DOING DISHES: Capital Area Calamari

calamari. n. (Cookery) squid cooked for eating, esp cut into rings and fried in batter. [Fr. Italian, pl of calamaro squid, from Latin calamarium pen-case, referring to the squid's internal shell, from Greek kalamos reed]

PUBLIC NOTICE:  Cephalapods, probably Loligo and Ilex squid, are invading the Capital Region!!! Please don't be alarmed - Zena, Goddess of Fire, is here to help!!! I will start (along with my courageous friends) by eating my way through a bunch of calamari to try and reduce their population. It's a tough job and not for the faint of heart. If you feel there is still a squid emergency at the end of all this, no worries: I'll go out after dark and use my laser beam vision to do some squid-jigging (as required).

Goat Island Squid

It seems like EVERYONE has calamari on their menus - the Italian joints, Mexican restaurants, Pan Asian options and even seafood restaurants. I have NO idea why. It's ugly (think tentacles), has almost no flavor, and, if you screw it up, chewier than a Barbie doll head (not that I would know). I think they think that, like ahi tuna, if they put it on the menu it will sell.

OK OK - it's pretty healthy (high in protein, low in fat, low in mercury) before you add the batter and deep fry it and cover it in sauce. Oh, and it enjoys a healthy wild population here in the northeast, so its also relatively inexpensive compared to many other seafood options (more than half or our squid comes from Rhode Island), and that's good too. It IS mild and firm for something slimy looking, and that's also very good. 

But is it delicious? Versatile? How in the name of Zeus are we even going to whittle down this long list of places that serve it down to something manageable? We couldn't so we started with what was in or around downtown Albany and worked our way out.

This is what we found, with a score as follows:

5 - Excellent (Laughing Squid)
4 - Very Good (Baby Squid)
3 - Ordinary (WTF Squid)
2 - Poor (Is that a squid in your pocket?)
1 - Inedible  (Dead Squid)

Garden Bistro 24: Friday November 7, "happy hour" - A normal size appetizer ($10) of Crispy Calamari tossed in a tarragon chili aioli over a bed of lettuce. It was NOT served on a bed of lettuce, rather garnished with a sprinkle of microgreens, and we didn't taste any tarragon, but it was delicious. The squid (hand cut in-house, including tell-tale-tentacles) was crisp, with a nice tasty batter, and the sauce had a good balance of sweet and hot. My lips were tingling and greasy at the same time - divine. The sauce was VERY rich - a bit overwhelming maybe - so it was good to go splits on this one.  Next time - and there will be a next time! - I'll ask for the sauce on the side.  SCORE: 4.5 - Great but too much sauce.

NEXT TIME: I went back a second time on Friday December 12 with a couple of my favorite Bar Babes to ask them to "deconstruct" this dish for me. Alone this deep fried squid was flavorful, (especially with an added dash of salt), and very crisp and rich. The batter was a bit more traditional/heavier than many others I've had in the area. The dish was better this time because it wasn't drenched in that delicious sauce. Oh, and this time there was a bed of greens underneath.  SCORE II: 4.75. TBB pointed out that the crust was thicker than she might like.

Crispy Calamari with tarragon aioli at Garden Bistro in Colonie, NY - November 7

The same dish at Garden Bistro "deconstructed" with the sauce on the side - December 12

Tesoro's Italian Restaurant: Sunday November 9 "happy hour" - A generous antipasti of Calamari Fritti ($8.95), freshly prepared in a batter of (just milk and flour) served with a gravy boat of simple marinara sauce on the side. The squid was very plain but nice and crunchy, and the sauce was bright (almost lemony) and not too thick or gooey. The dish was served hot with a large fresh lemon wedge on the side. A classic. SCORE: 3.75 - Very good but the fish could use a bit more salt/other seasoning.

Calamari Fritti at Tesoro's in Guilderland, NY

Barcelona Restaurant: Monday November 10, lunchtime - From the Great Beginnings part of the lunch menu, this was a generous serving of Fried Calamari ($7.95 though it's listed online at $6.95). The batter was delicate and a very light golden brown but not as crispy as we would have liked. It was perfectly seasoned with salt and a sprinkle of fresh herbs. The sauce was thick and smooth, and served warm (which we loved!). We noted there was a "Special Salad Barcelona" that offered up fried or sauteed calamari so we may go back and try it. SCORE: 3.5- Nicely done but we wanted it to be crispier.

Fried Calamari at Barcelona Restaurant on Western Avenue in Albany, NY

Creo' Restaurant: Monday November 17, lunchtime - Kung Pao Calamari is on their list of small plates ($12.00), "crispy calamari tossed with a Thai sweet chili glaze". Having learned our lesson with the squid in sauce at Garden Bistro the first time, we asked for the sauce to be served on the side, which didn't do anything to pull this dish together with all it's disparate parts, but it did let us try the sauce separately from the fish. Good thing we did. The calamari (lots!) was nice and tender but flavorless; at least it wasn't greasy. The calamari was presented on a bed of those white fried rice noodles (the puffy ones) with a sprinkle of scallions, chopped tomatoes, and black and white sesame seeds - very pretty. But the sauce was way too sweet, barely spicy, and somehow on the cheap, so I asked the waitress to ask the chef was was in it and this was the reply: sugar, water, pickled red chili and garlic powder. After all that work to use a sauce like this is the type of crime I am here to save the world from. SCORE: 3.0 Work on that sauce!!!!

A very pretty presentation at Creo

Reel Seafood: Tuesday November 25, 6:00 pm - Three of us barely escaped traffic and entered the newly renovated space with a sense of awe and delight. The bar and dining room are really lovely, classy, and a welcome respite from the holiday rush. The Cantonese Calamari ($13) appetizer was another take on that fried squid tossed with a sweet/hot sauce that by now is getting to be old school. This one would be tossed with a bottled sauce called Mae Ploy: pretty tasty but still, to my super-senses, overly sweet and syrupy, so again I was glad that I asked for the sauce on the side. My dish, like at Creo, came "de-constructed" - with finely sliced purple cabbage and a bit of fresh pineapple presented in their own bowl. Alone the calamari (a very generous serving!) was tender but nicely brown and crispy - perfect actually, with a slightly heavier batter . No salt. (Wondering by now if the chef doesn't think to season calamari if it is being served "plain"). Together the combination was splendid. The fresh crunch of the cabbage, the juicy bright taste of tropical fruit, the heat from the sauce and the tender crisp calamari all came together and made me glow. SCORE: 4.0. A bit of salt is needed when a sauce is served on the side. Please, make your own sauce.

Deconstructed calamari at Reel Seafood.

Next: Milano Restaurant, located in Newton Plaza on Route 9 in Latham, NY. This was the first area restaurant that boasted an "open kitchen" - one where you can actually watch the chef do his magic from the dining room - and the layout is still true today, more than 20 years later. This time it was lunch on a cold December 8 (Monday) - not busy but enough tables to make it worth their while. I was seated so I could see some of what was going on with the cooking process. I heard the squid go down in the saute pan with a nice poof of steam, and I saw it being decorated with the fresh herbs, and then I watched it sitting there for our absent waitress for several minutes before being served- thankfully it was still nice and warm. This was Calamari alla Diavola, an appetizer-sized appetizer (for a change) - sauteed, not breaded and deep-fried, and for the first time I wanted the serving to be larger ($9.50). This was the most creative dish of calamari so far on my wild squid expedition, and instead of wrestling with it, I gave it kisses. Sweet, tender squid that tasted like squid, not batter, dressed with Kalamata olives and capers and topped with a nice handful of fresh basil, served with a side of warm Kalamata and caper infused marinara sauce that was spicy but not "hot" hot. Excellent!  SCORE: 4.75. Next time I hope I get a larger portion!

Calamari alla Diavola at Milano Restaurant

OK that's (6) and since I started this there haven't been any new reports of squid attacks (nothing major, anyway), so this must be working! I'm still concerned about the explosive squid population here in Capital Region restaurants,  so please know that I'm still fighting the good fight. I'll go try the calamari six more times in six more places and I'll do another entry, assuming none of those squids takes me out in batter. I mean battle.

Zena, Goddess of Fire

P.S. If you have a FAVORITE place for calamari please comment!!! We'll add it to our list and hope to get there eventually, unless of course it's an emergency, and then we'll get on it ASAP. 

DOING DISHES: The Mussels Series, Part I of V - Garden Bistro 24

It seems my Foodie Friend I are easily confused these days, but FF is all academic and analytic and that's how she tries to keep track of stuff and make sense of things. Me, I just look like an idiot then try to run away really fast.

Now where was I. Oh, okay, we got into talking about mussels. We both really enjoy mussels when we go out to eat, sopping up some lovely broth with a hunk of bread, taking a passing sip of wine, picking out another mussel from it's shell, now slurping up the broth with a spoon, and sometimes drinking more wine until we are totally confused about just about everything. Divine!!! But we didn't know much about mussels, and neither of us had ever tried preparing them at home. We wanted to compare dishes in a few venues here in the Albany area, then cook up a batch of our own. This series is the first of what we hope will be many where we do some comparison dining and then bring it home. We call it DOING DISHES. No, we are not dishes.

I'm trying to find my phone.

Anyway what was I saying? Right - this is the first blog of four restaurants and one in-house cooking event. We'll talk about each dining experience in turn then finish up with an across the board comparison. FF made a chart for her notes. She did her homework. According to Wikipedia, where everything is true, the "...word "mussel" is most frequently used to mean the edible bivalves of the marine family Mytilidae, most of which live on exposed shores in the intertidal zone, attached by means of their strong byssal threads ("beard") to a firm substrate." There was a good article in the most recent issue of Cooks Illustrated, and too much information online, and plenty of recipes. She arrived at our first venue, Garden Bistro 24 in Colonie, NY with her pen and chart and mobile device. I took a few pictures, a few which were NOT on my phone today, which messes with my head, and just tried to wrap myself in the experience.

During dinner last night Zena was very certain that the raging thunderstorm and flashes of lightning were either Thor pissed at me again for something, or a sign that what we were about to partake of something wild and wonderful. Confused, I tried to focus on the wine list, which isn't very long but very reasonably priced. I ordered a white Bordeaux, which was really lovely - crisp but satiny. We shared a Countryside salad - crunchy soybeans, fresh sweet peas, red leaf lettuce, cheddar cheese, radishes, dressed with their homemade balsamic vinaigrette. Not salty at all, which I appreciated, since salt raises your blood pressure then you loose your temper, hence the problems lately with Thor. Right, dinner - sorry. So, we had to ask for side plates. All we each had was a napkin and a fork. There was a knife in the salad. A few minutes later our waiter offered to bring us utensils to serve the salad with, but we declined. By then we were getting into the almost minimalist environment. Paper napkins, a flower. The salad was hard to eat with just a fork. We shared the knife. The picture of the salad is NOT on my phone.

Then our mussels arrived. Our waiter was kind enough to bring us two hunks of bread and offered to bring more, but we just asked for spoons, which he forgot about but brought by later. We ordered the Mussels Frites - there are five choices and a special of the day; we chose the classic with wine and shallots. A huge thingy of frites freaked us out - they were good, a bit overdone perhaps (tasting slightly bitter as a result), but with a nice crisp exterior and still soft inside. We didn't eat too many. We ate mussels: a good count (30), all open, no broken shells, and small but tender. Only one with grit, but I blame that on the gods, Thor in particular, since I got it and not FF. Then the amazing sauce - very yellow, a few tomato bits, buttery, winey (not to be confused with whiny, which we were not). Great bread. I ordered another glass of wine and had to use my superpowers to keep the waiter from taking the glass that still had a slurp in it.

I wonder if there was saffron in the sauce. Didn't see any red floaties, but look at the color:

When Garden Bistro first opened they touted local/sustainable, but that seems to be off their marketing agenda these days. Mussels have been on their menu since they opened in 2010, and there isn't much local that you can say about PEI mussels in Albany, aye? But they ARE considered sustainable (eating at the bottom of the food chain), and the farming methods are okay for the environment, which is great. There is a lot about this menu that hasn't changed, so those of us who are easily confounded by change are happy to see our favorites still available, but we wondered if there wasn't another potato besides fries. The prices, uh, have gone up a few bucks since they opened, but I think dinner is still a deal. Salad: $9.50, Mussels $16.50, Wine $8.00/glass, plus tax and tip - a lovely dinner for just over $50.00. I couldn't figure out the bill because FF owed me three bucks for eggs but she had it together. It was a WONDERFUL meal - really GREAT mussels. Not to be confused with muscles....

Zena wrestles with a mussel at the Y

Zena, Goddess of Fire

Garden Bistro

Due to a sort of wandering around on Friday I ended up at Garden Bistro in Central Square Plaza. The Central Square Plaza is out Central Ave. across from the Kohl's Plaza, just before you reach route 155.  It has a mish mash of businesses, and the Garden Bistro is tucked in the middle.  I had the mussels with lemon pesto sauce.  I LOVE this dish.  I asked for a spoon in order to get every bit of the amazing perfectly balanced sauce which is generously providing a soupy delightful bath for the mussels. Thin slices of tender onion, basel and fresh tomato are swimming contentedly among the nuggets of tastiness.

I prefaced the feast with a huge and delicious martini, and that added quite a happy glow to the occasion. Pommes frites, with ketchup and a horseradish mayo sauce are the standard companion for all the mussels.

I've been to the bistro a few times and have not been able to get past the mussels because they are just so lovely.  They do have a menu that should make a party happy even for those who do not care for mussels, and they always have a special in each category.  Besides the lemon pesto sauce for the mussels there are also a suite of other well-balanced flavors that complement the delicate mussel flavor.

The ambiance in the bistro is warm with browny reds and despite the lack of carpeting, the sound level is busy but very comfortable.  There's a small bar and a good sized dining room.  It was full on Friday, as it should be, since there is much comfort and refreshment to be had within.

I highly recommend the mussels, but it is worth a visit no matter what your mood.