Another last supper: Craigie on Main

Still got a few good meals in me, it seems, and I'm making the most of it. Which meant a trip last weekend to Craigie on Main, where we had:

The ridiculously good grilled octopus. I don't know how they get such an incredible texture; forget everything you thought you knew about tentacles.



A lovely little cake of fromage de tête with a duck's egg. Here's the before and after (or at least during).





Then The Boy had chicken-sausage-stuffed chicken. The bird was brined, juicy and delicious.



And I went for the lamb three ways: a sweet, fatty piece of slow-cooked neck, a grilled tongue, and a very nice heart sausage that was light in texture but deep with flavor.



And then dessert — no, wait, first a sorbet of grapefruit and Campari topped with champagne foam. Palate: cleansed.



And then dessert: for The Boy, a just-tart-enough sour milk panna cotta with a nutty, spicy granola and cherry puree. Meanwhile, my pork-dar stopped at the bourbon-pecan ice cream pie, whose crust contained bacony goodness.



And then we were done — no, wait, first there was cardamon-ancho chile hot chocolate, smooth and spicy and warming.



And then a tiny, perfect, lemon-filled macaron.



In other news, I've gained back the weight I lost when I started chemo and have added another four pounds. Coincidence?

When to go to Craigie on Main

We love Craigie on Main, but dining there usually requires planning. I mean yes, you could make a spontaneous decision to turn up in Central Square one evening, but you'd better be ready either to make intimate, elbowy new friends at the bar or wait an hour for a table.

And then today, we had a revelation: brunch.

(I know; some of you are all like, Well duh! And I'm like, okay, I get it.)

Brunch at Craigie means the same attention to detail, creativity, freshness and richness — oh, and cocktails — and a much better chance of being able to walk in the door and get a table.

(At this point I should add a disclaimer: we did go the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Occupancy at other times may vary. Call ahead.)

So what did we have?

First, a doughnut. There, I said it. Fresh warm doughnut, glazed with sugar, on a pool of confiture de lait (aka dulce de leche). As an appetizer.



And to make it totally healthy, a nice side of macerated fruit salad with yogurt.



It was hard to choose an entree; organic white grits with baconed-up greens and rock shrimp? Buttermilk pancakes with huckleberries? Omelette with house-made merguez and feta?

Okay, it really wasn't that difficult. There were two immediate winners.

The Boy went for the house-brined corned beef and tongue hash, which was deep and rich and fantastic.



And I had the house-made "dimanche" sausage with buttermilk biscuit and a poached egg.



Lordy, just uploading the photos makes my mouth water. The sausage had a satisfying, addictive pâté-like texture, and the flavor was subtle and complex, with lovely dark hints (possibly liver).

Whoever makes the sausage at Craigie is a god among men.

The biscuit was fluffy, with a slightly crisp crust, perfect for soaking up egg yolk.



Sadly, we were too full for dessert. I was also intrigued by the side dishes, especially the coriander and cashew granola and the grilled pork belly. (Yes, pork belly as a side dish. Would you ever go back to bacon after that?)

But now we know we have much better odds of getting a table at Craigie on Main on a Sunday afternoon, I suspect I'll get to check them out soon.

Au Pied de Cochon: bonjour, canard en conserve!

Last weekend we took an almost-spontaneous (i.e. with only two weeks' notice) trip to Montreal. The drive up was a little rough — a six-hour trip after a full day's work — but we pushed onward, motivated by a constant drumming rhythm:

Duck-in-a-can, duck-in-a-can, duck-in-a-can ...

I wrote about our previous trip to Montreal, the highlight of which was dinner at Au Pied de Cochon, where The Boy realized his lifelong dream of eating poutine with foie gras and I discovered that my lifelong dream would be eating canard en conserve.

Now we were returning to fulfill that dream.

The only available table was at 9:00, which is later than we usually eat. So we prepared accordingly: we spent the day shopping on Rue Saint-Denis and took an afternoon nap. Oh, and we had an early lunch at Bières et Compagnie, a Belgian-style brasserie with 100 beers on tap and a lovely ostrich/duck/pheasant sausage plate:



(That was The Boy's lunch. I just had a simple salad.)



(Okay, it was loaded with Toulouse sausage. But salad nonetheless!)

Anyway, back to the main event.

Au Pied de Cochon was, as always, loud and busy. People at a long table in the window taking turns standing and making exuberant toasts. A group of six hip young guys, devouring plates of meat and passing around a plate of salad. An older guy with a graying ponytail and matching beard, looking like a world-weary corsair, steadily making his way through a plate of blood pudding.

We knew, of course, what our main objective was; but what else to order? Even with the best of intentions to be restrained, the menu at PDC almost dares you to try everything.

Come on, you haven't had the duck carpaccio before! What about the boudin and foie gras tart? Or the guinea fowl liver mousse? Or the Quebecois version of chicharrón, oreilles de crisse?

But we were good, and ordered salad.

Among other things.

Most notably, the cromesquis de foie gras:



They look innocent enough, don't they? But here's the deal: They're cubes of foie gras, breaded and deep-fried. The breading becomes an impermeable shell and the inside turns to liquid.

To eat, you put the whole thing in your mouth, close your lips, and bite. And suddenly it's as though the entire inside of your head is bathed in warm, soft, rich, deep, soothing liquid.

It actually, literally, seriously brought tears to my eyes.

As another snackeroo to begin, we ordered the plate of cochonailles. In fairness, we expected a small sampling of tasty pork bites. Earlier in the week, we were at Craigie on Main's Whole Hog dinner (see review from the people sitting behind us), where the tiny, delicate cochonailles looked like this:



So naturally we were surprised to find that at Au Pied de Cochon, the cochonailles looked like this:



Head-cheese terrine, two types of pâté (one of which is hidden beneath the bread), sausage, half a deviled egg, a lovely onion jam, something dolloped with mustard that I don't even remember, and that dark brown square, which is essentially salty beef-stock Jell-O.

But it's okay, because we also had salad.



Layers of fresh beets and goat cheese I could easily have eaten for dessert, had there been room for such a thing.

And then it came.



When they say "duck in a can," they mean it: the waiter brings a can, and a can-opener, and pours the contents out onto toast topped with celeriac puree.

My photographic skills are not sufficient, so I advise you check out Claudine's Flickr photo to see it in all its glory.

The magret: perfectly cooked, moist, meaty, delicious.
The foie gras: soft and tender and all the better for sitting in balsamic meat broth.

The cabbage: well, when the description essentially translates to "embuttered," what else needs to be said?

And despite the richness of the dish, serving it on toast somehow made it seem like home-cooked comfort food; as though there was really little difference between opening a can of duck and a can of beans to throw over toast for a quick lunch.

It was a luxurious and decadent experience, and one I highly recommend.

Interestingly, though, when I asked The Boy whether he'd order the same thing next time, he said no.

Not because he didn't enjoy it, of course (he later admitted he was disappointed that he had to share the foie gras with me; thanks, honey).

But as he pointed out, there are so many other things left to try: the foie gras burger. The lamb confit. The fries made with duckfat. The foie gras-stuffed pig's foot ...

Reasons to be bitter

On Tuesday, we finally managed to get a table at Craigie on Main. Okay, "table" is perhaps an overstatement; we squeezed into a corner of the bar and guarded it jealously.

It's great that Craigie is doing so well, and that it was packed to the rafters on a miserable weeknight two days before Christmas when every other place in the area was dead (Salts has closed completely for three weeks over the usually lucrative holiday period), so a little squishing wasn't a problem.

And as former-future-astronaut Tommy set us up with cocktails, there were even fewer problems.

One of my favorite cocktail ingredients is bitters (are bitters?). In the same way a few drops of vanilla can enhance the flavor of pancakes, or a little Worcestershire sauce gives depth to a stew, a splash of bitters adds a layer of complexity to a drink, pulling the other ingredients together gracefully.

Craigie has, from what I could see, more than a half-dozen types of bitters: Angostura, natch, but also Peychaud's, Regan's orange, Fee Brothers' whiskey-barrel-aged, Angostura orange, a small vial labeled only Spiked Ango ('stura, one assumes), and a variety of bottles from Bittermens.



My drink, the Joie Vert, began with the violent smooshing of an apple and ended with a few delicate drops of Bittermens Ginger. It was a beautiful thing: fragrant and fresh and autumnal, with woodsy hints of sage and that final zing of peppery heat.

The next day, lovely co-worker Sarah and I went to lunch at Eastern Standard. As we finished up dessert (beignets with maple-caramel sauce) I noticed familiar bottles behind the bar: Bittermens.

Sorry, first things first:



Aaanyway, the bitters. We inhaled the bottles. The chocolate mole smelled dark and intense; the tiki had sweet spices and citrus notes. I wanted to dab some behind my ears.

I asked the bartender for more info; most importantly, where could I get them? He explained Bittermens are not yet commercially available; they still need to pass through various approvals before they can be sold.

I found more details on the Bittermens site, including their hope that final health-inspector and FDA approval may be cleared by mid-January.

In the meantime, at least I know a couple of places that appreciate a bitter attitude.

Au revoir, Craigie Street Bistrot

This is Craigie Street Bistrot's last week in its current subterranean location; the final service is happening as I write. Last night, we went to pay our respects. Much as L'Espalier made a move this summer from its Back Bay townhouse to the new-hotel-smell Mandarin Oriental, so CSB is moving across Cambridge to Main Street to take over the site formerly known as La Groceria.

This is doutbless a relief for the kitchen crew; as with L'Espalier, the chefs at Craigie Street were pretty much working in a ship's galley. And similarly, the tight confines of the kitchen made it even more miraculous that they were able to create dishes of great delicacy, complexity and balance. The dining room isn't exactly cavernous, either.



The parallels between the two gave us a little trepidation. Our swan-song visit to L'Espalier had been disappointing; would Craigie Street's standards also start slipping as they prepared to close the doors?

One sign that this was not going to happen: Young Tommy is now the bar manager.

Okay, I shouldn't call him that; it's just that he was one of the first kids I met when I started as a school volunteer 15 years ago. He was a 10-year-old who managed to be both bratty and charming, and now he's lost the brattiness (pretty much) and has become a respected local mixologist who made a name for himself at Eastern Standard and is obviously destined for great things.

The school librarian, Jean (still one of my best friends), had high hopes that he'd become an astronaut; frankly, I think his chosen career path is a much greater service to humanity.

We settled in to read the menu, and then I recalled something I'd read in a CSB email about a wine. All I remembered was that it was made by re-using the lees after fermentation; that the result was either absolutely terrible or completely fantastic; that a recent vintage had been the latter; and that Craigie Street had the only 15 cases in the country.

"Oh yes," said our server, "you mean Noire." It was $68 a bottle, but we figured we might not get the chance again.

I'm not a sommelier. I'm getting more competent at pairing wine with food, I know what I like, I know what to expect from certain varietals. I don't have the vocabulary to explain Noire in wine terms, so I'll try this instead:

Usually, when I taste a wine for the first time, I can pinpoint certain fundamental flavors and characteristics—plum/spice/tannins; pepper/citrus/acidity; peach/minerals. It's like watching Murder, She Wrote and figuring out whodunnit in the first act.

By comparison, tasting Noire was like watching Memento: just when you think you know where it's going, it gives you more clues, different angles, unexpected revelations. Instead of responding to the first pour with (sip) ... beat ... "yes, that's fine, thanks," this was more like (sip) ... beat ... "wow ... oh, wait ... hold on ... oh my goodness ... oh ... um, this is amazing."

Oh, also, there was food. We both went for the prix fixe, with a couple of substitutions from the a la carte menu, and ended up with:

• Tartare of citrus-cured Irish sea trout with sturgeon caviar
• Banyuls-cured duck breast and fennel/pepper-cured lardo


• Spanish octopus with fresh hearts of palm (possibly the best octopus I've ever had)
• Ragout of cocks' combs and local mushrooms with a slow-cooked egg (I wiped the plate with bread; have I mentioned that I don't like mushrooms?)


• Slow-roasted sweetbreads, marinated in yogurt and served with kohlrabi and turnips
• Lamb: roasted loin, slow-cooked belly (a square of sweet fat), ragout of tongue

Throughout the meal, the wine changed, not just opening up as it breathed, but also being a chameleon to the flavors in the dishes, matching note for note against duck meat and fennel, chestnuts and kimchee.

And then dessert—it's included! How could we say no? The Boy had profiteroles with chocolate sauce and banana ice cream, and I had warm cornbread pain perdu with lemon-verbena ice cream, blueberries and huckleberry sauce. Lemon and blueberry should always run on the same ticket.

And then Young Tommy appeared with a couple of unexpected glasses of dessert wine, and met our (weak) protests with "I'm new here; I don't know what I'm doing."

And then there was a tiny dish of burgundy mousse with a champagne sorbet.

And then there were fresh, buttery madeleines with the cheque.

And then we wandered outside in a daze and I took a last couple of photos.





The new restaurant, Craigie on Main, opens around November 14.