Meal Tickets: Food, tennis fusion at New Haven

I visited the Pilot Pen in New Haven this week wondering about a few things: do their food stalls deliver?  What does wine enthusiast Amelie Mauresmo think of the local dining scene?  Was New Haven's beloved Pepe's really the first pizza place in the country?  Is Chef Jacques Pépin a tennis fan?  Surprisingly, in this case these questions were not the distracted musings of a hungry journalist, but professional responsibilities.

Here's why: back in March, TENNIS magazine mentioned a new guide to the restaurant options in cities where the WTA tour plays.  There, a brief, jokey reference was made to New Haven as a place where the dining options were "a little thin."  (Yes, even TENNIS magazine's army of fact-checkers occasionally let an unproven hypothesis slide by.)

Like all issues of the magazine, that one landed on the desk of Pilot Pen tournament director (and former WTA Tour chief) Anne P. Worcester.  Three things to know about Worcester: One, she doubles as the chief marketer for "market new haven" (in jaunty lowercase), which markets the cultural district of central New Haven, including the cluster of restaurants there.  Two, she oversees a program, unique to the Pilot Pen, known as the Mayor's Passport to Downtown Dining, wherein players are given a passport that allows them to eat at each of 29 New Haven restaurants, free.  Three, she organized this year's inaugural New Haven Food Festival, to be held at the tennis tournament.

As you can imagine, such a tournament director was not best pleased by the flagship magazine of her sport making (possibly unjustified) light of one of the main selling point of the city she promotes.  Her response, though, was a generous one: to invite an agent of the dastardly magazine (me!) to attend the the tourney on the day of the New Haven Food Festival.  As she told me, "The restaurants here can equal, and in some cases surpass New York's.  I hope you'll be able to set the record straight."  So, the question I was on a northbound train to answer, the bedrock matter of truth I was to pass a judgment on: how is the food in New Haven, anyway?

And thus this correspondent, after a leisurely hour spent watching Marin Cilic hit his rubber band of a serve, found himself eating slowly braised veal cheeks with a kind of tomato relish while chewing more metaphorical fat with the aforementioned Jacques Pépin.  The location was a large tent where tennis players, chefs, the mayor, and assorted swells able to afford a $105 ticket had assembled to taste the food of 19 local fine-dining establishments and the wines of Wolf Blass (whose Riesling was finely dry).

Pépin, the chef and longtime television partner of Julia Child, hosted the festival.  He enthused about the food scene in Connecticut, beaming "organic, sustainable markets are exploding here."  He also extolled the restaurant responsible for the veal cheeks we were both loading into our cheeks: the Union League Café in New Haven, a classic brasserie for the movers and shakers.  A nice touch: the single celery leaf garnish, which was more complementary than parsley and showed thoughtfulness and care on the part of the chef.  Union League Café also brought along a nice selection of petits fours to the festival.  Score one for New Haven.

I next sampled a gutsy aged Gouda (try one sometime if you haven't -- it'll ruin you for supermarket smoked gouda, though) from Caesus, a cheese-specialist operation probably inspired by the legendary cheese-fetishizing restaurants of New York's Terrance Brennan.  Then it was on to a decent ceviche from the restaurant Ibiza, an tasty crab curry from the restaurant Thali, a sweet roasted sea scallop from fusion outfit Bentara, and a slightly dry arepa covered with scrumptious lobster from Sabor, which dispenses Neuvo Latino cuisine.  Most of the dishes followed the contempory American model: remove some spiciness from a humble and/or exotic foreign dish (arepas, ceviche, etc.), and dress it up with luxury ingredients (lobster, etc.)--not the most compelling food style, but certainly not behind the times.

As mentioned, the players can eat for free at all of these restaurants.  Mark Knowles said the Mayor's Passport program was "a very real draw" for players, that they talked about it in the locker room.  Mahesh Bhupathi called Thali one of his top five Indian restaurants on tour.  John Isner told me "it's an extra thing, the food, not a special reason to come," but he was chowing down as said this.  Amelie Mauresmo came by, smiling, after beating Patty Schnyder and chatted with Pépin.  Lindsay Davenport seemed to enjoy everything she tried.  Tournament director Worcester had a clear rapport with her players, many of whom she personally convinced to play in New Haven (I'm guessing she mentions the restaurant program in her pitch).  The festivalgoers, thick with buttoned collars and gold earrings, watched it all in amiable clusters, before heading out to the night matches with their free Reidel wine glasses in tote bags.

Clearly the Pilot Pen and the New Haven restaurants have a synergy: Worcester and her team are making a concerted effort to incorporate New Haven dining into the tournament.  And the food itself was quite good, at times very good.  My one wish would be that they find a way to include the city's celebrated (though, for the record, not the nation's first) pizza places and Louis Lunch, where they claim to have invented the hamburger, into the festival--then out-of-towners could taste the food for which the city is most famous.

Do New Haven's restaurants "match and at times surpass New York's"?  In a word, no--based on the evidence of the Food Festival, New Haven contains a food scene about the size of half an NYC neighborhood like Chelsea.  No shame in that, however: it was clear that New Haven can compete with cities its size and quite a bit larger in having a vibrant, centralized dining district.  And from the looks of it, the ball is rolling downhill now and it will only grow.

They are justifiably proud, and it's an excellent idea to bring the dining scene to the tennis and the tennis players out to the dining scene.  Thumbs up from this correspondent.  Something like this could be tried with great success at other smallish tournaments: Stuttgart, Rotterdam, San Jose, Chennai.  If that happens, I can only hope their tournament directors remember to invite us along to assess.