I'm a sucker for anything cooked in a wood oven: pizza, roast chicken or pie. One of my favorite restaurants is Peasant, in New York's Little Italy, where everything is done in one.
Bleu Gourmet isn't ready to compete on that level—just yet. Fine wines and specialty foods are its stock in trade, but owner Sonny Ahuja has installed a winsome café too, and his wood-stone oven works just fine, thank you.
Ahuja, who formerly owned Nevada Wine Cellars, has stocked his shelves with more than 300 wines, most of them boutique labels at competitive prices. In the front are plain metal tables and chairs, as well as a newspaper rack, and just behind them, a handsome granite bar that Ahuja intends ultimately to turn into a legitimate wine bar.
I've had some delicious wines here, such as a D'Arenberg Late Harvest Riesling from Australia and a Torres Chardonnay from Spain. And I was shocked to get them free. That generosity is because it's all a work in progress. When you sit at the bar, you'll get a 2-ounce taste of any of the owner's featured wines—for free, and you can't beat that.
I like to come here for creations by former Little Buddha chef Christophe Bonnegrace.
Try a breakfast phazani: crusty pizza-dough pockets baked in the café's wood-fired oven and filled with imaginative ingredients. One with scrambled eggs, fontina cheese, asparagus and prosciutto beats any breakfast burrito all to pieces. Another, with spicy sausage, mushrooms, spinach, potatoes and smoked Gouda, is hearty and rustic.
The lunch and dinner menu runs to salads, pizzas, sandwiches and a few entrées, the best of which are finished in that magic oven. Ahuja has color-coded symbols after each of the dishes, to match them against a food and wine pairing chart on the back of the menu. That's a nice touch, but it will be nicer when Ahuja's wine bar is up and running. Is this neighborhood ready to support a real wine bar? Time will tell.
In the meantime, you'll have to content yourself with one of these terrific pizzas, slightly irregular ovals with a grainy bottom crust; yeasty, chewy dough shot through with the smoky flavor of hardwood; and intelligent toppings.
These are not, by the way, remotely like typical American pizzas, but rather like what you'd get in small-town pizza joints in France, Italy or Spain.
The margherita is always a good pizza-joint barometer, and this one passes with flying colors, topped with a gooey yellow cheese (possibly cheddar), plus the requisite proportions of tomato sauce, mozzarella and fresh sweet basil.
Something called the rib eye pizza gets marinated, aged rib eye steak; Roquefort, Gorgonzol, Brie, Camembert and honey. Whew! I'm a purist, though, and prefer something less esoteric than that, such as a classic pepperoni or even the house sausage pizza, made with fresh sautéed mushrooms, smoky cheddar and a touch of pungent Gorgonzola.
Salads aren't nearly as impressive, but then they aren't done in the wood oven. I like the Roquefort salad: mixed greens tossed with candied walnuts, sliced green apples and a nice amount of cheese. The Caesar employs a mountain of greens chopped to the point of mulch and the dressing lacks punch. I'd also recommend against the tandoori chicken salad because the chicken looks and tastes as if it were sliced from a loaf.
What makes this all the odder is Bleu Gourmet serves the second-best roast chicken I've had in this city, beating every place except Bouchon. The bird is rubbed with a dry herb mix, heavy on rosemary and tarragon, before being plunged into the oven, producing a crisp, juicy bird. Furthermore, you get a pile of delicious roast potatoes on the side.
The restaurant does a fine vegetarian lasagna—loaded with eggplant, artichoke hearts, asparagus, mushrooms, olives and spinach—and a nice roulade of pork tenderloin, stuffed with prosciutto, spinach and Fontina cheese.
Hot sandwiches served on French baguettes and finished in the oven are top-notch, too. Grab the prime rib sandwich when you see it on the specials board: thinly sliced beef piled onto an extra-virgin olive oil and salt-rubbed baguette.
There aren't many desserts, but there is a nice chocolate mousse cake, and a few rustic fruit tarts, such as apricot, apple and pear, made by the Normandie Bakery just a few blocks down the street. If you are not a wine drinker, the rear fridge is stocked with Le Village European sodas like French lemonade and orangeade, which are far more refreshing and flavorful than sugary American-style soft drinks.
I'm pulling for Bleu Gourmet, but the jury is still out on whether such a concept can fly here. We'll just have to wait and see.