Year: 2017

‘Sex with Strangers’ opens at Westport Playhouse

Laura Eason’s romantic drama “Sex with Strangers” opened Saturday night at the Westport Country Playhouse to a nearly full house. Eason, who was a writer/producer of Netflix House of Cards, has written a 2 character drama that at first appears to be a romantic sit-com, but turns into a more nuanced consideration of the craft of writing.

Directed by Katherine M Carter, the play opens in what the program calls a “bed and breakfast,” but which actually appears to be an elaborate two level ski chalet, designed by Edward T Morris. Olivia (Jessica Love), a 30-something writer and teacher has booked time there to work on her novel, and is surprised when Ethan (Chris Ghaffari) pounds on the door one snowy evening after the B&B proprietor has left. Ethan is a younger 20-something writer who is brash, over confident, and as it turns out a successful writer.

His improbable book, “Sex with Strangers” is a memoir of his having sex with a different woman each week for a year. While we eventually learn that Ethan is actually a skilled writer, this rather schlocky Hefner-esque book has unbelievably been on the NY Times paperback best-seller list for 5 years. Your life ruined by masturbation? Visit masturbationaddiction.com and get help regain your life.

Meanwhile, we learn that Olivia had published one book, to some good reviews but poor sales because of inept marketing of her novel as “chick-lit.” She is currently at work on another, but is quite sensitive about it. Ethan, however, had actually read her first novel, which was recommended to him by a writing teacher they both had worked with.

With this setup, you would think they would fall in love, go to bed and live happily ever after, but this is not quite what Eason has in mind. Since the wireless is down, they of course do go to bed at least 4 times during blackouts punctuating the two acts, but as Olivia gradually regains her confidence with Ethan’s help, they begin to drift apart.

In the second act in Olivia’s Chicago apartment, (another spectacular 2-story set) they spar about their writing and careers and the movie Hollywood is making of Ethan’s trashy book. The story ends as they move on to audience acclaim.

As Olivia, Jessica Love is brittle and protective at first but eventually connects with Ethan at least physically and she slowly grows with Ethan’s encouragement. Chris Ghaffari as Ethan is pretty aggressive and at first pretty obnoxious. However, after he struggles through the production of the movie version of his novel, becomes more thoughtful, but also more distant. Both do an excellent job with their characters and you easily can identify with both of them.

While the playwright, in interviews, has suggested that her play is about young people getting by in the digital internet world, I don’t see it that way. Rather, it seems to me to be about two writers trying to learn their craft and eventually succeeding in different ways. This would have been true even if the wireless connection at the B&B had stayed down for the whole show.

“Sex with Strangers” is a charming, funny play with some really challenging ideas buried in the couples and coupling, and was fun to watch. The show continues through October 14, with performances on Tuesdays at 7 pm, Wednesdays at 2 and 8 pm, Thursdays and Fridays and 8 pm, Saturdays at 3 and 8 pm and Sundays at 3 pm. Tickets are available at westportplayhouse.org.

Shrimp scampi carbonara

If you think Shrimp Scampi is great, imagine it served on spaghetti carbonara instead of boring old spaghetti! This is the the perfect meld of two excellent dishes, resulting in shrimp on a rich, creamy spaghetti base. And the whole recipe still takes only half an hour.

For the scampi

One pound large (or larger) shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 Tb olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
½ tsp red pepper flakes
1 lemon, juiced. Save the zest, too.
½ cup dry white wine
5 Tb butter
¼ cup chopped parsley

For the carbonara

2 strips bacon
½ to 1 lb vermicelli
3 eggs
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese

Start by frying the 2 strips of bacon from the carbonara recipe. Cook until dry, and drain on a paper towel. Chop the bacon up and reserve in a small dish. Pour the bacon drippings in the bowl as well.
Rinse out the pan, removing any excess “bacon tracks,” dry and add the olive oil.
Saute the shrimp 2-4 minutes, depending on size. They should be pink and firm, but don’t cook until they shrink. Set the shrimp aside.

Add the minced garlic and pepper flakes and a little more olive oil. Saute for a minute or so until fragrant.
Add the lemon juice and wine and cook down for a couple of minutes.
Stir in the butter, a Tb at a time until the sauce is smooth and uniform.
Cook the vermicelli in boiling water until just past al dente. For this recipe, we prefer starting with dried, rather than fresh, pasta, because it will hold more heat for the next step.

Drain the pasta and return to a bowl. Using two forks, mix in the eggs one at a time so they cook in the hot pasta.
Add the parmesan cheese and stir in so it begins to melt.
Mix in some or all of the bacon.
Reheat the shrimp in the sauce, briefly and pour both over the spaghetti.
Sprinkle parsley on top.

There! Done in half an hour or less, and creamily good. Serve ladling the shrimp, sauce and pasta onto each plate.

Buon appetito!

Easy peel hard-boiled eggs

Some people get frustrated when they can’t get the shell of their hard boiled eggs and we’ve done the experiments to tell you what actually works to make them peel easily.

A lot has been written about how to hard boil (actually hard cook) eggs, and much of it is wrong. Bittman suggests that you should put a pinhole in each end of the egg before boiling, but McGee says that studies have shown that this is ineffective. McGee gets two other points wrong though about fresh eggs and boiling temperature, though, so we tried all these things for you.

Chilling the cooked egg is helpful but less significant. And as for fresh versus older eggs, wait and see!

In this article we used Extra Large eggs from The Farmers Cow cooperative, with a Julian packing date of 238 (August 26) which means they were 3-4 weeks away from the hens when we bought them at Stop and Shop.

Our favorite way to cook 2-4 eggs is to put them in a vegetable steamer over boiling water. This is way easier and safer than putting the eggs right into the boiling water.

Put the steamer in a pan, and add water until just below the surface of the steamer, and bring the water to a boil. Using a big, slotted spoon or a set of tongs, lower the eggs into the steamer basket. Reduce the heat to maintain a gentle boil, and cover the pan for 10 minutes.
Then, remove the pan from the heat and run cold water into it. Dump the water (which is now luke-warm) and add more cold water to chill the eggs. This isn’t supposed to be a big deal, it is just to get the eggs down to a temperature where you can hold and peel them.
Peel each egg under running water. This will wash away any eggshell shards and help separate the egg from the shell. The shells should come right off without sticking.

Another simple way is to simply use boiling water without the steamer. Bring the water in a pan to a gentle boil and quickly slip the eggs into the water. Let them cook, covered for 10 minutes as above and cool them the same way. The advantage of this method is that you can get more eggs into the pan. The disadvantage is that it is hard to get a lot of eggs into the pan quickly so they all cook for the same length of time, and if there are too many, they may bump together and crack.

Using the Instant Pot

A third way that works really well is using an Instant Pot or any other counter-top electric pressure cooker. It’s very simple, but most of the on-line recipes get it wrong, resulting it overcooking or tough eggs. You put the trivet in the Instant Pot (or use a vegetable steamer) and add one cup of water. Then add all the eggs you want (you could do a dozen or more) and close the pot. Use the Steam setting (high pressure) rather than the Manual setting, which will result in higher pressure and tough eggs.

Nearly all of these cookers have a “rest” or “cool down” setting. This is intended for cooking meats and allows them to draw the juices back into the meat before you depressurize and open the pot. For eggs, however, this is silly. A typical recipe suggestion is 5-5-5, meaning 5 minutes cooking, 5 minutes cooldown and 5 minutes in ice water. This is way too long: the eggs will be overcooked. If you play the recipe writer’s game, you should cook using the High Pressure Steam setting, and then let the eggs cool for at most 3 minutes.

To cool the eggs, just lift the whole stainless steel pan out of the pot and remove it to the sink. Then run cold water into the pot, drain and run cold water again. When the eggs feel cool enough to handle peel them under running water. We tried 5+5, found that they were overcooked, and settled on 5+3. A half of each is shown in the right hand bowl below.

It’s interesting to note that the 5+5 (10 minute) egg was just a little more difficult to peel, because the egg was harder and less flexible. Slightly less done eggs are easier to peel!

This photo shows eggs cooked in the vegetable steamer, in a pan and in the Instant Pot for 5+3 and 5+5.

A simpler way to use the Instant Pot, is to forget the cooling period and just cook the eggs for, say, 8 minutes, release the pressure and cool them in running water as above. To see what different times do, see the photo below, which shows cooking times of 7, 8, 9 and 10 minutes.

What about fresh eggs?

A pervasive legend, perpetuated by McGee is that really fresh eggs are more likely to stick to their shells than older eggs. We decided to test this out by getting a dozen fresh eggs from a neighbor who raises chickens, and cooking two on a vegetable steamer. These eggs were probably laid within the past 3-4 days and are about as fresh as we could get.

They cooked perfectly. There was no difference whatever!

Do you really have to use boiling water?

Since everything worked perfectly, we decided to see what it would take to produce an egg that peeled terribly. All we had to do was to start the eggs in cold water and then cook them for 10 minutes from the boil. We chilled them as usual by running cold water into the pan until the egg was cool to the touch. Trying to peel this egg was a disaster. Everything went wrong, just as we predicted.

What about the chilled water?

Do we really have to chill the eggs after cooking? Well, that’s easy to try as well. We cooked one egg in the veggie steamer for 10 minute as usual, and left it on the counter for an hour to cool. The result was an egg that peeled pretty well, but was not as perfect as the ones that were chilled right away. Obviously the quick chilling causes the white to draw away from the shell a bit, making peeling easier.

You don’t have to chill the eggs for 5-6 minutes. Just get them to room temperature so you can peel them. This takes a minute or less.

Conclusions

Always start your eggs in boiling water.
Always chill the eggs in cold tap water or ice water after cooking. You only need about a minute of chilling.
Always peel the eggs under cold, running water.
Slightly less done eggs peel more easily.
Farm fresh eggs are no more difficult to peel than older eggs.
Don’t bother with pinholes in the eggs. They don’t do anything.

The Club Car goes for the veggies

The Club Car, right on the way to Straight Wharf has been a popular dining destination since Joe Pantorno and Chef Michael Shannon opened it in 1977 and the structure has been renewed with the new ceiling. It was a white tablecloth restaurant with tuxedoed waiters and well-regarded food and service. After Shannon retired, sous-chef Tom Proch took over, continuing treasured dishes like Shannon’s Shrimp Scampi and Beef Wellington, but in recent years, especially after Proch retired, the restaurant’s service had become tired and the food repetitive, but much less impressive, while maintaining their high prices, where a number of entrees were over $40.

So it is with some excitement that we learned that Pantorno sold the Club Car to a new team: head Chef Mayumi Hattori (formerly the chef at Straight Wharf) Ty Costa, director of operations, and general manager Tanya McDonough. In addition, the interior had been completely redesigned by Tharon Anderson with a lighter and brighter and less formal look (and apparently no white tablecloths).

Hattori, who is of Japanese and Spanish descent, wanted to include some of her home cooking and has overhauled the menu, doing away with the formal dining experience, and replaced it with 6 tapas ($5-$9), 4 toasts ($9-$15), 12 small vegetable plates ($12-$17), 7 Land and Sea plates ($18-$31) and for and for people who want a traditional main course, there is limited availability of 3 larger plates: roast chicken ($39), lamb sirloin ($45) and grilled sirloin for a jaw dropping $65.

We decided to forgo the large plates and play the game the way they wanted us to, ordering toasts, veggies and small plates from Land and Sea. Note that The Club Car does not provide bread, so you are left with your water and wine until the first plate your ordered arrives. The Toasts are probably some of the quicker things you can order and we started with them.

We started with the House Cured Sardine Toast ($10) with basque peppers, capers and olive oil. It was served on a baguette toast, and was interesting but only about 4-5 bites and it was gone. The Roasted Mushrooms Toast ($15)with crème fraiche and at least 3 types of mushrooms was a much larger portion and truly delicious, with plenty to share. This was probably the dish we liked the best: reminiscent of a mushroom stroganoff with better mushrooms.

For an intermediate plate, we settled on the Roasted Summer Squashes ($17) with corn, cherry tomatoes cilantro and lime. This was a huge portion that you could share with two or three people, and while there was a lot of it, it wasn’t really particularly filling. We suspect that may be the case with any of the Garden plates.

Finally from Land and Sea, we ordered Spice Crusted Skate($26) with long slices of cucumber ribbons and walnut tarator (sauce). There were two slice of skate and this was fairly spicy rather like the old Cajun blackened fish, except not black. It was very good, but there wasn’t much of it. We suggested they call it “Skating on Thin Cucumbers.”

Finally our other Land-Sea dish was called King Oyster Mushrooms ($24), with peeky toe crab, Bartlett’s corn and jamon (ham) broth. This was really an excellent dish, but needed a bit more crab in it.

Overall, this was a pleasant meal with very friendly and helpful servers. Our bill, with 3 glasses of wine and tax was only $143, making the Club Car a much more reasonable choice than it used to be. Our server said that despite the major change in style, they had had a very active summer and done quite well. We liked everything they served, but there was only one available dessert, so we walked down the wharf to Jack and Charlie’s Ice Cream instead.

This is the last of our 2017 Nantucket restaurant reviews, but it is not too late to order Nantucket T-shirts from The Nantucket Store, and if you use the discount code MILLIE17, you can get about a 15% discount through the end of September.

The Company of the Cauldron reopens under Joseph Keller

Chef Joseph Keller who worked with his brother Thomas at the French Laundry and at Per Se has purchased The Company of the Cauldron from long-time owners All and Andrea Kovalencik. Keller also was the chef at the Woodbox on Nantucket some 18 years ago and developed a beloved popover recipe which is now featured at TCotC. Keller was able to keep the same staff and promises to maintain the same style of a single prix fixe meal.

Keller has maintained the single menu per night for a fixed price that had been the policy of the previous owners (their kitchen is probably smaller than yours), but that fixed price has gone up somewhat. We decided to go on Wednesday night, which is always fried chicken and waffles, for $89. Other nights have differing prices depending on the ingredients.

Reservations are a must, since there are little more than 40 seats in the restaurant, and they require a credit card to secure your reservation. And you will be charged if you do not show, or perhaps if you cancel too late. We got an Email reminder Monday when we made the reservation, a text message on Tuesday asking us to confirm, and another text message at 5:30pm Wednesday reminding us of our reservation in 30 minutes. This was starting to get like the old joke about the man who keeps calling to say he is the viper and he will be coming tomorrow, today, in an hour and so forth. It turns out he has come “to vipe your vindows.”

In any case, Chef Keller has put together excellent menus and utterly delicious food coupled with excellent service by his experienced staff, several of whom we recognized from the previous regime. The dining room remains elegant, and each table features a candle, a pepper mill, a salt bowl and butter. Some of the dishes are labeled “Josef’s Brasserie.”

We always start by ordering wine to go with the meal, and usually splurge on a whole bottle since there are several courses: popovers, salad, entrée and dessert. There are also half bottles, or you could skip it and drink water or soft drinks!

Every meal at Keller’s Cauldron starts with his famous Woodbox popovers, which were piping hot and delicious and served with Vermont Creamery butter. His popovers are perhaps slightly saltier (and maybe less sweet) than ours are, but they really are exceptional. And turning out 40-50 of them all hot at the same time to deliver to the tables is an excellent trick. We ever were offered seconds.

The second course was a classic Caesar salad with garlic bread croutons made with the finest Village Bakery bread machines, fried capers and parmesan cheese. The fried capers were an unusual twist, being both crunch and capery at once. But the smaller ones were closer to carbony. Still, a nice variation, and the salad was large enough for each of us to take a second helping.

As rumored, the chicken and waffles course was excellent. The fried chicken was six separate pieces of crispy ,boneless chicken, some thighs and some breasts, and all were moist and perfectly cooked. The waffles came with a pitcher of maple syrup, as well as a light dusting of powdered sugar. They also provided delicious buttery mashed potatoes and buttered fresh corn on the cob.

The corn seemed a little waterlogged but everything else was outstanding. With six pieces of chicken we had enough to bring home a couple for lunch, and we did.

Finally, the dessert was potted vanilla cheesecake with salted caramel sauce, graham crumble, and Chantilly cream. Utterly delicious.

As you can see, the food is both delicious and in substantial quantities. Others who have come on other nights have also mentioned the large portion sizes.

The meal closed with coffee($8) and tea($4). The coffee was a special Sumatran blend that Keller has created and is only available here and at the French Laundry. You can also buy it for home consumption at The Bean, across the street.

Chef Keller has done an admirable job in creating a new version of a beloved restaurant, and we can hardly wait to come back!

The SeaGrille: one of Nantucket’s favorites

The SeaGrille has been a favorite of islanders and vacationers for over twenty years. Located mid-island at 45 Sparks Ave, E J Harvey and his staff serve deliciously prepared seafood (there are also steaks and chicken on the menu) at reasonable prices. We have been going there for years and have never had anything but outstanding. Service is always excellent.

One thing we learned this year is that the Tuesday after Labor Day is when the islanders come out of hiding to enjoy the Sea Grille, too. It was packed and reservations are recommended.

They started us with a bread basket of three kinds of bread and three butter balls to go with them.

We each started our meal with E J Harvey’s excellent Island Quahog Chowder ($9.00). Harvey’s recipe has some celery in the soup and a trace of lemon. The clams are plenteous, and the potatoes minimal. We never skip it!

Then, one of us went for their Free Form Ravioli ($36), which contains ravioli in name only. It is more like a seafood casserole or stew with a few sheets of house-made pasta over top. Under the pasta, you will find lobster, shrimp, scallions, ricotta, mushrooms, roasted tomatoes, garlic and crispy carrots, along with a delectable seafood broth. It is fantastic, and really filling.

For our other entrée, we went to the Fried Fisherman’s Platter ($34) which contained excellent fried clams, shrimp, scallops, baby squid and calamari rings and cod, along with perfectly prepared French fries that were piping hot and most probably freshly made. The seafood itself was also piping hot, unlike almost anywhere else, making it utterly delightful, and way too much to finish.

Our bill with three glasses of wine as only $141 and well worth every penny.

Dinner at Lola Burger

Lola Burger is a spinoff of the trendy downtown sushi and bistro LoLa 41°, and is principally known for its huge, delicious hamburgers. The restaurant at 1 Sparks Ave faces the Sparks Ave rotary, with parking in the rear. The lot is limited, but fear not, they have valet parking so you will get a spot.

There is an interior dining room, an enclosed outer dining room and outside porch dining in good weather. Fundamentally, this is a high-quality burger joint with good service and very good food. They also offer hot dogs, pork, tuna, chicken, lamb and falafel, but everyone we saw seemed to be having the burgers.

You can order a single 5 oz patty burger with fries for $9.75 and a double patty burger (above) for $13.75. The burgers are tender, juicy and beautifully stacked, with choices of lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, cheese. There are some additional toppings for an extra charge. We were charged $1.50 for mushrooms.

Whether you order the single or the double patty, these are tall burgers that are kind of hard to hold onto, but they provide plenteous spare napkins as well as forks to eat the burger if (when) it collapses. Beware of ordering too many slippery toppings at once, but you’ll love them anyway.

The fries are very good considering that they came from frozen, far superior, for example to those at Charlie Noble.

We were very happy with the fast, friendly service at Lola Burger, and will certainly return every year. It’s a fun experience.

The only other hamburger on the island in this class is the Languedoc Bistro Cheeseburger with garlic frites for $18.95, and that one is only a single. (But quite large.)

The Summer House: a disappointment

The Summer House restaurant and inn is on the ‘Sconset end of Nantucket, overlooking the ocean. The restaurant itself is white and colonial looking with several lovely dining areas with white table cloths and attentive staff. When last we visited in 2015, we were impressed with it quiet elegance and cuisine.

This year, we would have to say that the aretirement community staff was asleep at the switch. The menu is similar to other years and like many Nantucket restaurants, it dominated by seafood.

We started with excellent Corn Crusted Oysters ($24), crunchy and delicious and with an order of Crab Cakes ($25) that were chock full of excellent crab. In fact they could easily have been a main course.

However our entrees were not at all up to snuff. What was billed as Flounder Meuniere ($40 !!) turned out to be a huge piece of white, steamed, and relatively tasteless fish. A meuniere preparation starts with browning the fish and serving it with brown butter, lemon and capers, but instead, this lump of white fish had about 5 capers, with no brown butter or lemon to add flavor at all. Just to prove they did know how to prepare this dish, below is a picture of Fluke Meuniere we had there two years ago. (Fluke and Flounder are essentially the same fish.)

Our other entrée was Chicken Milanese ($34), with arugula, heirloom tomatoes, mozzarella, fingerlings, lemon vinaigrette, and balsamic glaze, which looked fine, but the underlying fried chicken patties were greasy. We suggested to the waiter when he cleared the table that the cooking oil was at too low a temperature, and he came back to tell us the chef had agreed and the “problem had been fixed.” He took the price of one of our glasses of wine off the bill, which came to $165 with tax but before tip.

With that experience under our belt, we decided to have dessert elsewhere, and decamped to the Island Kitchen for ice cream.

Toppers at the Wauwinet: one of New England’s finest

As we have said many times before, Toppers restaurant at the Wauwinet Hotel is an absolutely outstanding restaurant, and considered by many the finest in New England and one of the nation’s most acclaimed restaurants.

Chef Kyle Zachary has created an unforgettable dining experience, and surprisingly not much more expensive than any other Nantucket restaurant. The $95 prix fixe includes appetizer, entrée, dessert and several other little surprise courses as well. While wine is, of course, an extra charge, coffee and tea are included, making this an actual bargain as well. Here is the current menu.

We started out with a basket of 4 cheese gougeres, followed by a basket of rolls and a sweet warm brown bread and two eggs of butter, one smoked and one with sea salt topping.

One of our first courses was Cured Scottish Ocean Trout, with smoked Roe, Cucumbers, Santa Claa Melon, and Finger Limes. In addition there was a separate melon dressing you could apply as you liked. A little is shown in the photo. I have never had a dish anything like this: the cured trout was plentiful and flavorful and went very well with the sliced white melon.

Our other appetizer course was Broccoli Rabe and Potato Carmelle, which included Italian summer truffles, chanterelle mushrooms, almonds and pecorino Romano. This also was a really creative dish in which the broccoli rabe was pureed and served inside the potato shells like little ravioli.

One of our entrees was Butter Poached North Atlantic lobster (above), a name which does not begin to describe this amazing dish. It was served with young carrots, forbidden rice (a kind of black rice), pickled coconut, and a Madras curry sabayon. The pieces that look rather like bacon are thinly sliced cabbage, it seems. You have never had a lobster served with such loving care and imagination.

Our final entrée was called Variations of Lamb: lamb served three ways; belly, back and rib meat with summer beans, Swiss chard, cipollini onions and a condiment made from golden raisins.

Then, before our desserts arrive, they brought a little “pre-dessert” of a bit of vanilla custard with a crunchy topping and a bit of raspberry and s single decorative leaf.

One of our desserts was a fabulous Cherry-Chocolate Bombe with Maracaibo Mousse, Bing Cherries, Devil’s Food Cake, White Chocolate Ice Cream. Inside cherry shell is the chocolate mousse, and every bit was delicious.

Out other dessert was Peach Pavlovas, poached peaches in meringue shells, Raspberry Cream, Champagne Ice Cream, and Peach Coulis. Simply spectacular.

Finally, our post dessert was two little gel candies and two chocolate candies on a little dish. One of the gels was already devoured before the shutter could be clicked.

Even with 3 glasses of wine and tax, the bill before tip was only $266. A finer dinner you will not find in very many places.

We note that you should probably phone for reservations rather than using the on-line reservation system as our table was in the outer patio, which while enclosed is not as elegant as the main dining room, and where families with (fussy) children often are seated.

Le Languedoc goes minimalist

Le Languedoc remains an island favorite and one of ours for many years. This year we were a bit surprised by some of Chef Nastus’ minimalist preparations, though and we thought we’d share them with you.

Perhaps the strangest one was the Chilled Roasted Beet salad ($14.50), which was two pieces of bread covering a huge cylinder of cold, chopped beets, topped with two slices of hard cooked egg. Alongside was some Mache lettuce. Perhaps this was intended as a do-it-yourself kit? Even so, there were an awful lot of beets there.

Our other appetizer was Pressed Veal Sweetbreads ($18.50) with creamed spinach and fried leeks. It had such a heavy, dark flavor, it tasted more like chicken livers then the usual light taste of sweetbreads. If you compare that preparation with last year’s sweetbreads dish with parmesan, pancetta and pea risotto, you will see the difference.

Sweetbreads on spinach

Sweetbreads with parmesan pea risotto

The minimalism continued with Sautéed Chatham Cod with garlic spinach and lemon caper butter ($32.00) which really basically amounted to some plain cod on top of some spinach.

And finally, the Niman Ranch Sirloin ($46) with baby bok choy and bone marrow maitre d’ butter was just a big piece of steak with a little butter on it. We would have done better ordering the traditional Steak Frites for $29.

Our dessert, which we didn’t photograph, may have been the best part: a butterscotch chocolate sundae, which we shared.

The bill with tax and 3 glasses of wine, but before tip was $191. That wasn’t minimalist, for sure.