VIEW ALL ADANNA'S BLOG ENTRIES
12 Hour Pork Picnic and Sea Bass Quenelles - News from the
Hideaway…
(http://www.nyc.com/restaurants/The_Queens_Hideaway.75572/editorial.aspx )
Last night, we popped into Queen’s Hideaway
to see what the Queen was cooking up for dinner. The dining room was
overly warm, but no one was concerned because they were all in the garden.
We sat down in the dining room, glad to have it mostly to ourselves and
to the canine mascot who was hanging out on the banquette.
We decided to order the chevre mousse and smoked fig bruschetta to start, and then followed up with the 12 hour pork picnic and sea bass quenelles. I must say, the sea bass was absolutely perfect –
a real treat with a very light kiss of cornmeal. Accompanying the bass
was compote of sweet onions, tomato and spicy peppers and a green bean
slaw. The 12 hour pork picnic was a generous serving of slow roasted
pork loin (the kind with the bone in), a carrot & fennel slaw and herbed mashed potatoes. The spicy compote was better suited to
the pork than the sea bass, but who cares when everything on the plate tastes good?
">
Then the rain started and everyone fled to the dining room, plates and forks and glasses clinking and clanking.
A young dining-couple flopped down next to us. The female
reminded me of an actress from the early 80’s, the one with the short curly brown hair and big teeth and red lipstick, wearing that kind of naval look – with the navy blue and the Ralph Lauren gold earrings. But she had probably just been born in 1980, so for her this was Retro. She began telling her dinner date about how she had never intended to be divorced, but that she had just been too
young when she had married her high school sweetheart.
Thunder, lightning, a cool breeze blowing through the long,
narrow dining room…
It is so easy to reveal information of a personal matter
while sitting in a restaurant eating 12 hour pork picnic.
“So,” she tells her dinner-date, “Now I have two roommates.”
“How’s Bill as a roommate?” her dinner date asks.
“Oh, he’s chill. He’s the chillest.”
Note: The nerdy linguist part of me begins pondering the use
of “chill” as an adjective. Is it somehow the au courant equivalent of that beatnik tag “cool”? Or does she mean he is easy going? Oh! But wait for it…
“Yeah, Bill is so chill. Not like Ed. Ed’s like, the gregarious one.”
I
sense an imbalance here, the kind of thing that happens when “roots”
cooking meets “haute cuisine”, but no one can remember where the
salt is.
The
Queen’s Hideaway is roots; the scavenged chairs and tables and glasses,
the laid back vibe, the old punk and alternative girl rock
playing on the turntable, the ease with which everyone runs from garden
to dining room, plates in hand. But there is a balance here – it’s
roots all the way, interlaced with creativity and a vast knowledge of
food and flavors. Down home cooking from the mind of the Queen.
The sea bass quenelles prove it – a new take on the old catfish nugget,
the way my father used to prepare his catch of the day. The execution
true to the basic taste and balance that the dish evokes. I got
teary-eyed thinking about it. We ducked out just as the first cloud
rolled out and another one began flashing across the sky.
Another night at the Hideaway, nicely done.
Tags:
12 hour pork picnic, al fresco, Eliza Queen, garden, Queens Hideaway, sea bass quenelles
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 7/28/2006
(
Permanent Link
)
Send to Friend