Our M. Wells Diner Dinner

Dear Michelle, 

You must come back IMMEDIATELY. I have had one of the top ten meals of my life. 

I have many things to tell you about: Thomas Keller’s split pea soup, my time at home, naan cooked on the grill, rose infused vinegar, but this trumps all of them. Jeff heard about this place a while ago, a little diner car restaurant called M. Wells in Queens run by two transplants from Montreal, and decided to take me there for our first anniversary. 

I was fairly excited, having read good things about escargot, bone marrow, calves brains, you know, the things I tend to get curious about. We took the G train up into Long Island City, and walked a short way to the diner.  

The sun was setting, the night was mild and pleasant, and my hunger suddenly piqued to the point where I start getting a little weird. We entered the unassuming little diner car to an enclave of clatter and chatter, full of happy faces and promising smells. We wanted to try several things, and our waiter recommended five to six small dishes, so we hemmed and hawed and finally chose those that most intrigued us. 

The escargot with bone marrow was one of the dishes I’d read about and had really wanted to try, and immediately when it arrived I popped a piping hot snail covered in fat, parsley and bread crumbs in my mouth. I was lucky I didn’t burn myself! After that first hot but satisfying bite, I tried the cold dish that Jeff had wanted to order, Porchetta Sierra, while the escargot cooled a bit. 

I had not been all that excited about this dish; it was described as thinly sliced pork with a mackerel mayo and fried caper berries. Roast pork isn’t my favorite, but I was interested enough by the idea of it with fish mayonnaise. This ended up being my favorite dish, so elegant in its simplicity. The very juicy, thinly sliced roast pork had plenty of melty, not chewy, fatty bits. It was laid out in a circle on a plate, and the inner part of that circle was spread with a greyish mayo, and sprinkled all over were fried capers. 

This mayonnaise was the perfect amount of salty and umami for the pork, and the fried capers added a pop of much needed color and crunch. I don’t even like capers, which usually taste like mildew to me, but fried they are delicious! Jeff didn’t like it as much because mayonnaise weirds him out, but he did like his first ever taste of escargot, which was delicious, perfectly cooked. I was disappointed, and this was my only disappointment, that the marrow was liquid. I don’t know if this was by design or not, but I’d have liked spreadable marrow for the crunchy little toasts on the side instead of molten marrow that needed to be soaked up from the plate. 

Next out was caesar salad, Grouper cordon blue, and smoked chicken legs with fries. I don’t remember in what order we ate, but I am sure the level of gluttony we reached might have been just short of a deadly sin. The salad, Jeff’s idea as a light addition to the meal, was just that. It was a beautiful pile of green with a few golden croutons, all covered with a generous feathery fluff of fine, long bits of grated cheese. The dressing was made with smoked herring instead of anchovies, a nice touch. 

The Grouper cordon blue was good, although I was starting to recognize the physical limits of my stomach at this point. The fish was fried, with a crispy thin crust (I’m guessing cornmeal), combined with mortadella, pickled ramps (YUM), and a sour cream dressing on a thin toasted sourdough roll. That sauce was so good that even after I was uncomfortably stuffed, I was eating the leftover roll with the dressing soaked in. 

The most impressive dish of the night was the smoked chicken legs with fries. You see that description, and you think of a plate of drumsticks on fries, maybe with some sort of sauce, right? I did. What we got was a giant platter with a WHOLE CHICKEN LEG, thigh to claws, on top of biscuits and thin crunchy fries, all dripping with the best barbeque sauce ever. I say bbq sauce, but it was more like a cross between that and gravy (and it would have made an excellent poutine), thick and glossy and sweet and smoky and spicy. When I try to replicate this, I will make a white roux, then add chicken stock, tomato paste, apple cider vinegar, cayenne, paprika, and brown sugar. We each ate enough of the leg to taste it, as it was the most likely to be good reheated. That will be our dinner tonight, and the bones will go in with a ham hock and bacon to some baked beans I’ll make later in the week. You can bet I’ll try to make them taste like that sauce. 

When our waiter came by to ask about dessert (sigh), I told him this was the best meal I’d had all year, that it was exemplary. He returned with a bottle of maple syrup liquor (delicious!), and did a shot with us. It was a truly memorable evening, and we MUST go back when you return!