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Best of New York Food 2004

Best Vegetable

  • Casa Mono

    52 Irving Place, 212-253-2773

    People scrunch up their noses at the very mention of Brussels sprouts, recalling the terrible-tasting, mushy, overcooked tiny cabbages of their youth. It takes someone like Mario Batali, and his chef-partner Andy Nusser, to turn such a bitter food memory sweet. The menu at Casa Mona, Batali’s new Spanish-Catalan tapas restaurant, is market-driven, with vegetables from Union Square, and though Brussels sprouts are not a very Spanish ingredient, they are a natural to the Spanish method of cooking a la plancha, or “on the grill.” Sitting at the bar gives an appetite-whetting view of the open kitchen as the chef deftly sears the blanched and oiled Brussels sprouts on the hot metal surface until they’re charred but still crunchy and bright-green inside. With a squeeze of lemon juice and a dusting of fresh thyme leaves, eating your veggies has never tasted so good.

From the 2004 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine

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Other Best Of Guides

Our mission this year: to hunt down not just the best but the best values in the eating, shopping, drinking, and general-consuming universe of New York. It’s quite the process, this, requiring eating and shopping and drinking (all in the name of research), followed by heated but civil discussion, and heated but less-civil discussion, until a winner emerges in each category.

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