Kitchen Dish
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
People behave in uncharacteristic ways on Valentine’s Day. This Hallmark holiday of obligation to your significant other might be the one time a year you buy flowers, for example, or take your loved one to a restaurant that actually provides table service.
Pretty much every restaurant with cloth napkins is doing something special for Valentine’s Day. Many of them have special menus with pink items, or red ones, or aphrodisiacs. They’re advertising them on their Web sites. Look them up.
But some restaurants understand that not everybody is a couple on Valentine’s Day, and that for some, this day of roses and chocolate is a reminder that they’re single.
WEAR BLACK Annisa (13 Barrow St., between West 4th Street and Seventh Avenue South, 212-741-6699 ) has the sexy food that has become de rigueur on February 14, but chef Anita Lo also has on the menu a single squab en deuil, a French term that has the double meaning of “in mourning” and “garnished with black truffles.” It is accompanied by a bleeding heart radish. Ms. Lo also recommends eating bitter chocolate on Valentine’s Day.
CYNICS DELIGHT Prune (54 E. 1st St., between First and Second avenues, 212-677-6221), has an entire “Cynic’s Menu.” It includes “whore’s pasta,” a direct translation of pasta putanesca; crab, specifically stone crab claws with a mustard-mayonnaise sauce, and bitter greens with a broken vinaigrette. For dessert you can have “coffee and cigarettes” – a coffee mousse with chocolate sticks. Or you can have sour cherry fool, a type of cold fruit dessert, with burnt sugar syrup.
Prune charges just $34.50 a person for the Cynic’s Menu, which is exactly half of what it charges for the “Lovers’ Menu.” You do the math.
GIN BLOSSOMS If you really want to drown your sorrows, you could wander over to Bombay Talkie (189 Ninth Ave., between 21st and 22nd streets, 212-242-1900) and have an Umrao Jaan or three.
That cocktail, named after a Bollywood movie, means “unrequited love” and is made with Bombay gin, lime juice, and saffron syrup ($10). Finish it off with the deep, dark, bittersweet chocolate cupcake ($7).
Mr. Thorn is the food editor of Nation’s Restaurant News. He can be reached at bthorn@nrn.com.
