The Best Things I Ate This Month: October Main Dish

Lobster Cilantro Taco at Puesto

I was a judge at the taco smackdown for “Front Burner Fund” last week. A couple dozen chefs, doing their best Mexican handheld. If you don’t know the FB Fund, please look into it. Helps back-of-the-house kitchen staff afford healthcare  for their families. This taco from Puesto showed why the La Jolla kids are doing things right. An organic spinach tortilla is filled with lobster, cilantro aioli, crispy onions, avo and salsa. Super-fresh, great textures, a lot of yes. Puesto will be among those going into The Headquarters—one of the few locals among the chain restaurants in the otherwise killer project.

Tuna Tartare at The Hake

There are a hundred ways to mess up a tuna tartare, most of which include the words “too much.” But The Hake—a relatively new restaurant on Prospect hta twill charm the pants right off the most charm-resistant sourpusses—does their perfectly, with top-quality, sushi-grade fish. Chef Roberto Craig tosses the cubes with Dijon mustard, lemon olive oil (from their neighbor, WeOlive), capers, jalapeno, onions and chives. It’s topped with organic micro-radish and served with housemade sea salt chips. Now, yes, I realize that sounds like far too much for a simple tartare. But rest assured, no bit is overwhelming, the swimmer still comes through. And it’s fantastic.

Three Meat Pizza at Urban Pi

Never been an extraordinarily huge fan of “California-style pizza”—y’know, the sort that Ed Ladou and Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters’ pizza crew invented by putting salads and Thai food and four-star errata atop perfectly good pizza crust. But in our search for the city’s best pizza (“Best Pizza Issue” coming in November), this thing floored me. Organic tomato sauce, handmade meatballs, rosemary ham, handmade fennel sausage, red onion, fresh moz, bell peppers, parsley, organic Parmesan. I was eating at six pizza joints a day for a few weeks. And this was probably the best I tasted.