Breaking: Kristin Mulvenna Has Changed Her Relationship Status

Tomorrow marks the last day for Kristin Mulvenna, former co-owner of cozy, charming Café Estelle and former squeeze of the bruncherie's other half and chef, Marshall Green. “We broke up,” Mulvenna told us, “and thought it would just be best if I left the business.” Her name is already wiped from the website.

Maybe we should have seen the writing on the wall when Mulvenna (commenting on the media's focus on Green) told Felicia D. of Meal Ticket in January: “‘It really pisses me off […] I put in just as many, if not more, hours. Though Marshall is so talented, if I didn’t do all the things I do, it wouldn’t work at all. The thing that bothers me the most is that no one thinks I’m an owner — just Marshall’s little wife!’ She mimes a person putting an arm around her; in a mocking voice: ‘Oh, you’re Mrs. Marshall! We loooooove his food!’ She softens a little. ‘I understand why people are interested in him—the chef draws people to the restaurant. But we do it all together.’”

Though she doesn’t sound so in that particular interview, Mulvenna is sweet, having run the front of Café Estelle with oodles of grace and charm since it opened late in 2007. Hate to think we’re partly to blame for the trouble in paradise; we praised Green in a PW review and named him a Chef To Watch in the January/February issue of Philly Style.

Though we’re sad to see Mulvenna's cheery self go, you won’t get an argument from blogalicious; we’re major advocates of the clean-break break-up, without which the risk of relationship relapse is exponentially greater. And let’s be honest: Green’s food does put you on that kind of blissful, I’m-so-happy-I’d-do-you-even-though-I-know-it’s-a-terrible-idea-and-I’ll-regret-it-later mood.





Today’s brunch saw a crisp pizzette piled with speck, goat cheese and leeks; Green’s inimitable house-made breakfast sausage; brioche French toast stuffed with a cinnamon-cream cheese-pecan concoction reminiscent (in a good way) of Cinnabon icing; and the Eggs Juan, two poached eggs served over crisp bacalao (salt cod) fritters and dressed with tomato hollandaise and smoked paprika. Smoky, salty and rich, this is the new breakfast of champions, and so delicious we forgot to snap a picture. We don’t know if Mulvenna will miss Green or his food more, but other than her departure, the Cafe is operating business as usual.

Stop by and say hello to her tomorrow—and to our boy and local photog Mike Persico’s haunting hanging in the Cafe. After tomorrow, you can holler at her at Jose Pistola’s, but sister is already thinking ahead: “My goal is to have my own place in a year and half.” If it’s half as good as Café Estelle, we’re looking forward to it.

Photo: MealTicket, blogalicious

It’s Friday. It’s Lent. Order Pizza.

And for a complete listing of where you should order that pizza, peep our recent Philadelphia Style article (co-authored with editor Peter Proko) outlining the best pies in town. From the simple, fresh Margherita at kooky capitalization-afflicted SliCE to the sweet, almost dessert-like zucca pie at Osteria, here are the ones not to miss. We're told they're almost as mouthwatering as our MVP coverboy.

Photo: Jason Varney for Philadelphia Style

Cooking 4 Dummies: Buffalo Tacos!

Welcome to the second edition of Cooking 4 Dummies. Now that you’ve learned to cook fish—easy, no?—a recipe for meat. These tacos call for lean, mean, healthy bison (here we’re using a sirloin cut), but you can just as easily sub beef, chicken, tofu, or as T.I. might say, whatever you like. ‘Cause that’s what cooking’s all about, baby, improv. We had no sour cream in the house, so we used Greek yogurt. No limes either, but Meyer lemons worked just fine.

This go-round, instead of posting the instructions to the slideshow (some of which Pictobrowser cut off), we’ll list them here. Just follow along in the pics, kids. Here’s what you’ll need, besides the obvious like salt and pepper: two strips of bacon—we used the Balinese long pepper bacon we told you about yesterday and it was floral and smoky and spicy and amazing—one buffalo sirloin steak, red onion, tomato, avocado, Greek yogurt, lemon or lime, cilantro, chipotle peppers, pineapple, soft tortillas and (not pictured here) honey and cumin.

1. Cut the bacon into pieces—a scissor works well, just don’t run with it—and crisp it up in a hot pan.
2. Season the steak with salt and pepper.
3. When bacon is crisp, remove it from the pan, drain excess fat (be sure to leave a little) and drop in the steak.
4. Sear steak a few minutes on each side a crust has formed and looks like the pic.
Transfer steak to ovenproof pan and roast 400 degrees for about 20 minutes*.
5. In the mean time, chop the tomato, red onion, avocado and pineapple. (You know how to break down a pineapple right? If not, click here.) Squirt the avocado with citrus**.



6. Mix two big spoonfuls of yogurt with one chopped chipotle pepper. Add salt, pepper, cumin and a drizzle of honey. Stir and reserve.
7. Remove buffalo from oven. Transfer to cutting board and let it rest for 10 minutes so the juices reabsorb.
8. Wrap tortillas in a napkin or towel and nuke for a minute to warm.
9. After buffalo has rested, slice against the grain into thin strips.
10. Assemble tacos, garnish with cilantro and lemon/lime and enjoy!

We just polished that off four buffalo tacos for lunch (they’re healthy = you can eat more!) and we can tell you they’re freaking delicious.

*A note on temperature: When eating a steak, we like it medium-rare, but in these tacos we took the meat closer to medium-well to avoid any bloody drippings turning our tortillas to mush. Adjust the cooking time more or less as you like it.

*This prevents the avocado from getting all brown and gross.

Sealed With A (Delicious, Smoky, Greasy-Lipped) Kiss: Bacon By Mail!

In the realm of the Best Presents Ever, this one is hard to beat: a subscription to Zingerman’s Bacon Club, “a monthly ration of America’s best rashers.” If you don’t know the big Z, they’re an Ann Arbor-based treasure trove of artisan foods. In their store and online, the company sells everything from Tunisian preserved lemons and Quebecois goat butter to wild pine cone syrup and caramels dusted in bee pollen. The Bacon Club, a Christmas gift, has brought us three months of happy mornings. The sizzle and snap in the pan. The smoky aroma hanging in the air. And lots of sunny-side-up eggs and vegetables cooked in the wonderful rendered fat we’ve been saving since December. One pound of bacon arrives once a month, and we haven’t been this excited about the mail since we stopped watching Blues Clues. Christmas morning brought Neuskes applewood-smoked, followed by Kuttawa, Kentucky-based Broadbent Hams’s hickory-smoked bacon brightening up dreary January. Today is bittersweet, as we received our final (and most exciting) variety: Balinese Long Pepper. (Some light long pepper reading here.) We’ll have to stretch this pound… unless someone wants to renew our subscription for us?

Photo: blogalicious

Cooking 4 Dummies: Fish In Foil

Some people seem to think our job involves sitting around the house while Padma Lakshmi look-alikes spoon-feed us Osetra caviar as we peck out nasty one-liners on a laptop. Partly, this is true (namely, the laptop), but if you talk to any food pro they’ll tell the life ain’t always so glamorous. You’ll frown when we tell you this. You’ll protest that, no, we have the coolestjobever! You’ll secretly think what horrible ingrates we are. And it’s true. Reviewing restaurants and writing about food is amazing work, but there are some things you need to sacrifice, like your 32-inch waist and the simple joy of cooking at home*.

In an attempt to eat healthier in the 2009 (actually just be able to gorge with impunity at restaurants), blogalicious has been actively trying to cook more at home. Till we fall off the wagon, we’ll be bringing you the results in this new recurring feature, Cooking 4 Dummies, slideshow recipes so easy a caveman could do it.





We’re assuming you’re intelligent enough to connect the dots between the slideshow. We’re also assuming you can chop an onion without severing your pinky. If not, watch a few hours of Food Network before proceeding. This recipe for lemon sole is healthy as well as idiot-proof. Mix the ingredients, pile them into a sheet of aluminum foil, place the fish on top, wrap the foil into a packet and bake. The cooking vessel is the serving vessel, so clean-up’s a mothafuckin’ cinch!

Fear not the weird ingredients. In this particular recipe, the presence of rose water, pomegranate molasses and pistachio oil is a function of our compulsive shopping habit that rears its ugly head around exotic and unusual comestibles that invariably wind up sitting around in the cabinet until we force them into dishes like these. The rose, pomegranate and pistachio create a Middle Eastern profile for the fish, but you could just as easily swap good old extra-virgin olive oil for the pistachio stuff, add some herbs-de-Provence and crushed tomato for a Mediterranean riff. See how easy!

*It’s important to note we are not chefs. But from dining out often, reading cookbooks, watching lots of Barefoot Hamptons Ogre and being a general student of food, we’re pretty good at figuring out what goes with what and the steps to take to achieve a delicious and edible result. Bon appetit, baby.

Photo: blogalicious

In Season: Cara Cara Oranges

Perhaps you've noticed the Cara Cara orange has graced our monthly changing List on the right right side of this page, but that little line doesn't do this citrus justice. This strain of navel orange originated at the Hacienda de Cara Cara in Valencia, Venezuela in 1976 and has been a cult favorite since. Also called pink navels for the blushed color of their flesh, Caras have a mellow acidity and sweet, almost floral flavor. They're in season rightthisveryminute, solid for 99 cents each at Whole Foods. Yesterday we tossed some segments with fennel, avocado, red onion, olive oil and a spritz of rose water (to pick up the orange's flowery notes) for a bright, summery salad alongside pan-roasted pork chops, but Caras are also perfectly delicious eaten out of hand. Get 'em while the last.

Photo: blogalicious

Eat It Now: Morning Buzz French Toast

If, like us, you dig your breakfast sweet and savory, get thee to Black N Brew now. This week’s specials include the Morning Buzz French Toast, double-decker egg-battered bread topped with two perfect poached eggs. The taut huevos popped like water balloons when we dove in with our fork, sending forth a gush of rich golden yolk into the maple syrup and powdered sugar. Sweet and savory f’real, packed with enough carbs and protein to give you energy till dinner. Maybe this is performance-enhancement drug A-Rod’s being so vague about. If that’s the case, we’re glad we don’t play pro ball.

Photo: blogalicious

Just In Time For Beer Week: Amada, First In PA To Serve El Bulli Beer

Here’s why Jose Garces is so great: Even while he’s in the thick of opening week shenanigans at Chifa, he’s got something simmering on the stoves at his other restaurants just in case, blinded by novelty, you temporarily forget about them. Today, Amada announced the addition of Spanish beer Inedit to its bar menu. Sounds like an unpleasant publishing term, but actually means “never been done before.” Well, well. The brainchild of Spanish brewery Estrella Damm and legendary El Bulli chef Ferran Adria, the beer is a 4.8% ABV blend of lager and Belgian wheat styles. So it tastes like Yuengling mixed with Hoegaarden…? To garnish with an orange or a Phillies chant, that is the question. Inedit is $30 for a 750 mL bottle or $7 for a five-ounce tug. Salud!

Photo: EstrellaDamm

As If You Needed Another Reason Not To Eat At Applebee’s

From CNBC yesterday: In the face of the economy, chain restaurants “trimming the fat” by cutting portions. Check out the vid here with Wendy Bounds of the Wall Street Journal.

Photo: PencilRoving

Watch Out, Josh Duhamel! Turista Menu at Modo Mio

Outside the ristorante lining the winding alleys of Florence, the grand avenues of Rome and pretty much everywhere else in Italy, you’ll find the turista menu. Judging from the name, you might decline. Even the Perillo Tour groups strolling the Via Veneto in PayLess kicks probably wouldn’t want to self-label themselves tourists. However, the turista menu isn’t something to snub; rather these pre-fixe dinners are a key to eating cheaply on Euro.

You’d have to be Stevie Wonder to mistake Girard Avenue for somewhere in Italy, but here the turista has taken hold. At Peter McAndrew’s snug trattoria Modo Mio, the four-course menu costs only $32 per person, as if the regular menu wasn’t inexpensive enough—antipasti $8, pastas $11, entrees $13-$18. Portions are European-sized, “like in Italy,” explained the waiter, “not in South Philly.” Harsh. But mostly true. (Try Le Virtu for an exception.)

Dark and noisy as a rave, with diners toasting with complimentary shots of Sambuca and singing happy birthday over moist, crusty-edged apple-walnut cake slathered with Nutella, Modo Mio has captured the spirit of dining in Italy, or as wine guy and blogalicious buddy Brian Freedman aptly pointed out as our antipasti started arriving around 10 pm, “I feel like were Spanish or something.”

Flavored with unusual ingredients and interesting flavor pairings, McAndrew’s menu is not what we’ve come to expect from the Italian restaurant in Philadelphia—and is all the better for it. Spiced with nutmeg and clove, the patty of cotechino (the sausage on the heavenly Lombarda pizza at Osteria) enticed with a bewitching aroma that was part butcher shop, part pumpkin pie. The pork was luscious and flavorful, heightened further by dabs of fried crema, pistachios, a drizzle of saba (a syrup made from concentrated grape must, the byproduct of the first stage of winemaking) and an egg poached in balsamic vinegar. This dish was explosive; sweet, sour, salty fireworks all rounded out by the richness of the pork and the liquid yolk. Hard to top that, no?





There were also pan-seared scallops with green olives, roasted peppers and radicchio, as well as tender, almost creamy calve's tongue sliced into fine, frilly ribbons tangled with roasted beets, baby basil, goat cheese and poppy seeds. So, so nice, and that aint’s just the opium talking. The pasta course followed, bringing spicy bucatini Amatriciana; not-often-seen stradette (fettucine made with cornmeal) tossed with cauliflower, capers, cream and scallops; and dreamy gnocchi with haunting, James-ian ragu of boar ragu, black pepper and dark chocolate. If we’re nitpicking, the sauce was a touch too wet (sloppy joe-like, as one dining companion pointed out), but the flavors were on point, so hearty and wintry we sopped up the extra with Modo Mio’s awesome bread, doughy on the inside but unapologetically crusty outside. Talk about busting a cap.

Entrees: buttery, lemony whole-roasted striped bass crusted in a gremolata riff with breadcrumbs and anchovies; skirt steak with porcini and sugo finto (a meatless Tuscan ragu); tender tatters of slow-roasted suckling pig with braised cabbage and fennel; and the vitello, a balancing act that sharpened the richness of a crisp breaded veal cutlet, fried egg and walnuts with tangy pomegranate vinaigrette, bitter radicchio and sweet, creamy gorgonzola dolce.

By the time dessert arrived—had to get that apple-walnut cake—we had been at Modo Mio for three hours. It was a great time, enhanced by a great check: $41 per person with tax and tip. We almost felt guilty of stealing, so we’re paying it forward. Bring friends. Bring wine (and Champagne and beer). Emrbace the turista, baby.

Pics coming as soon as Flickr decides to start working.

Photo: ModoMio, blogalicious

Restaurant Week Report: Panorama

Along with the streets of Philadelphia, hell has apparently frozen over. Not only did we have a delicious September Restaurant Week, but another mostly positive experience this time round. When friends of blogalicious booked a table at Panorama, the elegant always-been-meaning-to-get-there ristorante in the Penn’s View Inn, we felt pretty good. We’d always heard nice things about Panorama and their Restaurant Week menu, thoughts echoed by Foobooz last week.

If you’ve never been, the wall mural-wrapped restaurant is like dining in a Renaissance painting, or a very extravagantly decorated South Philly living room. It was packed like the Cantina on a Saturday night, and though we had a 9:30 rez, we were quickly banished to the wine bar. Yes, you heard correctly, 9:30 pm. The delay drug on, lubricated by a robust, blackberry Dolcetto from Panorama’s biblical wine list.

We sat a little after 10, and the food started flying from the kitchen. For appetizers, you could order either the antipasto salad or one of the restaurant’s pastas. Kind of a no-brainer. We steered toward the tagliatelle with earth wild mushrooms; orechietti with shrimp; and the gnocchi, airy potato gumdrops lightly dressed in marina and nuggets of slowly melting smoked mozzarella. Yum. For entrees, Panorama lets you order any of its dishes. The friends made a beeline for the filet mignon, a tender eight-ounce steak capped with truffle butter and melted leeks, but we went with the crisp cutlets of veal breaded in toasted hazelnuts and lemon zest. It was light and lovely, served alongside a simple, lively arugula and grape tomato salad and lemon-mascarpone mousse. Killer.

By dessert, a perfect white-wine poached pear washed down with lots more wine, it was close to midnight. Just like dinner in Italy. With three bottles of wine ($35 Chianti, $40 Pinot Noir, $50 Dolcetto D’Alba) the $35 per person base quickly escalated to $80 each with tip for earnest, friendly, if a bit familiar, service. Not exactly cheap, but it certainly would have cost much more had it not been Restaurant Week. Sorry for the lack of pictures (‘twas dark in the dining room), but to see what Panorama’s all about, check it out for yourself. Restaurant Week ends tomorrow night, and, according to OpenTable, there are plenty of tables available.

Photo: Panorama

Deal Alert: Alison Two

On the heels of a stinging one-beller and a very different tale from Philly mag, Alison Two has put together a stimulus package that definitely passes in this house. Three courses. $35. Monday through Thursday from 5 pm to 6:30 pm. Yeah, you’ll have to leave the city in the middle of the afternoon to eschew the traffic, but you can spend the whole drive home figuring out which critic you agree with. And while you’re there, pick up a box of Alison’s house-baked cookies in this nifty little chest of drawers, which might include pistachio macaroons, cardamom orange Madelines, granola Concord grape jam bars, lemon poppyseed biscotti, raspberry almond sesame sandwich cookies, Mexican wedding cookies. Only $15.

Menu in 3, 2, 1…

Appetizers

Creamy Parsnip Soup, Cured Duck, Citrus Hazelnut Butter
House Smoked Trout, Caviar, Fennel, Lemon Crème Fraîche, Chive Potato Cake
Chopped Salad, Romaine Lettuce, Blue Cheese, Poached Egg, Tomato, Asparagus, Herb Toast
Arugula, Duck Prosciutto & Manchego Cheese Salad, Membrillo

Entrees

Skate Wing, Cauliflower Puree, Fennel and Radish Salad, Cardamom Vinaigrette, Roasted Lemon
Grilled Hanger Steak, Bacon & Onion Frites, Tomato Chili
Grilled Pork Chop Al Pastor Style, Crispy Masa Cake, Pineapple & Salsa Verde
Roasted Chicken Breast, Caramelized Brussels Sprouts & Pearl Onions, Salsify Puree, Cider Reduction

Desserts

Cinnamon Brioche Bread Pudding, Caramelized Bananas, Banana Crème Fraîche Ice Cream
Meyer Lemon Creme Caramel, Candied Kumquats with Basil, Lemon Tuile
Chocolate Brownie Sundae, Vanilla Ice Cream, Double Sauce

Photo: ©2009 Courtney Grant