A Birthday Dinner at Claud
We all have embarrassing things that we do in our lives where, if there were a documentary crew following us around, we’d ask them to leave the room while we engaged in our secret behavior. Such would be the case had anyone been watching me plan my birthday dinner this week in New York. I spent hours — days, even — on Resy making reservations, second guessing reservations, recalculating goals, reconsidering aesthetics, until I’d booked and unbooked about seven different places before settling on Claud in the East Village.
The inspiration came from David Lebovitz, who raved about his dinner there when we had lunch at Fish Cheeks a few months ago. Looking at the menu, I liked that it was eclectic, somewhat upscale, without being over-the-top fancy. (My first dinner choice, Le Coucou, where I went back in 2017, seemed a bit too lavish for a Monday night.) Claud, on the other hand, has a modest, sophisticated feel to it. It reminded me of some of the cooler bistros I went to in Paris.
Our seats were at the bar and it was a great spot to watch all of the action. We’d pre-gamed at The Clover Club in Brooklyn (a bit too enthusiastically: I was two cocktails in) yet we still felt obligated —okay, inspired — to order a bottle of wine. The bartender/waiter heard what food we were going to get and suggested this Spanish red because it was “fun.” We like fun! And indeed it was simultaneously lightly textured and boldly flavored, acidic enough for food but fruity enough to dazzle on its own.
As for the food, we started with kampachi which was clean-tasting and perfectly sliced, but not something I’d write a sonnet about or anything. However, I would write a sonnet about these squash fritters which came out piping hot and dusted with copious amounts of Pecorino.
In Chinese cooking, there’s the concept of “wok hay” — or the breath of the wok — and I think the same thing happens with a deep-fryer. It’s that sensation that you get when the food immediately leaves its cooking vessel and enters your mouth. There’s an energy to it and an excitement that’s impossible to replicate if any extra time passes. If you ordered these fritters to-go, they wouldn’t be nearly as praise-worthy when you got them home.
My favorite dish of the night was one of Claud’s signature dishes: the chicken liver agnolotti.
Though some people squirm at the idea of liver, it’s one of my favorite cooking ingredients because it’s so naturally rich and intensely flavored. Imagine chicken liver mousse, then, stuffed into pasta, tossed in butter, and then drizzled with reduced balsamic and you’ll get what all the fuss is about here. This is one of those restaurant dishes that you could ostensibly make at home, but never would because it would take so much time… this is why we’re lucky to have chefs.
For our main course, we shared the duck which came with a fruit that I’m 90% sure was cherries? (I can’t find the menu online, just the wine list. Did I mention that I was two cocktails in + wine?)
While this was a more traditional restaurant dish, it was still pretty extraordinary. The combination of tart fruit and perfectly rare duck with some kind of greenery and sauce hit all the right spots. The presentation — which you can see above — was both homey and arty, that perfect sweet spot of modern dining.
For dessert, there was no way I wasn’t getting the famous $22 slice of chocolate cake which Helen Rosner in The New Yorker described as: “a wedge of darkness, six layers of night-black devil’s-food cake alternating with strata of an intense and creamy ganache.”
I hemmed and hawed over my birthday dinner, but that single slice of cake — an event in and of itself — was proof that I absolutely made the right decision. The sea salt on there? And those layers of ganache? A dream come true. Thank you Claud for making my 45th (gulp) birthday so special. Now where to go for my 46th?
