Back in town after a weekend away and all I really want is a salad, a simple salad. Sometimes, especially if you have been eating food catered by a local pizza place from chafing dishes all afternoon, a salad is exactly the right thing to close the weekend. Falling asleep on a Sunday night can be a difficult thing, especially on an empty stomach, but if you are half full at 5:30 pm the likelihood is you will be starving at bed time. Usually a salad makes the most sense, but where?
If I weren't as lazy as I am I would just make a salad, and were I to do it myself it would ideally be with greens from the greenmarket, or as a back up at least be organic from a supermarket. The dilemma here was that most of the places that I can safely rely on for this tend towards finer dining, meaning as wonderful as their salads are they can veer towards the precious when all I really want is a big plate of greens. Wife, however, being someone who does not go as deep into buffet as I do, was in the mood for an actual entrée which is probably what caused her to remember Home.
Home was exactly what the doctor ordered. Simple, small, and casual, they focus on local artisinaly produced product wherever possible, including an entirely New York state wine list. A humble neighborhood place you can stop by in your commuting clothes, sit down, and have a well prepared meal much like the one you would have made yourself had time and energy been on your side.
I started with a simple greens and spring vegetable salad -- carrots, radishes, sunflower seeds, and mixed greens with a mustard-thyme vinaigrette.
From the verbal specials I chose a fried oyster salad -- very rocket-centric mélange of greens in the same thyme-mustard vinaigrette with cornmeal-crusted fried oysters and sliced pears. Six plump oysters spoke of the northern Atlantic in their size and brininess. Thinly sliced green skinned pears rounded out the peppery arugula, acidic dressing, and richness of the oysters' crust while the saline interior smoothed the mustard highs.
To round out my light dinner I had a side of garlicy greens, spinach. The genius of naming your place Home may be that people like me are willing to forgive things like grit in the spinach. I saw it as no big deal that there was a little sand in it, it was locally grown after all and when I buy fresh spinach I also find it very difficult to free the leaves of all their sand, so I tried again and again. Sadly, around my fourth bite I found the crunch of gravel maddening and gave up. With half the portion already gone, I decided not to try to return it and made note of it to our waiter for future reference.
Home's wine list is all NY state and the by-the-glass offerings are from Shinn Vineyard (owned or at least operated by a former member of the Home team). Sitting outside in the backyard on a cool spring eve with fried oysters on the way I decided on their rose. Crisp and dry, it had notes of strawberry and tropical fruits and was safely filed in my head as "quite nice" until I had a bite of Wife's fennel-crusted pork loin with wheat berries. This was a great paring. The pink, a little bold for a pink, had all the definition to match up to the herbal characteristics of the roasted meat.
Home is quaint, it is somehow comfortable (in spite of being the restaurant version of a railroad apartment) and the food is solidly good. If you are willing, as I am, to overlook things like sand in the spinach in exchange for well-executed food made of local product at a reasonable price, I suggest it.
Any reason that you did not give the street address?
Thanks
Posted by: mistergee | May 23, 2006 at 10:25 AM