The actual Marfa, Texas
After a long, arduous, and highly suspenseful search for a decent chicken-fried steak in NYC, I finally found the promised land. The adventure has gone on over the past three years in the joyous company of my friend and former Food & Wine colleague Ray Isle, who’s also a sometime Houstonian. I’m pretty sure we tried every single chicken-fried steak (CFS, as Texans call it) in the entire city. This week found us sitting at the bar at year-old East Village restaurant Marfa, eating a—holy cow—a real live Texas-style CFS.
We’d been hearing about the one at Marfa but kept putting it off, out of either disbelief or total loss of faith in New York’s skills in this department. But everything about Marfa’s CFS was exactly right: tender, thin steak (pounded to an inch of its life), deep-fried until the batter is crunchy and hot, and topped with rivers of cream gravy, as it’s called down south. That gravy, mercilessly botched by just about every NYC spot that tries to do a chicken-fried steak, was precisely what it needed to be: thick, creamy, and specked with bits of black pepper. That’s it: no silly frills. Just down-and-dirty lusciousness. A little bourbon on the side, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better on a winter night.
Another night this week, I ended up at Northern Spy Food Co., in the ex-Old Devil Moon space on East 12th Street. (Devil Moon, charmingly divey though it was, made a subpar chicken fried steak.) I like the idea that, at Northern Spy, you can make a meal out of the three-side-dishes-for-$14 option: caramelized leeks with pecorino; red quinoa with radish and sherry dressing; fingerling potatoes with garlic and mustard, and a few more to pick from. Mostly tasty, but as an entire meal it turned out to be a little too virtuous, and next time I’ll try the crispy chicken-thigh sandwich with arugula and chimichurri. The store area in back sells all the usual suspects of NYC food hipsterdom, circa 2009: Early Bird granola, Mother-in-Law’s Kimchi, NuNu chocolates, McClure’s Pickles, et al. The diner-esque vibe has all the lived-in ease of Old Devil Moon, but it was half-empty the night we were there. Hopefully more locals will stop in and put some real wear and tear into the place.