Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of how radically wine lists in restaurants have changed over the past, oh, fifteen years or so. I've been on a sort of Italian-resto-spree lately, and I'm coming out of it thinking that I'm either dreaming or I'm living in a golden age of Italian wine and food here in NYC.

Example One: Scarpetta. I've been a fan of Scott Conant's cooking since the first bite I had of his luscious polenta with wild mushroom fricassee at L'Impero, a dish which, I'm thrilled to find, he's replicated on the menu at his new restaurant, Scarpetta. I've been here a few times in the past month or so, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite spots in the city, partly because it seems like Conant has finally landed in a place where the ambience of the room is of a piece with the character of the food. I loved L'Impero, but it was a tad formal for my taste; Alto was like watching Cezanne try to paint like Tintoretto or something; Scarpetta nails it. And besides the presence of things like Conant's signature capretto (roasted baby goat, and mighty darn good it is), there's also the smart, adventurous, and fairly priced wine list. We drank a terrific white, the 2006 Vadiaperti Fiano di Avellino, about which I know nothing but that it's packed with flavor and focused all at once. Next, a bottle of the 2006 Hofstätter Lagrein. Its bright acidity played foil to its dark, chewy fruit, and both went ideally well with Conant's rich duck-and-foie gras ravioli, not to mention his fall-apart-tender short ribs.

Example Two: Bar Milano. First off, if you're lucky, then partner Tony Abou-Ganim is going to be behind the bar mixing drinks here, as he was the night I stopped in. I asked him to make me something interesting with rye. He replied with a Rattlesnake, which, according to the 1947 edition of Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide is one ounce of rye, two dashes of Pernod, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a half-teaspoon of powdered sugar, and half an egg white, shaken with cracked ice and (in my case) strained onto rocks. Sublime on a steamy evening, and a good lead-in to poking around Bar Milano's all-Northern-Italian wine list. I bypassed the exceptionally weird 2005 Movia Lunar—I love Ales Kristancic's wines, but this stuff is odd to a fault—and instead settled on a bottle of the 2006 Grosjean Freres Cornalin from the Valle D'Aosta. This is the kind of wine that never, ever, in a million years would have appeared on a wine list back in, say, 1985 or even 1995. Utterly obscure, it was also mighty darn delicious—bright red fruit, potent but not weighty, distinctive and very fresh. Good with duck, you might think. I did, and it was. Plus the duck itself was superb, the skin crisp to a just-so toothsomeness, the meat tender and deeply flavorful (Pekin from D'Artagnan—good to know), the rhubarb compote that came with it a nice tangy-sweet touch as were the earthy, savory lentils.

Example Three: Dell' Anima. One thing I like about this place is that practically every bottle that wine director Joe Campanale offers probably wouldn't have appeared on a wine list back in 1995 (with maybe the exception of some of the Tuscan & Piedmontese wines). The list is like a playground for Italian wine fanatics. In the mood for a little Fumin? A glass of Cesanese del Piglio? Or maybe some Petite Arvine—I was, for the latter, since I was still on my Valle d'Aosta kick. The 2006 Grosjean Freres Petite Arvine (those guys again!) was unctuous and rich; lots of texture, lots of minerality, and very good with avocado & preserved lemon bruschetta, a snack which wasn't exactly Italian but somehow very much was, all at the same time. Next up was a 2007 Romano Clelia Fiano d'Avelino "Colli di Lapio", about the best Fiano I've run across (including the Vadiaperti, much as I liked it). Melony, aromatic, and long, it was substantial enough to go with chef Gabe Thompson's intensely woodsy Garganelli with mushroom ragu (a died-and-gone-to-heaven dish for mushroom fanatics) yet graceful enough to also go with something as evocative of springtime as Thompson's farfalline with asparagus, ricotta salata and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.

And I forgot to mention: we started off at Dell'Anima with a bottle of white Lini Lambrusco, which is made from red Lambrusco Salamino grapes, just to make things even a tad more complicated. It was like drinking lightly sweet flowers.

Man, this Italian wine-list thing. Esoterica everywhere. But it sure is fun.

It’s heartening when one’s home state strikes a powerful blow against the forces of darkness. And I’m here to tell you, if you want the forces of darkness whisked from your view like yesterday’s dust-bunnies, you’d better get on a plane, fly to Houston right now, go to Killen’s Steakhouse in Pearland, and order their creamed corn.

Yes, I know: creamed corn? What’s with this lunatic and his dern creamed corn?

Well. If fate had smiled on you as it did me, and you had made your way to Killen’s the other night and seen fit, as I did, to order yourself a sixteen-ounce ribeye, a plate of fried asparagus (yep) and some of chef Ronnie Killen’s so-sublime-your-brain-will-melt creamed corn, you’d know what I’m talking about. You’d start to give a damn about creamed corn. An upside-down, sideways and with boots on damn, in fact.

Anyway, enough of this folderol. What Killen said he does is as follows (I think this is largely accurate): he cooks his corn on the cob, slices off the kernels, then simmers the cobs in cream and butter, infusing the liquid with an intense essence of corn character. He removes the cobs, scrapes every bit of corn pulp and milk out of them into the pot, purees a quarter of the kernels, adds those, adds the rest of the whole kernels, dashes in a bit of cayenne pepper (crucial), grates a bit of parmesan on top, and sticks the whole thing under the broiler just long enough to brown the parmesan. Whereupon he serves it to people like me, who then have their whole understanding of creamed corn’s place in the culinary universe pretty handily rewritten for them.

Alison Cook, esteemed restaurant critic at the Houston Chronicle and hometown pal, hauled me (and my mother—long story, but she's pals with Alison, too) out to Killen’s the other night, and thanks is due. Outside of my corn-epiphany, everything about this meal was spot-on: a sixteen-ounce wet-aged ribeye that was charred on the outside and toothsome within, a sixteen-ounce dry-aged ribeye that was straight-up the best steak I’ve tasted in at least a year (better than anything I’ve had in NYC in that span), and, hey, fried asparagus. Breaded fried asparagus. With lump crabmeat in a lemon-butter sauce on top. God knows what Houstonian chef-maniac dreamed up deep-fried asparagus, but apparently it’s the latest food-rage in my always odder-than-it-seems hometown.

Nice wine list, too, by the way (this is a wine blog, after all). We ordered a 2004 Les Mas de Collines Gigondas that was aromatic and supple and went surprisingly well with onion rings, and then a 2004 Scott Harvey Old Vines Zinfandel ($30) that was chock-a-block with wild berry fruit and relatively (14.5%) moderate in alcohol, at least as far as old vines zins run these days. Great with a steak.

Oh. And chef Killen’s crème brûlée bread pudding, four words that were destined to go together, as far as I'm concerned. You don’t want to know, but essentially it involves soaking buttery croissants in lusciously rich (but not wildly sweet) crème brûlée custard, then baking the mushed-together mass until it is, um, extremely good for your heart. Right. (Here: the look of someone used to getting everything, denied his rightful portion of c.b. bread pudding.)

Two last things: I left with lingering regrets that I did not order Killen's sirloin chicken fried steak, though that does give me a justification for driving 12 miles straight out Telephone Road to this deceptively low-key place the next time I'm in town. Also, it's worth noting that when Ronnie Killen's parents owned the property, it was an ice-house. Man, the times they are a'changin. Oh wait—hasn't that been said before? 

I had the interesting experience over the weekend of being the guest wine speaker for an all-chocolate brunch that the immensely talented Andrew Shotts, of Garrison Confections in Providence, put on at the James Beard House. 

Generally speaking, I think chocolate and wine go together miserably. People seem to want to believe that a big intense Cabernet or Zinfandel will go wonderfully with a hunk of high-quality chocolate; in fact, they want to believe it so much that they ignore what's going on in their mouth, which is usually the chocolate obliterating the taste of the wine. Dark chocolate (the chocolate worth eating, I think) is tough: it's intensely flavorful, it's bitter, sweet, fruity, complex, and also fairly alkaline. It can work very nicely with sweet wines—Bual or Malmsey Madeira is the absolute, top-o-the-heap, A+ chocolate-pairing wine, in my experience—but for dry wines the stuff is usually a disaster.

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Thing #1:

2001 Pierre Sparr Riesling Grand Cru Schoenenburg ($35, give or take) This is still available out there in the world, according to wine-searcher.com, and that's a fine thing, because it's terrific Grand Cru Alsace Riesling that's drinking just gorgeously right now. Light petrol aromas mingle with floral and lime skin scents, then open into a Riesling with tremendous depth of flavor—lime and tangerine zest notes, peppery spice, graceful texture, and a long finish. Quite old vines; minimum of 40 years on limestone, chalk and clay soils near Riquewihr.

Thing #2:

Marco Canora's Tuna Carbonara at Insieme, in Manhattan: a fragrant tangle of perfectly cooked spaghettini, tuna bottarga shavings, micro-dice of salty, intense tuna bacon, and a little fresh parsley. I'm always impressed with the pastas at Insieme—somehow Canora manages to instill tremendous flavor into what seem (and often really are) very simple dishes. This particular pasta is that kind of clever turn on a classic that makes you think, you know, why didn't someone come up with this before? I'm not sure if it's always on the menu, but nab it if it is.

And you know how these things go: Thing #1 + Thing #2? A sum much greater than the parts, as far as my tastebuds were concerned. Or else a Dr. Seuss story. Your call on that one.

Went to a nifty small-scale Alsace wine and food tasting the other evening, hosted by DB Bistro's chef de cuisine Olivier Muller and wine director Arnaud Devulder. There was a compelling reason to go, as DB Bistro produces (for my money) the best tarte flambée in NYC—challenged, yes, but not bested by the one at The Modern, I think. Tarte flambée is basically extremely thin dough with fromage blanc spread on it, and then thinly sliced onions and smoked bacon on top of that, the whole thing slipped into a fiercely hot oven just until it's crisp and crackly. Some recipes call for crème fraiche mixed with the fromage blanc; Muller's doesn't. The dish was born, he says, when bakers in Alsace would use a thin bit of dough to test the heat of their ovens—if the oven was hot enough, it would crisp and lightly char almost instantly. 

Whether those bakers were drinking Riesling with their ur-tartes-flambée I don't know, but they should have been. Devulder poured tastes of the 2000 Trimbach Cuvée Frederic Emile (about $40 fo the current, '03 vintage) and the 2001 Pierre Sparr Grand Cru Schoenenburg (about $35) with Muller's rendition, and they both went terrifically well. The Trimbach smelled of spice, bitter orange and a hint of diesel fuel, and tasted of apples and apple skin, orange rind and minerals—lovely wine. The Sparr was bigger and richer, with an almost oily texture and notes of peaches and lemon zest. The key to the pairing is acidity—tarte flambée isn't very weighty but it is rich, and the edgy acidity of both wines cut right through that richness.

And one could extend this idea, of course. Alsace Riesling, for instance, with pasta carbonara wouldn't be off base. Or just Alsace Riesling with a big plate of smoked bacon. Go wild. It's important to feed the soul sometimes, even at the expense of the body. 

The other night I went to Anthos, the new haut-chic-Greek midtown spot from chef Michael Psilakis and restaurateur Donatella Arpaia. As about fifty other bloggers and restaurant reviewers have noted, high-end Greek food seems to be having its flavor-of-the-month moment—witness the arrival of Barbounia, Parea, etc. (I'm still waiting for the cuisine of ancient Babylon to make a comeback—bring on the dried fish and date cakes!—but that's just me.) What's interesting about this Greco-proliferation, though, is that it's one of the few restaurant trends I've found where the wine got there first.

Greek wines have been impressing sommeliers for several years now, and for good reason. If you're curious as to why, Anthos wouldn't be a bad place to start, as it has one of the most comprehensive lists of Greek wines I've run into—I can't think of many other restaurants that would offer seven different vintages of Tsantali's Cabernet-Limnio blend, for instance.

The other thing Anthos has in terms of wine is a hell of a sommelier, Mark du Mez. This is my idea of great wine service: at one point in the evening I asked Mark about a Chassagne-Montrachet premier cru he had on the list. (The list, by the way, is extensive and has a good Burgundy selection, too; our table started with Greece and moved on to France, sort of like the Romans circa 130 B.C.) Regarding my choice Mark said something along the lines of, "Well, it's definitely good. But with what you've ordered, I really think you'd enjoy this more." This was a 2002 E. Giboulot Côte de Beaune La Combe d'Eve—which, outside of the fact that it turned out to be a beautiful, minerally, silky-textured white Burgundy that went perfectly with our meal, cost thirty dollars less on the list than the wine I'd asked about.

Since then I've tried to think of the number of times I've had a sommelier suggest a wine priced that much less than the one I planned to order. The number I've come up with so far is zero. That's not really a surprise; in some sense, Mark's suggestion cost the restaurant's bottom line $30. But what he also did, far more lucrative in the long run (and just plain better service, too), was instantly create a return customer.

Wine service aside, the other thing that will bring me back to Anthos is Psilakis's cooking. Highlights of the meal included the supremely good taramasalata (very garlicky, very un-fishy, completely addictive), a pillowy sheep's milk ricotta dumpling topped with a single, succulent pan-seared Botan Ebi shrimp ("You may suck the head, if you like," stated our waiter—good advice, in fact, if somewhat unfortunately phrased), and a crisp-skinned piece of perfectly seared red mullet atop a luscious, bacony bed of lentils.   

Anthos has no website yet, but reservations can be had by calling 212-582-6900.

Went to dinner the other night at Oceana, that venerable-in-NY-restaurant-terms monument to all things, well, oceanic. I was there primarily to check out the cooking of new chef Ben Pollinger (who most recently worked at Tabla under Floyd Cardoz, and before that with Christian Delouvrier). Cornelius Gallagher, Oceana's previous chef, is a hard act to follow, but Pollinger's cooking was definitely up to the task. A silky, paper-thin square of gin-cured gravlax brought the word "seductive" to mind, not a term you usually associate with gravlax. A quirky little tower of Florida stone crab, fava beans and pureed artichokes, perched on an artichoke-heart base and spiked with smoky bits of pancetta, was the sort of thing that could easily turn out to be glop, but instead was a poised balancing act of flavors. And while the olive-oil poached swordfish was a touch dry (oddly, this was the second piece of olive-oil poached fish I've had in the past week that was too dry. Something is amiss with olive-oil poaching in this town), an entrée of sweet Nova Scotia lobster atop perfectly cooked ribbons of malfatti pasta, the whole thing laced with a blood-orange cream sauce, was exactly as decadent as it ought to have been.

The other pertinent aspect of this meal was Oceana's wine list, which has always been very good. Given that the restaurant ain't exactly cheap—three-course prix fixe at $78—there are a surprising number of good, under $60 bottles on the very extensive list. (There are a lot of good, extremely expensive bottles, too, but that's to be expected.) Examples include Ronco del Gelso's 2005 Tocai Friulano for $48, Château Soucherie's 2003 Cuvee Anaïs Savennières for $50, and Selene's 2005 Hyde Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc for $55; for reds, the choices are more restricted—since the menu is primarily seafood, it's a white-focused list, of course. Still, the Jade Mountain Paras Vineyard Syrah at $57 is well worth its price, and would go great with that lonely lamb entrée down at the bottom of the menu.

Ah, but head slightly north of that mark, and you could drink simply terrific Chablis—the 2002 Jean & Sebastian Dauvissat Premier Cru Vaillons—for $95. Cheap? No. Drinking perfectly, full of lifted aromatics and pure chalky minerality, and just about ideal with everything on Pollinger's menu? Absolutely. I'd suggest rushing right over there and ordering it before they run out.

Had dinner last night at Telepan with Bill Hunter, the owner (along with Billington Imports, in some capacity) and winemaker at Chasseur. Bill's a bluff, friendly, no-nonsense sort of guy who happens to make some pretty extraordinary Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. The standout last night for me was his 2004 Chasseur Durrell Vineyard Chardonnay ($48). Unfined and unfiltered, the wine is slightly hazy (not a problem) and its texture is a physical incarnation of that veil-like appearance; it's the kind of white that wins you over on texture alone, before you realize how good it tastes (think white peach and other stone fruits, brioche, and a faint, appealing note of butterscotch). It achieves that supple richness partly because Bill believes in leaving the wine on its lees well into the new year, creating the conditions for the kind of autolyzed yeast notes most people are familiar with from Champagne. He poured it next to a bottle of John Kongsgaard's 2004 Napa Chardonnay that he ordered off the list at the restaurant, an act that took a substantial amount of winemaker-cojones, given the level of acclaim Kongsgaard has received for his (admittedly terrific) Chardonnays. It was close to a dead heat in terms of quality, but in the end I gave the edge to the Chasseur, which surprised me.

Also, just a side note about Telepan. Bill Telepan is a wonderful chef, and he's cooking at the top of his game right now; everything I had-down to the slightly absurd but in-your-face delicious foie gras "donuts" that appeared as an amuse bouche-was superb. Of particular note were some nearly ethereal ricotta gnocchi, served with a small forest's worth of wild mushrooms, coin-sized discs of potato and toasted pine nuts, with small shavings of ricotta salata scattered on top; the definition of the flavors here was remarkable, with no ingredient vanishing under the weight of any other. It's hard to imagine a dish more suited to the style of Chardonnay we were drinking (though a kind of deconstructed lamb cassoulet went very well with the Pinot we switched to afterward, too). Aaron von Rock's wine list is adventurous and extensive, too, full of things I wished I could have ordered, But, you know, there's only so much one can experience in a single night.