“This was not a diet evening,” my friend Penny says with a soulful sigh. Her determination to shed five pounds she imagined she gained over the summer postponed yet another night, she decides “cookies, cakes n’pies” will be our lone dessert.  Normally a paragon of discipline, even she is tasting small chunks of warm chocolate chip and butter toffee Macademia nut cookies, toffee-filled caramel cupcake, fried apple and chocolate pudding pielettes, a white chocolate covered pretzel and housemade ice creams. Of course, a bite or three of everything is de rigeur for me.  After all, it’s my job.

        I’m probably not coming back to Gold Street unless I find my dream loft around the corner. It’s $50 round trip by taxi and a long haul up and down stairs on the subway. Well, maybe you could tempt me with a car and driver. I think my arteries could take it twice a year.  Till Libertine clones itself somewhere in midtown when I am not near the mac that I love, I’ll try to love the mac I’m near.

        Every New Yorker needs a soothing spot like Solace in their Rolodex: Good food, relaxed prices, a romantic garden. It’s a perfect retreat from the sensory torture of restaurant trendiness for aging baby boomers with a little hearing loss and for their parents too. You’ll spot them in their Chanel knit knockoffs claiming the banquettes. Isolated from the flow of pedestrian traffic on First Avenue, Solace remains a secret oasis. Your husband, glued to Monday football in another zip code, is not likely to spot you out back flirting with your boy-toy.

        There is music – it fills the emptiness on quiet nights – mostly European jazz, Oscar Petersen, Dizzy Gillespie.  And the staff will turn it down on nights a full house gets raucous. “If we don’t notice the noise, someone will always ask,” says Chef David Regueiro who’s tended the kitchen since Solace moved into this townhouse just over a year ago. (No, he’s not the infamous David Ruggerio who admitted padding tips to pay the bills in the Chantilly space on Park, though there’s often that confusion.)

 
Niçoise olives, Yukon golds and anchovy dress up grilled calamari. Photo: Steven Richter.

        I hadn’t been back since my first early dinner  when  the greeter seemed surprised to see a customer and I marveled at the prices, the reasoned measure of light and the chefs’ carefully cooked monkfish and butter braised lobster with artichokes. (Indeed, I did write his name as ‘Ruggiero’ – a misspelling of both chef Davids’ last names. It’s treacherous to work without the backup of New York magazine fact checkers.) But all summer I got invitations to taste the chef’s suckling pig special.  Then came Fall and the seasonal lure was now pheasant from a farm near his Connecticut home.

Lamb loin chops. Photo: Steven Richter

        

        “I hate pheasant, I wrote back.  It’s dry white meat for people who like overcooked chicken breast.”

        “Not when the chef brines it,” I was told.

         Indeed, the crisp-skinned pheasant is amazingly moist sitting on a few turnip slices and a scattering of escarole, though the plate with its three small hills of chestnut purée is pretty sparse, as you can see from my guy’s photo.  Regueiro tells me he’s added roasted chestnuts and fingerling potatoes. At our tasting last week, grilled calamari Niçoise, perfectly cooked giant prawns and remarkable lamb chops with eggplant caviar (at a sane $27) reminded me why I have been sending friends craving civilization to Solace. And the bread we’re using to sop up the zesty puddle of smoked paprika-spiked tomato-chorizo sauce under the prawns is house-baked. But all of us are put off by the almost sugary sweetness of the corn soup. It seems to need something, white wine, a dash of balsamic vinegar, even tomato water, to let the corn taste through. I suppose that’s an odd little ‘kvetch’. 

        Will you be looking at  pears finally ripening in the bowl on your kitchen counter one of these days and think, “what can I do with these besides eat one and wait for the rest to rot?”  Are you eyeing the leftover pork loin from Friday’s dinner wondering what magic you have on hand to make a picnic lunch for four on Saturday? Should you thaw some ciabatta rolls and whip up some garlic-yogurt curry mayonnaise?  What would Gina DePalma of Babbo do with those pears? Or Gabriel Kreuther at The Modern?  Want an idea for the pork from Vikram Vij in Vancouver? That’s when you want to pick up The Flavor Bible  (Little,Brown, $35) by my friends and frequent co-conspirators on tasting expeditions, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg.

        The two of them, relentlessly prolific food book writers (okay, I’m jealous), often show up at dinner glowing from a five mile run to cap a deadline day.  Essential sippings for their weekly wine column in the Washington Post  never seem to interrupt the superhuman flow of books from their dueling computers or maybe I mean dual computers. Their IACP award-winning What to Drink with What You Eat  is just being reissued as their latest hits the bookstores. Inspired by chefs’ enthusiastic use of an earlier work, Culinary Artistry, as a source of ideas for creating dishes, and by the greater availability of ingredients as well as the wide-ranging creativity of celebrated chefs, the two of them have been collecting ideas for flavor affinities and actual dishes for several years.  The Bible is that gospel, a wealth of inspiration, arranged in alphabetical order.

        No it’s not a cookbook with recipes.  It’s a book to provoke cooks and chefs to greater creativity, classic and avant garde, or just to read when you’re hungry.  Let’s see.  I have this can of Spanish anchovies. Chef  Jose Andres likes anchovies with nectarines.  I don’t have a nectarine but I do have some sensational plums and the makings of his sherry-vinaigrette. It certainly trumps Fairway’s healthy tuna salad for lunch. Okay Jose?

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