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El Califa

When famous Pujol chef Enrique Olvera craves some tacos he goes to Taqueria El Califa! That says it all! This is my tacos place of choice, in Mexico City and in the world! I come here every time I am in Mexico! There are 10 locations across the city, they deliver until 4am and they are open until 4am so you really have no excuses to miss it. This is the perfect late night joint (I’ve been there for lunch at noon and was the only one and I’ve been there for dinner at 2am and it was packed!) and on top of it all it is super affordable like most things in Mexico!

The presentation is often underwhelming but the flavors are all there!

Things not to miss are the tacos al pastor (with pineapple of course), the queso fundido (with Rajas or with mushrooms), the Chicarrón de queso (to be eaten with the onions and cilantro side you get), the Gaona taco, the Rib-Eye taco and so much more. They also have very good Horchata drinks and fresh juices like orange with chia seeds…

Here’s what I had for my lonesome noon lunch today:

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Meauxbar

After working with U2 in New Orleans my crew and I definitely needed a well deserved meal to celebrate and although there was no time to hit the usual restaurants everyone knows about, we decided to try something that got good reviews and was on the way to the airport.

Meauxbar is sort of a farm to table bistro with some very interesting dishes. Nothing fancy but good food and nice atmosphere in which executive chef John Bel and his team provide sober renditions of inventive dishes that are a joy for the palate and are easy on the eyes and the body.

I’m a lover and a connoisseur of burrata and I have had some incredible ones in Southern Italy (where burrata IS from), some really bad frozen ones in Italian restaurants around the US, some decent ones from stores, farmers and restaurants. Well let me tell you, this burrata was one of the best ones I’ve ever had in the US! I don’t know how they do it but I asked the waiter and he said it was not imported from Italy but made by a nearby Louisiana cheese maker which really surprised me. Served on a bed of summer squash, sunflower seeds and peaches vinaigrette, honestly this burrata was so authentic tasting that it might as well have been served on a bed of rocks and it would have been delicious anyway!

Would have been a shame to be there and not have some gulf products so we tried the special of the day (scallops on a bed of kale and rice) and the Gulf Fish courtbouillon, both very good.

The $35 pre fix lunch came with a dessert and I had the fennel mousse which was truly exquisite as well!!

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Cosme

I started taking pictures for this food blog idea years ago and the first restaurant I did it at was Pujol, in Mexico City.

The same famed Pujol chef Enrique Olvera then opened Cosme in New York and so I had to try it and in doing so I feel like I have almost come full circle, in a way 😉

Cosme is a much more lively, sceney place than Pujol (which is classier, quieter, more dimly lit, more elegant and with an older crowd, at least the night I visited). It’s in the Flatiron District and you can sit at the tables in the back, at the bar in the front or in the lounge chairs of the entrance/foyer area, the menu is the same, the attitude and surrounding company changes a lot.

We tried mostly seafood appetizers. The scallops were good but the radish, but the giant jicama (yam bean root) shavings it came with were a bit overwhelming, especially visually, as they covered everything. The Uni tostada with bone marrow salsa was really good and, most notably, the Fluke with ants and sesame were the absolute winner!

The octopus memela with black beans, salsa verde and queso fresco was great as a dish but would have not been as remarkable without the bed or flavors around the tentacles.

Considering this should be THE Mexican spot in NY I expected a lot more from the herb guacamole, which was underwhelming and a bit bland.

The corn tempura softshell crab with shishito mole and tomatoes was probably the best entrée (and by that I mean main course… another misappropriated and misused word of the new English language).

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Eins Unter Null

What sounds like Rammstein song title is instead the name of an exquisite new restaurant in Berlin, in fact, probably one of the best new restaurants in Berlin. Smack down in the middle of Berlin's Mitte, EinsUnterNull already received their first Michelin star so I'd recommend going while you still can get in.

Given the city's affordability one can still enjoy an inventive, adventurous, multi-course luxurious lunch or dinner for half of what this meal would cost in NYC, for example.

The 5 course lunch menu was only 45 Euros and there is also a 3 course option for 29 and a 4 course for 37.
Dinner is much more expensive and starts at 82 Euros.

Eins Unter Null means "One Below Zero", and that's because their main dining hall is in the basement. However I went for lunch and the downstairs was closed so I was seated on the ground floor with sunlight and a view of the street.

The style of the restaurant and the kitchen is very modern and minimalistic, lots of wood (tables, chairs and even some utensils) almost Dutch or Nordic I would say.

The kitchen is in full view but behind a wall of glass so you can observe without being bothered by the noise. The place is actually very quiet. The staff is obviously very nice but very knowledgeable. Ask for the Italian hostess/waitress Martina who is also an accomplished musician and works here because when she ate there "the place blew her mind", she said!

The food was incredible indeed and the menu is so interesting.

The absolute winner for me was the so called "Mushroom Bread with onion blossoms and linseed oil", basically a layer of super thinly sliced mushrooms that smell so fresh you can imagine the moss and the trees. But the rest of the menu was as imaginative as it was delicate as it was tasty.

Even the desserts were delicious, from the crumbly one to the beet root chocolate cookies.

This place will be the first restaurant I go to when I return to Berlin.

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Sugarfish

Sushi master chef Kazunori Nozawa was also known as “the Sushi Nazi” because allegedly he used to throw people out of the restaurant if they asked for dipping sauces or tempura or for a “California rolls” (apparently even famous people like Charlize Theron got thrown out).

After having run a restaurant in Tokyo with his mother he opened his first restaurant in Los Angeles in the mid/late eighties and  Sushi Nozawa quickly became a world renown restaurant. In 2012, after 25 years, he retired from making sushi and opened Sugarfish, for which he and his sons still select the freshest fish every morning.

Sugarfish has become a hit and has 10 locations in Los Angeles and one in New York. The first ever location is now closed so I visited the second location, which is now the oldest one and is located in Marina Del Ray, near Venice Beach.

When I tried to visit the New York location in the first month it had opened there was a 3 hour wait, so I ate somewhere else. But in LA it’s much easier to get a table or a seat at the bar (although it’s not really a sushi bar, as the kitchen is off to the side). Expect a wait of at least 20 min (we waited 30 min on a Monday night at 9.30, which is a very off time…).

The food is amazing and surprisingly affordable. The omakase (or “Trust Me” as it’s called) is only $35 and there is a light version for $25 and a version with two extra specials for $45.

The fish is super fresh and the preparation is truly great. For example the salmon, and the eel were some of the best salmon and eel I’ve had and the large scallop had a tangy bite to it which was a bit of yuzu ponzu on it. Even the sushi rice was tastier than most: it is warm-ish and harder, almost “al dente”, I’d say, and with the right amount of vinegar. The only bad thing about the rice (and about the whole experience) is the consistency of the rice. The taste is great but you can’t pick up a piece of sushi with your chop sticks without dropping some rice on your plate. It’s impossible. Maybe I should have tried the old school japanese way (by hand)… And forget about picking it up and flicking it over to dip the fish in the soy sauce (which is the way you use soy sauce on sushi, fish side down!). It’s impossible! That was a drag but the taste of the fish made up for it. 

For a place with 10 locations I was amazed at the quality.

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Mr Taka Ramen

I’m always a seeker of good pizza, good espresso and good ramen, although I am not nearly as experienced or picky about the latter as I am about the former two.

Opened a little over a year ago by a Japanese owner, Mr Taka (admittedly not a great name) is the NY outpost of a Tokyo establishment of the same owner(s) which bears a different name, thankfully. The NY location is sunny, bright, open and feels pretty spacious even though it only has 4-6 tables and two counters (whole restaurant probably seats 25-30 people max). 

Ever since discovering Mr Taka, in NYC’s Lower EastSide, I’ve been taking all my japanese friends and clients there to see and hear their reactions and everyone seems to love it, which makes me feel good about my approval and love for this place.
Today I took a Tokyo rock band of 6 native japanese musicians here, so it was a great opportunity to take pictures of a few different bowls as well as hear their opinions, which were all very positive (although one of them said “special”, which sounds a bit like a lost-in-translation translation of when Americans say “interesting”… hmm).

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Rafael

As I’ve stated before in other posts, one of the many great things about travelling to foreign countries with weak currencies is that you can have amazing meals at a fraction of what they would cost in the US or Europe.

In Bogotá Colombia one such meal was at Rafael, a Peruvian restaurant with Lima-inspired meat and fish dishes as well as pasta and desserts. The bill came in at little under $50/person, but that’s including cocktails, wine, coffees and digestives, so really without drinking this could have easily been an incredible $30 meal!

Of course we started with pisco sours for the table, quickly followed by maracuya and lulo juices for me (the designated driver) and Argentinian Malbec wine for my friends and co-workers.


And for food of course we started with two different ceviche appetizers (of which the traditional version ruled over the other warm type), some pulpo alla gallega and fish cakes (which the waiter brought two orders of without us having asked for that).

For my main course I had a fluffy white fish  (the menu was only in Spanish so I wasn’t sure of the name) prepared in a typical Peruvian way (although the bed of rice in a green sauce didn’t convince me, but the baby scallops made up for). 

Unfortunately I didn’t take pictures of the main courses of my fellow diners but I can assure you the presentations were impeccable and the food was delicious according to everyone’s account (and I should mention that on this night two of my fellow diners were accomplished french chefs).

For dessert we ordered the typical Peruvian dessert called Sospiro, which came in an amazing spring-looking mousse/sauce over slices of the squishy-textured local guanabana fruit and a bed of dulche de leche emulsion. The second dessert are caramelized pears with a caramel praline slice and a vanilla-based fruity sauce. Both desserts came with small leaves of basil and berries.

Stay away from the coffee! Colombia has unfortunately never had good espresso (even though they produce great beans) but this place is definitely the proof of that. We ordered espressos and got what in Italy would have been a below par bad, bitter, way too watery and way too long coffee so we sent them back and asked for espresso ristretto and got the right amount of coffee but still way below par bad, bitter, watery coffee without the foam that comes from the right water pressure. Avoid coffee here at all costs if your standards are as high as mine for espresso.

Other than a couple of small hiccups with the service (like bringing two appetizers and charging us for it, charging us for a drink we didn’t order etc) this was a great meal at an affordable price that’s definitely worth a visit. 

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La Condesa Irina Lazaar

This is a little hidden gem in Bogota, Colombia. It took me about 5 visits to Bogota to discover this place, not even my local frieds knew about it and at the time of this writing it doesn’t even show up on Maps or Google Maps if you search for the name, even though it’s been open for 7 years already!!!

This is a lunch spot ONLY. Reservations recommended. Open Mon-Fri from 12 to 3.30 only, the place serves mostly the political crowd of the nearby city hall and offices (the corruption must be adding to the flavor ;-)). It’s closed Saturday and Sunday and it’s nestled inside the old beautiful, historical and slightly sketchy (at night) La Candelaria neighborhood.

American-Mexican owner and chef Edgardo Areizaga is a really sweet guy and a jazz lover, so if you are in a jazz group or on tour there make sure you stop by and bring him a CD! He’s got great food stories and even produced a jazz CD of a local trio that he wanted to support. What a guy!
He mentioned to me he wants to start opening other restaurants and cook less so try to go soon while he’s still there doing the cooking (although he said if he hires other chef they have to be better than him…).

La Condesa Irina Lazaar serves no wine (except for one local brand of Rosé -although you can probably bring your own wine and have them uncork it) but they have beer and other drinks (none of the amazing Colombian juices though). You walk in to a small dining room with about 8-10 tables and one step up, almost staged, is a big open kitchen where you can watch the chef and his two assistants prepare your food.


The restaurant has no menu but when you walk in Edgardo greets you and tells you what’s good that day. When I arrived he said the steak, the pork chops and the salmon were the thing to get today and he told us to sit down at table 7 by the window. A few minutes later he came to the table and said “I’m making you the steak and I’m making you the pork chop and I’ll make you a little sausage starter”… he kinda ready our minds… hmmmm… why argue?


The italian-inspired sausage starter with tomatoes was actually amazing. The steak cooked rare was delicious, juicy and tender. The huge pork chop was a tad dry if you ate it without the marbled fat around it (which I was at first trying to do to be “good” to by body) but when I cut into the fat and ate the meat and the fat together all the flavors and the consistency came there beautifully, with the right amount of juice and meat. Both mains came served with potatoes and a good salad and the appetizer was served on a bed of delicious cooked tomatoes.


The only dessert available was a chocolate cake which was very good, but I don’t think it was made in house…

This is probably too gringo if you are looking for local food but otherwise definitely worth a visit… and if you are a jazz musician especially so!!!

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I Love Paris

Who says you can’t eat good food in an airport? At Paris CDG you can! This stupidly named restaurant is in Terminal 2E and is the latest venture by Le Grand Véfour chef Guy Martin. It’s by far the best food I’ve ever eaten in an airport. That’s for sure!

Mushroom mousse for starter.

A burger cooked rare (because in Europe you can and you should!) with cheese and good fries.

The uniquitous Floating Island dessert you find in so many Parisian restaurants. Basically fluffy white egg beaten with sugar over a bed of caramel sauce and hazelnuts. Delicious.

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52

This unassuming almost bistro-looking place surprised me with their presentations. I stopped here for a quick dinner before going to a show at New Moraning jazz club, in the heart of the Harlem of Paris. Affordable, beautifully presented and very tasty food!

When in Paris you must have escargot (snails!) and it’s not your thing or you don’t want a whole plate full of this dish is perfect because it had only one snail served inside a hollow breaded crispy shell with lard emulsion and some good raw ham right on top. Very classy!