text by Howie Kahn
Design by martin flores
Having
Phil’s
What
If Phil Rosenthal likes your fried chicken, he'll hug you. If he is delighted by the taco he's eating, his jaw will drop dramatically. He is wide-eyed and open-minded about food, which makes him a rare and refreshing dining companion in this age of know-it-all eating, with every savvy diner armed for Twitter with their hottest take. Not Rosenthal, who is more Frank Capra than Frank Bruni. Joy alone, it seems, was enough to land him a Netflix show about food. On Somebody Feed Phil, he spans the globe, from Bangkok to Mexico City to Tel Aviv, eating and praising and cracking jokes like a Borscht Belt Bourdain. He's qualified to make jokes. Rosenthal created Everybody Loves Raymond, one of the most successful sitcoms ever and the economic engine behind his second act: investing in more than a dozen restaurants, hosting his show, and asking to be fed.
We decided to feed Phil at his favorite New York brasserie, Balthazar. (Just a late afternoon snack before he drove to Jersey on a pizza mission.) The idea? To let this uniquely enthusiastic diner guide us through a menu, which you should click on below. “I'm good at this,” Rosenthal says, raising the menu in the air. “I'm a professional. You ready? Let's have the escargots. Let's have the bouillabaisse, what else? The ceviche. Let's have the beef stroganoff....and some frittes please!”
This is Phil.
“When I was graduating from college, I fell in love with food. I would read the New York Times about these magical places called 4 Star Restaurants. They were generally French. La Grenouille and Le Bernardin, which are still in existence. Lutèce. La Côte Basque. The Quilted Giraffe. I loved these places so much that I would save up, a hundred dollars—and in the early 80s, a hundred dollars was a lot for a dinner—and on my birthday I would go. I found another idiot whose birthday was a week from mine to go with me. We didn't even have enough money for dates, so we’d split one girl to come with us, just to class it up a bit, to make it a celebration. And we’d put on ill-fitting jackets and ties and the waiters would say, do you want to see the kitchen and we would say, Boy, would we! And this started a lifelong desire to share that experience with people.”
restaurant
“That is just love in a bowl. The hearty beef stock, the beautiful onions that lose all their edge. They just become sweet and mushy and if you have great cheese and a great crouton on top, it's so satisfying, especially on a cold rainy day. Who doesn't love that?”
onion soup
“If you were to do a Top 3 list of Parisian dishes, I think escargot jumps to the top of the list. Not everybody likes the idea of snails, but damn! It’s just an incredible vehicle for garlic and butter, isn’t it? And they just look so beautiful in the shells. How many foods have a special holder just for that one thing? I am a garlic freak, having never have had it until I left my mother's house. Amazing that you could go through that much of your life without having a basic flavor!”
Escargot
“Talk about a transporting food. The flavors of a great oyster can be like a vacation. They take you to a memory of the seaside.”
Oysters
“Duck confit is one of the world’s great dishes. I love duck any way, but when you confit, it concentrates everything you love about duck into the most tender, fall off the bone, delicious thing. It’s one of my top ten favorite foods in the world. I love that flavor. It’s like, if chicken attained a heavenly greatness.”
Duck Confit
“Right away you’re smelling all those herbs and tomato and lobster and seafood. That’s just transporting.”
Bouillabaisse
“When fries come to the table, it’s the first thing you’ve gotta go for, because they’re at their best right now, right out of the thing.”
pommes Frites
Balthazar
"We’re at Balthazar. This is probably the best French Brasserie in New York. I don’t know of a better one. You can feel like you’re in Paris by just walking in this place. The high ceilings. The décor. The food. The menu. Everything screams Paris to me here."
