siteit blog | medical student |
Giant-Size Flagship of a Growing EmpireA Review of Max Downtown Restaurant, in Hartford
Max Downtown, in Hartford, has 25-foot ceilings and giant wall murals.
By RAND RICHARDS COOPER
Published: April 6, 2012
- Sign In to E-Mail
- Single Page
- Reprints
RICHARD ROSENTHAL is Connecticut's Danny Meyer , a restaurateur-Midas who rules an ever-expanding empire of trattorias and seafood emporia, taverns and luxury burger joints. With his Max Food Group celebrating its 25th anniversary, the time seemed ripe to revisit the flagship, situated on the ground floor of Cityplace I , Hartford's prime power building and the tallest in the state.
Related
-
Times Topic: Connecticut Dining
Connect with NYTMetro
Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for news and conversation.
George Ruhe for The New York Times
CHEF'S CHOICE The shellfish sampler at Max. The New American menu created by its executive chef emphasizes seafood.
Fittingly, everything about Max Downtown is oversize: the 25-foot ceilings and giant wall murals, a huge blackboard invoking Connecticut food providers in Whitmanesque cadences ("From the icy waters of Stonington to the rolling hills of Litchfield"), front-door awnings with "Max" in letters probably big enough to appear on Google Earth.
Oh, and some pretty sizable steaks, too.
Expense is no obstacle, is the message. Swiftly circulating servers, attired in black vests and white aprons, trail whiffs of foie gras and truffles. The décor features Champagne bottles in those goliath sizes, Balthasars and Melchiors, named for ancient kings. The wine list's 400 entries rise to a lofty $1,149 Harlan Cabernet.
The New American menu created by Hunter Morton, the executive chef, emphasizes seafood — and the results were terrific, beginning with an appetizer of golden-fried, panko-coated calamari in a spicy sambal aioli. The starter menu offers ahi two ways: a lavish tartare, mixed up with peppery, citrusy yuzu kosho and served atop mashed avocado; or wok-seared, coated with sesame seeds and cut in a nifty row of triangles. This was tuna so fresh I skipped the wasabi. The Max crab cake was equally appealing, a big dome of incredibly fresh Maryland crabmeat plated atop a colorful swirl of parsley-asparagus purée.
Of the nonseafood starters, artichoke hearts were slightly lost in a welter of cherry peppers, cubed eggplant, pine nuts and bits of chèvre. But I loved the pappardelle, broad pasta ribbons in a Parmesan sauce with crisped prosciutto, micro-greens and a big dose of truffles. Both an heirloom beet salad and a duck with pear salad were thinly dressed, and it was tempting to pick out the treats and ignore the tangle of frisée and endive. Far better was an artfully deconstructed Caesar salad, uncut Romaine leaf on a plate dotted with roasted garlic cloves and a Parmesan tuile bearing a single silvery anchovy.
Half the main courses at Max are steaks, in styles ranging from cowboy-hearty to mignon-dainty. My companion ordered an aged rib-eye from Brandt Beef (a hormone-and-antibiotic-free California farm), tender and richly marbled. And my Kansas City strip — a mammoth, bone-in cut cooked to pink-red perfection — was the tastiest lean steak I've ever eaten.
We couldn't decide on a sauce, so our obliging waiter brought all five: béarnaise, house steak sauce, red-wine reduction, cognac peppercorn cream and Maytag blue cheese. Was it déclassé of us to turn our dinner into a sloppy dipping session? Perhaps, but this is Max. "Our servers should make you feel they're working for you, not us," said Steven Abrams, Max's managing partner, in a recent telephone conversation.
Max's chophouse specials include unusual cuts, like a bone-in fillet, and we rejoiced one night to find tournedos Rossini, seared foie gras piggybacked on twin filets mignons. This kingly dish epitomizes unctuousness: two sublime meats in a truffled Madeira sauce with the concentrated savor of a marrowy veal stock cooked way down. The side dishes we ordered presented quality to match: buttery sautéed wild mushrooms; roasted Brussels sprouts, suffused with the salty deliciousness of bacon; and asparagus with Hollandaise sauce.
For those interested in something other than beef, excellent alternatives exist. A wedge of farm-raised Shetland Island salmon, cooked a la plancha, was rich and flaky, though the fingerling potatoes accompanying it lacked flavor. Stonington scallops came perfectly butter-browned in a bowl of beet pasta, braised cabbage, bacon and asparagus tips with a delicate Parmesan broth. A grilled Homestead pork chop, partnered with sausage-and-focaccia stuffing and crisp haricots verts, was moist enough to stand on its own — but even better when dredged through a rosemary-tinged port-wine reduction.
- 1
- 2
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét