Fifi’s Cultural Smorgasbord: Mardi Gras, Giant Buddhas

Admit it. It’s a hassle to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. More fuss to get yourself to Rio for Carnival.

Fun as these annual over-the-top parties are, the throngs and chaos through which you must wander in search of fun diminishes their enjoyment.

Here’s a better idea: Have some fun without the stress in Newport Beach at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse Annual Mardi Gras Celebration. Save Feb. 8 for a most interesting dinner with some stellar South American wines and cuisine. The restaurant promises a Carnival-worthy party.

In addition to the unique menu, this festive occasion features live music, party favors and more. The most intriguing opportunity for the evening is the chance to “discover” superb vintages from the South American region that are regarded by many experts as evolving trends in wine.

The five-course dinner’s featured wines include Uruguay’s 2000 Vina Progreso Gran Reserva, the Chilean 2002 Veranda Chardonnay and two selections from Argentina, the 2002 BenMarco Malbec and a luscious dessert wine, Santa Julia, Torrontes Tardio Viognier Mendoza Argentina, 2002-03.

Appetizers for the evening are yucca stuffed with spicy chicken and pastry shells filled with crab, artichoke, pancetta and mushrooms. Creamy shrimp bisque is the soup course, followed by pork osso buco. Main course is Tenderloin of beef with crawfish sauce and dessert of puff pastry filled with seasonal fruit and topped with cr & #269;me anglaise is the finale.

At $85 per person, excluding tax and gratuity, the price is right. And the food- and wine-matching certainly show the restaurant is dedicated to giving us a different and delicious kind of adventure. Let’s party!

The Mardi Gras dinner starts at 6:30 p.m. Please call (949) 720-9633 for reservations. Fleming’s is at 455 Newport Center Drive in Fashion Island.

Zen and Paninis

On the spot that used to house a Coco’s on MacArthur Boulevard in Newport Beach, there now is a brand new building with two diverse restaurants, Caffe Panini and Ten Asian Bistro & Sushi, both owned by the same corporate partners.

The restaurants only are days old and finishing touches on exteriors and landscaping just are being completed. But the interiors are done and customers were plentiful enough when we visited. We’ve not yet tried the food at this Panini, though we know something about it since there’s the original Panini on Pacific Coast Highway in Corona del Mar. We have dined at Ten Asian Bistro, an amazing Zen-sensitive space that exudes peace and beauty with food encompassing of the cuisines of China, Korea and Thailand on the minimal side and lots of sushi/sashimi/house dishes on the laden side.

My first reaction was that the architects of Ten Asian Bistro had indeed visited Tao in Manhattan and Koi in Los Angeles, both gorgeous spaces whose Zen demeanor is built around strong Asian and Buddha themes.

Our first impressions of Ten Asian Bistro have us believing that we’ll be spending serene time here, perhaps more at lunch when there’s no bar or lounge crowd and there’s more serenity.

Consider Ten Asian Bistro a Wow! visual experience. First of all, Buddhas dominate. They represent the cultural perception of Buddha from China, Japan, Thailand, India, Indonesia and possibly other countries. As you enter the front door, there’s a life-size Buddha and two Thai Buddhas on either side of the shallow step-down into the main dining room.

A 16-foot-tall Buddha dominates the main dining room. It sits atop the sushi bar ceiling. Beneath ceilings of black, the walls behind the showcase Buddha are metallic in color and resemble giant rectangular blocks. The sushi bar under this panorama has 18 black leather bar stools that blend with walls of black pebbles, part of which becomes a water feature. To the side of this already impressive display is a hallway connector to Panini that is painted cinnabar red with several niches in it, each of which houses a Buddha or icon of some sort and a few decorative Asian vases.

The dining room seating is at black tables surrounded with black chairs with red velvet seats. This same Chinese red velvet upholsters a long banquette on one wall. A Japanese shoji screen sits in one corner of the room, giving a fantastic slash of citrus green color corralled by the black shoji framing. I love the sub-context of the modern jazz music that plays background to all this.

The menus stay tuned to the theme: iridescent covers in red for lunch and black for dinner. Within, there’s not much variation in price between the two. As for content, the main difference is that the lunch menu has an added section of salads, inasmuch as they are such common midday fare.

Otherwise, on one side of the menu there’s an appetizer section headed by lobster pancakes with coconut curry sauce, edamame, miso soup, lettuce wraps and such. The dim sum section touts shrimp and pea shoot dumplings, scallop sieu mai, filet mignon won tons and lobster spring rolls among the choices.

The sea category features soy glazed salmon (akin to a teriyaki style preparation), crispy honey shrimp (they serve jumbo prawns for all their shrimp dishes), scallops, toro tuna, sea bass and catfish. Five Asian-influenced versions of steak and lamb make up the meat category, along with the two kinds of chicken and crispy duck, the latter fowl all of Chinese persuasion and of the least interest to me. It’s the sushi/sashimi and the land and sea entr & #233;es that fascinate.

The left side of the menu is completely the realm of the sushi chefs, half a dozen of them who stand behind that impressive black sushi bar in their pristine chefs’ whites. Many of the items can be ordered hand rolled or cut, or in lieu of sushi can be ordered as the sashimi alone. You will find every kind of popular sushi seafood and shellfish represented. All are assiduously prepared and presented with loads of eye appeal and some are downright fascinating in their preparation.

One of the gourmet treats of Asian cuisine exists in dishes that make use of the browned and crisped outer layer of rice that clings to the side of the pan. We know it in sizzling rice soup and crispy rice with shrimp in Chinese restaurants. Even the Persians have a wonderful appetizer of this crispy rice called tadig that comes with various toppings. Ten Asian Bistro does it a little differently and very tastily. The sushi chef shapes little bricks of sushi rice and browns them on all sides then tops them with a slightly spicy tuna tartar. Good stuff.

Then there are Ten Asian Bistro signature rolls. We ordered the Alaskan crab California roll (eight pieces) that had chunks of the fresh crab inside. The volcano roll is popular, rightly so. It consists of halibut surrounding baked scallops, topped with an aioli sauce. Definitely a do again dish.

The cucumber-wrapped roll, also known as a lollipop roll because it’s held together with a decorative bamboo skewer, may have been introduced to pacify those cutting down on carbs but it should be on your table, carb cutting or not. This is a combination of tuna, salmon, crab and yellowtail surrounding an asparagus spear, all of it wrapped in cucumber slices. Wonderful with the accompanying ponzu sauce. We also had the roasted fresh water eel sushi; terrific as well.

Shrimp tempura roll with eel sauce, seared albacore with crispy onion, soft-shell crab roll and halibut sashimi with sea salt and lime are on my next agenda, along with entr & #233;es of sea bass with mirin reduction and wok-seared New York steak.

Now, we need to walk through that cinnabar hallway into Caffe Panini, or go outside around the building to this Italian/ Mediterranean restaurant’s own front door. For breakfast, there are lots of scrambles: eggs with veggies, meats, cheeses. Ditto for omelets. They remembered to offer breakfast cereals and grains, too. One of the delights is the array of freshly baked Danish style pastries, cinnamon rolls and muffins. Breakfast sandwiches are served on croissants, focaccia or bagels,think Italian style eggs cooked with spinach, prosciutto, even turkey, and with provolone cheese melting on top.

For lunch, there are a number of Mediterranean-influenced appetizers and 10 salads. In staying with their name and theme, there are 27 panini (grilled) sandwiches that come with selected side orders. Mousaka, dolmades, stuffed eggplant, kabobs of all sorts and a couple of pasta dishes are a few of the entr & #233;es.

There are two ways of dining here. In the front of the space, there’s a sit-down dining room and patios with full table service. Behind a divider wall is the self-serve section where you order the same dishes yourself at the counter and then sit at the bar style tables, one of which is a long slab of black granite surrounded by bar stools. It’s also where a decadent array of those good pastries peek out at you, daring you to get out without buying one. This is a place where lattes and other espresso-based drinks are at home.

Coffee Flashback

Patience, patience. Just wait and everything old finds its niche again. What caught my attention this week was the press release I received touting “Cold-brewed coffee named food trend to watch for in 2005.”

This on-the-brink trend, however, saw its earlier days in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when my cooking students and I were buying the thick, cylindrical filters through which we were dripping cold water over ground coffee beans in a time-consuming process. The results were a good cup of coffee. But it was the time required that put the damper on our enthusiasm after a few weeks.

Just as back then, the press release tells us that the cold-brewed coffee concentrate can be used for hot or cold coffee drinks and that connoisseurs are tuning in to the delicious flavor of the distillate, with 50% to 60% of the acidity and the caffeine quotient left behind in the filter. Like a flavor concentrate, one uses but a small amount to a cup of hot or cold water for the refreshing end result.

One of the great perks that I found in those earlier days of dripping filtered water through my grounds was that I could take a small container of the coffee concentrate traveling with me and for about two weeks we could have good hot or cold coffee in our hotel rooms whenever we wanted it, without so much as a coffee pot in sight. I remember the super smooth taste of the coffee and that it kept well in the refrigerator for at least two weeks. They say the same is true today.

It was Mia Stainsby, food and restaurant critic for the Vancouver Sun, who recently named cold-brewed coffee as one of the “15 food trends to watch for in 2005.” She highlighted that Seattle’s Best coffee and some other coffee houses already are using the cold process for some of their beverages. The no waste factor is a plus for the coffee mixologists, too.

I learned other things from the press release that I might as well share with you. These facts also sound like good trivia stuff to me.

Todd Simpson, a chemical engineering graduate of Cornell University, developed and patented the cold-brew system in 1964, the same system used today to cold-brew coffee and tea. Connoisseurs long have been drinking coffee made from cold-processed concentrate. Three quarters of those who suffer from heartburn say that “beverages such as coffee” cause a problem, but using coffee made with cold-brewed concentrate alleviated the coffee reaction, probably due to the lowered acidity and caffeine levels. Unknown to most consumers is that name brands including Honest Tea, Caribou Coffee, Williams Sonoma, Arizona Iced Tea, Godiva and Barnie’s use or have used cold-brewed coffee or tea in producing their bottled concentrates and ready-to-drink beverages.

The press release said Seattle’s Best Coffee, Starbucks, Pret A Manger, Gloria Jean’s Coffee, Barnie’s and Diedrich Coffee are using cold-brewed coffee concentrate to make some of their signature coffee drinks. Gosh, this makes me wonder if I really threw out that last chunky round of cottony compactness, called a cold-brew filter, that I saw lurking in the corner of one of my kitchen drawers not all that long ago, waiting patiently to be used when the trend came around again.