Surprise, Surprise: There's Pizza in Them Hills

AMERICAN FLATBREAD

Our Take:

So we've been to a lot of pizza places in our day. In fact Tara, being a born and bred Brooklynite, can truly lay claim to knowing her pizza pies. Pizza brings her back to her days of childhood when she would walk to the corner store and get a “slice and a small coke” for a $1.10. From Franks pizza in Canarsie, to the heralded Lombardi's and Patsy's, it is a fact that New York knows its pizza. New Yorkers pride themselves on the simple no frills way of eating pizza: sauce, cheese, and crust--period.

When we moved to Vermont, we thought, our pizza days of old were over. David had flashbacks of the skinny sliced, canned toppings, and overly saucy pizzas of his youth in Burlington. When we heard about American Flatbread, we were skeptical. Arriving at the restaurant we saw the menu and our pizza purist red flags were raised. The description of the pizzas on the menu seemed ungapatchka at their core (ungapatchka is a Yiddish word that describes the overly ornate or busy, e.g. strawberry-kiwi bagels, peanut butter ambrosia danishes, or tofu-spelt ice cream). The quirky names of the pizzas like Dancing Heart Bread and Roasted Tomato Salas, made us immediately fearful that Flatbread was going to tamper with pizza’s simple perfection.

How wrong we were. In fact, the base of each pizza on the menu is essentially simple, primarily a mix of bread, cheese and sauce, as it should be. The toppings are not overbearing, but a welcome addition, and do not take away from the pure dahliciousness of the pizza. The variety of homemade and organic toppings is impressive including: farm fresh sausages, olives, red onions, Vermont goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes and nitrate free pepperoni. You can mix and match, or put your trust in the combinations listed on the menu. Our favorite pizza ended up being the Punctuated Equilibrium, the right combination of roasted sweet peppers, VT goat cheese, red onions, rosemary, kalamata olives and fresh mozzarella. A close second was the Revolution: tomato sauce, caramelized onions, mushrooms and a blend of cheeses. The basic cheese and herb is a can't miss as well ... then again, we've had nearly all of them (beside the pork pies), and we've never managed to dislike but a one.

We've yet to try the nightly special pies but they do sound attractive, if not a bit on the experimental side. On a recent night the special pizzas were: wood-roasted eggplant with a house made Thai green curry with roasted chilies, seared green beans, scallions, and fresh cilantro and mint; and a pizza with slow-braised beef, fire-roasted VT Jerusalem artichokes, arugula, red onions and carrots, and Grafton Village smoked cheddar.

All the pizzas come out as soon as they are made, bubbling hot and cut in a variety of shapes and sizes. It makes the eating a lot of fun, not knowing if you're going to pick up a piece with mostly crust and just a speck of topping or a solid square full of cheese, sauce and all the goodies. Either way (the crust could be eaten naked, the toppings with a fork or the sauce sopped up with a spoon) they all stand independently superior in their flavors.

One thing Flatbread has on its brethren to the south, is that they offer the most wonderful salad we’ve eaten at a pizzeria. It consists of a fresh mix of locally grown organic greens, shredded carrots and celery, lightly-dressed with a sesame-ginger tamari vinaigrette (blue or goat cheese optional, but the salad is just as good without). It’s so fresh, so simple and a must to start any meal at Flatbreads.

The only annoying thing about Flatbread is that other people love it just as much as we do. Often it's impossible, literally impossible, to get in on Friday or Saturday night, and it can even be a good 30-minute wait during the week (almost unheard of in Vermont). The bar is a nice place to sit, but a bit small to accommodate the hungry hordes. The pleasant hostess does keep you up-to-date and adequately moves the process along. Once seated, the hurried wait staff is able to get your food to you quickly, so generally by the time you bite into your first octogonal piece of pizza the frustration of the line is long forgotten.

Ultimately though it's all about the pizza. And at times Flatbread can be a little experimental, non-traditional, off the beat and path, a bit like Vermont and Vermonters. While perhaps out there by New York standards, like most good New York pizzas, Flatbread gets the basics right, they get the bread right, the cheese right, the sauce right and the cooking right. Having Flatbread close to home makes our long journey away from New York seem just a little bit shorter.

Our Rating:

Service: ***
Ambiance: **
Food : ****
Price: $$

Rating Scale:
* average
** not bad
*** wicked good
**** the best

$ cheap eats
$$ moderately priced
$$$ expensive
$$$$ wicked expensive

Au Petit Extra, Leaving You Fat and Happy

AU PETIT EXTRA

Our Take:

On a recent trip to Montreal we returned to one of our favorite Francofile haunts, a bustling, formerly smoke laden (sorry to say the ambiance provided by a smoky room has yielded to the health laws banning smoking inside Montreal bars and restaurants…a good thing…I think), which has petit in its name but is nothing short of bold in every possible way. Au Petit Extra (APE) stands as one of the best French restaurants you’ll find north of the half way point between the equator and the North Pole (for those of you that never noticed, a small sign on the Interstate 89 near Highgate, Vermont marks the exact halfway point between the equator and the north pole, cool!).

We’ve never had a problem getting into APE, although interestingly it’s always full. Even on our most recent trip, after deciding to eat there late in the afternoon, we were able to get a reservation for five at 8 PM on a Saturday night (with a little help from the concierge at our swanky hotel in Old Montreal) a feat unheard of in most hoppin’ New York restaurants. APE is a bit off the beat and path, sitting on a less than glamorous block across from an ESSO station and a strip of former appliance stores and closed up bars. None-the-less, when you walk into APE it exudes pure life: laughter, smells, debate, drinking, eating, kissing, all that makes life good. We’ve sat in all parts of the restaurant, and there’s not a bad seat in the house. The tables are cozily spaced throughout two rooms (formerly divided between smokers and non-smokers) with plenty of room to sit and move, but still providing the sense that you’re dinning communally, a nice and often forgotten experience.

The menu at APE changes frequently, but is consistently divided between hearty meat, fish, and pasta dishes. It’s pure bistro fare, bold flavors, large portions, and plenty of richness. On any given night the kitchen could be serving braised rabbit, a simply moist broiled salmon, flank steak in a fruity au jus, or duck confit. Despite a changing menu the food manages to stay the same, delicious.

Fluency in French is a bonus at APE, as the entire menu is left untranslated, and the French speaking wait staff, while able to get the gist of the dishes down, mostly translate on a basic level: Fish, Rabbit, Steak, etc. Ordering can be an adventure, but it becomes part of the ambiance and fun of it all.

Our group of five settled on a smattering of appetizers. The raw oysters where not only edible (often the standard for raw oysters outside of restaurants dedicated to the craft of shucking), but very very good, bordering on great. While they were not on the level of Blue Ribbon’s raw fare (in our mind the best raw food available anywhere) they were cool, nicely shucked, briny and fresh, what an oyster should be.

The escargot was delicious although, how can anything covered in a rich blue cheese sauce be anything but good? We never really tasted the snail, but, again, anything that provides a vehicle to eat melted blue cheese is fine with us.

A melted goat cheese salad was made up of three rounds of a sharp, nutty, and a bit grassy goat cheese, melted crispy over a few rounds of bread and set atop a bed of perfectly dressed greens. The richness of the goat cheese went perfectly with the bitter greens to make a must order appetizer (I’ve gotten it five times now and I’ve never gotten sick of it).

Finally, we had wonderfully plump mussels cooked in a winey-butter sauce that was a perfect dish for soaking chunks of crunchy French bread restocked throughout the night. Other appetizers not sampled included: two different foie gras dishes, a fish soup, and a duck dish. The first round of food also included either a nicely portioned fresh house salad or a simple soup (included in the price of the entrée), both providing a nice break from all the richness.

The entrees, while not quite as memorable as the appetizers, were all proficiently prepared and served. The flank steak, while basic, held up nicely and was cooked well, pushed to a higher rating by a deliciously fruity au jus reduction (that prompted even David, as the token Veggie in the group, to lap up the sauce with his bread). While cuts of boeuf in the past such as a New York strip and prime rib have been better, the flank steak did not defeat the general sense that APE knows their cattle.

APE offered a couple of fish dishes. David went with the halibut which, although a wee bit dry, had nice flavor and was interestingly accompanied by plump oysters and fresh herbs. Basically, fish in a bistro is fish. Although it’s never going to wow you, you really can’t have a bad fish dish if it’s fresh and well prepared, as the fish at APE has always been.

A pesto fussili with tomatoes and prosciutto was nicely portioned and properly sauced, providing a light option for those that, after stuffing themselves on the appetizers, couldn’t eat much more.

The hit entree was a roasted chicken stuffed with goat cheese. The chicken was firm yet moist, and amply stuffed with a mix of creamy goat cheese and herbs. It was a perfect blend of solidly cooked meat with a twist, without any of the unnecessarily frills often accompanying chicken. Other entrees that night included: two veal dishes, monkfish, duck, and, honestly, a dish listed as roasted thazard with the green pepper purée, which I later figured out through the magic of the internet, is a type of Tuna.

The entire meal was accompanied by a wine list with lots of variety and options. Given the comeback of Merlot we gave into the trend and ordered a medium priced, full bodied bottle that held up to the the strong flavors of the meal. Every wine we've had at APE has worked, with the exception of a sugary sweet Riesling a few years back.

This past visit was the only time we've ordered dessert at AEP, and the chocolate cake with a raspberry sauce, made us regret not ordering during our previous visits. It was sweet, creamy and a little tart, with some crunch on the bottom that made an all around nice compliment to the dark coffee served along side.

The service at APE is intentionally, appropriately and refreshingly schizophrenic, ignorant of your presence until you need something then attentive and at times overly bossy, just the way we like our French waiters. It’s nice to be in a restaurant where the wait staff allows you to dictate the time and terms of the meal, happily able to serve you in 45 minutes or three hours and forty-five minutes.

At APE you never really look at the bill or care that you didn’t. Generally you’re too drunk and stuffed to do anything but happily hand over the credit card, or your stack of loonies. We know it’s somewhere between reasonable and kinda pricey, but whatever the bill comes to, "la addition" is a footnote to your night. After all, APE is about feeling fat, happy and reminded of what a great dinning experience should be.

Our Rating:

Service: ***
Ambiance: ****
Food : ***
Price: $$-$$$


Rating Scale:
* average
** not bad
*** wicked good
**** the best

$ cheap eats
$$ moderately priced
$$$ expensive
$$$$ wicked expensive