Dinner at Wildair
I rely, to an unhealthy degree, on reviews.
Eater, Yelp, NY Times, the Tribune, TripAdvisor. I take everyone’s opinion into account when I’m selecting where to eat next, what recipe to cook next, what kind of stemware to buy. (We ended up with Riedel Veritas. I love them.) I read thousands of reviews a month. Like, when I’m supposed to be sleeping and Chris asks me what I’m reading and I slam my phone down and say, “NOTHING.” And fake fall asleep.
But I’m not sleeping. I’m never sleeping. I’m always looking at Eater’s heat map and tracking the new places opening and gushing over their menus.
But when it comes to making a reservation in a new city, I’m paralyzed with fear of making the wrong choice. I feel crippled with indecision and the inability to think for myself. (Ew I just re-read that sentence. Grim.)
Thus, my life can be described in one word: tabs. Dozens and dozens of tabs opened as I right-click myself into oblivion layering on review after review for different restaurants. I don’t even know the exact moment when I became so obsessed. Probably the first time I had A5 wagyu. But anyway.
In NY this week which gave me the opportunity to knock a couple spots off my NYC restaurant list. One, notably, was #8 on Bon Appetit’s list of best new restaurants in 2016 and also a product of the Eater list of 38 Essential NY restaurants. And that’s why we pay them the big bucks, ladies, because they never lead me astray.
Wildair was such a wonderful surprise. It is incredibly easy to miss, hardly more than a blip on the radar in the busy Lower East Side. (Did I say that right? Did I sound like Gossip Girl? I am so clearly midwestern AF.) But what it lacked in curb appeal, it MORE THAN compensated for in stupid-good food.
The place is small. Like, 30 people small. We-practically-sat-in-the-kitchen small. I love places like that. We could watch the cooks assembling things, pouring cocktails, and goofing around with one another. Our server looked like she belonged in Anthropologie. We asked for wine recommendations; she recommended the cheapest wine on the menu. Seriously, thank you, Anthro-angel.
Moreover, the cheapest wine on the menu (Mas Candi “Cabories” - $50, which means it’s probably a $20 bottle) was really good. Remember when I was in SF at Lord Stanley and we drank what that server had called, “party wine?” It was just like that. Juicy. Fruity. Juicy Fruit gum.
As any self-respecting lady or gentleman knows, if you’re going to sit down to a nice wine and dinner... the first thing you must do is order some pre-game cheese.
THIS CHEESE CHANGED ME. I have spent a lot of time and dollars at the Mars Cheese Castle, and Caputo’s, and even the country of Italy. So I know a thing or two about cheese. But these were some of my favorites I can ever remember. Two soft cow’s milk options (a brie-like object and a bleu) and a hard, more forgettable one. The Brie was just molten goo. The kind of goo all cheese dreams of becoming. And the bleu was seriously just... smoky, not too barnyard stinky, creamy perfection. The last one was probably great but I blacked it out in order to save more memory space for the first two.
We were deep in the wine and cheese zone when woman sitting next to us started to address us with a personal review of what she was eating. She was losing her mind over the beef tartare she had just finished, declaring it the best beef tartare of all time. #BOAT. It was just the kind of endorsement I needed to get this food party started. Our server validated that this was, in fact, the best beef tartare ever (I feel like everyone says that whenever I’m at a joint that serves it), so we ordered it.
Beef tartare is such an old-trusty for me. I always get it. I always like it. It rarely ever surprises me. But this one actually was worth our crazy neighbor-diner’s outburst. It was covered in, you guessed it, more cheese, and almost had a venison-like taste to it. It was very unique, very tasty, and very much worth the hype. But it wasn’t even close to my favorite thing... so that should tell you something about how good everything was here.
Our next course was incredibly simple, sweet potatoes and whipped ricotta with fresh herbs. But man, did it blow me away. Idk what I’m doing wrong but the herbs I grow don’t taste like this. Everything was so bright and clean and just tasted like real food with no makeup on.
The next course, a spicy tuna tostada with cherry tomatoes on burnt bread, was equally awesome. And the portions were surprisingly large. There was no skimping on the tuna, and by the last piece I was just scraping it off with my fork and tossing the bread. I was also picking flecks of cheese off the table and eating them. I was being a complete hillbilly. I just needed to make sure NONE of it went to waste.
We were actually starting to get full when our main entree came out. And this is where I have to dock a point from Ms. Anthropologie because she *did not* mention that the pork Milanese was enough to serve a family of four. It was HUGE. It came with a small green salad and sauce gribiche (a French sauce made with hard boiled eggs and mustard). We tried, hard, to put this thing away... but after we got about a third of the way through, we had to call it.
Bless her heart, Anthropologie offered us the dessert menu and I flat out pushed it away and said “NO.” This keg was tapped. I couldn’t have eaten an Altoid if I tried. So that sweet server darling put the remaining Milanese in a box for me to take back to the hotel. I told you, I did not give a hoot. Everything was so good, I needed to ensure every square calorie was accounted for and consumed.
The Forkling says: 8.7 forks out of 10.0.
So if you’re wondering how this story ends, it ended with me, sitting cross legged on my bed at the hotel, in a bath towel, listening to Chvrches and eating cold pork and a lightly dressed green salad out of a cardboard box.
Being a food blogger (is that what I am now?) is so glamorous.