Lidia Bastianich

You are currently browsing articles tagged Lidia Bastianich.

You know an Italian restaurant is going to be good when half of the people seated in the room eating alongside your table are speaking Italian. Add in the fact that the restaurant is owned and operated by famed chef Mario Batali and restaurateur Joe Bastianich, son of one of my all time favorite people, Lidia Bastianich, and chances are it should be pretty memorable.

I have eaten at the Bastianich restaurant, Becco, in New York City before (posted about here), and had a really fantastic, homey Italian meal. We have tried to get reservations at other Batali restaurants on past visits to NYC without luck, but luckily, as we entered Westchester County on our way back from NJ yesterday, I remembered Batali’s and Bastianich’s suburban restaurant, Tarry Lodge. We had just enough time to GPS the directions and to call ahead with a reservation before arriving in downtown Port Chester, NY.

Tarry Lodge

Tarry Lodge

Port Chester has an eclectic mix of restaurants and stores, and we kind of thought we were in the wrong place. But sure enough, we soon passed by Tarry Wine, turned the corner, and found ourselves looking for street parking right near Tarry Lodge.

The outside of the restaurant definitely sticks out from the otherwise drab surroundings, the smart green façade dotted with shaded windows. The inside is beautiful with lots of natural light, cheerful yellow walls, and fabric used as decoration rather than paintings or other art. One room offers a long, white marble bar while the other featured spaced out tables covered in white cloths.

Tarry Lodge

Near the host stand, a wooden box holds business cards from other Bastianich and Batali eateries. My goal? To eat at all of them!

Mario Batali restaurants

The menus at Tarry Lodge were a little overwhelming with tons of house-made pizzas and pastas, antipasti, and salad. Additional weekend brunch options and a pri-fixe menu, $19 for a salad and pizza, made choosing our food even more difficult!

Tarry Lodge menu

The wine list was just as extensive with a great selection of wines, including Bastianich wines, by the glass. I decided on the 2008 Bastianich Refosco as I had tried it at the Newport Wine Festival.

Tarry Lodge wine list

As I sipped on my wine, our server brought soft focaccia and fragrant olive oil with a few olives basking in its deliciousness.

Tarry Lodge wine

I don’t often eat the bread served to the table at a restaurant, but I did have a small piece of this focaccia and wished I could eat the entire plate without ruining my appetite.

focaccia and olive oil

My husband decided to take advantage of the $19 deal, and I shared his walnut and gorgonzola salad with him. Topped with tart Granny Smith apples and homemade cheese, this salad was crunchy, fresh, and steeped with flavor.

gorgonzola with walnuts

For our main entrees, we decided to sample Batali’s pasta and pizza. I ordered the Fusilli alla Crazy Bastard, yes, that was the name, which is a corkscrew pasta with a creamy pink goat cheese sauce, sundried tomatoes, and walnuts. The portion was enough for several people, and it made an excellent dinner many hours later Smile The flavors in this dish were out of control, tangy, creamy goat cheese, salty sundried tomatoes, and some bitter greens dressed up simple pasta and made it something special.

Fusilli alla Crazy Bastard

Out of all of the pizza choices, we both fixated on the pizza with goat cheese, pistachios, and truffle honey. How could we NOT get that?

The pizza had a thin crust with chewy edges, mounds of fresh goat cheese, caramelized red onions, crunchy pistachios, and sweet, earthy truffle honey. It was pizza perfection.

Goat Cheese with Pistachios and Truffle Honey

We also brought some of the pizza home for a snack later that evening. The food was so satisfying and rich that a little really went a long way.

My full belly said no to dessert, but my reasonable husband questioned when we would be eating at one of Mario Batali’s restaurants again (um, hopefully soon!), and we decided to have espresso and the mascarpone cheesecake. We managed to eat every single bite Smile

MASCARPONE CHEESE CAKE

espresso

I love eating a big, fancy, delicious lunch that includes wine and espresso. My body definitely can’t do it everyday, but it is such a nice treat and broke up our forever long drive back to Boston.

The service at Tarry Lodge was as delightful and impressive as the food, and the setting was comfortable with a definite nod to the Italian countryside. It was nice to come in from a cold, bleak day, for a little bit of comfort in the form of some homemade Italian food.

Chef Batali and friends, if you are reading this, I am currently looking for a job and would love to collaborate with you on an Italy On the Road Again, as long as my other favorite person, Gwynnie is involved. Pretty please? Winking smile

Have you ever eaten at one of Mario Batali’s restaurants or the restaurant of another celebrity chef? If you haven’t, do you have a dream restaurant?

Tarry Lodge on Urbanspoon

Tags: Dining out, Food, Joe Bastianich, Lidia Bastianich, Mario Batali, New York, pasta, pizza, restaurant, Travel, wine

Happy Monday! After choosing the old fashioned way (slips of paper with blog names/email addresses in a bowl!) I am happy to announce that the winner of the Nigella Express cookbook is:

That says "The Whole Plate" in case you can't tell!

That says "The Whole Plate" in case you can't tell!

Congrats Leslie! Please send me an email to let me know where I should have the book mailed.

Thanks to ALL of you for entering. When things settle down at work for me, I am going to make a list of all of the celeb chefs you mentioned and will post it for anyone who is interested in exploring some new restaurants/books.

One amazing, famous, classic culinary inspiration that wasn’t mentioned is Lidia Bastianich of Lidia’s Italy. I LOVE her show on Public Television. Her food always looks so good, so when I recently had the opportunity to eat at one of her restaurants in New York, I was psyched!

We had an 8:00 reservation at Becco, and because we had quite  large group, we arrived a little late. Becco is adorable and really reminded me of trattorias in Italy, with the warm, inviting smells and bustling, lively atmosphere.

We were seated at a long table near the back of the downstairs room, and our servers came over immediately to ask if we wanted to water. We ordered both still and sparkling, and I was happy to see that the sparkling was San Benedetto, one of my favorite mineral waters (I know, its just water, but I find great pleasure in a nice bubbly water).

The first thing I noticed was how great the service was. We had several servers assigned to us to fill our water, and I didn’t have an empty glass the entire night. We also ordered wine. Remarkably, they have a pretty extensive wine list of $25 bottles. We ordered a few bottles, and I had a glass of the medium bodied red:

 Morellino di Scansano(Toscana) I Perazzi 2006, La Mozza

I sipped on my glass throughout the evening. It was delicious, but it had been a loooong work day, and red wine tends to make me sleepy!

I decided to skip an appetizer or salad and went straight to my entree. The couple next to me had steaming bowls of seafood in red sauce, so I asked what they were having and ordered it. The dish turned out to be:
 

Zuppa di Pesce Misto $26

This was an absolutely delicious mix of seafood, perfectly soft, silky, and fluffy polenta, and a tomato and lobster broth. The scallops were huge, tender, and sweet. The shrimp were grilled to perfection, and the white fish tasted so fresh! This dish was definitely what I wanted. I was only able to eat about half, and I was bummed that the hotel didn’t have a fridge because this would have made a great lunch!

We had a few birthdays in the group, so the restaurant staff brought out a couple plates of tiramisu. I of course had to have a bite, and it was creamy heavenly goodness! I am hoping to go on a foodie trip to NYC soon, and Becco will def be on the list, along with Babbo and Le Bernardin. Can’t wait to have the time to do this!

Sorry I didn’t have any photos; its tough with a group of colleagues. No one knows about my blog, and for some reason I am keeping it that way until I beef it up a bit. Only the hub and my mom know 🙂

Do you tell your friends/family about your blogging?

I hope you all have a great night! I have a few fun product reviews this week. Please don’t forget to shoot me a guest post if you would like. I would love to hear from you!

Tags: Becco, Lidia Bastianich

new restaurant
WordPress SEO fine-tune by Meta SEO Pack from Poradnik Webmastera