PRICE:
Frommer's Very Highly Recommended

The newest (in 2007) in the BLT (Bistro Laurent Tourondel) restaurant empire calls the Ritz-Carlton Central Park home. And it's the perfect setting, across from the greenery of Central Park, for the "market" cuisine served here. Other restaurants have chimed in on trendy market-fresh food, but few can do it as well as the people at BLT. The ingredients change seasonally, sometimes daily, depending on what's fresh at the market. Each month, the menu lists what is peak in that particular season. When I visited in November, sunchokes, pumpkin, black cod, bosc pear, chestnut, and a variety of mushrooms were just some of the fresh items used in the dishes prepared that day. Matsutake mushroom and sunchokes, for example could be found in the meaty roasted langoustine appetizer, while the amazingly flaky and moist entree of black cod sat atop a delicious celeriac puree. The bosc pear was used in a perfectly made tart tatin for dessert, while chestnuts were found in a floating island accompanied by orange blossom madeleines. Even my cocktail, a spin of the Brazilian caipirinha displayed seasonal ingredients with the addition of concord grapes. Service, as it is at all the BLT restaurants, is professional and helpful, and the room tries to recreate a rustic, farmhouselike ambience with water served in milk bottles and an old plow at the restaurant's entrance.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's New York City 2009, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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