Terroir!

Last Friday night, Miyoko and I braved the rain and headed out to a trendy new wine bar in the East Village - Terroir. It's so new it doesn't have a phone line yet. That's how cool we are. I first read about it here on Serious Eats and it sounded really good, so when Miyoko and I decided to have dinner, this was the first place I thought of. Ed Levine on Serious Eats really liked it, so it had a lot to live up to. I started with a wine cocktail (they're too close to a school to serve hard liquor, but they have cute wine mixed drinks). It was good, it had ginger beer and it was nice and bubbly.

We ordered a lot of food. The bartender gave us a funny look, but we soldiered on anyways. Here's our first bit of food: Calamari salad with smoked chickpeas, garlic, lemon, parsley and chili.


It was really good. It had a nice clean taste and the chickpeas were well cooked - not mushy or undercooked either. The pictures aren't great because I was too embarrassed to use the flash and I tried to surreptitiously take pictures without anyone noticing....so yeah. That's how it goes. Here's our Beet risotto balls with Gorgonzola, which came under the heading "Fried Things."


Here's one that I split open. Yummy!


We got a chicken liver bruschetta as well, but I forgot to take a picture of it. Now here comes my favorite of everything we ordered - Veal and Ricotta Meatballs.


Aaah! They were so good - warm and savory and the sauce was to die for. They gave us some bread to sop it up with. I highly recommend this dish.

We ended with two 3 oz glasses of sparkling wine (you can get 3 oz glasses, 6 oz glasses or a bottle. I liked that) and a chocolate budino with candied hazelnuts on top. My pictures didn't come out well, so you'll have to take my word that it was great. It reminded me of really thick nutella.

I'd go here again! The food was great. I can't say too much about the wine (since I don't know much about wine) but the wine list is an entire binder of choices, so there must be something worth having. The drinks that I had were both very enjoyable. So go out and eat!