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“Telepan”

Occasion:	Cuisine:	Area:	Cost:	Rating:
Night Out	New American	Upper West Side	Moderate	Great

g parts in there? They didn't do anything for the salad in terms of texture or flavor profile. It was just odd. But his Hen of the Woods mushrooms ($13) were complete brilliance. Perfectly roasted (and nicely salted) meaty mushrooms surrounded a frisee salad topped with a glossy, jiggly beautifully poached egg. Once pierced, the sunny orange yolk slips out, running all over the mustard-dressed frisee. It's dreamy.

As we moved onto midcourses we noticed that the room was getting quite warm. I tend to heat up quickly, but when Jamie was visibly hot (she is always cold), I knew something was wrong. Apparently the air conditioning was on the fritz, and the heat was on full blast, which even in December was too much. They were trying to fix it but there was not much hope. So Jamie, Alison and I started to disrobe. Off came our sweaters. We joked about a game of strip dinner. After each course, we might have to lose more clothing. Don't worry, we stayed clothed, but I think I lost a lot of water weight at dinner. (Yay!)

Midcourses were even better than the first ones. There are many dishes involving eggs, which I love (please Bill, open for breakfast), including the egg in a hole ($16), a thick cut slice of Amy's Sourdough bread, buttered and grilled and filled with two sunny side up organic eggs (all of Bill's eggs are from Katherine Bradshaw's Pine Hill Farm in Connecticut), and topped with two deep pink slices of lightly smoked wild King salmon and a parsley crème fraiche. (Time for the vodka shots again.) I loved the colors of this dish almost as much as the taste-the smoky fish, the creamy egg, the cool tart crème fraiche, the buttery bread-the whole thing was just so bright, vibrant, and fresh.

But people there is nothing on the menu that compares to the Robiola Tortellini ($16.50). This is a dish that would have resulted from the marriage of an Italian grandmother and a Jewish grandmother, which I guess would be some sort of sequel to Brokeback Mountain-perhaps entitled, "Down on The Tuscan Kibbutz." Anyway, seriously folks, this dish has elements of the best home cooking in the world. The chicken broth, or brodo as Bill calls it, is wildly rich, swimming with ribbons of kale and bobbing with these tiny, amazingly light meatballs made of veal, and nice fat kreplach (tortellini as Bill calls them) filled with robiola, a Tuscan farmer's cheese. Jamie and I were in love with the soup. We kept going ... [more, click below]

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Posted: January 3, 2006

Other restaurants in Upper West Side :
+ 'Cesca   + Asiate   + Blue Hill Stone Barns   + Per Se   + The Neptune Room   + Spigolo   + Telepan   + Aix Brasserie   + 'Cesca   + Bar Boulud   + Dovetail   + BarBao   + Dinosaur Bar-be-Que   + Kefi   + Bar Luna   + Ed's Chowder House   + Red Rooster, by Rachel Barbarotta   + Loi by Dara Pollak   

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