Three Latest and Best

And now, in case you're getting a little sick of hearing about foie gras, we return you to your regularly scheduled snark-a-licious restaurant programming. And while I may have been grossing out some of you vegetarians -- and flexitarians -- here are a few notes for you eaters of sea creatures. Three Latest and Best -- The All-Crustacean Edition!

Shrimp-tastic Burgers at Alcatraz: Wednesday, we attended the launch of a new menu at Alcatraz Brewing Company downtown at Circle Center Mall. Alcatraz has been in Indianapolis for nearly 10 years, once part of a chain but now with only two remaining locations. While I was all excited that we might have a good chef coming to town to run the operation, we found that Tavistock, the corporation that owns Alcatraz as well as quite a few other decent eateries around the US, has a new corporate chef, Bobby Varua, who will be based in Chicago. He's redone the menu at Alcatraz but won't be on site day-to-day. So, while the bad news is that we have yet another absentee landlord for a not-quite-a-chain restaurant trying to make it, the good news is that the menu is really pretty good. My favorite? The Shrimp Burgers -- think crab-cakes-with-shrimp, think deep-fried, think sweet sauce on a soft bun. Also good were the flatbreads, oh, and the cocktails.

I Love Shrimp Tempura Rolls: While one doesn't always associate Fishers with good sushi, their new little place, I Love Sushi! is getting good press. Right on 116th across from the Nickle Plate, look for decent lunch specials with an assortment of nigiri, maki, miso soup, and salad. My favorite? What they called "white fish" and a shrimp tempura roll even though it was garnished with eel sauce. But on a cool and rainy day? The miso soup hit the spot.

Shrimp, Lobster, They all Have Tails: Check out the winning soup from the Indianapolis Dine magazine Best Soup in Indy competition. Sure, it's been a Karl Benko love fest around here lately, but I can't miss a mention of his superb lobster bisque with his housemade infused oils and perfectly cooked lobster. The soup from Peterson's was the clear winner in two days of tasting nearly 70 entries. My favorites were also the two winners from Brix (the coconut curry and BLT) and the tomato bisque from Ripple Bagel and Deli. (What I won't do for the craft. Just order me the ba-donk-a-donk-butt, extra flabby, with the side of thunder thighs.)

Two-Minute Warning: Oh, where to begin, dearest Vitesse. Before, while your food was found lacking, you were a warm hotel lobby bar, a beacon in the night, never crowded until you had loud "jazz" music. Now you are but a hotel coffee shop. Gone are the cushy chairs. Gone are the comfortable couches grouped around the faux fire. Gone are the lengthy wine lists and considerate waiters. Oh, wait. You didn't have that before. But, still, gone are the dishes that at least *tried* to pretend they belonged in a swanky-wanna-be downtown bar. Vitesse, we hardly knew you. OK, we knew you and didn't like you very much, but we liked you better then.

Ouch! More Problems for Jonathan Wright

Apparently the service, front of house problems, and complicated, difficult-to-execute dishes are still haunting Chef Jonathan Wright. He may be brilliant but it looks like some of the same problems he had at Restaurant Du Soleil are emerging for him at Lark Creek Inn. Michael Bauer, food critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewed Wright's restaurant last week. (Wright joined Lark Creek Inn in August.) Ouch.

Buh bye Du Soleil; Hello Capital Grille

Word on the street is that The Conrad is finally putting both its restaurants out of their misery. We hear that Hilton corporate has agreed to lease the space for both Vitesse and Resataurant Du Soleil to Atlanta-based RARE Hospitality Intl, owners of The Capital Grille line of steakhouses. (Note that's "capital" as in "What a capital idea to make our restaurants profitable" as opposed to "Look, the Capitol is right over there.") No word on food and beverage for the rest of the hotel. I assume they'll keep hotel staff in place to handle events and catering.

The Capital Grille is a high-end steakhouse featuring 5000 wines and rated favorably by Wine Spectator and food guides such as Zagat's. They have around 25 restaurants in the chain with heavy saturation in south Florida, the northeast corridor, and even the Chicago area.

In the past week, I've had a lot of emails and dinner discussions with folks demanding we protest and blanket hotel developer Kite and corporate parent Hilton with letters. But, hey, how much space have I devoted here to how awful the Conrad restaurants are after all the hype? While I think independent restaurants are great, I've also made no secret about the fact that I think smart, successful independent restaurateurs have to pursue excellence. And sometimes chains can get the job done better. Would anyone really want Du Soleil to stick around when they've had execution problems, service problems, and even a question that Indianapolis will support a pricey French bistro downtown? Hotel restaurants are already a tough game to run -- and even tougher in a downtown like ours so heavily saturated with convention hotels and stand-alone restaurants. There are two things restaurateurs know about Indianapolis: It's a steakhouse town, and it's a perfect spot for smaller, high end chains. (If you don't think chains work, try getting a table at Fleming's on a weekend.) Restaurants are business and sentimental favorites don't make good business sense. What does make good sense is for Hilton to find an good, solid restaurant company to take over operations of their eateries.

I'd love to hear other opinions on this, so please feel free to post. But also check out The Capital Grille's website and while you're watching the elegant flash animation, remember that Du Soleil and Vitesse never even *had* websites of their own let alone updated menus and wine lists.

Speaking of Typos. . .

Hello, Feed Me/Drink Me Readers! How honored I am to be the first guest contributor to Indy's dishiest foodie blog. As you know, writing for a publication like Nuvo doesn't always allow me the space and leisure to write about more of the random observations I make as I head out every week to see what victuals this city has to offer. So this is my chance to give you a little insight into what it's like on my side of the plate. Check back later in the week for details about my night on the town with Kisha of Radio Now 93.1 as we undertake a gustatory odyssey to try as many of the restaurants participating in Devour Downtown Winterfest in one night as is humanly possible.

Until then, here's my latest beef. Or pork belly, er, pork chop as it were. Menu typos: why are there so many and why do we forgive them? Sure, you can laugh about the "Engrish" on the menu at your local Chinese takeout, but those folks have had to negotiate all of the intricacies of this all-too-permissive and hodgepodge language we speak here in the land of the free. But when it comes to a restaurant with $50 entrees and $100 bottles of wine, you'd expect that someone at the restaurant would know how to spell the things they're planning to serve you.

No menus in the city are more notorious for their sloppy, careless editing than those at the eateries inside the Conrad Hotel. You'd think that with such a reputation at stake that someone there would be using a spellchecker--or even a version of Microsoft Word that would correct their mistakes for them. The last time I checked, "crustinis" wasn't accepted by either Microsoft or the Oxford English Dictionary. Even Giada knows it's "crostini." The menus at the Conrad have become such a joke that I even know folks who have made a game out of finding the mistakes on the menu. A full two months after I ribbed them in a review about the replacement of "neige" (the French word for snow) with the curiously un-culinary (and much more equestrian sounding) English word "neigh," it's still unchanged on the menu. Accents on other French words and phrases are employed, it seems, merely by caprice, and capitalization is utterly random and without reason. Some entrée descpritions use commas and periods; others merely use hard returns to separate accompanying items.

What's worse is that what is spelled correctly isn't what will necessarily come out from the kitchen. On a recent visit, a waiter only somewhat sheepishly announced that the list of wines by the glass was "all messed up" because of a mandated inventory. He was happy to fetch us samples, however, of nameless zinfandels and merlots. The braised pork belly on macaroni and cheese (7 + 4 dollars) was, make no mistake, a rather dry pork chop on top of some gloppy, poorly integrated corkscrew pasta with a bland cheese sauce. When I last dined at Restaurant du Soleil, the much-lauded "pomme croquette" and "whipped cauliflower cream" to complete my quite juicy pork chop were mysteriously translated into cauliflower and broccoli with a cream sauce. Delivering the dish, the waiter scurried off in a flash so as to avoid any questioning. What sounded remarkable on the menu was much more pedestrian on the plate.

Again, the point must be made that these kinds of errors and subsitutions could easily be excused when the cost of the meal could fit into a Rachel Ray $40/day budget (with tax and "generous" tip). But when you're not likely to get out of a restaurant for less than $75, you deserve a little more care in all aspects of the dining experience, the least of which should be 5th grade spelling.

So, what restaurant has the best menu in Indy? Do you like any that whet your appetite, make you want to try everything, or just plain look nice? Put your gastronomic grammar hats on, Indy diners, and report back here with your findings!

Note: Having amassed many reader questions from columns as well as general comments, I'd like to take space to answer culinary questions from Feed Me/Drink Me readers as well. I'll be adding a regular question/answer feature (with Braingirl) and encourage you to ask away! Email me or post your questions in the comment section.

Three Latest and Best

ShelBi Street Bistro: What a find in Fountain Square! Perfect little pizzas, great sandwiches, and rich salads grace the menu at this eclectic but sweet cafe across the hall from the Fountain Square Diner. And bonus, they do the food at the rooftop in the summer as well!

Fried Oysters at Mo's: We all know what Mo's, A Place for Steaks does well. I mean, they dry age their own Prime. But my new favorite dish? The fried oysters in a blue cheese sauce on a bed of spinach. Dinner in a bowl. Don't forget the bread for sopping.

Food of the Week: Pre-cooked steelcut oats from Trader Joe's sweetened with a little maple syrup and brown sugar in the frozen food section. Each box has two pre-cooked, pre-measured portions of this yummy, breakfast goodness. Just pop a hockey puck of this hearty oatmeal in the microwave, and viola! Healthy!

Two-Minute Warning: Last night, with every downtown bar filled with Pacers fans, we scooted over to Vitesse for some peace and quiet -- that and a healthy dose of snark since we knew what we were getting into. First, there was no wines-by-the-glass list. They were "doing inventory" and not able to tell us what they had (which is difficult when, you know, selling wine is what you, um, do.) Vitesse is supposed to be known for their massive by-the-glass list although it was only 43 at my last count. When we weren't impressed with a few names our waiter rattled off in the Cabernet department, we finally gave in and asked for the wine list by the bottle settling on a nice Benton Hill Pinot Noir. It arrived, he doffed the screw cap with a flourish (it really does take something out of the wine presentation), then proceeded to pour us both full glasses. As we commented that we hoped no taste was necessary (because neither my dining companion nor I are shy), he quickly covered the mistake by agreeing with our suggestion that screw caps reduce the risk of spoilage. Then there was the menu. Not only was the menu laughably typo-ridden ("crustini" anyone?) but what we ordered was not what we got. After we worked our way through the bagged mixed greens salad (complete with brown ends) that was billed as "frissee and arugula", we moved on to the pork belly and macaroni and cheese which was really a very non-fatty piece of center cut pork chop over a mac/cheese that turned into an oily mess in the bowl. The poor waiter -- a victim of poor training and worse management -- was stuck in the middle. When we said, really more his information than anything else, "you realize this isn't pork belly, right?" He said, somewhat sheepishly "I know." My only question was "then why in the hell didn't you tell us?" Geeze. They've got problems over there. But hey, without the Conrad who else would we complain about. That's part of the fun. We drank our wine in a couple of cushy leather chairs out of the hustle and bustle of the city enjoying the nice little pinot on a rainy night. More on the menu later.

Howdy, folks!

Thanks to Indy Star's Traci Cumbay for the nice shout-out this morning in today's food section! I'm not sure I've ever been "indispensable" before! For those of you just visiting us for the first time, feel free to poke around a bit. I've been going through my backlog of posts so you'll see a few more NY/SF foodie postings than usual in the past few days -- plus, it's rating's season. (More later on French Laundry and their new, shiny 3 Michelin stars.) In the meantime, here's are some local tidbits to whet your appetite:

New at the Conrad: Susan Guyett is reporting the Conrad has hired a new executive chef to replace Jonathan Wright. Wright left earlier this year and has recently landed at Bradley Ogden's Lark Creek Inn. Enter Doug Knopp who reportedly has arrived from the Boar's Head Inn in Charlottesville, VA. Having run multiple restaurants at the tony resort complex, Knopp sounds like a good fit for the ambitious Conrad hotel food operations. We'll all have to see if he can shape up the food and service at Restaurant Du Soleil and Vitesse. (Hint: Start with that lunch buffet! It screams "Leftovers!"!) (And don't even get me started on the "food" at Vitesse.) I notice the press machine has been turned way down on Chef Knopp's arrival. Maybe a good lesson learned after the high profile entrance -- and exit -- of Chef Wright.

Dry Aging Update: After all the dry-aging folderal last month, I hear I have a piece (or maybe two pieces if I scare up a date) of a USDA Prime strip loin currently dry aging by hand with Peterson's chef Karl Benko. More to come on what may a true vertical steak tasting. More in 30 days!