Red Alert! Eastern European dishes are invading random Western restaurants! Should you duck and cover, or welcome the enemy?
M. Wells Diner, with its salmon coulibiac, may be no more, but here’s another Russian-inspired dish to sink your teeth into: Telepan‘s House Smoked Brook Trout, with corn blini and green onion sour cream. The fleshy cubes of trout, piled high on the pancake, were delicate and lightly smoked, a welcome change from more traditional sliced fish. The green onions furiously looked and tasted like chives, but I don’t complain. My main criticism would be that the sour cream mixture was too lemony and masked some of the subtlety of the other ingredients. The corn blini managed to taste like corn and remain airy — well done! The whole meal was very market-oriented and well executed. (Telepan used to be the restaurant that consistently snatched the duck eggs at the Union Square Market before I even had a chance to get there.)
On a different topic, we were back at Hospoda tonight, and if the menu layout has changed, the food is still outstanding. Some of the dishes have benefited from further tuning, too!