Five fabulous shrimp cocktails
Plus, rice pudding is so in + chefs love this heritage breed chicken
I predicted this would be a year for homey bakes over laminated pastries, and I’m taking the proliferation of the homiest dessert as proof I was right. Two words: rice pudding. Everyone’s obsessed. Bruce opened their Café Triste residency with rice pudding for dessert. S&P serves a platonic diner rendition in a pleasing shade of pinkish beige, with a strong vanilla flavor and springy tapioca texture. And I’m here to tell you that the riz au lait at Le Veau d’Or is, contrary to popular belief, an even better third course than the île flottante. Chloe Walsh is currently in Sri Lanka, and, yep, making coconut-and-cardamom rice pudding with kithul syrup. NYT Cooking called rice pudding “criminally underrated” last week. And new Gourmet’s first-ever recipe was a humble Baked Rice Pudding, which I will be making for the inaugural dinner party in our brand-new home next month—infused with fig leaf powder I made before leaving L.A.
As the brilliant minds at St. John (one of the best restaurant Instagram accounts going) put it:
“We like Rice Pudding. It is a fundamental but often an under-appreciated dish. It offers comfort and warmth each time, hopefully with happy memories, here served with a dollop of quince on top.”
The other thing that is Very Much Happening Right Now is Soviet food. For Caper, Annie Armstrong wrote about the Estonian House on East 34th—open to non-members on Thursdays—where you can feast on pickled herring, dill potatoes, and beef stew. Luke Fortney seems to be at the banya eating pelmeni every other week. Penny is running an exceptional dish right now: a subtly creamy salad of beets, trout roe, cracked buckwheat, capers, and golden raisins hidden under a blanket of thinly sliced raw beets. Gourmet covered a Kyrgyz restaurant in L.A.’s Koreatown, and I wrote about sublime samsa in Brighton Beach… It's all the rage!
It’s another new franchise day! Fab Five spotlights five standout versions of a specific dish. I had to launch with my all-time favorite New York food: shrimp cocktail. High-protein, low-cal, forever the chicest appetizer or snack. This first edition focuses on Manhattan (where the standard rate seems to be $26), as I’ve been living in the West Village this winter, and there are a million shrimp cocktails in this glitzy, five-borough town. Brooklyn will come this spring, so send your nominees to emily@theangel.nyc.
Before the ranking, allow me to briefly elucidate. A great shrimp cocktail requires two things, properly executed: flavorful, taut shrimp and a slickly textured, well-seasoned cocktail sauce. A bonus aioli is always welcome. Here’s the fab five.
