The hardworking folks behind this non-award winning blog are enjoying a deserved warm weather break on Florida’s Gulf Coast right now. No offense to the locals, but we did not pick this particular destination for its well-known and highly prized food culture. Instead, it was selected as a fitting location for our first post-baby trip that would be easy to get to, easy to negotiate in situ and with guaranteed good weather, something we’ve been craving after a hard winter made tougher by a sleepless infant.

However, we are happy to discover that we didn’t touch down in a food desert at all, and we could have posted about the delicious and moist blackened mahi-mahi sandwiches we had yesterday at Randy’s Fish Market, but after a preparatory month of near-total meat deprivation that helped us fit into our bathing suits with less embarrassment, we were feeling decidedly carnivorous. So, here are some grilled cross-cut beef short ribs, leftover from the tablita parrillada we gorged on during last night’s visit to Martin Fierro, an Argentine-run parrilla hidden away in a strip-mall on the other side of town. Named for the central character of Argentina’s famous epic poem by Jose Hernandez, it’s a faithful recreation of the parrillas we so enjoyed almost exactly two years ago during our visit to Argentina and Uruguay, in every respect but the strip-mall.

Joining them were a quick salsa criolla and some rounds of fried yucca. Sure, it’s not exactly beach food, and we stripped off at the pool with noticeably less enthusiasm today, but it was delicious and exactly the kind of indulgence we had been looking forward to for weeks. And, as every Englishman knows, a little of what you fancy does you good.

There are few things that, when slapped between tortillas and christened with spicy condiments, fail to get me excited. Making it a shame that the vast majority of Mexican restaurants near us have such a limited spectrum of taco fillings. Not that I don’t enjoy carnitas, carne asada, fish or chicken tacos, I very definitely do, but that there is something of a tyranny inherent in this four-point agenda.

Recently, after our meaty dust-up with the Uruguyuan-style tablita parillada, we found ourselves with a surfeit of grilled sweetbreads (aka mollejas in Spanish, aka thymus glands in biology), and were looking for creative ways to use this most succulent of leftovers. Ever the slayers of convention, we sought to break this taco-based tyranny, and gently reheated our sweetbreads combining them with a crunchy, tangy salsa of radish, roasted corn and grape tomato, all wrapped in a blue corn tortilla for a dramatic finish.

In this process, we learned that throughout the South-West USA and northern Mexico, taco stands offering sweetbreads (as well as other tasty fillings including tongue and tripe) are so common you just about fall over them at every corner. All of which made us feel slightly less original in our preparation, but no less enthusiastic about its merits. Indeed, it was reassuring to know that places still exist in this condensed and standardized world where you can be openly and brazenly glandular should the feeling so move you.

As Odysseus was nearly drawn to his destruction on the rocks by the enchanting song of the sirens, so your hardy WANF voyagers were almost powerless to resist breaking themselves on the plentiful tables of Uruguay. However, unlike Homer’s hero, for whom women were the main weakness throughout his epic peregrinations, during our recent travels in South America, we found that grilled organs, specifically sweetbreads, are the likely source of our eventual ruin.

A comparatively short (by Odysseian standards) three-hour Buquebus ferry ride from Buenos Aires across the Mar del Plata – the enormously wide and constantly brown estuary of the Rio de la Plata (River Plate) – lies Uruguay’s capital and largest city, Montevideo. Arriving by water feels delightfully old-fashioned, and it allows the visitor to get a sense of the lie of the land in a way that a plane ride cannot. Rather than the confusing meander through a city’s outskirts on the way in from the airport, the city slowly revealed itself to us as we approached it by sea, face-first, so that we could see the way it had been built, outwards from the port.

Centered on the port is Montevideo’s cuidad vieja (old town), which with its faded colonial glory and salty night-time reputation, is immediately charming to the visitor. Only the giant ultra-modern cruise ship towering over everything prevented us from wondering if the ferry hadn’t also been a time machine. The hub of the old town is the Mercado del Puerto, a magnificent Victorian-era market with a skylit roof supported by wrought iron pillars, where the air is thick with the thwack of cleaver on meat, the cries of competing vendors and the sooty warblings of its resident pigeons. It no longer serves as a venue for trading fresh produce, a fact that might be sad if it weren’t now a giant parilla (grill/barbecue) serving all manner of traditional Uruguayan meaty preparations.

More accurately, there are actually a bunch of different parillas within the mercado all in friendly and typically laid-back Uruguayan-style competition with one another for the title of best in the city. We spent a good fifteen minutes cagily circling the mercado trying to figure out some way of discerning which might be leading this contest. After inspecting rack upon similar rack of sizzling meats, we decided to let demographics be our guide and plumped for Estancia del Puerto, the place with the fewest available seats (2), and the most drunken dudes with guitars serenading the patrons (1).

We had left Buenos Aires on a very early morning ferry and, having eaten nothing on the journey, arrived in Montevideo in a terrible, bleary-eyed state of hunger. The only way out of which seemed to be robust servings of charred beast. Happily then, the menu was the most extensive of its kind we have ever seen, containing more than eight choices of steak, five of sausage, 3 or 4 matambres (stuffed beef rolls), chicken, pork, and an intimidating selection of organ meats, not to mention a full range of pasta, salads and sides, in both full or half portions. Understanding, by this point in our carnivorous odyssey, that servings tended to be of a generous nature in this part of the world, we ordered half portions of mollejones (sweetbreads), morcilla (blood sausage), lechon (suckling pig), the potentially gruesome chotos/chinchulines (guts), and a bottle of typically Uruguayan tannat (red wine), in the hope that this might save room for further sampling of the menu.

Since, like all good grills, only certain sections of this parilla were used to actually cook meat, with others functioning as warming areas for ready-to-serve meats, we were presented with our choices within seconds, and what a presentation! No garnish, no sides of vegetables, no wasted real estate at all, just meat on plates and silverware wrapped in a paper napkin, with deep, communal tubs of chimichurri and salsa criolla scattered around the bar. We dived in recklessly.

The star of the show was the lechon, or milk-fed baby pig, which was heavenly. So good in fact, that were it not for the perfectly crispy skin overlying a thin-layer of incredibly sweet fat, and the moist, almost milky-tasting, flesh of unweaned piglet, it would truly be a barbaric dish. But our pause for reflection on the plight of young pork was brief as we tore into the golden beauty of the sweetbreads, the complex spices of the morcilla, and the (surprisingly) wonderful crunchy texture and minerally-tasting joy of the chinchulines. It all tasted to us like no meat had before, even the condiments had a singular tang and freshness to them that we found a step-up from those we’d had earlier in the week. And it seems we were not alone in this.

Glancing up at our surroundings and fellow diners as we approached fullness, it was comforting to see that everyone else was head-down and going full-bore into their lunches too. And who could blame them? Like the irresistible song of the sirens, the evocative combination of wood-smokey atmosphere, beautiful Victorian architecture, and the surround-sound effect of wall-to-wall sizzling would surely stir the soul of any meat-lover and be ruinous to the anti-meat resolve of even the most hardcore vegetarian.

Mercado del Puerto
Rambla 25 Agosto de 1825 y Perez Castellano,
Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo, Uruguay
Mercado del Puerto online

Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton’s widely-revered nouveau American place on East 1st Street has been called a lot of things since it opened in 1999 – among them, “phenomenal” and “inspired” (NYMagazine), “wonderful food” (BlogSoop.com) and “immediate success” (NYC.com), and rightly so, in my humble opinion. Generally, we aren’t attracted to, can’t afford, and don’t really desire to visit big-name chef’s big-name restaurants and pay big-name prices for big-name signature dishes, all the while praying for the merest glimpse of said big-name chef, and this is precisely why our first review of a well-known (outside of NYC) restaurant is Prune and not Mesa Grill, Babbo, or Jean-Georges.

Owner and chef Gabrielle Hamilton, my wife’s new girl-crush, describes her aim when she started Prune as wanting “…an unassuming way to slip into the shallow end of the pool of New York City restaurants”, and she appears to have achieved this in Prune‘s unassuming feel, no more than 10 tables, the austere, French-brasserie-style decor, and the small menu. Of course, Hamilton has also taken the restaurant scene by storm, serving simple, tasty dishes with a gusto that befits their often hearty, gamey ingredients, and in doing so, she has been widely emulated.

In his forward to Fergus Henderson’s St. John Bar and Restaurant cookbook The Whole Beast: Eating Nose to Nail, Anthony Bourdain says that Henderson’s signature dish of roasted veal marrow bones with parsley salad would be his last meal should he find himself moments away from the electric chair, adding that he was delighted upon finding an exact recreation of this in New York because he felt he had found a “kindred-spirit” who “gets it” – namely, Gabrielle Hamilton. This should not imply that Hamilton simply serves excellent knock-offs of other people’s food, but rather that the rediscovery of unpretentious, traditional dishes made from less popular cuts is now a growing trend in the UK and US because of people like Henderson and Hamilton.

Readers of this blog with any sense of our body of work and culinary proclivities will know that while we do not disdain chicken breasts and filet mignons, we are interested in exploring the eating and cooking of other parts of the beast, not because we are food fashion conscious, but rather because we understand that it takes more skill to make offal taste good than it does to present a fat fillet, and, as we said in our first podcast on rabbit, we believe it’s foolish and represents a small-minded snobbery to restrict yourself to prime cuts of the chicken, cow and pig. So, a trip to Prune was long overdue.

Amy chose the deep-fried sweetbreads (described by one peevish restaurant reviewer as Kentucky Fried sweetbreads) with bacon and a caper-lemon butter sauce, while I made like Bourdain and chose the veal marrow bones with parsley salad. The sweetbreads resembled nothing I’ve seen at KFC and, frankly, such a description is insulting. They were crispy, light, and tender inside with a sauce that had the tangy flavor of lemon and capers rounded out with the ineffable goodness that is a lot of butter. The marrow bones initially appeared slightly intimidating, especially when served with a small ramekin of what looked like fleur de sel, but armed with nothing but a teaspoon we bravely attacked them, bringing forth an amazingly translucent animal fat/juice along with the soft, gloopy, simultaneously sweet and savory wonder that is bone-marrow. Sucking the bones proved irresistible so tasty were they, and in the quest for that one last morsel greasy fingers slipped, knocking salt ramekin and contents onto an alarmed, but gracious adjacent diner. “But, what of the parsley salad?”, I hear you say. Well, of course, it was delicious too. A simple dressing of oil and lemon juice over a salad of flat-leaf parsley, thinly-sliced shallot and crunchy bites of cornichons (baby gherkins) complimented the rich and glutinous bone marrow perfectly. I can imagine making this salad with virtually any kind of roasted or grilled red meat or game, and I would guess we’ll be recreating it on these pages very soon.

While we readied ourselves for the arrival of our main courses, we struck up a conversation with two of our fellow diners (on the opposite side to those we had just showered with expensive salt). James, a soon-to-be food journal publisher from London, and his native New Yorker companion, Brian, had eaten at Prune before and while they also had the sweetbreads to start, they had the monkfish liver with warm buttered toasts in place of our marrow bones. “It’s quite oily and, er, liverish.” was James’ assessment of the latter dish, and you can’t argue with that.

As our main dishes arrived, Brian and James were experimenting with a very yellow wine from south-west France that was fermented in open barrels allowing it to oxidize and develop a more astringent flavor. The waiter described it as the “wild-west of wine-making” which, to anyone with the briefest understanding of the American frontier, would have connoted the brawny perfume of unwashed cowboys, saddle-grease and rotting chuck-steak. Happily for our erstwhile companions, it was only rather tart, like a young scrumpy cider, but they found it not to their taste, offering us a go on it, perhaps as a way of getting rid the quicker. I could have drunk a glass of it, but a bottle would likely have turned my mouth inside out.

Amy had ordered the rabbit in vinegar sauce and I the grilled quail with braised escarole and raisins on the vine for our main courses. My quails were perfectly grilled. Crispy-skinned with a hint of heat from red pepper flakes, but beautifully pink and moist inside. They were gamey and delicate, more like squab than any quail I’ve had before. Amy’s rabbit was, well, better than the one we made recently (even though that was very good) perhaps because of the oodles of butter in the sweet and sour vinegar sauce which also contained some warm whole cornichons — an unexpected, but highly successful addition. Our side dish of steamed asparagus tips (which could have used a little salt) came with an egg yolk (the white having been cut away) for dipping which we both thought was ingenious and delicious.

Meanwhile, James and Brian were enjoying their mains, respectively steamed razor clams with an almond-chili picada, and grilled branzino with fennel oil and gros sel. The clams and fish both looked excellent, especially the branzino which was charred to a dark, rich patina on the outside but remained white, flaky and moist on the inside. Their side dish was the particularly unusual boiled fennel shoots, which had a crunchy, wholesomeness rarely found in restaurant side dishes where the flavor of vegetables is usually masked by garlic, spice or a sauce.

As we concluded our meal with a distinctly average chocolate cake that was too dry, but with two excellent digestifs – mine an eaux de vie from Oregon made from pears, and Amy’s, her favorite, sambuca, we chatted some more with James and Brian about food and food culture in Britain and America. James argued that he thought Britain was slightly ahead of the states in terms of regaining its endemic food culture and reviving typical products. Perhaps it’s true that America, as a whole, has yet to rediscover its culinary roots and return to them in the whole-hearted way the British have – though many areas of the East and West coasts have been doing this for some time. But I would argue that any restaurant, chef or restaurateur who wishes to focus on quality local ingredients and traditional techniques should first eat at Prune and see how deliciously it can be done. Emulation is no bad thing if you get it bang on, and, for me, I would be perfectly happy if I never got to eat Fergus Henderson’s original bone-marrow dish at St. John in London, if I could dine on perfect knock-offs like Gabrielle Hamilton’s twenty minutes from my front door.

I think we’ll let the debate about where gastronomy is and should be heading, who’s in the lead, and who’s falling behind rage elsewhere. Our blog is not the forum for food snobs to poke holes in the successes and failures of various chefs, rather it is the place where we honestly appraise meals we’ve eaten whether we’ve cooked them ourselves or enjoyed the work of others. In this case, I cannot speak highly enough of our visit to Prune and I would encourage you all to give it a try if you’re prepared to be a little adventurous in your eating. This isn’t grilled locusts in peri-peri, this is honest-to-goodness food, simply prepared and given the respect it is due.

Although we haven’t made roasted bone marrow yet in our little kitchen, two food-blog friends did and I think they both look absolutely delicious. You can check out the first recipe here and please visit our friend Claudia’s Fergus Henderson recipe here.

Prune, 54 East 1st Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenue, New York. F, V trains to 2nd Avenue/Houston or 6 train to Bleeker/Lafayette. Reservations are recommended. Lunch 11:30 – 3:00 p.m. Mon-Fri; Dinner 6:00 – 11:00 p.m. Mon-Thur, 6:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m. Fri-Sat, 5:00 – 10:00 p.m. Sun; Brunch 10:00 – 3:30 p.m. Sat-Sun.