NEW YORK –

Monday we ate lunch at The Green Table, a small, spare, almost zen-like restaurant inside the vast and fascinating Chelsea Market, on Ninth Avenue just at the northern edge of the Meatpacking District, which now, of course, contains more restaurants, clubs and boutiques than meatpacking establishments. It’s amazing! There used to be no traffic except for trucks and no people except for meatpackers wearing bloody aprons and their customers in this formerly quiet, way out-of-the-way neighborhood.

Anyway, Chelsea Market is a huge building that features myriad wholesale and retail food emporiums and restaurants. One of our favorite places is Buon Italia, a store that imports all sorts of foodstuffs from Italy. When we go to NYC, we always make it over to Buon Italia to pick up guanciale, coppa, panchetta and other cured meats. lime honey — great on my toast in the morning — and other items.

We stopped by The Green Table, an all-organic (but not necessarily vegetarian) off-shoot of The Cleaver Co catering group. LL had baked eggs with ramps and potatoes and a little salad, and I had macaroni-and-cheese, also with a salad. A nice lunch.

Now the glass of wine I ordered will, I’m sorry to say, have relevance only to BTYH readers in the Northeast. It was the Wölffer Estate Rosé 2007, from Sagaponack, The Hamptons, Long Island. This is a very spare, very dry rosé wine in the Provençal fashion, but there’s nothing Provençal about its make-up, which is 40% chardonnay, 35% merlot, 17% cabernet sauvignon and 8% cabernet franc. That roster of grapes raises the question: If the wine contains 40% chardonnay grapes, is it only 60% an actual rosé?

The estate was founded in 1987. Winemaker is Roman Roth, who has made wine in his native Germany, in California and Australia.

The wine, made, not surprisingly, all in stainless steel, is a classic pale copper/onion skin color. The bouquet offers notes of dried strawberry and and fresh peach with hints of dried thyme and wet rocks. The mineral quality intensifies in the mouth, while touches of pear and melon are added to the flavor spectrum, with more backnotes of dried herbs; the wine is vibrantly clean and crisp. This would be a great picnic wine, served with fried chicken, deviled eggs, ham, potato salad and such.

I rate the wine Very Good+. It costs about $15 at the winery.

Visit wolffer.com.

NEW YORK –

The Modern is the fine dining restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s operated by Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group; Meyer is the well-known owner of Union Square, Gramercy Tavern, Tabla and a host of other diverse restaurants in New York. Now appetizers at The Modern — at lunch — range from $17 to $42 and main courses go from $24 to $45. So most of us in the real world won’t be eating lunch there.

Fortunately, The Modern offers The Bar Room, a far more casual restaurant where patrons, hungry and thirsty after hours of looking at modern and contemporary art, can rest their weary bones and perk up with food and drink. There’s a small lounge waiting area, a bar appropriate for dining as well as imbibing, and an open dining area with tables and chairs. It’s all quite welcoming and attractive in a sleek modern fashion.

Chef at The Modern is Gabriel Kreuther, whose roots in Alsace are revealed in many dishes of the menus for The Bar Room and The modern.

The small menu in The Bar Room consists of three pages: The 18 items listed on the first two pages are served in appetizer portions; prices are $11 to $24. The 10 items found on the third page are served in “half-entree” portions; prices are $15 to $28. Now I didn’t say the The Bar Room menu was cheap; we’re not talking about $7.99 for meat ‘n’ three, including a refillable glass of sweet tea, but we are talking about delicious food that gratifyingly balances tradition with invention, lovely presentation, a waiter who knows the menu and wine list backwards and forwards and terrific wine selections.

So, perched at the bar, LL started with the shaved spring salad ($15), while I chose the veal and goat cheese terrine with watercress ($14). She followed with a fascinating item, a traditional “leftovers” dish from Alsace that featured lamb, conch and tripe is a spicy, savory ragout ($16). This baekeoffe, said our waiter, is the least-ordered dish on the menu, but it holds a special place in the chef’s heart. My second course was squid wrapped in pancetta with a black rice cake and Parmesan foam ($20).

So, how to tie these dishes together with one wine? Well, that wasn’t quite going to work. I suggested a riesling from Alsace, the Dirler Belzebrunem 2004 ($11), and while the waiter acknowledged that as a good idea, he offered to pour LL two half-glasses of wine so she could have a different experience with each of her two courses; when they came, they were generous “half-pours.” For her, he chose a gruner veltliner from Austria, the Prager Federspiel 2007, Wachau ($16) — a lovely gruner, clean, vibrant, floral and minerally — and for the red, the Umathum Zweigelt 2006, from Austria’s Bergenland region ($12). The zweigelt grape was propagated in 1922 as a cross between blaufrankisch and St. Laurent; it makes a deeply colored, spicy wine, hearty but not heavy.

The beautifully composed salad consisted of baby arugula, baby frisee, sections of grapefruit, slivers of cucumber and, according to the menu, Sicilian pistachios. The richness of my veal and goat cheese terrine was balanced by the slight bitterness of the watercress; all of this was draped by a light green sauce made of parsley pureed with a bit of garlic and olive oil.

More diners ought to order the baekeoffe, though I understand that many people are put off by the idea of tripe. Our waiter told us that chef Kreuther treats the tripe in three different processes over three days to ensure its tenderness and almost custardy texture. The dish is presented in a ramekin with a crust of breadcrumbs; the sauce that encloses the lamb, conch and tripe is deeply flavorful. It was a great dish for a chilly, rainy day.

My squid wrapped in pancetta like neatly tied presents were skewered on a shaft of rosemary. I’m not a true believer in the cuisine of foams and gels, and in relation to the grilled squid and the rice cake under them, the Parmesan foam was largely superfluous; better just to have shaved a few slivers of Parmesan onto the squid.

Still, that’s a quibble. This was a terrific lunch, capped off with two cups of excellent espresso. We would definitely go back, and since we visit MOMA every time we’re in NYC, we’ll probably eat there again soon.

The Museum of Modern Art is at 9 West 53rd Street. The number of The Modern’s Bar Room is (212) 333-1220. The Bar Room opens at 11:30 a.m. daily and closes at 10:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday, and 9:30 p.m., Sunday. Menus and wine list are available at themodernnyc.com.

This routine happened to us at a restaurant last night. It’s becoming a common occurrence. This is one of those steak and chop houses where a strip steak is $39 and a rib-eye is $42 and everything else is a la carte.

We’re seated at the table. One waiter brings water and says, “You’re waiter will be here in a moment.” So the official waiter comes, says hello, my name is whatever and I’ll be taking care of you tonight — taking care of us? — hands each of us a menu and puts the wine list on the table.

“May I start you off with a cocktail or a glass of wine?” he asks.

I say, “No, we’ll look at the wine list and the menu.”

So he ambles off and we look at the menu, compare ideas about what we might order and what kind of wine we’re in the mood for. Usually LL and I order either fish or red meat so one bottle of white or red wine will do. So we’re mulling these things over, and I’m looking at the wine list, and the moments flee by, and LL says, “We haven’t gotten any bread.” Indeed, we have not. And she adds, “I wonder if there are any specials we should know about.” Indeed, we have not been told about any specials.

The waiter shows up finally and asks, “Have you had a chance to select your wine?”

I say, “Well, yes, but could we have some bread?”

He looks amazed. “Well,” he says, “don’t you want to order the wine first?”

And I say, “No, the wine is to go with dinner, and when the wine comes we’ll want some bread to go with it.” So off he goes to bring us some bread.

Which he does, and then we order the wine, and then he has to go get the wine and then he opens the wine and goes through all the folderol and THEN we get around to the matter of reciting the specials and ordering dinner.

By now, a time zone has slipped away to the east. Friends, life is too short to sit in restaurants where the preferred method of business is to get the cocktails and wine on the table as fast as possible and get patrons good and oiled before allowing them to decide what they want to eat or even bringing them some bread with which to buffer their stomachs.

It’s not — to be fair — the waiter’s fault. He was only doing what management tells him to do. But, lord love a duck, isn’t it enough that we’re paying $60 or so each for dinner? Must we be led down the path of inebriation too?

Waiter image from images.inmagine.com.

… is food poisoning. Which felled first me and then LL after we dined Thursday night at a new restaurant I was reviewing. Yes, a restaurant’s worst nightmare: The dining critic gets food poisoning. It ain’t a pretty circumstance for the diner either, lemme tell you, after about eight hours of cramps, violent vomiting and, um, other explosive eruptions. Needless to say, I missed work Friday and lay prostrate most of Saturday, weak, exhausted and, for some reason, aching all over. I did keep down some scrambled eggs and toast last night and I had my tea and toast for breakfast this morning; as I write this post I’m eating soda crackers and sipping ginger ale. LL took care of me until Saturday evening, when she said, “You know, I’ve been feeling pretty queasy since this afternoon.” Yep, it hit her too.

The culprit? Either the crab cakes with remoulade sauce or the calves liver I ordered. LL had a tiny bite of each; I finished off the rest. Did the food sit out too long? Had it not been refrigerated adequately? Was it already spoiled when it came from the purveyor? The point is that somewhere along the line, someone wasn’t careful enough.

Now, here’s the dilemma. Do I out the place? A charge of food poisoning can kill a restaurant. Do I review the restaurant as if nothing had happened? Call the restaurant to let them know? Drop the review altogether or wait a few months? I confess to not being keen about going back soon.

It’s interesting, in a way, that in 20 years of reviewing restaurants for my newspaper — 20 years this coming January — I have never been stricken with food poisoning. What are the odds? I’ve had plenty of bad or bizarre meals, but never this. The problem is, there’s no defense; even tainted food, I now understand, can taste fine, but once you’ve swallowed it, you’re done for.

So, excuse me, but I’m actually not feeling quite up to scratch.

When we were in New York last month, it was unseasonably and oppressively hot for the first couple of days. Then, on Wednesday, it cooled off wonderfully, turning crisp and fall-like, a perfect day to tromp around Chelsea and look at art. Which we did until about 1 o’clockwhen, famished for lunch, we dropped in at Tia Pol Bar de Tapas, a narrow, deep store-front establishment where on this fine day that French doors to the sidewalk were flung wide open.

Chelsea may have been the center of New York’s contemporary art world for more than a decade, but it’s still tough to find a place to get a decent lunch. We have eaten at Empire Diner, right across the street from Tia Pol, many times and were heartily tired of it. Likewise Botino, the old stand-by of the Art Crowd.

So it was a great pleasure to take two stools at the corner of the marble-topped bar at Tia Pol, close to the open front of the restaurant, where we could sit and watch the world and the traffic and the walkers and their dogs go by. Turns out there’s a three-course prix fixe lunch for $16. We couldn’t pass that up! Since there were two choices for each course, we ordered everything. And glasses of sangria, red wine chilled with a few ice cubes and containing a modest amount of diced apple and lemon, so the sangria was completely not sweet and not overwhelmingly fruity. It was incredibly refreshing.

Now the $16 three-course lunch is, one understands, a simple affair. First, gazpacho or blistered gernika green peppers tossed with sea salt. Second, squid with rice in a squid ink sauce or a “po’boy” with crisp squid, aioli, tomato and lettuce. Third, a Fuji apple or a dish of ice cream. Simple, yes, but well-prepared and tasty all around, even to that fresh, crisp Fuji apple.

You can see it the top image that the gazpacho was an attractive reddish-orange color and that it was pureed almost smooth, except for a couple of pieces of tomato; it was delicious. The roasted and blistered peppers were hot, salty and earthy. Squid in its ink is not the most photogenic dish on earth, as you can see, but it was tasty (and fairly chewy), while the sandwich was pretty hearty and down-to-earth. The apple, the vanilla ice cream. Everything was delightful and well-worth the price.

Next time you’re doing the art tour of Chelsea — and don’t take that assignment lightly, we covered only two streets that day — treat Tia Pol as your canteen and oasis. I know that we’ll be back.

Tia Pol is at 205 10th Avenue. Lunch is noon to 3 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; dinner is 5:30 to 11 p.m., Monday through Thursday, 5:30 to midnight Friday, 6 to midnight Saturday and 6 to 10:30 Sunday. Call (212) 675-8805 or visit tiapol.com, where the lunch and dinner menus are displayed.

Six of us gathered last Tuesday for dinner at Falai, a small, sleek, irresistible Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was my second visit, having eaten there back in March. The diners were LL and me, our friend Julie (with whom we stayed for part of last week), Terence Hughes of mondosapore fame and his longtime partner Ken, and Gabrio Tosti, the irrepressible owner of the fine little (mainly) Italian wine store De Vino, one block north of Falai on Clinton Street. We were joined later — hours later; it was a long riotous meal — by Gian Luigi Maravalle, proprietor of Tenuta Vitalonga in western Umbria, whose plane was late and whose luggage was lost.

Chef at the restaurant is Iacopo Falai, whose talent is for taking traditional ingredients of northern Italian cuisine, adding a sly inventive touch here and a sly inventive touch there and coming up with food that is delicious and memorable without being cute and tricky. After quite a bit of discussion and diplomacy, the table decided to order the prix fixe menu; here were the choices — Antipasto: Polenta Bianca (chicken liver, dried dates and wild mushrooms “Vellutata”) OR baby octopus with fresh celery, string beans, Granny Smith apples, American caviar. Pasta: Gnudi of ricotta cheese, baby spinach, brown butter, crema di latte, sage. Carne/Pesce: Manzo (petit filet, butternut squash and orange puree, blood orange fennel salad) OR Branzino (potato-wrapped sea-bass, leek, white asparagus, huckleberry sauce). Dolce: passion fruit souffle. Four courses for $55. Some members of our party tried to negotiate a menu without the gnudi, and the efficient, amenable and incredibly, infinitely patient manager Jiordona — pictured here with Terry Hughes (in his usual serious mood) — even offered such a deal at $50, but in the end, everyone got all the courses.

We began by quickly downing a bottle of the crisp, floral and delightful Ronco delle Betulle Tocai Friulano 2005 from the restaurant’s wine list ($44). After that, we consumed five bottles, two that I brought and three brought in by Gabrio. The first of Gabrio’s wines — and we pretty much scarfed this down too — was a new rosé, the fresh, delicate and tasty Whispering Angel 2006 — everybody who thinks that’s a terrible name raise your hand! — from Chateau d’Esclans in the Côtes de Provence; Sacha Lichine bought the property in 2006. This dry rosé offers whispers of crushed raspberries and strawberries and feathery hints of stones and dried flowers for pleasing effect. The high-concept label is attractive, the wine retails for about $22, and it’s the only rosé that Gabrio sells.

We drank these gentle opening salvos during talk and bread — Iacopo Falai is a former pasty chef, and the breads are excellent — and appetizers, of which the octopus got best marks. You can see from the image how great the plate looked. The baby octopus was exceedingly tender — it’s boiled first and then grilled — and the curl of celery and the slender batons of apple provided crisp contrasts in texture and fresh flavors. Not that the Polenta Bianca was any slouch. Indeed the combination of the creamy chicken livers and slightly crusty polenta with the sweet fruitiness of the dates and wild earthiness of the mushrooms was heady and flavorful, but the dish was definitely rustic compared to the finesse of the octopus.

Next came the gnudi, a carefully shaped oval-like nest of ricotto cheese and shredded, cooked spinach bathed in a nutty brown butter sauce with a touch of cream; leaning against this delicate construct was one sage leaf. Rich and creamy, these gnudi disappeared into our mouths in about three minutes, leaving us wishing that they had not vanished so quickly.

I picked up a bottle of Domaine Leccia Petra Bianca Patrimonio 1998 ($25) at Crossroads Wines & Liquors on 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues at the suggestion of Nicolas Palazzi, who is French through and through yet bears the name of his father and honorable ancestors from Corsica. The Palazzi family owns Bordeaux properties in Cotes de Bourg, Entre-Deux-Mers and Graves, and Nicolas lives in New York nine months a year trying to market the wines. Anyway, he and I are email correspondents, and he, mindful of his Corsican heritage, had delved through the stock at the totally eccentric and treasure-filled wine store, found this wine and sent out a bulletin. “Petra Bianca” refers not to the wine’s color — it’s red, made from 100 percent niellucciu grapes — but to the chalky clay soil that nurtures the vineyards of Corsica’s Patrimonio region. The wine was imported by Kermit Lynch in Berkeley, Ca.

I’ll confess that I didn’t love the wine, though it was very interesting. It opened with whiffs of cedar and eucalyptus, scents of walnuts and walnut shell, dried spice and brown sugar, the sign of a mature red. In the mouth, the wine was dense and chewy, formidably tannic and sporting a startling hit of acid. It smoothed out and became more palatable in 15 or 20 minutes, but the whole time it was in my glass I kept thinking, “What happened to the fruit?” Of course, it’s nine years old; it would be instructive to try more recent vintages.

By this time, of course, our entrees had arrived. When I dined at Falai in March, I had ordered the manzo, asking for it to be cooked to medium rare, but what came to the table was medium or more. This time I ordered the beef rare, so it came to me at a perfect medium rare temperature and rosy-red color. The preparation at the end of the winter included parsnip puree, red wine-cooked shallots and wild mushrooms and a Marsala-truffle sauce; more in keeping with the season — and it was hot in New York last week — the petit filet came with a butternut squash and orange puree and a blood orange-fennel salad. It was a sumptuous yet completely balanced and appropriate presentation. I did not, alas — or I don’t remember, alas — tasting the branzino.

Next we opened the Rosso Ca’ de Merlo 1998 from Guiseppe Quintarelli, who is often called the “Master of the Veneto” or the “King of the Veneto.” This is the kind of wine that at first sniff and sip you say, “Well, here’s a once in a lifetime opportunity,” meaning that in completely the best way. This wine also came from Crossroads and cost about $76; it was imported by Robert Chadderton in New York. Despite the name, the wine has nothing to do with the merlot grape. It is, essentially, a sort of super-Valpolicella, made from corvino grapes (taken from a single hillside vineyard) in the traditional ripasso method in which the wine undergoes a second fermentation on the skins of the dried grapes used to make Amarone wines, thus providing additional strength and tannin. Nothing tannic here, however; the Rosso Ca’ de Merlo ‘98 was lovely, smooth and mellow, subtle and supple, composed of black cherry, currant and plum flavors deeply infused with dried spice, potpourri and black tea with touches of moss and clean earth. What a treat!

Not to be outdone, Gabrio rushed back to his store and returned with a bottle of the Merlanico d’Orta de Conciliis 2000, a Vino da Tavola (two-thirds merlot, one-third aglianico) produced by Lombardy’s Barone Giulio Pizzini Piomarta; the importer is Vignaioli Selections in New York. The price at Gabrio’s store is $150. This is, frankly, a stunning wine, deep and rich and flavorful, and it gets deeper and richer and more flavorful as moments pass. It opens beautifully, warmly in the glass, offering notes of cedar and tobacco, leather, toasted hazelnuts and wheatmeal, black currants and plums with hints of wild berry, earth and minerals. Retaining considerable tannins, the wine is dense and chewy, packed with spicy wood, yet generously supplied with black and red fruit flavors, that wane as the large and fairly austere finish takes over. And what a match for the medium rare beef filet!

By this time Maravalle had arrived, sans luggage and sans vino for us to try, so again Gabrio rushed over to his store to get something from Tenuta Vitalonga. He returned with a bottle of Terra di Confine 2004, a blend of 80 percent montepulciano grapes and 20 percent merlot. As Maravalle pointed out, this is a young wine from young grapes, planted only four years ago, so we were not surprised that the wine was bold and brash, wild and robust, bursting with currants, plums and dark-chocolate-covered raspberries nestled in dense, leathery tannins. Another wine destined for pairing with hearty red meat dishes, it sells for $25. I would try it from 2008 or ‘09 through 2012 or ‘14.

Were we finished?

With wine, yes, but not with dinner, because dessert came, a sumptuous, luxurious, yet light-hearted passion fruit souffle.

And then we gathered our gear, our notes, our bags and shuffled out of Falai, by far the last to leave, hoping against hope that we wouldn’t have hangovers the next day.

Falai is at 68 Clinton Street, near Rivington. Call (212) 253-1960.
De Vino is at 30 Clinton Street. Call (212) 228-0073 or visit de-vino.com.

The top image of the restaurant, shot from behind the small bar area looking toward the back, is by Jeremy Liebman for New York magazine. The rest of the images in Falai were shot by LL or FK.

The waiter comes to the table to ask if we want coffee. The usual discussion ensues: What types of coffee does the restaurant offer, are all the choices available in regular and decaf and so on. The waiter takes the orders and then asks, “Will you be needing cream and sugar with that?”

What happened to the days when an order for coffee meant that the waiter automatically brought to the table a little tray that held the cream and sugar and the other accessories with which we decorate or alter our coffee? The service would take different forms. In a diner, you would be brought a little metal pitcher for cream or milk and a little metal canister, usually holding sugar or sugar-substitute packets. In a fine restaurant, a silver tray might hold a silver bowl of sugar cubes, while the milk or cream pitcher would also be silver and have a lid. These luxuries fascinated me when I was a child, especially the sugar cubes wrapped in paper, because when you unwrapped them, the paper kept its tiny neat folds and you could play games with it. Not that my family went out to eat in restaurants frequently, or ever.

Anyway, before I get all teary-eyed with nostalgia and fantasies about lost childhoods, let me say that the seemingly polite question that we hear so often now in restaurants, “Do you need cream and sugar with that?” is merely another way in which restaurants abdicate their responsibilities toward good service and erect a wall of faux-etiquette between waiters and customers.

And then the check comes. Now obviously the vast majority of checks in restaurants are paid by credit card; that’s the way of the world and the expense account. But occasionally I’ll pay with cash, slipping those greenbacks between the covers of the fake leather booklet. What happens nowadays is that the waiter picks up the book, turns slightly and then says, “Will you need change back from this?”

Well, honey, it’s not a negotiation. That question, disguised as polite concern and a way to save you, the customer, time, is such a naked plea for a tip that the waiter might as well get down on his or her knees and say, “Please, please, please!” It’s really a form of intimidation. Why take time to figure out a proper tip, is the theme: I’ll just keep the rest of the money.

No, waiters, take the booklet the way you’re supposed to, keep yer mouth shut, except to smile pleasantly, and bring back the change. Then the diner can figure out the tip and leave the appropriate amount.

Yes, I know, waiters have a hard life, and I’m not being ironic about this — all you have to do is listen to their horrific tales to understand — and, I hasten to add, the points I gripe about in this post are not the fault of the waiters; these are management decisions to deliberately diminish the quality of service.

But the tone of a restaurant, the pace of the meal, the cordial yet detached relationship between waiter and patron, the unspoken yet always fulfilling round of little details that comfort and assuage: These all need to be maintained in order for diners to have a successful experience in a restaurant, whether chomping on a grilled cheese sandwich at Mom ‘n’ Pop’s Road House or slicing into foie gras at La Maison de Upper Crust.

Service with a smile, dude!

Image of the happy waiter is from ckm2005.ucsd.edu.

I recently received a link to the website of a new restaurant in Cambridge, Mass. This is T.W. Food, an amalgam of such vibrant dedication, preciousness and (it looks like) sheer genius that it makes one dizzy just to read about it. The restaurant is the brain-child of Tim Wiechmann, the chef, and his wife Bronwyn, the manager. They are young (33 and 29) and seem to be energetic, gifted and ferociously sincere. The premise is ingredients and wines that range from simple organic to bio-dynamic and the creation of dishes that reflect synergy among ingredients, locality and wine. The philosophy (or slogan) is “From Seed to Plate,” with a focus on “sustainable and fairly treated ingredients.” The skeptic in me, I’m almost ashamed to admit, says, “How unfairly can you treat a potato.” (O.K., that’s unfair; the menu looks fabulous.)

The menu changes every day, at least a portion of the menu, and is supposed to be posted to the website (twfoodrestaurant) by 10 a.m. The offerings are limited: five starters and a selection of oysters; six entrees and three six-course “chef decides” tasting menus, one vegetarian; three desserts and a selection of cheeses. Prices range from $10 to $15 for starters, $25 to $30 for entrees (tasting menus are $55 — one is vegetarian — or $85 with wine), and $8 for dessert.

Check out the website to see what the intriguing food is like — the menu is heavy on the earnest descriptive style of the 1990s — because what I really want to focus on is the unique wine policy.

Now we’ve all dined in restaurants that field impressive or even oppressive wine lists that sport page after page of chardonnays from all over the world and cabernet sauvignon-based wines from all the world with an emphasis on the Big Names and Labels anointed by ratings of 90 and above from The Wine Spectator and The Wine Advocate. Such profusion makes it difficult to chose a wine for dinner, even for the experienced though perhaps not wealthy patron.

The wine list at T.W. Food begins from completely the opposite direction, offering one sparkling wine, eight white wines, 11 reds, seven desserts wines (six by the glass only) and four reserve wines. The emphasis is on the producer, not the number of wines the list can boast or the roster of Usual Suspects.

In whites, there are a chardonnay and semillon from L’Ecole No. 41 in Washington; two Savennieres, a Quarts-de-Chaume and a sparkling rose from Donaine de Baumard in the Loire Valley; a gruner veltliner and a riesling from Anton Bauer in Austria, and a Premier Cru and Grand Cru Chablis from Domaine William Fevre.

Reds include two pinot noirs and a cabernet sauvignon from Babcock Vineyards in Santa Barbara and a charbono and a merlot from Coturri in the Sonoma Valley; a Cotes-du-Rhone Villages, a Croze-Hermitage and a Chateauneud-du-Pape from Tardieu-Laurent; and, from Chateau de Roquefort in Cotes-de-Provence, a rose, a Bouches de Rhone and a Cotes-de-Provence.

That’s it. Prices range from $39 to $94, with most being in the $40s to $60s. About half the wines are available by the glass, at prices ranging from $9 to $11. What a refreshing and respectful approach to pairing wine with a restaurant’s signature cuisine and to promoting the work of individual producers.

Then there’s the reserve list. Naturally, the prices are fairly high: Heitz Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2001, $125; Domaine Bouchard Pere et Fils Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru 1997, $180; Chateau Haut-Brion 1998, $240; Chateau d’Yquem 1997, $320.

Here’s the deal though: The prices for the four reserve wines represent the wholesale prices the restaurant paid to acquire them. For patrons at T.W. Food who want to experience these wines with the restaurant’s fare, they are available at the restaurant’s cost. There’s no mark-up, as the website says, “Not a penny.”

I have never heard of a restaurant willing to do that. Sure, the biggest mark-ups tend to come in the lower to middle price range of the wine list, and the restaurant isn’t giving the reserve wines away, but still, it’s not making money on them. You will have to decide for yourselves if this policy is a sign of preciousness or integrity, or perhaps it’s both. In any case, it’s extraordinary.

This was mentioned in The New York Times food section last week, a “carpaccio of tomatoes.”

Now friends, you may slice a tomato thick or you may slice it thin, but no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still just a sliced tomato. And a sliced grapefruit — not an easy matter anyway — is not a “carpaccio of grapefruit,” which I have seen on menus; it’s just a sliced grapefruit.

Most people who love food, especially Italian food, know that beef Carpaccio is a dish that consists of paper-thin slices of raw beef served with olive oil, arugula and Parmesan cheese. It was invented by Giuseppe Cipriani of Harry’s Bar in Venice and named after the great Venetian artist Vittori Carpaccio (1460?-1525/6). The point is, I mean my point is, that “carpaccio” is not a technique; it’s a dish, which could (one grants) have some acceptable range of variation — one pictured here has truffles, which seems like over-kill — but still must necessarily operate within its proper sphere. I could see lamb Carpaccio, for example, treated in the regular manner, but I have also been served shrimp Carpaccio and octopus Carpaccio, and I would say that those concepts are beyond the pale.

Today, you see, carpaccio has become the new napoleon. What I mean is that 10 to 15 or more years ago, witty (or desperate) chefs expanded the notion of the luxurious dessert called a napoleon — layers of puff pastry alternating with pastry cream, whipped cream or jam and topped with fondant icing, traditionally with combed brown and white stripes — to mean any group of ingredients stacked in layers. Hence, lobster napoleons, hence sweetbread and foie gras napoleons. The limit, for me, was reached at La Maison Blanche, in Paris, in March 1990, where I was served a “napoleon” that stacked, carefully, eel with eggplant and zucchini. Sorry, but that sounds like vertical ratatouille to me.

(What I chiefly remember about the restaurant is that a large white German shepherd-like dog was sleeping right inside the front door, blocking the way in or out. Nobody paid attention; they just stepped over the dog. The French are sort of lovable after all.)

The connection between the dessert and the short Corsican conqueror seems to be the remarkable resemblance that the pastry napoleon bears to Napoleon’s Tomb at Les Invalides. Ha-ha, no, I made that up, it’s probably an association with napolitain, the French adjective for Naples.

All right, F.K., you’re saying, you’re on one of your tears again.

Well, hell, yes, of course, because words have meanings and they matter, and the names of things, the names by which we know them — napoleons and carpaccio — have meanings and they matter. When those words and names are blurred and forgotten, we have lost something irreplaceable. When some master chef of the “Slicing and Dicing” class at the Culinary Institute of America blithely says, “O.K., apprentices, carpaccio those tomatoes for me and napoleon them on the plates,” we have doomed ourselves a little.

I’m just trying to keep that from happening quite so soon.

The image of the beef carpaccio at top is from abc.net.au; the second carpaccio (with truffles) is from atmospherebistro.com. The napoleon is from grahamdavies.net; Napoelon’s tomb is from sagarmatha.com. Thanks to all.

If Freud did not ask “What do young people want?” he should have.

Attempting to answer that question, if only in terms of attitudes about wine and wine consumption — at least one thing that young people want being lots of booze — is this report, “20-25 Year-Olds and Wine,” commissioned by VINEXPO and carried out by the firm of Brulé, Ville & Associés. According to the press release from VINEXPO, the gargantuan wine fair held every year in Bordeaux, BVA surveyed two groups of 10 people in the United States, France, Japan, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, “male and female, students and professionals, independent and living with parents.” all “occasional drinkers.” That’s — um, quick calculation in the head — 100 people. The margin of error here must be about a zillion percent, but let’s go with the results anyway.

Following Gen X and Gen Y — what happened to poor Gen Z? — this demographic of 20 to 25 year-olds is called (or, PR-wise, has been dubbed) the Millennials, presumably because the oldest of them turned 20 in 2001 or so.

The first factor to mention is that attitudes toward wine among the youth of American and the youth of Europe differ markedly. In the U.S., those surveyed indicated not only that they are “not very familiar with wine” and that wine was only “occasionally served in their families” but that wine consumption and knowledge were features of “European culture.” The youth of France and Belgium, on the other hand, know enough about wine to understand its various authentic images: the “noble chateau and grand estate” and the “rustic, countryside farmer who makes his own wine.”

All those surveyed, or at least the countries in general, agreed that wine does not possess a “young image” (as opposed to, say, an oil-drum filled with Purple Passion) and that “the classic wine drinker is older” — get this — “30 or 35-40 with experience, comfortable income and married.” Wine consumers are “refined, educated and cultivated,” as assessment with which, of course, I heartily concur.

In fact, the youth of all five countries surveyed in the report expressed a certain sense of longing, saying that wine drinking is “mature,” that people who drink wine have entered “an older world,” that wine drinkers seem “more responsible,” and that — and here’s the crux — wine drinking is a sign that “you’re getting better behaved and less wild.” The alternatives seem to be a dinner party at which well-dressed and mannerly people drink various fine wines with their courses and chat about art, death, love and time OR knocking back a quart of Red Bull mixed with Ecstasy and disappearing into the Behavioral Sink for a weekend.

The prospect of drinking wine, however sophisticated, does bring anxieties. Wine is “difficult to select” said the responders to the survey because there is “too much diversity,” there are “too many brands and styles,” you never know “what a wine is going to taste like” and — the opening of the abyss — “you can make mistakes.” One sees the headline: “Restaurant Empties After Youth Orders Beaujolais with Thai Hot Wings/Ex-Girlfriend Vows: ‘He’ll Never Hear from Me Again’.”

Branding, on the other hand, can be an attractive advantage, especially for the Millennials of Japan and the U.S. It’s not surprising that youth in the Land of the Rising Sun and their counterparts in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave would be equally interested in “packaging designed for young people” and “promotions with goodies and cool advertising,” nor that they would be “open to something new” such as “different bottle shapes and colors.” Japanese and American pop and consumer cultures have existed as carnivalesque distorting mirrors of each other since the 1960s: We have Courtney Love, they have Hello, Kitty; they have Godzilla, we have Don Imus.

It’s difficult for me to believe, though, that labels like Three Blind Moose and Bitch — Bitch is actually pretty great — will draw young people to wine consumption in droves. Critter labels and chick labels and trailer park labels are promotional fads and have little to do with actually learning about wine and how to enjoy it.

Those youthful snobs in the U.K., by the way, trying to maintain old standards despite the Everlasting Loss of the Empire (and hoping to inherit their fathers’ wine cellars) believe that branding “must not be obviously targeted toward young people” and that the “serious, traditional side of wine” must be conserved.

What does all of this commentary mean or reveal?

Young people want to like wine. Drinking wine makes them feel good about themselves, grown-up, responsible, mature. The whole culture of wine and matching wine with food, though, is confusing: So many grapes, so many kinds and styles of wine, so many countries, regions, labels, brands.

This is where restaurants need to step in. Oh certainly you can have a retail store put together a case of 12 different wines for you and you can invest in one or some of the numerous wine guides that are available. I recommend both of these steps.

But I think that restaurants need to be far more consumer-friendly in their wine lists and approaches to offering and recommending wine with meals. Wine lists need to be shorter, less expensive and more useful at matching the wines on the list with specific dishes on the menu, without being coy or cute. Waiters need to try harder to help diners select wine and not simply leave the list on the table. If you’re in a bistro-style restaurant, for example, order a roasted chicken and ask the waiter to help you choose a glass of a medium-bodied chardonnay and a medium-bodied pinot noir, see how those work together and decide what works best with your palate. Of course this situation means that waiters need to be thoroughly trained about the wine list and the menu, too, and pairing the food and wine, and that process takes time; I bet, though, that it would lead to bigger tips.

The image of carousing youth is from montrosechina.com.