GastroBlog
on our last night in philadelphia, we went to vetri, which mario batali calls the best italian restaurant on the east coast. which is an interesting assertion, since batali has a pretty highly regarded italian restaurant on the east coast.
i haven't been to batali's babbo yet -- a tremendous hole in my resume -- but if it's better than vetri, wow.
if i was good enough to make marc vetri's business plan work, i would probably get into this cooking business thing.
vetri is on the first floor of a little row house just off broad street. it is tiny. 10 tables tiny. and the 10 tables are pretty close together. depending on what time of year it is, they are open 5 or 6 days a week. they close for a couple of weeks a couple of times a year. one night a week they do only the degustation menu, so everyone in the joint is eating the same thing. and on that night, vetri hand paints a personal copy of the menu for each diner.
the limited space can make it a tough reservation to get. getting a table on saturday night, when they do the you'll-eat-what-i-serve-you menu, is apparently french-laundry hard to get. indeed, a saturday was one of my two options when i was planning, and there was no getting in that night. luckily there were tables available on my other option, which was my preference anyway.
part of the reason for the limited space in the dining room is that when he acquired working antique espresso and deli slicing machines, he made room for them in the dining room, so people could see them. and i also read that his dad suggested moving a wall in the restaurant to take some room out of the kitchen, and give it to the dining room so they could serve more people. vetri's reaction to this was to say that if they moved a wall, it would be to make the kitchen bigger and the dining room smaller, so they would have more room to make fewer meals.
i totally get all of that. and would love to emulate it.
so anyway, on to the food.
wow.
first, we get there and sit down in the middle table of three tables for two that are very close together. thus, no photos. for me to take photos would've been like taking the picture of the people sitting on one side or the other from us each time. and with the flash, just couldn't do it.
so, on to the food.
i wasn't 100 percent sure what i wanted to get, and pam had no idea. the menu descriptions are pretty simple, but includes a lot of exotic-sounding ingredients, even if they might not be as exotic as they sound. so pam suggested we do the tasting menu, which is six courses, and i was pretty sure would include things she wouldn't like, and may not even try. so i thought that was dangerous. so she asked if i would order for her. i suggested that i would order several dishes that we would share. basically constructing my own tasting menu, but controlling what and how much we got. it worked out well enough that i bet we do it again in the future.
we started off with an appetizer of golden sweet onion crepe with white truffle fondue. i picked it because a) it sounded good, and b) because there are several sample copies of the degustation menu on the web site, and it was on all of them. so i figured if its that much of a signature, i want to try it. it was a tiny puck on the plate, with a crepe wrapped around caramelized onion. the flavor was explosive. very, very tasty. there was a white sauce on the plate, and i wasn't getting a lot of flavor from that, but the onion had huge flavor, and tasted like candy. i only wish we had ordered two of these.
next, we shared two pasta courses.
the first was one that i knew we were going to have from the first time i saw the menu online: chestnut fettucine with wild boar ragu. to which pam said, "we're having wild boar again?” (she was mocking me from a time when i said this years ago.) yes, we had boar at jack's on monday night. but i had to have the chestnut fettucine. the fettucine had a distinct flavor, tho i don't know that i ever would've figured out it was chestnut, and the ragu very creamy. there was only a modest amount of boar in it, and that was fine, because i was in it for the pasta.
the other pasta we shared was casoncelli with sage and pancetta. casoncelli is a stuffed pasta, and it looked a lot like potsticker. and potstickers are a-ok with me. the filling with veal, pork and raisins, of all things, and the pancetta was in crispy strips on top. we were officially 3-for-3 at this point.
next we shared an entree: guinea hen breast stuffed with prosciutto served with mushrooms. this one cracked me up, because we weren't told until it came to the table that it was stuffed with foie gras in addition to the prosciutto. it's like, "oh yeah, we put foie gras in it." i think the mushrooms were porcini. guinea hen sounds exotic. it’s chicken.
for dessert, i got the fig tarte with fennel sorbet. i got it because the idea of fennel sorbet sounded interesting. it tasted sort of like licorice, which makes sense when you realize that fennel and licorice are both anise-y. it was the only thing we had that i would rank as merely "good."
i had really high hopes for vetri, and it exceeded them. if i ever go back to philadelphia, i'll be sure go back here (and probably morimoto, too). but next time, i would be inclined to try the degustation. i picked a pretty good tasting menu, and i'd be happy to let them pick one for me.
(oh, and a postscript: the couple next to us did do the degustation. and remember how i said i was sure there would be something they would bring us that pam wouldn't want to eat? the entree for the degustation the night we went was goat. the woman, who was sitting next to pam -- and was probably sitting closer to pam than anyone we have ever actually had dinner with -- didn't eat it.)
when your dessert was the worst thing you ate, and it was pretty good, the past couple of hours were well spent.
tuesday, sept. 11, 2007
vetri, philadelphia
