Tuesdays with TT: ABC Kitchen

Over the past couple of months I have become quite the food blogger. I or (CT) bring a camera to every restaurant we go to. Since Yvo has been busy with school, I am stepping up and will now have a weekly column, Tuesdays with TT. Bon Appetit!

Ah it’s that time of year again, my birthday.  Since we went to Maialino a couple of weeks ago, I had to choose a different place for my birthday dinner. (I didn’t really, but eating two Maialino’s in one month probably is impossible.)  One place I heard about that opened very recently was ABC Kitchen.  A new Jean Georges restaurant in ABC Carpet & Home that is dedicated to organic, sustainable food.  CT & I had a great lunch at Nougatine, so I decided that I wanted to go here for my birthday.

The design of the space is very bright, fresh, and unique.  I believe it used items from ABC Carpet to furnish.  All of the table and dishware are not uniform, which give the place a funky vibe.  We like the little flowers and different bread plates on the table.

Here is the bottle of wine we had.  A nice light red and reasonably priced.

To start we ordered a couple of small plates.

First up was the chicken liver toast.

The calamari came with marinara and mustard sauces.  The calamari was good, but the coating and frying was sloppy.  There was not much pretzeliness to the coating except for some salt flavor.  The marinana had some nice heat to it, which was a welcome addition. The other dipping sauce was a mustard that added a nice zing to the flavor of the calamari.

I really wanted to try one of the pizzas since they are made by Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery and Co., which Jean George is a partner.  The current “special” pie is clams, mint, parsley, and fresh chilies.  How could I not try that? There were also some other mains that I wanted to try so CT and I decided to split the pizza and another dish.

The pizza is a little small on the personal pizza size, but big on flavor.  The mint was super fresh and could be smelled from across the table.  Whole clams were adorned all over the pizza.  The crust was excellent with a great char.  It is probably the most unique pizza I ever had.  The flavors all worked very well together with the heat from the chili bringing everything together.

The requisite upskirt(apologies for the blurriness).

The grilled hampshire pork chop, apple-meyer lemon puree and swiss chard sounded too good to pass up.

Unfortunately, the flavor did match the presentation.  The chop was a little dry from being cooked too long, so the puree was a necessary element.  I got some hints of lemon from the puree, but actually forgot that there was apple in there too.  You can see some of the swiss chard underneath the chop.  It was good to get some greens with the dish, but didn’t really add much.

As if we didn’t already have enough to eat, we decided to get a side of vegetables. The special vegetable of the evening was braised endive wrapped with ham and gruyere.  Sounds good to me!

Here it is cut open so you can actually see there is endive and it is not all ham and cheese.

This was a tasty side, but the endive was completely lost in the strong ham and cheese flavors.  In the end, we probably shouldn’t have ordered this.

Since we looked at the dessert menu on the website beforehand, we knew we would be ordering dessert.

The “Sundae” to be specific. (Salted caramel-peanut ice cream, candied popcorn, whipped cream, & chocolate sauce)
It was quite a nice presentation and delicious to boot.  Unfortunately, the salted caramel flavor was lacking, so there was a little disappointment there.  If you aren’t a salted caramel fanatic like Yvo and me, you will be very happy with this dessert.  The textures were well pronounced between the soft ice cream, thick chocolate sauce, and crunchy peanuts & popcorn.  A great way to end the meal.

For only being open about two months, ABC Kitchen has all of the kinks worked out already. It was a great place to celebrate my birthday and I left very happy.  I would love to return and see what new offerings there are on the constantly evolving menu.