In the Restaurant . . .
Visit www.berkshiregrown.org for additional details about Farmed + Foraged 2010.
Baba Louie's now offers SAMI's Gluten-free Pizza Crusts!
These delicious 12 inch, wheat-free, gluten-free crusts are made from millet and rice flour. They are not made with sourdough starter. Any of the pizzas on our menu can be made using these crusts for the same price as a large pizza.
We use a screen to keep the crusts from coming into contact with our regular pizza crusts, but please note:
If you have a severe wheat allergy, we cannot guarantee that you will not have an allergic reaction.
Ingredient List:
Organic millet flour, brown rice flour, water, aluminum-free baking powder, sea salt, organic ground flax seed, citric acid
In the Press . . .
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Times Union Food Critic Celina Ottaway Raves for Baba Louie's Quality
This is the first time I've gone back to a restaurant for a second visit in order to confirm how good it was.
Pizza is not something I praise lightly, and after my first visit to Baba Louie's in Hudson I was winding up for a pretty serious rave, so I wanted to make sure. Or at least that was my excuse as I found myself making another trek down to Hudson. Due diligence and all, right? Yeah, due diligence and swoon-inducing tiramisu.
On my first visit, my mom and I stopped in for a midweek lunch. The woman who greeted (and I use this term loosely) us at the door barely made eye contact and her expression made me wonder if we were intruding. My expectations of a fine lunch sank even further when she brought a carafe of water to our table and left it to us to fill our glasses. When our server arrived, she was pleasant in a removed kind of way, and by comparison that felt like a big improvement.
You need really, really good food to get away with this kind of reception, and Baba Louie's has it. Three spoonfuls into a bowl of sweet potato soup with chili and lime and I'd forgotten all about the hostess. By the salad, I decided that maybe the waitress was nicer than I first thought. One piece of pizza, and I was ready to hug everyone in the room.
The soup ($3.95 for a bowl) was thick and smooth with a nice hit of lime to complement the deep sweetness from the potatoes. All of the soups at Baba Louie's are vegan, and this was a good example of how a vegan dish can be rich and satisfying. The accompanying sourdough potato roll arrived warm and had a chewy exterior that gave way to a soft inside with just a hint of tang. I had to restrain myself from asking for a basket of them.
The Caesar salad ($9.50 for a small) was a refreshing change from the gloppy, over-dressed salads that parade around in the name of Caesar. The bite-sized bits of romaine were crisp and flavorful in their own right, and the dressing complemented rather than covered them. I wished for a little more anchovy to complement the brightness from the lemon, but the salad was lovely as it was. A small was big enough to share as a starter.
The quality of the ingredients comes through again and again at Baba Louie's, even in the small details. The cheese on the pizza is made fresh for the restaurant. The Parmesan that topped our salad had such a wonderful bite you could have served it on a cheese plate.
It was hard to decide whether to go classic or crazy with the wood-fired, sourdough pizza. We settled on the Dolce Vita with tomato sauce, wilted spinach, fresh mozzarella, California figs, gorgonzola, prosciutto and Parmesan topped with infused rosemary oil ($10.95/$15.95). The thin crust manages a crisp underside while still retaining a nice chew. In terms of schools of pizza, this isn't the air-pockets and charred bits that you might find in a New Haven pie or John's Pizzeria. The lip of the pizza stays thin right to the edge, more along the lines of The Cheeseboard in Berkeley, Calif. (But unlike a lot of Albany-area, thin-crust pizzas, there is nothing cracker-like about the crust, even at its crunchiest.)
The sauce is as good as the crust, and again the ingredients shine here. The tomatoes warm your mouth like mid-summer sunshine. I knew from the first bite that we had ordered wrong. Well, not exactly wrong -- the prosciutto and figs and gorgonzola were lots of fun -- but with crust and sauce this good, simple is better. On my second trip, I ordered a mushroom and anchovy pie that had me conjuring excuses to drive to Hudson once a week. The service on my second trip was much better.
With pizza this good, it is tempting to indulge and forgo dessert, but that would be a mistake. The restaurant has a non-traditional tiramisu ($5.95) that is worth its own drive to Hudson.* Instead of lady fingers, the dessert starts with a supermoist tiramisu sponge cake that is golden with egg yolks and hints of orange. The layers are brushed with a mixture of syrup, rum and sherry or expresso for the middle, a rich decadence that never gets heavy or soggy. The center is then layered with mascarpone cream and small chunks of a semi-sweet Belgian chocolate. Again, the quality of the ingredients and the details were just that much better than what you might expect. It was the perfect end to a very fine meal.
April 2008
After just its first year, Baba Louie's Hudson makes the list -- Zagat Survey's Best of the Hudson Valley!
