Weight Watchers weigh-in

Today's weigh-in confirms what I've been feeling in the way things fit. Down again. And yesterday I finished the day with a half cup of ice cream and two biscotti. This counting thing works.

Chains offering more healthy fare

The New York Times today has an interesting article about how chains are reacting to pressure to offer healthy fare.

http://nyti.ms/YbzKPc

New York Review: The Original Sandwich Shop in Greenwich Village

The Restaurant Dieter typically does not really rely on Yelp for recommendations. One reason is the ying-yang nature of the crowd: "it's the best place ever" co-exists with "They served me fried rat and the host was so rude to me!" Another is the potential for a business to work the system with fake reviews.

But in an unfamiliar area, I do open the app up from time to time just to see what is close by. And I do glance at the reviews. It's hard not to. I just temper my expectations.

When the claim is "the best turkey sandwich ever," one has to wonder. I don't know if I can support that claim, but it was good.

The turkey is not Dietz and Watson or Boarshead or anything else from the deli case. It's fresh and apparently roasted in the kitchen and sliced to order.

Imagine the surprise of being asked this follow-up question after ordering the dieter staple: "White, dark or both?"

What arrived on the cheapest paper plate was slices of seasoned, but not salty, meat, so juicy it threatened to soak the bread. This kitchen spends the money on what counts.

With a banana, it brought lunch to 6 Weight Watcher points.

If you're in the village, stop by for a higher quality turkey sandwich than you're most likely to find anywhere -- except your own home perhaps.

New York review: At Tenth Avenue Cookshop, the accommodating waitstaff gets a cheer

Shrimp salad

 At Tenth Avenue Cookshop, everything on the brunch menu looks good. The pastry basket looks wonderful. People all over the place are having big hearty cast iron skillets with luscious huevos rancheros, three eggs with black beans, jack cheese and creme fraiche. The fries are heaping mounds of thin fried goodness. It seemed like a poor choice for a dieter.

There were two salads, the most promising of which was a shrimp salad with radish, shaved carrot and fennel. I ordered that.

We'd sat at the bar and watched the bartenders making drinks. For one popular one, they shoved a fat slice of grapefruit into the glass first. It looked inviting.

The grapefruit was a gift

Although not on the menu, The Restaurant Dieter asked. The server was only too glad to comply, and it didn't even end up on the bill. The grapefruit was at the peak of season -- tart but also sweet. As an unexpected bonus, the salad itself had a few fat slices.

The Weight Watchers point tally was a mere 3 points -- 2 for 4 ounces of shrimp and 1 for 1 tablespoon of vinaigrette. It was so low that we ordered the assorted housemade treats -- the kind of small sweet things that often turn up at a fine restaurant with the bill. These included a wonderful cherry pistachio nougat and tiny disc of intense orange olive oil cake. I tried them all, assessing myself another 5 points.

If you go, sit and the bar. The folks there will treat you well.

The assorted housemade treats

New York review: Go to Gobo for vegetarian in the West Village

Vegetarian won ton with fresh spinach

 Vegetarian and vegan dining is far from healthy. Tofu and vegetables sound potentially virtuous, but a dish fried in canola oil or sauteed in extra virgin olive oil still drips (often literally) in fat. That glossy sheen is unmistakable.

An awful lot of the food on the menu of Gobo, in the West Village, is likely fattening. Braised tofu, pineapple fried rice, yam fries, crispy spinach and soy cheese wontons; just going down the list makes one think: "Hell, I could just order a Chinese stir fry and be done with it."

Steamed vegetables with tahini dressing

But the menu is wide, and at least a few items are clearly intended to appeal to the dieter. Take the steamed farm vegetables with tahini dressing or the salt-and-pepper edamame. A meal based on these, with some brown rice on the side, is satisfying indeed. In Weight Watcher points, it was a bargain. A couple of points for the dressing and a couple for a cup of edamame still in their shells.

The item most difficult to assess was a won ton soup. The won tons themselves were meaty, although no meat was used. And the spinach was fresh, barely cooked, from being thrust into a savory (but fortunately not salty) vegetable broth.\

New York review: Rouge Tomate comes totally clean and aids dieters in the process

Lobster tagliatelle

With the exception of chains that post their dubious nutritional information online, it's rare to find a sit-down restaurant that is so transparent.

So imagine the surprise when the menu at Rouge Tomate offers that a diner need only ask in order to see the full nutritional information -- on everything. "Just a moment," the waiter says, and suddenly a ring binder lands on the two-top.

Under vinyl page protectors is everything a dieter would want to know, and every single dish appears to be well within that dieter's reach. Amazing.

A recent Saturday night meal at Rouge Tomate goes down in dieting history as the first and only time The Restaurant Dieter has been able to use Weight Watchers E-tools and figure the points value on before the food came to the table.

Dinner rounded out at a healthy 28 points. I probably ate more than I would have ordinarily, but only because the whole affair was so relatively guiltless.

Where does a restaurant like this come from? The website says the restaurant follows a charter called Sanitas Per Escam, which is Latin for Health Through Food. The whole thing appears to be both a restaurant and a consulting gig rolled into one.

The restaurant is the work of one Emmanuel Verstraeten, a "serial entrepreneur" (his website's quotation marks, by the way). It's the New York outpost of a similar restaurant he opened in 2001 in Brussels, according to the website. He is also the founder and CEO of SPE Development US Inc., a consulting company in the area of -- you guessed it -- healthy food.

In what appears to be a nod toward keeping an ethical distance, the SPE website notes that Rouge Tomate itself is not SPE-certified because "It is SPE Certified's policy to provide third-party certification only." Hence the use of the phrase "follows a charter" and the arm's length. There will be no nutritional self-dealing here apparently.

Anyway, the food was, for the most part, quite good.

Ricotta and carrot spreads

Dinner started with crusty whole grain rolls, accompanied not with butter but two spreads: a savory carrot puree and a house made ricotta cheese. Had I known that, I might not have ordered the toasts, but at 2-3 Weight Watcher points each, why not?

Three come for $13. The spaghetti squash version was the standout, with Maryland crab, honeycrisp apple, jalapeno and cilantro. The cranberry tapanade tasted like...cranberry. The wild mushroom, redolent of thyme on a bed of ricotta, tasted pretty much like the mushroom pate from "The Moosewood Cookbook," the much-beloved vegetarian cooking bible from the 1970s and 1980s.

The toasts: mushroom, crab and cranberry tapanade

Cauliflower salad

A roasted cauliflower salad with hazelnuts, salted grapes, bok choi and toasted buttermilk really needed a kick of some kind -- something acidic or fiery. It arrived looking every bit like a Miro -- dips and dabs and squiggles of color all over the plate. Perhaps it's the trendy technique itself; when a dish is so deconstructed, it can be difficult to get it mixed enough to enjoy the whole effect. It clocked in at a meager 4 Weight Watcher points.

For the main course, 10 Weight Watcher points seemed a small price to pay for a fresh herb pasta tossed with a sauce made from fennel and lobster oil, with a touch of saffron and lemon. A couple fat claws and a small tail of lobster gave the dish enough protein to balance the perfectly al dente tagliatelle, studded here and there with bits of herb. With some broccoli and big wheels of leek to provide fiber, it was a meal any dieter would find satisfying.

Cookies

The dessert menu offered a range of tiny treats, including a couple with dense chocolate, for as little as 3 points. When a pastry chef is confident enough to express himself or herself in the humble cookie, I'm inclined to order them. The portion for one person consisted of six miniature cookies, including a tiny biscotti and a date brownie, and came with a shooter of apple cider. The latter was so foamy it appeared to have been freshly extracted from a juicer back in the kitchen.

For this part of the meal, I only estimated. So confident was I in the kitchen's discretion that I forgot to ask the server to bring over the nutritional ring binder one more time. The need for transparency had given way to trust. Now that's something a dieting restaurant patron doesn't do every day.

Washington, D.C. review: Kellari and other fish restaurants redefine healthy Greek food

Fish on display at Kellari

Until a Greek restaurant called Kyma opened in Atlanta a few years back, I had a very limited understanding Greek food's wide diversity. My mother's friend back home in suburban Detroit, Connie, was Greek. Connie taught Mom how to make all the rich and fattening stuff: cheese-laden spinach pie in buttered filo dough, pastitsio (a sort of Greek lasagna, if you've never had), moussaka and baklava, the famous walnut-filo-honey dessert.

Downtown Detroit is home to a street of restaurants known as Greektown. The fare there is from the similarly rich side of the Greek tradition. You are not a real Detroiter until you've ventured down there after a Tigers game, ordered saganaki and heard to the waiter yell "Opa!" as he lights flames the cheese tableside.

Despite Greece's enduring relationship with the sea, Greek food did not mean fish -- at least to me -- until we started eating at Kyma, and in New York, the wonderful Estiatorio Milos. Both are restaurants decorated with a large display of the fish, clear-eyed and obviously fresh.

Which is why when friends took us to dinner in Washington D.C. recently, they chose Kellari. They'd dined with us once at Estiatorio Milos and knew it was safe.

These restaurants are not novel in the least. Nothing on the menu really surprises, unless one's experience with fish consists of Red Lobster. The star is fish that's immaculately fresh and grilled simply with olive oil (or in The Restaurant Dieter's case, just lemon).

A traditional Greek salad comes with big hunks of tomato, pepper, onion, cucumber and feta. The cheese is so tart and salty that a dieter can ask for it on the side and use less. The combination of the acidic tomato juice, a tiny bit of olive oil and a bit of crumbled feta provides all the flavors one needs. For Weight Watchers points, one of these very filling salads is a mere 3 points -- 1 for a teaspoon of olive oil and 2 for an ounce (about the size of your thumb) of feta.

Allow The Restaurant Dieter to yell "Opa!" himself, choosing the Urban Dictionary's definition of affirmation or delight.

But please -- please -- hold the flaming fried cheese.

Greek salad