning he was painting landscape scenes in North Africa of mosques and markets, where you could see that the recognizable images were beginning to break apart into planes of color. Soon he was stacking planes of colors and forcing them to vibrate by juxtaposition, probably due to the influence of Kandinsky and others.  Wonderful stuff.

We went back to the Hotel and changed and then we taxied in the 5:00 rush traffic to the Colbert Report studio and arrived three minutes before we would have lost our VIP status and shut out of the show.  Melissa Salmons got us VIP tickets because she is a writer to “Days of Our Lives” and knows several writers for the Colbert Report (They all are in the Writers Union, among other ways).

 

 

There was a warm up comedian, Paul Mancuso who was funny. He got to know the audience and took and read Luke’s card to the audience and made jokes and got the audience to laugh and scream and turned us into the Colbert Nation, so we would respond to Colbert’s jokes.  The show was live and took about an hour to produce.   The book guest was Jason? Feldman, who teaches at Harvard and wrote “The Cool War” which analyzes the competitive, yet co-dependent relationship of the U.S. to China.      

After the show, we taxied to Ouest at 84^th and Broadway after we had ordered drinks Melissa arrived and we were seated in the large room with a view of the cooking line.  We ordered two appetizers, an escargot torte and Oysters sautéed with oyster mushrooms.  I loved the escargot which turned out to be a little like a deep dish pizza and a lot like a torte holding its own broth and chives with the escargot.   The oysters were not as successful because I did not care for its darker oyster flavored broth that conflicted with the lighter flavors of the oysters but it was garnished chives and salmon caviar, which was nice. 

I was happy to see my favorite dish that I ordered last time was still on the menu, roasted pigeon, which I ordered.  Melissa ordered the Halibut encrusted in porcini mushrooms, Suzette ordered the Fish stew with Monkfish, oysters, clams and lobster, which turned out to not be very good, because it was in a mils sauce that was over salted.   In fact Suzette said that Ouest’s food and service was not as good as it had been three or four years ago.  The bartender opened a bottle of 2012 French rosé and it was bad, which should have been a tip off, but what could compare to Topolobampo,  I agree with her. 

Luke and Rebecca ordered the trout, which was served in in a pile of sautéed planks which I thought was a very clever idea.  My roasted pigeon was perfect as usual and I enjoyed the chive risotto on which it was served, which I shared with Luke.  As Anthony Bourdain said during his lecture at the NRA, “There is only one way to fix risotto and it either is right or it is not.”  That way appears to me to be soft but with a slight al dente crunch and that was the way Ouest prepared their risotto.  The pigeon was roasted to medium rare, grey on the outside ad red in the center which made it very tender.  Since we had all ordered fish I ordered a bottle of Slipshift Oregon Willamette Valley Pinot Gris, which was light and fruity.

 

We had waited a long time to order and the waiter sensed that, so when he came by after dinner and we told him we were finished, he said, “May I offer you dessert, we chose four. I don’t know if it was to make him feel better or to make ourselves feel better but they were mostly delicious.  A small dark chocolate cake with a thick chocolate sauce topped with a scoop of fresh made vanilla bean ice cream, a bombe cake made with chocolate cake on bottom, then a round topping of peanut pastry cream and covered with that same lovely thick chocolate sauce.  Rebecca ordered a gelatin panne cotta in a parfait glass with a layer of light yellow translucent passion fruit sauce floating on it.  I ordered the apple tart, which turned out to be a small apple tart with a scoop of cinnamon ice cream and a drizzle of reduced apple hard cider, which caused the cider to stiffen and made it sweeter; a very clever idea.

Generally the dinner was okay but not great.  Thankfully we were not charged for our initial drinks or for the desserts and that relief made me feel better about the meal and willing to return to the restaurant, although it will probably need to be without Suzette.

Bon Appétit