Tarry Market (or, Batali and Bastianich, Purveyors of Fine Foods)

Here’s the idea. Do you remember when Arthur Avenue was about real live Italian people, who dwelled right in the neighborhood and sought the flavors of their native land on this street? Or, maybe, you remember the Arthur Avenue of monthly expeditions, when second-generation suburban matrons loaded up the Wagoneer for Nutella and baccala. In Port Chester’s Tarry Market and Tarry Wines, Batali and Bastianich are re-creating that dream of Arthur Avenue, a place where all the smells and tastes of Italy are joined in a single market.

All around, you’ll see evocations of gas-lit markets, a clock-faced analog scale, a row of antique twine holders. Old merchandise trolleys are repurposed as displays, and the counters are topped with softly polished Carrera (ruts not yet formed through use). Sun streams unevenly through Tarry Market’s industrial windows, pooling on counters with almost Sterbergian glamour. Even the sign—Batali and Bastianich, Purveyors of Fine Foods—carries the whiff of sleeve-gaitered grocers. I find this pose endearing, since this pair are essentially the food world Glimmer Twins. In fact (and don’t attack me, my best quarter happens to be Italian), but at Tarry Market, I couldn’t help recalling scenes from one of my favorite movies, The Godfather Part II. Do you remember when Vito Corleone was a lowly clerk in that Lower East Side grocery store? Or when he hung up his first Genco Olive Oil Import Company sign over the roiling throng of Mott Street? Tarry Market is a little bit antique grocery store, with sepia-soaked nostalgia and a pinch of set dressing.

Which is all just looks, of course: Tarry Market offers an ultra-modern shopping experience, where customers can load up a booze credit card and hit the Enomatic wine vending machine before hitting the aisles. (You gotta admire these guys: what grocers don’t want tipsy shoppers, impulse-buying their way through the store? Word to the wise, though: drop by Tarry Wines for the free wine samples.) Tarry Market’s design comes via Lisa Eaton (incidentally, Mario Batali’s wife’s cousin.) Eaton’s also helped to design other B&B restaurants, including Tarry Lodge next door.

The store is broken into several distinct areas: a pretty café up front, a cheese counter (including a cave), salumi and prosciutti, grab-and-go refrigerated groceries, a bakery, a butcher case, freezers, and chocolate. Fresh pastas take center stage with a square counter that sports an array of filled, cut, and extruded pastas – plus, here you’ll find imported Gragnano dried pasta, which, aside from Sophia Loren, is Napoli’s most iconic export.

Tarry Market’s butcher counter is simply meat porn, with fat, sexy-ass steaks cut by Niccolo Mauro from Pat LaFrieda primals. Oh, baby… and for my idea of foreplay, and you can buy chubby Creminelli boar sausages at the salumi counter. This counter also slings the best in Spanish jamon iberico, though Tarry Market’s globe-trotting isn’t strictly Euro-based. You’ll find the U.S. in cult joe Stumptown Coffee and Brooklyn’s own Mast Brothers chocolates. Throughout, tucked around the cases, you’ll find exotic oils, spices, and gourmet items right alongside manufactured products from Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, drop next door to Tarry Wines. While we admired the lack of pretension in the “Unusual, Rare and Old” rack – where the most pricey bottle is $135, and it’s stuck out there in the open for anyone to bump into – we loved TW’s “$15 and under” table, where we lucked out with four, $11.99 liter bottles of Ecker Zweigelt. This shop isn’t huge, but it isn’t a boutique spun toward super-elite tipplers, either. It offers casual tastings, and, soon, expects to offer informative classes. Luh-huvvv!

The thing that always amazes me about this B & B crowd is that not only does it have great products but that it gets in there and sell the hell of ‘em. I love, for example, that Tarry Wines and Tarry Market offer gift cards in time for the holidays, and I love that Batali’s wife’s cousin did the design. I love that Joe Bastianich’s Greenwich honey is right there on the shelves, while his mother’s products are there—and soon, so will Mario Batali’s—and Bastianich’s wine books are hawked at the wine shop along with many of his own wines. Recently, purveyor Joe was spotted at Tarry Market in person (only missing those mercantile sleeve gaiters) selling the hell out of those Italian truffles, with half an eye cocked [OR an eye half-cocked]toward the registers. I only wish that my own family were this attuned to making money.

Thanks a Lot!

These thanksgiving events will help put some lead in your pencil, even with all that turkey-spawned tryptophan pouring through your veins.

Industry Night at the Cookery
Wednesday, November 24, 10pm ‘til whenever

According to Chef Dave DiBari, who uses his restaurant as a “work, live, and play space,” this month’s Industry Night will have none of his usual menu hijinx. No band, no cover, and (sob!) no chicken-skin Cheetos—just late hours, a special Cookery burger, and “a celebration of alcohol-induced comas and more reason to binge on the proverbial day of turkey genocide.” That’s right, folks—this year, you get to face your family with a vicious hangover!

Thanksgiving at BLT
November 25, 1pm – 8pm
$68 for adults; $34 for children (exclusive of beverages, tax, and tip)
Look for a three-course prix fixe at the base of the Ritz-Carlton towers, where celery root, chestnut, and apple soup (with sage foie gras croutons) might yield to roasted turkey with chestnut-sausage stuffing, cranberry-grenadine sauce, and rosemary gravy. I looked twice, and there are none of those yams topped with marshmallows on offer—which is reason enough, as far as I’m concerned, to skip your family holiday and head to BLT.

Thanksgiving at Red Hat on the River
November 25, noon – 9pm
$65 for adults; $30 for children (exclusive of beverages, tax, and tip)
Spend your Thanksgiving with a view. Sure you could get the turkey at Red Hat, but isn’t that so frikken obvious? Why not sample the veggie gnocchi, the Claiborne steak (may he rest in peace) or the sustainably raised Loch Duart salmon.

Everything but the Turkey at Chiboust
Cheat your family and lie your butt off for the holidays! Chef Jill Rose will sell you everything but the turkey, which includes Thanksgiving sides, gravy, stuffing and fabulous desserts at perfectly reasonable prices. Buy a turkey, slap it in the oven, then go for an extended mani-pedi; just remember to take off the plastic, and feign concern over lumpy potatoes.

HotFlash

Trend Alert! Reverse Migration

In one of those uncommon indicators of Westchester’s fabulousness, county restaurateurs are now expanding their brands to New York City! Once the hot news was that city foodies like Dan Barber, Stephen Paul Mancini, and Andy Nusser deigned to venture northward, but that busted trend is reversing with Cafe of Love, Zitoune’s Lower East Side Olivia Bistro, and Lulu Cake Boutique going—proverbially—south.

Bun on the Run, Italian-Style

Great ham, great bread, and that’s all you need. At Tarry Market café, you’ll find perfect (yet supersized) evocations of the ubiquitous

Italian railway snacks with grab-and-go sandwiches made with Tarry Market’s fetishy salumi and prosciutti. Stop by the Enomatic with a freshly loaded charge card, and sample your way through all eight wines on offer, all while tucking into freshly baked rolls piled with slices of nutty prosciutto crudo, mild prosciutto cotto, or soulful mortadella. Folks, this is why Italians tolerate those late trains.