New York Times food reviewer Sarah Gold knows so much about food that she is sure no one would ever enjoy eating the blackened tofu salad at New Haven’s Da Legna restaurant — even though she didn’t bother trying it before saying so.
Nor, apparently, did the people who accompanied her on two separate occasions to the popular State Street restaurant.
In this otherwise largely positive review of the restaurant in Sunday’s New York Times, Gold skewered the appetizers. She actually ate a couple of them, and disliked them, she wrote. Then she added the following:
“We did not even order some of the more outré, Asian-style appetizers, like seaweed coleslaw or blackened tofu salad. (If there are people out there who crave seaweed and tofu before tucking into wood-fired pizza, I have yet to meet them.)”
OK. She’s too smart to have to try a dish before dismissing it. Or to meet anyone who doesn’t eat dead animals.
But she may have benefited from waiting for the effects to wear off from all that great craft beer and Italian wine she reports sampling at De Legna before taste-testing her philosophical reasoning.
For as she may have noticed, Da Legna has an extensive vegan menu, rare for a New Haven-style pizza place. And De Legna serves enough small plates to offer main-course alternatives to pizza.
And guess what? Unlike carnivores like Sarah Gold, who order meatballs or calamari for appetizers at De Legna, vegans, like yours truly, have found reason to order non-meat selections to start the meal.
Even if we order the pizza for the main course.
Which we don’t always.
Just saying.
Snobbery and illogic aside, it’s still nice to see one of New Haven’s culinary gems — not to mention a vegan’s paradise — get its due from an esteemed news outlet.