During the holidays we tend to stay close to home with family and friends, and with a few notable exceptions (a great meal at Paradox Lodge last week) we avoided going out to restaurants. I won't count office parties as “going out to dinner”. For that reason I haven't had a lot to blog about over the last few weeks, but that is about to change. As I get ready to add more of our favorite destinations to the blog in the coming year, I thought it would appropriate to revisit what I am trying to accomplish with North Country Rambler, and to also restate some of the things that we are most definitely not trying to do.
North Country Rambler is a very personal blog about our culinary adventures in upstate New York. Most of those adventures involve dining out in restaurants. My friends and I spend half of our time in the Hudson Valley, and half in the Adirondacks near Schroon Lake. We eat out a lot. You may have noticed that the destinations mentioned are in the Hudson Valley or north of Glens Falls, and that the capital district is conspicuously absent. The reason is that we spend very little time there, but the good news is that the Albany Times Union does a great job of local restaurant coverage on their website.
On our blog I attempt to share our favorite experiences, and our favorite restaurants. We make no claim to offer a list of “the best restaurants” in the area. We go out of our way to avoid “four star” haute cuisine establishments. We are looking for a good meal with a good bottle of wine at a reasonable price.
We also will never criticize an establishment on this blog. That is not our purpose. If we do not like a restaurant, you will not read about it here. (but check out our Facebook page; sometimes the bad stuff ends up there :) This blog will focus on telling our readers about the places we enjoy, and why we enjoyed them. Obviously we look for friendly, knowledgeable wait-staff, and a pleasant atmosphere. I've noticed that in any of our favorite restaurants the personnel all have one thing in common – they all enjoy doing what they do. The restaurant business is a really, really, hard way to make a living. You have to love it to be successful.
Dining, ideally with lots of friends, should be enjoyable – it should be fun. To that end we tend to seek out a very specific type of dining experience. In a word we like “bistros” and variations on a bistro theme. Bistros are often ethnic, and we do indeed favor ethnic eateries. My personal favorite cuisines are French, Italian, and Spanish. Our own American dishes usually draw on our own Western European traditions, and our “American” bistros often reflect that heritage. Bistro cooking is simple fare – not even approaching what would be called haute cuisine. The dishes offered are usually variations on what you ate at home growing up. Simple home style preparations of real food – dishes like short ribs, and cassoulet, and beef bourguignon, or paella, or just a nice broiled trout. Dishes that your mother could prepare at home. (If not your mother, then somebody's mother. Certainly not mine, who had a hard time with fish sticks.)
Dining, ideally with lots of friends, should be enjoyable – it should be fun. To that end we tend to seek out a very specific type of dining experience. In a word we like “bistros” and variations on a bistro theme. Bistros are often ethnic, and we do indeed favor ethnic eateries. My personal favorite cuisines are French, Italian, and Spanish. Our own American dishes usually draw on our own Western European traditions, and our “American” bistros often reflect that heritage. Bistro cooking is simple fare – not even approaching what would be called haute cuisine. The dishes offered are usually variations on what you ate at home growing up. Simple home style preparations of real food – dishes like short ribs, and cassoulet, and beef bourguignon, or paella, or just a nice broiled trout. Dishes that your mother could prepare at home. (If not your mother, then somebody's mother. Certainly not mine, who had a hard time with fish sticks.)
Bistro fare is real food. We avoid anything that smells of fusion anything, and especially “deconstructed” anything. Any waiter's mention of “an essence of crustacean foam” can send me screaming from the dining room. I am fascinated by molecular gastronomy as a scientific pursuit, but sorry – to me it is not cooking; it's playing with food. Your mother told you not to play with your food. I'll take the cassoulet and a bottle of Beaujolais, thank you very much.
We also look for restaurants that have a bar, and I have a valid reason for that. I am fortunate to have a group of friends that have dined together every week for twenty years. We usually meet on Wednesday evenings around 5:30 PM with the late arrivals showing up by 6. We like to collect at the bar before we sit down in the dining room. If a restaurant does not have a bar you are often asked to wait until your party is ready to be served, or the early arrival is sitting alone at the table waiting for the rest of the troupe to show up. So we seek out restaurants with bars. Honest – that's the reason.
We seek out good food at reasonable prices. We look for value. Value does not necessarily mean very inexpensive. (I'm easy but I'm not cheap!) We look for a decent wine list that offers a well thought out selection of wines from good producers for under $75, with an average cost closer to $40. We are not looking for a wine list with a ten year vertical of first growth Bordeaux. I have no problem paying $70 in a restaurant for a Premier Cru Burgundy. I do have a problem paying $400 for a bottle of Lynch Bages that I have in my cellar and paid $50 for fifteen years ago. Don't misunderstand; a restaurant with a fabulous selection of expensive older wines is entitled to that mark up. They carried (and financed) the inventory for years and hopefully kept the wines in a decent cellar in peak condition. They are entitled to their profit. I'm just saying that we do not seek out these types of restaurants to eat at every week. I prefer Bar Boulud over Daniel. We want a great meal, including a good bottle of wine, for less than $100 per person. These are the places that you will read about on North Country Rambler. I hope you enjoy reading about them. Thanks for stopping by.
If you have any suggestions – particularly about restaurants that we would enjoy – I would love to hear from you. Please do leave a comment, or send me an email at northcountryjoe@gmail.com
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