New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, who wrote the brilliant/infamous takedown of Flavortown -TV food star Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant – takes on Boerum Hill’s Krescendo today. In a good way. Wells gives the eatery – which teams up San Francisco culinary luminaries Elizabeth Faulkner, Nancy Puglisi and cocktail expert Darren Crawford – two stars.
NYT: The menu seems to revert to the ordinary. There are pizza knots, rice balls and meatballs, a few salads and a handful of simple pastas including spaghetti with tomato sauce. Then there are the pies, including three under the heading Pizza Napoletana. This might have stood out a decade ago. Today, it puts Krescendo among a herd of brick-oven strivers.
But here, under Pizza Italiana Classica, is a flash of lamé: Finocchio Flower Power.
What is on top of the crust is mainly fennel, but to call it a topping would imply that it is interchangeable with some other item. It is not. This pizza is an essay on the theme of fennel. Ms. Falkner stews the bulb to draw out its mellow sweetness, spreads out some raw fronds for their fresh, herbal flavor and calls on the seeds in fennel sausage for their licorice snap. The vegetable’s candylike tendencies are kept in check by sharp aged provolone and powdered red chiles from Calabria.
Source: Cobble Hill Blog
http://cobblehillblog.com/archives/8158