One of those days again, when eight hours at work feel like 327 hours, and of course it doesn’t help that the milieu in the Bluff City has been fraught with gloom, so we trek over to The Belmont, about eight minutes from the house, for a burger. And we get a perfect parking place! Right by the back door! Good omen! The interior of the place is so gaudily lit up with Christmas lights, I mean a million tiny lights, at least, that it’s like sitting inside a Christmas tree, say the one at Rockefeller Center. We don’t even need menus. LL orders a burger, medium rare, with cheddar cheese and fries. I order a burger, medium rare, with Swiss cheese and bacon; LL does a double-take and gasps, and the waiter says, “What’s wrong? Did you mean to order bacon on your burger?” And LL says, “No, I just can believe that he ordered bacon.” And I got onion rings.

I’ve always loved the burgers at The Belmont. I love the quality of the meat and the almost rectangular soft, but slightly chewy French roll the burger comes on. I love it that this kitchen has never been afraid to cook a burger exactly to medium rare because that’s what the customer wants. This is one juicy, meaty, flavorful burger, and the Swiss cheese and bacon, oh, and the little paper container of cole slaw which is never quite enough but adds some zip and crunch — well, I’m sorry, but I’m about to go out on a limb here and say that this is, OK, not THE best but certainly among the top three or four burgers in town. It’s individually styled but not eccentric; it creates its own tradition of greatness without losing sight of the honorable American heritage of burgers.

The Belmont was packed last night: couples young and middle-aged and elderly; families with children; groups of friends; a few solitary diners eating at the bar. A gentle hubbub of conversation over the eclectic range of music. A sense of complete, comfortable unchangingness in the heart of Old East Memphis. Isn’t that the definition of a favorite place?

Looking at some local restaurant wine lists online, I couldn’t help noticing this range of prices for Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label Brut, the non-vintage French champagne that’s one of the most highly visible and relentlessly marketed brands in the world.

Ready?

Umai ……………….. $70
Encore ………………$80
Felicia Suzanne’s …..$85
The Grove Grill ……..$95
Erling Jensen ……….$96
River Oaks ………….$98
Chez Philippe ……… $99
Interim ……………..$112
The Majestic ………$113
Circa ……………….$130

That’s right, readers, there’s a difference of $60 between the lowest and the highest prices of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label on these 10 wine lists, this for a champagne that retails usually for $35 to $45. Of course the restaurants don’t pay the retail price; they pay wholesale. Yes, I know, the price in the restaurant includes the high Tennessee sales tax on wine as well as the city tax, but still, if Umai, a small establishment that can’t move a lot of the stuff, can charge $70, it means that places charging over, say, $90 are making a killing. And $130!!!!! Does the word “unconscionable” mean anything to you? You pays yer money and you takes yer choice.

OK everyone, it’s almost time for the year-end restaurant wrap-up, and this year we want to include your favorite spots. Post ‘em here…

When I reviewed Umai at the end of March, I gave it two stars, based mainly on the fact that service was amateurish and erratic, that it took eons to get dishes out of the small, open kitchen and that much about the French-Japanese fusion restaurant seemed provisional. The food, however, was close to excellent.

Last night’s meal proved that service is much better — well-known waiter Patrick McNamara, formerly of Wally Joe, now presides at Umai — the food still takes a while to get to the table but not hours, and the food itself is better than ever. In fact, throughout our dinner, there wasn’t a single misstep. Presentations are artful, beautifully detailed, without being precious or pretentious; flavors are married in series of often playful comparisons and contrasts, the primary emphasis being on purity and intensity. Sushi and sashimi are now available at Umai, but we stuck with the regular menu.

Dinner began with a tasty tuna salad-kimchi amuse-bouche and continued with appetizers of black mussels and the fish Grenobloise. The mussels are flash roasted and then steamed in and served in a kimchi-miso broth and accompanied by thin triangles of toasted bread. This is a great mussels preparations. The mussels are good size and deeply flavorful, as is the broth, which brings an earthy exotic flavor. The Grenobloise is an unusual dish for a restaurant that employs so many Japanese themes and ingredients; this preparation is pure French bistro, two small filets of (in this case) flounder, crusted with panko crumbs and perfecty fried, served on dense, glossy mashed potatoes with a caper-butter sauce.

LL ordered the roasted hijiki seaweed salad, a dish of striking intensity and power. As you can see in the photograph above (which she took), the salad is also beautiful to look at, flecked with sesame seeds, topped with thin lemon slices and adorned with a hem of English peas. I had the soup du jour, a generous portion of ginger and sweet potato soup (no cream) with exquisite balance between the ginger and the sweet potato. (That’s the other image, which I took.)

Since we were drinking red wine (the Hewitson “Miss Harry” 2005), we chose red meat entrees. LL had the “Drunken Duck,” slices of medium rare duck breast that had been marinated for 48 hours and then seared. These are served on a bed of creamed potatoes with steamed choi sum (in the bok choi family) and the dark mahogany “drunken duck” sauce. I’ll unlimber the word “intensity” again at this moment to say that the duck is one of the most emphatically rich, deeply flavorful and intense dishes, I mean sublimely delicious, I have ever encountered, and we made little inroad, though we took home what we couldn’t eat.

Almost that intense is the sirloin strip encrusted with guajillo (a chile pepper common to Mexico) and chickory coffee, grilled to the requested medium rare — actual medium rare — and served with a tasty and exotic “sour” fried rice and a Japanese curry veal au jus. Lord have mercy! We took a lot of that home too.

McNamara convinced us to try one dessert, the “homemade pie du jour,” last night being an apple and apricot tart that was almost more savory than sweet.

When people talk about bargain dining, Umai should be at the top of the list. Appetizers are $7 to $13, entrees are $17 to $20. The short but well-chosen wine list is equally cost-conscious, the white wines ranging from $20 to $29, the reds from $16 to $35.

The restaurant still feels a bit provisional in furnishings and comfort-level — it’s cold in fall and winter — but service is thoughtfully Old School and the food, as I think I’ve indicated here, is superb.

Umai is at 2015 Madison. It’s open for lunch Wednesday through Friday, dinner Wednesday through Saturday and for Sunday brunch. Call 405-4241.

This is spill-over from another post, but it’s a good one to have stand on its own. Let’s post corkage fees for restaurants here. Kristi posted that Saigon Le and Guadalupana don’t have fees, and I added that Lou’s Pizza Pie doesn’t, either (you can also take beer in).

Pete and Sam’s charges $2.50 per glass, so it’s $5 if two people are drinking wine, $10 for four and so on. And at Interim it’s $8, which is great.

Post ‘em here.

Just reading over Fredric’s post about Equestria and it brought to mind a conversation I recently had with friends. We were talking about a prix fixe dinner at Per Se in New York–$250. Of course that’s expensive and no one argued. It could even be said to be obscene, frankly, when many families can’t afford to spend that much on food in a month. But then we got in the discussion of what is expensive and what’s just to be expected.

Is a $20 entree pricey? $30? $40? Where does it break for you? Let’s get some talk going on this and then I’ll weigh in with my opinion, too. There’s more to it than just the price of the food.

Sorry, guys. It’s easy to let time slip away when you take a few days off work… I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. It was another busy weekend for us, and I ended up with a cold and feeling blah. The holidays are so busy this year!

But here’s something kind of fun. At a party Saturday night a friend wasn’t eating his paella and when I asked why, he said he’d filled up on Ro-tel dip at his granddaughter’s birthday party that afternoon. That got a good laugh and got us thinking about all the different ways folks use Velveeta in the South. There’s even a Velveeta fudge!

So I’m soliciting Velveeta recipes and maybe this’ll turn into a story. My mother-in-law, by the way, was served Velveeta on white bread after giving birth to her children. Nothing has ever tasted as good as those sandwiches, she said.

So share with me. Tell me what you do with Velveeta processed cheese product.

It was a surprise when Brett “Shaggy” Duffee left the kitchen at Karen Carrier’s eclectic Beauty Shop, in Cooper-Young, and headed for the eastern reaches of Germantown and Equestria, a restaurant with a long up-and-down reputation of being different things to different people. (Former Equestria chef Kevin Rains now presides at Roustica, where Marena’s used to be in Midtown.) So, perhaps a surprise but not an undeserved change for a talented chef.

Of course, Equestria is not Beauty Shop and Germantown is not Cooper-Young, so Duffee has tailored a menu that’s a bit more sedate than what patrons of Beauty Shop expected. Who would quibble, however, about a ramekin filled with white beans and tender rabbit meat and shavings of pungent black truffle under a crunchy breadcrumb and pecorino chapeau (”Rabbit Cassolette”). Or a special appetizer one night, a redolent and spicy duck, sausage and mushroom gumbo?

Duffee rubs a rib-eye steak with annatto seed (from the anchiote tree, popular in Latin American and Caribbean cuisine), grills it as requested and serves it with a slice of Cabrales cheese, an almond and morel mushroom reduction and melt-in-yer-mouth croquettes made of Serrano ham and Gruyere cheese. Nothing too restrained there, though more straightforward is the pork osso buco (the shank) served with crisp roasted fennel, a bacon and red onion marmelade and polenta. The servings, by the way, are more than generous.

A good way to end a meal is with a wedge of a delectable pecan tart.

Now Equestria is not cheap. Appetizers are $10 to $17, entrees $26 to $36, nor does the wine list shirk prices at least two times the retail price or more. The place looks comfortable and inviting, a bit masculine, and as “casually elegant” as the restaurant’s website suggests. Service is polite, decorous, even rather serious.

And that’s where my question comes in. On our first visit to the restaurant, sitting not far from us, were two couples dining together. One of the men wore a red baseball-type cap, and he kept it on his head the entire time eating dinner. Now I realize that the world is a far more casual place than it was 15 or 20 years ago, yet in a restaurant where dinner for two, with a good bottle of wine, can run over $200, where the waiters, dressed in black, ply their trade with solemn discretion, where the lighting and atmosphere suggest elegance and intimacy — wouldn’t you think a guy could take off his cap for an hour or two? Or are people so casual nowadays that they’re completely oblivious to mood and tone and propriety?

This email came to me from a reader and I’d like to get your input on it. Do you agree, not so much about Los Compadres as about the dumbing down of ethnic food? 

Further, I’m doing a wrap-up of the best ethnic restaurants in town as part of our year-end restaurant picks. If I’m not reviewing a restaurant, I’m either cooking at home or eating Indian, Mexican or Thai food somewhere. Tell me your favorites, because time is running short and if I’m missing a good spot, I need to get there and try it out soon.

Here’s the email:

Have you noticed lately, more than the usual for Memphis, that local area ethnic restaurants are dumbing down their fare with their sites on profits? Take Los Compadres at the corner of Union Ext and Poplar. When they were first conceived, as I understand it, it was because multiple disgruntled employees formerly from another popular Mex restaurant banded together to form an alternative place to go with better food and service. Clearly this was an opportunity for Memphians to get good Mexican fair without the long lines experienced at say El Porton. The focus was on the food… in fact if you had already had two beers they wouldn’t ASK if you needed another drink. Then, there was a shake down of the original partners/ families in management and the resultant managing family (owners) installed a beautiful patio and turned the place into another terrible food *Mexican style* drinking place with poor service. What gives… is this what Memphians really want?? Plastic tubs of refried beans and powdered chickn soup mix and gristly cheap meat mixtures covered with wilted lettuce? Served with cheap tequila flavored alcoholic margarita mixes?? Hey, profits win as long as nobody says anything about it because we all vote with our dollars and Los Compadres now enjoys those long lines that started this establishment in the first place!! Seems that Memphis can’t handle decent ethnic restaurant food. Or maybe they go ˜longingly so in hopes that the good food will magically reappear. Still, Los Compadres is a great place to meet friends and have a drink and perhaps some chips but I miss the ( good ) old food terribly! Please charge more for GOOD food if  you need to. BUT have good food. And whats with the tubs of institutional refried beans?? Never seen them in Mexico. Pinto beans aren’t really that hard to serve, are they???

When we lived at the Greenstone at Poplar and Waldran, we used to go to Saigon Le frequently, because it was just down Poplar and around the corner on Cleveland. After we moved out east, though, we lost touch with the place and its great, inventive Vietnamese cuisine. Venturing downtown recently, however, and needing an early dinner, we stopped at Saigon Le and were really glad that we did.

The restaurant, which opened in April 1993, is owned by its unassuming chef, Hoa Nguyen (known as “Mama”) and operated by the expansive Le family. My first review ran in The Commercial Appeal on May 28, 1993, and while we didn’t use a star rating system in those days, my reaction was more than just enthusiastic; I thought the food was remarkably fresh, delicious and creative. I wrote a brief “Second Helping” on June 24, 1994. Then in March 1995, Saigon Le burned to the ground. Hoa Nguyen was determined to rebuild the exact building in the same spot, and that’s what the family did. The restaurant reopened in October that year, and I wrote another rave review. From that time until the early 21st century, I always included Saigon Le on my annual list of the city’s best restaurants and mentioned Hoa Nguyen as one of our best chefs.

Anyway, when we went into Saigon Le recently, everyone welcomed us with “Long time no see!” (there was none of the brusqueness that has occasionally soured patrons’ experiences at the restaurant) and our waiter immediately brought us a new salad in Mama’s repertoire, a small platter holding finely shredded seaweed, sliced cucumber, sliced onions, basil leaves and boiled shrimp, all bathed with a light, slightly sweet, slightly vinegary dressing. If any dish on earth were fresher, cleaner and tastier than this, with its blending of mild and piquant flavors and its lovely combination of shades of green and white with the pink shrimp — well, I can’t think of it, so never mind.

We ordered the appetizer pancake, which is actually an omelet (of sorts) folded around mushrooms, onions and bean sprouts. This comes with a plate of various salad greens — opal basil, romaine and such — that you wrap around a piece of the “pancake,” dip in a savory sauce (mixed with red chili paste) and happily devour.

For entree we asked for the curry chicken soup. Mama’s genius reveals itself here in a dense, mustard-yellow color broth of amazing complexity and subtle heat. This holds only pieces of chicken, white potatoes and sweet potatoes with a few bits of onion, and believe me, it needs nothing more to be completely satisfying. Oh, heck, let’s just say it: It’s awesome! The chicken you can dip in another multi-layered sauce, heavy on the black pepper, that contains slices of red chilies.

What a great meal, aided in its compelling nature by the fact that even with a couple of Tsingtao beers, the tab was about $30.

Saigon Le is at 51 North Cleveland and is open for lunch and dinner every day except Sunday. Call 276-5326.