Pete Wells

• King
• Foxface
• Mercado

"Lately I have fallen under the spell of an East Village restaurant called Foxface. The cooking there is hard to pin down, geographically. Stopping in a few weeks ago, I ate Low Countryish wild red shrimp on grits, with sweet corn off the cob and a potent saffron-lobster sauce. More recently, I had skinless pork sausage inspired by sai ua, the spicy and tangy specialty identified with the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. The soft tripe I enjoyed the other weekend had been simmered with ’nduja, the fiery and malleable Calabrian sausage, and then covered with a few thin shingles of shaved pecorino."

"If I had started hanging around at Foxface sooner, especially during the cold months after its opening, in February, I might have run into a wider variety of cuisines and main ingredients. I did manage to get some of the elk osso buco while that was still on the menu. I never got to try the wild hare, though, stewed in red wine with a bit of chocolate and thickened with its own blood, a formula that students of very old-guard French cooking will recognize as lièvre à la royale."

Pete Wells, NYTimes