To Try a Chef's Most Interesting Work -- And Cut Calories -- Stick With Appetizers

Small Packages
To Try a Chef's Most Interesting Work -- And Cut Calories -- Stick With Appetizers
By RAYMOND SOKOLOV
May 3, 2008; Page W5

At elegant Max Downtown in Hartford, Conn., the other night, my wife struggled with a pound of lovely aged beef, ate half and still felt stuffed. While she negotiated a doggy bag, I polished off my second appetizer, a miniscule foie gras "BLT," small but rich enough to satisfy me completely after a creamy garlic soup bulked up with crabmeat.


Grilled foie gras 'BLT' at Max Downtown in Hartford, Conn.
Appetizers go by a lot of names -- starters (first in Britain, now here), hors d'oeuvre, first courses. And of course they have a proper place in the menu structure we have inherited. They're supposed to whet your appetite and tide you over while the chef works on your main course. But in an ever fatter world obsessed with slimness, these smaller dishes offer a way to eat less and, in many cases, sample a chef's most interesting work.

The two-appetizer meal plan is my current strategy for holding the line -- the waistline -- without denying myself cutting-edge food and remarkable flavors when I eat out. I foil my foodlust, which often outstrips any true hunger I may be feeling, by ordering two appetizers and no main course.

I almost always get served a lot less food but not too little -- and pay a lot less, too. Not only that, in many of the restaurants I go to, those first courses I order are often far more inventive than the stodgier mains I've shunned for dietary reasons.

At the most creative end of the restaurant business, whole menus are now devoted to such small plates, either small plates as such, in a sort of globalized imitation of those all-appetizer tapas restaurants in Spain, or, small plates in effect, as part of the procession of minimal portions in a tasting menu. At the pinnacle of this trend is Joël Robuchon, in his small-plate Atelier operations in New York, Las Vegas and around the world, or at his grander Vegas restaurant that is virtually all about the tasting menus.


Grilled eggplant
Less sumptuous but no less intricate is Manhattan's tiny 16-seat French-Spanish tapas/tasting triumph, Degustation, an addition to the downtown empire of Jewel Bako's Jack Lamb. You sit around a counter watching the chefs -- led by Wesley Genovart -- a few feet away and then enjoying the theater of plating as a man inches away assembles the multiple ingredients that go into one of the virtuoso dishes with explosive flavors, such as squid stuffed with braised short ribs with lentils and chorizo.

On the same wavelength, Anita Lo, the prize-winning chef at Annisa, has opened Bar Q a few steps away, where pigs' wings (single pork ribs) and eggplant and other demi-portions pepped up with kimchi and miso cascade out of the kitchen.

For someone seeking this kind of lean, serene cuisine in a more conventional, a la carte restaurant, however, the two-appetizer shuffle is the step to dance.

At our early-bird dinner in Hartford, Max Downtown's menu forced you to think outside the box, because chef Hunter Morton is evidently thinking that way too. He has kept up all the essentials necessary for a very good steakhouse. Max Downtown's wine list is celebrated outside Hartford, and on Sunday nights you can acquire many of the better bottles at a 50% discount.


Squid salad
But Mr. Morton is also a man of his time, and this manifests itself most vividly in his changing first courses. My foie gras sandwich ($14, compared to my wife's $42 steak) was composed of two small rectangles of brioche toasted with foie pate and enclosing thin slices of foie gras with house-smoked bacon, accompanied by tomato confit and a few duck-fat frites standing up in a paper liner. So this little dish alludes to more than the classic BLT (a toothpick holds the package together), reminding you also of calf's liver and bacon.

Sometimes even a restaurant with poorly focused main courses will shine in starters and smaller plates. Betty's Wok and Noodle Diner is a cheerful, new-agey Asian-Latino bistro across from Symphony Hall in Boston, where the center of the menu is an array of confusing choices among various sauces from Thailand, China, India and nowhere (Asian pesto), along with meats, starches and vegetables that result in customized and plentiful, though indistinctly combined, flavors and textures. The starters, on the other hand, are prepared with focus and style. Cool 'cucs' and weed is a bracing bowl of shredded cucumbers and seaweed in a creamy ginger-wasabi sauce. Better still was the microplate of fried plantains, unctuous in texture and nicely set off by the tomatillo-lime sauce.


Spicy pork "wing" at Bar Q
We concluded our culinary tour of Boston in the gentrifying South End's buzzy, tapas-based Toro, where star chef Ken Oringer serves a jazzy brunch full of relatively modest-size plates of huevos rancheros and skirt steak. There's a tasty kobe beef hamburger and a deliciously dressed arugula, pine nut, Manchego cheese and raisin salad. But the tastiest items were the least imposing.

Discreetly listed at the bottom of the menu were a half dozen or so "sides." I ordered all of them and made a totally adequate meal. Really, three would have sufficed. The spicy black beans, the roasted corn on the cob spread with crumbled white cheese, the little bowl of fried slices of chorizo made an inspired little meal.

I did not feel like taking a nap afterward. And I was glad for this refinement to my basic two-appetizer plan. Don't overlook the peripheries of the menu. Good things in small packages may lurk there.