Nor'easter and a Shipwreck in Brielle, NJ

It all started with a storm. Howling winds, pelting rain, sand everywhere. Piles and piles and piles of sand on Ocean Avenue right now. They're plowing the streets. With snow plowers. If my ankle weren't injured, I'd consider lugging my snowboard up the street and boarding these sand giants. There are orange cones everywhere to prevent cars from churning up more sand as they drive, and last I checked, they were trying to get the situation under control with a leaf blower... Good luck with that.

It was a cold and rainy night. The kind of rain that inevitably lands directly in your eye, as my friend Ursula put it. Sideways rain. Speaking of sideways, it was a perfect night for wine. So after my aunt schlepped herself down here with my two grandparents in tow, we decided to go out for dinner (more like go out for a glass of wine and order dinner so we seemed presentable). We landed ourselves at the Mahogany Grill in Manasquan, sat at the bar, ordered a glass of wine, and only then were we told that the kitchen decided to close early for the night! Oh the travesty. Some burnt homemade potato chips with sea salt were placed in front of us, but we opted for the wine and conversation aspect. The bartender is a very talented artist, and was showing us photographs of her paintings. They were pretty amazing--I wish her the best of luck in her pursuit of an art career. Now, the wine was decent and the conversation was stimulating, but the women next to us had the most succulent looking dumplings and vanilla bean cheesecake, and I had one thing on my mind... FOOD! So the bartender was kind enough to call over to Shipwreck, who said that if we came immediately, they would seat us. We lollygagged. We're New Yorkers, it was a Friday night, and even though it was almost eleven... well any restaurant worth its salt would serve dinner at 11 on a Friday night. That's just how we do what we do.

We got to Shipwreck around 10:50 and ordered three appetizers and two fantastic glasses of Antinori Toscana from 2005. Italian wine just sends me. Love it.

The appetizers came quickly, thank goodness. The best of the three was the veal shortribs. Usually, shortribs are beef, but I must say, the veal was perfect for the weather. Good, thick, melt in your mouth chunks of meat to savor. I wasn't crazy about the chopped olives on the side, but that's because I don't like olives. Olive oil I could probably pour into a class and drink. Olives, I gag. I tried really hard to overcome this preference, and ate as many olives as I could when I lived in Italy, and then again when I visited Spain, but alas, I have not conquered my abhorrence of this little green or red or black ovals.

The second appetizer on my list was the crabcake. Nothing spectacular, I've had way better, but decent and mostly crab meat as opposed to mostly fried breadcrumbs. Sauce was ok, again, not spectacular, but edible and re-orderable mostly because it was hunks of crab and I really enjoy hunks of crab. The major pitfall was that it came with caper berries. Now, I despise capers. Unlike olives, I have never tried to overcome my completely reasonable abhorrence of capers. Tiny, salty bug eggs. Disgusting. Magnify that by things that look like baby figs, and I trust you, my face is a kodak moment of shriveled up disgust. After biting into one (all food critics must deal with their fears if their fears are edible), I promptly had to dispose of it in my napkin. I felt as though I had been crushed by a giant ocean wave, the kind that hits you so hard you find yourself tumbling around underwater, unable to decipher which way is up, swallowing gallons of salt water and not being able to breathe. Oh... caper berries, trying to be all clever and disguise yourselves as something wonderful and sweet like a fresh fig... How dare you! Ugh, I shake my fist at you, green caper berries!

The last appetizer was a doozy. Scallops with foie gras. I adore foie gras, and the best I've ever had was down the Shore at a restaurant called Whispers in Spring Lake. Scallops are slimy, foie gras is slimy... So there was no excitement from a combination of textures. The scallops were, well, scallops. I'm not a huge fan of these strange white masses, and Shipwreck didn't do anything to make me care more for them. The best scallops I ever had were cooked by my friend's fiance while I was visiting in Montauk. He made me LIKE scallops. Actually, he made me ask for more, a feat yet to be duplicated. Something about adding Grand Marnier... Anyway, these scallops were left at the end of the night. The foie gras was way too oily. I felt like I was eating straight lard, and I, as you have probably noticed, really like lard-esque products. But this was too much. So overall, Shipwreck wasn't the total disaster it portrayed itself to be, but it also isn't a place I'll dream about in my sleep. And those caper berries? Well, they might just give me nightmares.