Small Bites

Guest bloggers Deven and Jill Black are taking over again while I prepare for next week’s half-hour special on RNN — all about wine! Leading up to the Greater New York Wine & Food Festival, I’ll be hosting a show about wine in the area, how to taste wine, a tour of local wine bars and pairing cheese and wine, among other great stories. Should be fun! Tune in at 6:30 PM Wednesday, March 26 to RNN: Channel 6 or 19, depending on your cable system. Meanwhile, enjoy Deven and Jill’s visit to Two Spear Street at the foot of the hill in Nyack:

Blacks?

There’s a lot to like about Two Spear Street, starting with its lovely room, with lots of white woodwork setting off the warm peachy tones, the soft, complexion-flattering lighting, an interesting and eclectic wine list, and of course the river view. There’s a special, albeit obnoxiously smug sense of contentment that comes with enjoying a glass of wine in a beautiful restaurant while you look out at people fighting the remnants of rush-hour traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Our dinner started with a goat cheese cheesecake, served atop a mixed green salad. The savory cheesecake was exceedingly creamy, but the distinctive tang of goat cheese was disappointingly muted.

The salad was great, though, with a piquant vinaigrette nicely complementing the slightly bitter greens. Ultimately, we would have been happier with a simpler—and goatier—take on this dish, like toasted medallions of goat cheese or just some goat cheese crumbled over the salad.

Crispy calamari, a Restaurant Week appetizer that’s also on the “real” menu, was exactly as described.

Even with the very light batter cooked to crispy (and nongreasy) perfection, the calamari rings remained tender. They came with two near-miss sauces—a creamy but too salty herb aioli, and a tomato chutney that fairly screeched with flavor, most of it sweet. Mellower tones, especially dialing down the sugar to let the spiciness become more perceptible, would have given it more finesse.

Entrees were also qualified successes.

The Frenched pork chop was a tad dry and over-done, but it was treated to a maple glaze that gave what could have been a pedestrian dish an interesting and delicious new life. The maple and accompanying sweet apple chunks were used with restraint, adding highlights more than dominating.

The artic char made an eye-catching presentation, with a slab of pale salmon-colored fish elevated atop a mound of orzo salad. The plate was zigzagged with bright green squiggles of cilantro pesto, the pattern echoing the rickrack edges of the leaves of young arugula that lay under the orzo. Visually, it was a big green festival of Spring. And the fish was tasty, but to basil lovers, cilantro pesto is a second-best understudy. Also, we’re not huge avocado fans, but the big unctuous chunks that studded the orzo salad didn’t add much flavor or texture. Something that presented more of a contrast—roasted peppers? carmelized onions?—would have turned the orzo into something more than just a platform for the fish.

The wine list at Two Spear Street features a few wines from countries not often seen on restaurant wine lists. Among the reds there’s an earthy Israeli pinot noir from Barkan Vineyards and a big but nuanced shiraz and a less successful merlot from the South African vintner Indaba. We tried all three and recommend the pinot noir and the shiraz.

For the most part, service was prompt, responsive, and professional, with one weird exception: the mystery of the sorbet. It started when we ordered. Our water insisted on taking the full order, including dessert, at the beginning of the meal. Ordinarily, that’s required only in special cases, like when the kitchen has to allow time for made-to-order soufflés. Three desserts were offered on the special menu: carrot cake, tiramisu, and a sampler of three sorbets. Asked what the three sorbets were, he ducked the question with the skill of a White House press secretary and said that they were all good. Making a tiny leap of faith, we ordered the sorbets and the tiramisu.

Seeing other desserts going by, we saw that the carrot cake was an adorable little mini-layer cake, straight out of a fairy-tale tea party. Similarly, the tiramisu was an exercise in small but exquisite design, although it was so heavy on the mascarpone that it took some serious excavating to find the flavorful coffee-marinated cakey bits within.

The trio of sorbets was less impressively presented.

Three small and indistinctly colored scoops, all garnished with a wedge of strawberry, and each nestled in its own compartment of a three-way dish that looked like it was intended to hold a choice of sauces. The identity of the sorbets still seemed to be a state secret. The server who delivered the desserts pleaded ignorance and deferred to a manager. She stopped momentarily to ponder the question, then confidently pointed to one as coconut, another as mango, and a third that escapes memory, but it doesn’t matter. A quick taste revealed that one was peppermint, the next pistachio, and the last was what seemed to be a grainy dulce du leche. And oh, yeah, they seemed to be ice cream and not sorbet. Despite the identity crisis, the pistachio was a winner, with large, meaty chunks of nuts.

Hudson Valley Restaurant Week is ideal for a place like Two Spear Street, which, in fine-dining terms is almost a speakeasy.

It’s not the sort of place you’d stumble across while window-shopping through town, even though it’s only a couple of blocks from the shops and other restaurants. It’s just enough off the beaten track, at the end of an alley-like little side street that leads down toward the river, that the management is likely glad of anything that can help raise the restaurant’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind profile.

So besides hopping on the Restaurant Week bandwagon, the management sweetens the deal with an incentive to return soon. Restaurant week diners get a coupon for 15% off their food bill on a Wednesday Thursday or Friday night between now and the end of June.

Two Spear Street, 2 Spear St., Nyack. 845-353-7733. 2spearstreet.com

Photo Caption: twospear05.JPG