Mouth Watering Prose

The dining room at A Voce Columbus. Image from Joonbug. More pictures from Sam Sifton's review here.

I recommend reading Sam Sifton's review of the Manhattan restaurant A Voce in the New York Times. The piece demonstrates how great and descriptive food writing can be. The author's standards for every category of the dining experience are clear, and he can be surprisingly generous, as exemplified by his straightforward acceptance of the restaurant's corporate remit to produce top fare with calibrated regularity. Combining flavors creatively and choosing ingredients impeccably earn the reviewer's praise, but he dismisses as callow efforts to meet various NYC menu obligations, like strip steaks even for Italian eateries, without any attempt at culinary invention.

And the sentences Sifton uses for describing the food make for enjoyable reading. He liked the grilled calamari so much that it "could come with yard grass and used tennis balls and still be decent." Wonderful, evocative images are laid out alongside the gastronomic options, and the author does not refrain from punctuating each description with a verdict. The recommendation to enjoy a glass wine and cold cuts while reading the rest of the menu prompts Sifton to write us our own gastronomic tour.

Any two of these [appetizers] will do; there are many courses to go before you sleep. The appetizer list yields a remarkable house-made salt cod, with taggiasca olives, raisins and pine nuts, that is somehow both delicate and brawny — a football player in ballet's fourth position. There are also roasted mushrooms with mâche, hazelnuts and a creamed fontina, rich and earthy, quietly elegant, sensual: it's bedroom fare.

I additionally recommend you have a glass of red wineas a pleasurable accompaniment to such a tour de force review, maybe something Italian and reliable like a Valpolicellia, .